June 9, 2008
Strong Language
I'm not one to be put off by strong language in the bedroom.
Let's face it, there needs to be some sort of talking going on while playing snugglebunnies or the whole thing become a cacophony of grunting and slapping sounds with the occasional vibrating and oogah-horn noises thrown in.
And since a man wants to be careful of what he says in bed — women are always listening and taking notes and a man doesn't want to say anything he can be held accountable for later — cursing (and praying) seem like safe bets. And while I can't explain it somehow screaming "Oh God, oh God, oh God" does seem a bit more romantic than screaming, "I'm going to mow that freakin' yard and then spread some mulch and then paint the window casings!"
Wait. Before we go any further, let me explain why cursing/praying make for better bedroom banter:
Oh God, oh God, oh God: Short and to the point. Rolls off the tongue. If there is a God this might draw his attention to you and the swell job you're doing pleasing your lady. (If you are not married and this is simple fornication, try to make a face that looks repentant during the act. If it is adultery, choose a different deity entirely; maybe that Indian gal with all the arms.)
I'm going to mow that freakin' yard and then spread some mulch and then paint the window casings!: This one has several problems going for it. Firstly, it sets you up for a lot of work just about the time you'll want to slip into the DFS* coma. Secondly, it's a lot to say and in order to get it all out before the exciting climactic end some guys are going to have to start it just about the time they start foreplay.
The guidelines I've laid out here apply only to the men. Women can say anything in bed without too much worry. We're just happy she's there and won't be any less happy if she spends the time she's with us talking about all the other guys who were so much better at pleasing her than we are. It's not like were listening or going to remember anything she says anyway and, secretly, we're thankful for the noise as the chatter keeps us oriented with respect to top-and-bottom navigation. (And boys, if you're doing it right you're eventually going to lose track. This is why I always keep a sextant next to the bed and shoot the North Star before getting out the oils.)
(I've got to say, though, with women top-end and bottom-end aren't really all that important. God, if there is one, was certainly looking out for the guys there. Of course He knew well ahead of time what buffoons we'd be in the bedroom.)
Where were we?
Ah yes.
I'm not one to be bothered by strong language in the bedroom. Thus far in this post I haven't given any examples but let me just say I'm not put off by women screaming things like, shit, fuck or damn. (I can't tell you the number of times I've had a woman climb back into the bed screaming, "What the fuck are you doing!?")
Having said all of that, hearing men curse while I'm in bed is so much not the turn on. Especially at 6:45 in the morning. Especially when my kids' window is on the same side of the house as mine is.
What woke me up this morning? "Something's fucking wrong here," said by one of the construction guys across the street.
And he's right. There are many things fucking wrong there. Not the least of which is construction guys cursing at 6:45 when the city says they can't start working until 7:30. And what the fuck were they doing early Saturday morning that woke me up? And how did that external wall that tilts in for 3/4 of the way up before tilting out (reaching only true vertical at the pivot point) pass inspection? And why is it taking so long to build; is it because they have an American crew working the job? Some Latinos dug out a basement and stuck a three-bedroom house atop it over a long weekend last year (and yes! I'm exaggerating).
I really don't care how long the project takes, though it is taking too long. I don't care how much noise they make; I can typically sleep through anything. However, I don't need an early-morning "fuck" that might wake my kids up.
And I certainly don't need construction guys taking a piss outside by their truck a short stone's throw from the Port-A-John.
*DFS: Drool, Fart, Snore.
Technorati Tags: Contruction
Posted by delmer at 7:50 AM | Comments (10)
April 15, 2008
Dogs
I just climbed off The Mighty Schwinn.
If you are curious it's my 4th ride of the season and I've put in 77 miles. All things considered (snow) I'm not terribly far off last year's mark… well, about 200 miles, likely.
With 3 miles to go I was approaching a woman whose dog was pooping in the grassy area between the sidewalk and street. This was just outside a school in an area that will get heavy foot traffic.
The dog quit pooping and, as I was parallel to them, the woman gave the leash a tug and the pair started walking off.
So, I turned my head, and in my best Big D commanding-type voice with a little bit of I-can't-believe-you're-a-f*cking-pig mixed in, said "Pick that up."
I know she didn't. But I also know she heard me and that each time she's out walking her dog she'll have to wonder if the guy coming toward her on the bike is the one who knows she lacks the common decency to pick up after her animal.
Posted by delmer at 7:51 PM | Comments (4)
April 3, 2008
I am a (stupid) Grumpy Old Man
[It appears I published this the other day as well. In the midst of the hard-drive upgrade I'd lost track of some things I'd saved. Sorry folks.]
The other day the boys and I were at Taco Bell having a late lunch. As we sat and ate a guy in his early 20s walked past.
As he walked a napkin blew off his tray and onto the floor. When it did it caught the guy's eye; I watched him watch it fall to the floor.
Two steps later a second napkin blew off and hit the floor.
Three steps after that the guy sat down and didn't appear to give his napkins a thought. I, however, was unable to let it go.
Firstly, if you don't need two extra napkins, don't get them. You drive up costs for all of us and use resources that don't need to be used. If everybody in the US took two extra napkins that would be a half billion extra napkins.
(When I get a Fruit & Yogurt Parfait at McDonald's, I give the granola back. I don't like it and I don't want to throw it away. I take one napkin; I can normally eat an Egg McMuffin and Parfait without getting stuff all over my face. Some foods, I'll admit, require more napkinage.)
Secondly, leaving your trash laying in the floor seems to suggest you are too good to pick up after yourself. You're not. You're not better than anybody else. Honestly, if you don't have the manners to pick up after yourself you are one or two steps down the evolutionary ladder than the rest of us; just half a step ahead of Sally Kern.
Finally, trash on the floor is a slip hazard. Though I'd be lying if I said this was the thing that bothered me most. It was the rudeness of leaving trash on the floor.
Anyway, I picked up the napkins, took them to the guy, laid them on his table and said, "You dropped these."
He mumbled something and didn't look up. I don't know if I made any sort of point as far as he's concerned, but my kids saw me do it and, if nothing else, I'm sure they'll think twice before leaving crap that blows off their trays in the floor.
Posted by delmer at 8:36 PM | Comments (8)
February 26, 2008
This is not Blogging
But I had to tell you something that just happened. Actually it happened about 12 hours before I wrote this and for a minute I had the thought that it was a shame I'd quit blogging as I wanted to tell someone about it. Not because it's fascinating but in all fairness I never let fascination or lack of fascination, as it applies to my stories, keep me from telling one. I'm not the Human League.
Last night I discovered I was out of garbage bags (tall kitchen bags, to be precise — the 13-gallon kind, though there's no way in hell you'd ever get 13 gallons of garbage in one. Maybe if you were throwing out pot after pot of soup or baked beans) and decided I'd stroll to Kroger to buy some more. I could have strolled to Walgreens, as is it so much closer, but the trip to Kroger went better with my plan to walk 4 miles.
With my iPod in my ears I took off. I think it's about 1.6 miles to Kroger… in any case I was there in short order.
The number of people in the store suggested there was some sort bad-weather thing moving in and I had a vague recollection that we might be getting ice and snow. Anyway the checkout lanes were full; as I moved past the magazine aisle I'd heard a code-red alert for more cashiers go out over the intercom. I wasn't horribly concerned about this as I planned on using the self-checkout.
I grabbed my Hefty bags, gave them a baseball-player style adjustment, and headed toward the trash-bag aisle where I picked up a 30-pack of the Kroger generic Tall Kitchen Bags (I didn't want to carry a big box home). As I moved back to the front of the store I grabbed a rotisserie chicken then moved to self-checkout.
There are four self-checkout lines; each one was in use and there were at least four people waiting.
As you know, self-checkout is designed for people with just a few items, I think our sign says 15 or Less which I think is too many items to trust a person to self-checkout with. I also think the sign should say 15 or Fewer (but that's just the guy who knows something about grammar and countable nouns speaking).
As you know, many Americans are self-important assholes who think that whatever it is going on in their lives excludes them from the laws of common courtesy and societal rules even when those rules are printed out on a sign hanging above their heads.
Wait, maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe these weren't self-important assholes, but rebels flaunting their rebelness. In retrospect maybe I should be happy the sign didn't say: No Masturbating. ("Clean-up in self-checkout.")
In any case you didn't have to be Rain Man to see that the two people, a man and a women which serves to demonstrate that self-important assholiness transcends gender, using the rear-most self-checkout posts had more than 15 items in their carts. I counted them anyway, stopping at 15 but making a mental note that they had more than 16, 17 or 18; I'm not a Nazi about this, I'd cut them some couple-items-over slack.
What is even better is that the guy seemed to have never used self-checkout before. Anything the pulled from his cart he gave the once-over like he wondered what he was supposed to do with it. (Actually, now that I think about it, he may have had the wrong cart in line with him as each and everything he pulled out of it he looked at with a what-the-fuck-is-this expression.)
[Yes, I've ended a sentence with a preposition in the above paragraph. That's not a grammar error — but a style choice. 15 Items or Less is a much more severe grammar f'oh pa.]
I sort of make fun up there, but, honest-to-God, the guy had no idea what he was doing.
He was outdone only by the woman who seemed to have brought a bunch of stuff with her from another store as none of it was scanning. In all fairness, I can understand how this can happen as, just the other day, I emailed a PO off to a vendor who called me to ask for some clarification on some item numbers I'd sent. I rechecked at their website, read them to her over the phone, and only when she started a sentence with "Are you sure…" did I realize I was at a competitor's website. We were able to sort it out in seconds and the people in line behind me were none the wiser.
Such was not the case with the woman.
I have not been at the top of my game with respect to mood lately and this just irritated the hell out of me. We had two people who could not be bothered to get in a regular line because it would take too long for them to get their 20-plus items checked out holding up the folks behind them. Of the four of us waiting, only one had a cart (containing 9 items) and the remaining three didn't even have baskets; we each had one or two things.
So, I put my chicken and my bags back (where they both belonged — I'm not one to make work for others by being too self-important to carry things bag to where they go) and walked down to Walgreens, where I purchased the 100-pack of Walgreens Tall Kitchen bag.
One-hundred bags people! That's 1,300 gallons of garbage I'll be able to throw away. You know, so long as it's baked beans or soup or something.
Posted by delmer at 7:10 AM | Comments (2)
February 18, 2008
Hide in Plain Sight
I work for, quite possibly, the best company in America; and I don't say that just because some of my coworkers read the blog (in their spare time, away from work and only after satisfying their significant others in the way a significant other yearns to be satisfied.).
[Before I go any further I'd like to point out that my coworkers are one of the reasons the place I work is the best place in America to work (and the good feeling is so strong it actually bleeds into Canada and Mexico just a bit); surprisingly, as good, kind, friendly, and superiorly smart as they are, they bring me very few homemade oatmeal and raisin cookies.]
Anyway, the company I work is located in an area that is surrounded other similarly-sized businesses. I'm not sure what the other businesses do, but if they're like us it's probably some sort of light manufacturing. The point is, we're not in a residential area and there's very little around us. I'm guessing that after 5 p.m., with the exception of the stragglers, most of the street is empty of people. Traffic, after close of business is very light; I often ride my bike by work in the evening and rarely see anything moving.
The other day we received a code violation. One of the city's code enforcement people drove by and noticed our sign had a spotlight on it that was still lit. Our sign is a very nice-looking brick the metal thing that is at ground level; the spotlight is in the ground as well and aimed at the sign. In all my years of coming to work I've never approached the building and had the spotlight bleed around the sign and into my eyes as I was driving. I would have noticed and said something.
Anyway, per city code, signs may not be lighted before 7 a.m. and the light has to be off within 30 minutes of the close of business. What this says is that on most days we can have our sign lighted when the sun is up. There will be that little bit of time, right around mid-December when it gets dark early, that the light will be helpful, but mostly we'd just be wasting electricity.
Of course, it's easy to argue that having our sign lit at all is a waste of electricity. Aside from looking nice at night, I don't imagine it really serves much of a purpose.
But that is not the point. The point is that the city has a person driving around, before 7 a.m., taking pictures of lighted signs in industrial-park areas.
And this person has consistently missed the guys building the mulit-unit apartment/office thing across the street from me. They wake me up most mornings at 7 a.m. backing something up (that makes a beeping), or pounding on something, or talking about the blow jobs they got last night (I made that last one up, but this was getting sort of ranty). They're not supposed to start, per the city, until 7:30 a.m.
I honestly don't care, much (Saturdays trouble me), about the construction, or the fact they start early as I'm normally up at 7 anyway.
But. But what? It just seems odd that our sign gets dinged and it is so incredibly unobtrusive. I know the thought is that the light may distract drivers or interfere with traffic lights (it was spelled out in our notice). And I accept the fact that the rules can't be selectively enforced — if you don't cite us how can you feel good about citing someone who's sign is actually in a position to create a hazard. Of course, if we bring "selective enforcement" into the equation you have to wonder about the building that's going on across the street from me.
[In all honesty, I don't care about the light on our sign. I've already said I don't care (much) about the construction (I wish they'd hurry the hell up). And I love the little city I live in. It's just that when we got the code violation I was filled with such a "You've got to be shitting me" that I had to blog about it.]
This is where I work. (Surrounded my nothing and light industrial.)
This is where I live. (You'll notice "Main" right before street.)
This is your brain on drugs… any questions?
Posted by delmer at 8:31 AM | Comments (5)
January 2, 2008
The Fifteen Dollar Can of Pop
Let me start by saying everything that happened is my fault. That doesn't make what happened right. I will bet you that none of you would allow what happened to happen to anybody if you were Overlord of Fucked Up Banking Processes.
I have an account with US Bank. I'm pretty sure this is the one that I've had for about 21 years and that it started as a Household account, then became a Star Bank account and is now a US Bank account. Not that it matters, I guess.
The ex is on the account and when she divorced me I tried to close it. Alas, I couldn't without getting her involved in the closing process and I chose not to do that.
Every two weeks $20.00 are deposited into the account. Once a month $12.00 are automatically withdrawn by Forte to pay for Usenet access. Once in a while I'll notice I have a surplus of several hundred dollars and I'll buy a hooker.
Over Thanksgiving I lost my wallet and dutifully canceled all my cards. The first replacement card to arrive was my US Bank card and when I checked the balance I found it had over $300.00 available. I decided to do something about it.
Fast forward a month to right around December 21. I was at Kroger and decided to make an withdrawalrawl so I'd have some money in my pocket. The Kroger has a US Bank machine, and rather than use my Chase Bank card and suffer the $2.00 fee, I decided to drain a little more out of the US Bank account. I withdrew $40.00 and took a look at the receipt. I was disappointed to see that the machine was screwed up and my balance hadn't printed.*
As I left the ATM I decided to grab a pop. I really wanted a Diet Pepsi but as I was closer to the 7-UP case and it was right by the self-checkout aisle, and self-checkout was empty and I didn't feel like walking the 10 steps to get a Diet Pepsi and run the risk of of the delay having me end up in a line full of people who have always been intrigued by the self-checkout but afraid to use it but have decided they'd give it a go tonight even though the sign says 10 items or less and they have a full cart.
So I grabbed a Diet 7-UP.
It cost $1.33. I used my US Bank debit card to pay for it (if you've seen the commercials you'll know all the cool kids do this to keep the action going and the music playing).
As it happened, at the time of the purchase, my balance was $.30; that is, thirty cents.
Rather than deny the transaction, and force me to reach for one of three other cards in my wallet, OR, break one of the two twentys I'd just gotten, US Bank floated me a loan. And then they charged me $31.00 as I was then carrying a negative balance.
And they sent me a note in the mail.
I am responsible for knowing my balance. It is my fault my balance went negative. I'm certain US Bank has sent me a mail item full of very small print that told me what happened would happen. This whole thing, once again, is my fault.
My balance went negative on December 24. I'm not sure when the note was sent but I do know that four days after it was sent I was going to be charged $7.00 a day. I collected the note from my mailbox December 31 and 15 minutes later when I was at the local bank branch I found I'd accrued $14.00 in late fees, which seems to suggest the note had been mailed six days earlier. Let's say it was mailed December 24.
This is where something else that happened was my fault. That thing is that I'm not in the habit of collecting my mail daily. I normally get junk. I pay all of my bills online. There are days I get nothing at all. So there's a good chance the note was in my box Saturday and had I got it then I could have avoided the additional $14.00.
Anyway, there I was, at US Bank with $45.00 in fees that had come about as US Bank had 'loaned' me, without me even having to ask, $1.03 seven days before. (Can any of you math whizzes calculate the interest on that?)
It was totally my faul. I'm sure Tony Soprano would have agreed, but he'd gone home early as it was New Year's Eve.
In the end I was able to get the $31.00 fee waived. Due to some sort of bank rule, probably described in great detail in something US Bank has sent me, I would not be able to get both fees waived ... I chose the $31.00 fee.
Which brought the cost of the Diet 7-UP I didn't even want down to $15.33.
Irony Time: While I was at my parents' house over the holiday, quite possibly while the note from the bank was on it's way to me, I read an article in Reader's Digest about the things banks do to increase their profits. The thing that happened to me (that I'm at fault for) was one of the things described.
*It is likely that the transaction receipt said my balance was .30 and I didn't notice it. I remember thinking that the balance had shown zeros all across and I knew that was unlikely, especially since I thought it was something over $50 even after the $40 withdrawal.
Posted by delmer at 8:32 PM | Comments (9)
December 30, 2007
Dear Lady Shopper at the Kroger
If I have to move your groceries back on the belt more than once so I can continue to place my groceries on it, perhaps you've started putting your groceries on the belt too soon.
That little grocery-divider stick, whatever it's called, did not magically hover above the belt and maintain its position and keep your groceries from intermingling with mine. That was me, pushing the stick, and your groceries, back toward you even as you continued to empty your cart.
Regardless of when you put your groceries on the belt, you will not be able to pay for them, leave the store, load up your car and enter the flow of traffic, where it is likely you will sit through multiple green lights, until I pay for my groceries. Your eagerness actually slowed things down as I had to move your stuff back past the plane that was defined by the hand I was using to slap my stuff up on the belt.
Why didn't I say something to you? Because I thought you'd notice that I'd moved the stick and your stuff the first time and I didn't want to appear rude. There was also a little bit of me that couldn't believe a person could actually be as oblivious or stupid as you appeared to be. Certainly, I thought, you'd noticed the second time, when your stuff had passed me and I had to reach ahead of my position on the belt to pull the stick (and your stuff) back so I could continue to decart my groceries. By the third time it happened I was more curious about whether you'd be able to find your car than anything else.
By the way, I seem to have your Dentucreme.
Posted by delmer at 7:47 PM | Comments (5)
December 23, 2007
More Driving and Riding
Just the other day I made comment about people having trouble with green lights. In two instances I'd noticed a guy and then a woman sitting through green lights to the point they inconvenienced other drivers. In a third instance a goofball (and I'll prove he was goofier than originally thought) was sitting several cars back from a light trying to trip the green arrow.
Let's discuss this third person first. The light in question is at Davidson and Avery. The green arrow would signal Davidson westbound traffic to take a left onto Avery. I was at that light twice yesterday — once on a bicycle (behind a car) and once in the minivan. In each instance I got a green arrow and in each instance I was pulled up to the light as traffic engineers would have planned. So, it would seem that approaching this light without trying any sort of driving trickery gets the arrow. (It may be worth noting that in each instance I'd been stopped for just a second before the light changed. Maybe I tripped the green (or the car in front of me had when I was on the bike) as I slowed for the light. If this is the case I'll place an edit here. Edit: I had, and apparently when I was on the bike the car ahead of me had, tripped the light as we slowed just a second before it would turn. Today I sat at the light and did not get an arrow; I'd sat ten or twenty seconds at the red.)
Do you recall the guy that sat through the green light and took it on the yellow which held up the van (then me, on the bike). And I'd complained that the lady in the van had not honked? At that same intersection, yesterday afternoon, traffic in the left-turn lane got a left-turn arrow that the driver in the first car missed as he was setting up his cheese fondue set. The car behind him, perhaps not a fan of finger foods, gave him a long, very pleasing, blast on his horn. Bravo.
At the Britton Parkway/Davidson Road light I was stopped on the bike as I headed east. Traffic coming from my left has to turn either left or right and there were a couple of cars in the left-turn lane. I've already said I was stopped. Their light turned green and the first car made a left turn so he'd be in front of me when I got my light. The second car, driven by a woman, pulled up to the light and sat there like it was a sign. She eventually went.
Later, something happened that hasn't happened in a while. As I pedaled down Dublin Road a carload of girls drove by me and gave me a "Wooo-hooo!" They got hung up at the next light and I was behind them before it turned green. They sat through the green just a moment because, I think, they were trying to get a look at me; they'd turned around and I made eye contact with the driver through my sunglasses. In all honesty, they could have been sitting through the green just because they were women.
I think I've been clear in that I don't really care to have people yell or honk at me when I'm on The Mighty Schwinn but that women woo-hooing me are the least offensive of these behaviors. I think I've also been clear when I've said that I don't think young women are honking at "me." They're honking at a guy on a bike. I had enough gear on that I could have been Michael Meyers on my way to my next Halloween Party and they'd have never been able to tell. I was also old enough to be their father.
Posted by delmer at 11:02 AM | Comments (4)
November 5, 2007
More Driving Tips
As I have explained before, my driving skills are second only to yours. This of course makes me the second-best driver in the world. While it's a pretty high office to hold there is, unfortunately, no money involved (but it's kind of cool to have the designation on my insurance card).
I'm about to type some things here that will be of no benefit to the daily, or even weekly, What's a Delmer Look Like reader. You may wonder why I'm taking the time to post this then. It's for the others.
The other's are, of course, the idiots who are using their cell phones to browse the Internet while they drive -- which is the only explanation for some of the things I see; I'm hoping that one or two of them will stumble across What's a Delmer Look Like and that some of the tips I leave may help them.
Let's begin:
When you get on an on-ramp in Ohio you are committed to getting on the stretch of highway at the bottom of said ramp. There will not be a four-way stop at the bottom of the ramp. You will not have an opportunity to make a U-turn on the ramp. We do not put attractions, convenience stores, or gas stations on the on-ramp; you are not going to be able to stop for milk or gas or to ride a Ferris Wheel. You should use the ramp to accelerate to an acceptable highway speed. That's what the people at the bottom of the ramp expect.
When you get to the bottom of the ramp you are going to need all the speed you can muster as you will be merging into the fastest lane of traffic on the highway. This is because too many idiots, upon entering the highway, move immediately to the middle lane or far lane without any thought to the speed they might be going. This speed is often 10 mph under the posted limit and forces traffic to move to the empty lane -- the lane that is traditionally called the slow lane -- to pass.
Which is why ...
Once you've made it on to the highway you should stay in the lane closest to the passenger side of your car unless you are passing someone. You do not need to move to the middle lane or what is commonly called "the fast lane," for whatever the hell reason you seemingly do for no reason, unless you are passing. If you are in a lane and you find you that you are being passed on the passenger side of your car, you need to move the hell over at least one lane.
You may pass a police officer at the posted speed. If your are in a 65 mph zone and the officer is doing 55, you may pass him at 65.
You can not bank MPH. If you are roaring down the road at 70 mph in a 65 zone and you see a trooper in the median it does you no good to slow to 50 mph to pass him. By the time you've seen the guy he's zapped you with the radar/laser several times and has decided whether or not he's going to stop you or put another sugar in his coffee. Pass him at 65! Butch up! Drive like a man! It's not like he's going to stop you in a couple of days when you're doing 45 in a 35 zone and say, "You were going 10 mph over the speed limit, but I noticed that on Wednesday you passed me at 15 under ... so I owe you five. Here's a coupon."
Finally ...
When the light turns green, you go. The people behind you know how to drive and you're holding them up.
This is a pumpkin patch I passed on the way home from Mechanicsburg one day. I'd meant to post it before Halloween but I'd lost track of it.
Posted by delmer at 9:21 PM | Comments (11)
October 9, 2007
What's $100 Billion Buy These Days?
This evening I needed some yard-waste bags and decided I'd ride the bike to Home Depot to pick them up.
When that mission was accomplished I shot off to McDonald's for a Fruit & Yogurt Parfait and a grilled chicken wrap (no sauce). I started a new book on the PDA as I sat and sipped on my super-big water.
As I was preparing to leave I caught a bit of the conversation the two guys behind me were having. One was going on about how the Democrats had increased the cost of a program by five times and how they were going to pay for it with an increase in the tax on tobacco products and how unfair that was.
He was, of course, talking about a bill Bush had vetoed. A bill that would have provided health care for uninsured children.
I was eager to continue my ride so I could get home in time for Carpoolers and I missed the rest of the conversation. I'm guessing, though, that the guy talking continued thusly:
"Of course, in 1998 smoking added $75 billion to the cost of health care in the United States. About 20% of the population smokes and I guess it really isn't fair that the 80% of the population that doesn't smoke has to pay a portion of this or that their premiums keep going up year after year. AND, I guess the money the Dems are asking for is less than half of the $100 billion smoking-related illnesses cost the nation in terms of health-care costs and lost productivity. And, if you think I'm making any of this up you can Google for it when you get home."
Though I could be wrong. The rest of the conversation may have simply been, "You gonna eat them there fries?!"
(For the record folks, this isn't an anti-smoking post. It's an anti-dumbass post.)
Posted by delmer at 8:34 PM | Comments (12)
September 19, 2007
I don't know what about this upset me
There are times, admittedly, when the smallest things bother me and even I can't figure out just what went wrong.
Yesterday I shot out of work a bit early to pick the boys up so we could go see Balls of Fury. I thought we'd go to Westpointe but at the last minute decided on another theater.
[I should point out that I have over 100 screens available within 9.5 miles of where I live.]
We arrived at 4:45 for a 4:50 showing and spent the next five minutes looking for someone to sell us tickets. The theater was empty except for a customer in the bar area (which sort of tips of the fact that this was Movie Tavern) and a kid on his cell phone.
I gave out a few "hellos" with no response. I went up the ramp to where the theaters are and looked down the hallway in either direction. The kid that had been on his cell phone was in the hall area and I saw him go through a door that must have led to a projection room.
The boys and I meandered around a minute or two more. I talked with the customer at the bar and jokingly said "movies must be free today."
I went up the ramp again as the kid who had been on his cell was coming out the door he'd previously gone in.
"I'm looking for someone to sell me tickets," I said politely. "Can you do that?"
"I'm off the clock," he said, equally as polite.
"What if I try to go back and see the a movie without paying?" I said with some humor in my voice.
"I guess I'd have to stop you," he replied, and he seemed to be a bit uncomfortable.
"But you're off the clock. Why would you care?" And I was still just joking around.
(I was never going to sneak back and see a movie. I couldn't, I wouldn't feel good about it. )
I went down the ramp. There was still no one there to sell me tickets and I'd been there at least five minutes. The bar area is cavernous and it just made place seem all the more empty.
And something snapped. It had been at least five minutes. Common sense suggests that someone would show up any second. But, my movie was starting and for all I knew it would be 15 minutes before anybody came out from wherever they were.
I knew I could be at Westpointe before then and I knew Balls of Fury was starting at 4:55 there. With previews we might make it without missing anything. I was fairly certain someone would be available to take my money.
We missed about two minutes. We saved about $30 when you count the savings of ticket prices and the fact we didn't have the opportunity to have salads, wings and pizza.
I don't know what about the experience irritated me. The parking lot was almost empty when the boys and I arrived so it makes sense the staff would be light (devoid of staff doesn't make as much sense). Maybe the lack of staff bothered me as the movie was about to start and there should have been someone available to sell tickets at least up until the movie started.
Who knows? Maybe I'm just a jackass.
Posted by delmer at 7:01 AM | Comments (5)
September 18, 2007
Another Broken Spoke and a Near Miss
[My blog publishing tool has crashed again and taken with it several already-composed entries. I was aware that it might crash (it sometimes does when I have things saved) and had archived one or two things. This is one of those archived items. I'll rewrite the Final Observations bits and post them tomorrow and the next day. (I'd forgotten to archive the Final Observation II and III posts. IT people should really know better.)]
I've broken another spoke on the rear wheel of The Mighty Schwinn. The original wheel was about 20 years old (I may have been wrong when I said 21 years the other day) and as far as I know the only spoke that ever broke is the one I blogged about July 9. That wheel had almost 2800 miles on it just the past two years.
Following the new wheel purchase I had the boys for an extended period of time and didn't get to ride as much as I wanted. I also missed the better part of three weeks when I was on vacation. The point is that the new wheel has very few miles on it. I had two spokes replaced the 10th and I had another replaced the 14th (at no charge).
It's very expensive to buy a new wheel one spoke at a time and I can't help but think that somewhere there's a wheel-design engineer with a plaque above his desk that says, "give them rims; sell them spokes."
Maybe I should get one of those Fred Flintstone solid-rock wheels. They looked sturdy.
Wednesday, September 13, I was pedaling up Davidson Road when the DHL Man tried to hit me.
Davidson is one of those very wide roads that seem to be pretty common around me. There's a nice, wide eastbound lane, a nice wide westbound lane, and a turn lane in the middle. I think you could easily (easily!) put 5 cars side by side on Davidson. Maybe 6. A thousand Smart Cars.
At just about the midpoint between Avery and Dublin Roads there is an overpass and the road narrows here for as long as it takes to drive over I-270. It isn't that great a distance.
I started up the hill, with the sun behind me, doing 24 mph. I'd probably slowed to 19 mph at the top. And this is where the DHL man blew by me in one of those big delivery trucks (at about 6:20 p.m.). He was so close I could have hit him with the side of my fist without having to take my left arm much past 90 degrees. He had to be doing 35 or 40 mph. (He easily pulled away from me coming down the hill and I was doing 30 then.)
I think he was lost and trying to make up time as I saw him signal left not far past Trueman Blvd., enter the turn lane and then change his mind. I finally caught up to him at Vicksburg Lane where he'd turned left into the subdivision.. I got his truck number and started composing my letter to DHL as I continued my ride.
I eventually decided the guy is just trying to make a living, probably has a family to take care of, and that I really didn't want to cause him any trouble.
Still, I have a family and getting killed isn't going to do them any good. Even if it means somebody gets a package 20-seconds earlier..
An hour later, as I rode past the road I work on and I came across the DHL guy again. He might be the guy who delivers to our building.
When all was said and done the DHL guy zipping by me too close didn't startle me as much as hoodlums yelling at me does (it was still uncalled for). Or spiders lunging at me in a sink.
Posted by delmer at 7:00 AM | Comments (4)
September 9, 2007
Duck Duck Goose
You know how sometimes when you go on vacation and you leave a pet behind (well cared for at a kennel or with a neighbor) and when you retrieve him he engages in behaviors that piss you off seemingly as a way to teach you a lesson for abandoning him?
The Mighty Schwinn seems to have done the same thing to me. I pulled it out of the garage today and noticed it had a funny roll to it. Close examination revealed one of the back spokes was broken and that the tire needed truing.
The only other spoke I know I've had replaced was the one from last month. That spoke was 21-years old and it made sense that it snapped… I'm pretty sure I blew out my knee about the time I was 21. Things happen when you hit that age.
That 21-year old wheel was replaced with a new wheel and new spokes and one of those spokes has already snapped. It can only mean that The Mighty Schwinn didn't appreciate the sitting-around time it had to put up with while I vacationed.
It had been my intention to put 20 or 30 miles on the bike and I probably shouldn't have gone anywhere after I noticed the spoke. I was having a bad case of The Blobs, however, and hit the road for 14.
And this was good. For it gave me a chance to play the game I sometimes play with drivers.
I'm not sure what the game is called, and I never know when we're going to play it, but it goes like this. I'll be pedaling along, minding my own business, and someone will drive by and yell something unintelligible at me. It's normally high school boys and I think they do it to see if they can startle me so they can then drive off giggling like little girls and telling each other just how cool they are. Following the yelling it is up to me to determine whether or not I should chase them down. I guess the whole thing is sort of like a wheeled version of Duck Duck Goose.
And so, I was pedaling up the hill on Fishinger Blvd. when a faded gray Caddy went by and the driver leaned across his passenger and yelled at me. The driver had a wild tangle of dark hair and there was a third guy in the backseat. Despite the fact the car had gone by me in the left-hand lane, leaving me the right-hand lane all to myself, I didn't care for it.
I had been startled and I could almost hear their girlish giggles of the guys as they drove off.
They were slowed by the light at Smiley which had turned green by the time I got to it. As I pulled into the road adjacent to the Mill Run Shopping Center they pulled into the parking lot for Mill Run. I swung into the parking lot and kept my eye on them as they made their way toward one of the banks. And this is where we met.
The driver, a high-schoolish looking guy with wild, dark hair, had a surprised look on his face when he saw me.
"Was that you that yelled at me back there," I demanded.
He shook his head at me.
"You didn't shout at me? None of you yelled?"
Three heads shook and the passenger shrunk away from me and leaned more on his door.
So far this year the score for the game is tied 2-2. I've had four idiots yell at me or make hand gestures and I've tried to catch three of them. I've caught two. Wait, maybe the score is then 2 (caught) to 1 (got away) which puts me in the lead.
Anyway, chasing people down may not be the smartest thing to do. I like to think it will teach the idiots a lesson but maybe the lesson they learn will be hey, we've gotta start packing some heat.
(BTW, closer examination at the bike shop would reveal two broken spokes.)
Posted by delmer at 9:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 21, 2007
LOST
LOST
Thus read the note I stuck on one of the refrigerators at work late last night.
Now, I know the container isn't lost. It has been tossed out by whomever was charged with cleaning the fridges last week. And I understand, completely, why it was tossed: it is far too time consuming to look at the container, notice is has chicken in it, and keep it on the shelf.
It is much more economical — from a fridge-cleaning approach — to simply scoop stuff into a big trash can.
And it isn't like we aren't given a warning. Each Friday before the big Frigidaire purge an announcement is made warning us the kitchen is about to be cleaned and that if we want to save anything we should scurry on down to the cafeteria.
Yes, yes, yes. I understand.
As a matter of fact we run by a similar set of rules in IT. Before someone's network password expires they receive a warning that states, "You have six grace logins before your password expires. Would you like to change your password now?" Six eventually decrements down to one if a person continues to login, day after day, without creating a new password. If the person fails to change passwords before running out of grace logins they are locked out. When that happens I, knowing the person will have no use whatsoever for any of their data as they can no longer access it, run a script that purges anything they've ever touched from our network.
It's a big time saver for me and lets me get out of work twenty seconds earlier.
No. Wait. I don't do that.
When you get right down to it, the container is my responsibility. And it never really had a chance. I took chicken in to work for lunch on Thursday and forgot to eat it. I forgot to eat it Friday as well although I remembered it that night before I went to bed. By then the container's fate had been sealed (burped and sealed, if I may) and I decided not to worry about it until Monday morning.
Oh yea, and my grandparents all passed a long, long time ago.
Posted by delmer at 5:53 PM | Comments (2)
May 29, 2007
We're gonna have fried chicken ... wait, no we're not
Let's start today with a little bit of TMI.
I rode the bike in to work today (in bike shorts and a jersey) and I forgot to pack underwear. That's a problem I'll fix at lunch, but until then I'm flying commando.
Now that we're beyond that I'd like to take a moment to invite everyone to the Kentucky Fried Chicken just up the road from me. The KFC in question has a great staff and they work together like a well oiled machine. A well oiled machine that is now free of trans fats.
This KFC also happen to attract some of the stupidest customers on the planet and if you're in the mood for a good time, and not really interested in getting any food, it makes for quite the people-watching experience.
Yesterday morning Samson asked me what my favorite food was. When I answered fried chicken Samson said the thought it would be a fine dinner treat. And so it was going to be.
At dinner time Sammo and I made the drive to The Colonel's and found ourselves in line behind four people who were obviously together. Four people who, it seemed, had never been in a KFC. Four people who had given no thought to what they might want to eat, aside from something chickeny (probably, and that's up for debate).
Four people who had coupons that may have just coincidentally been for KFC. I say "coincidentally" as nothing they did or said suggested they had actually read the coupons before dragging them out of their pockets.
I cannot tell you how painful they made the ordering process. I felt sorry for the KFC employees. I felt sorry for me. The pain was so excruciating that I felt sorry for the people of Pompeii and they've been dead since well before the time Harland Sanders put together his secret mix of herbs and spices.
Each time it looked like the ordering process was almost over — which was often signaled by an employee asking, "Is that all," and a dumbass saying "Yes," something else would come up.
I know what you're thinking. How can they not know if they've ordered drinks. All I can say is that it was taking a really long time, and I'm surprised they weren't forgetting each other's names.
After a person would order he or she would move to the part of the line where the food came out. This is where the Where are We Going to Sit in this Empty-Except-For-Us Restaurant comedy started to play out.
Sammo and I almost left a couple of times but were always tricked into staying by a carefully choreographed, "Is that all" / "Yes" combination.
Finally, the last customer took a step toward the group performing the second act and I thought, "Aha. This is it."
The customer then threw me a head fake and made her move back to the counter.
I herded Sammo out of the restaurant and we went to Kroger where we picked up baked chicken.
And what was I going to get at KFC? A bucket of chicken. The 16 or 20 piece, whatever it is … it doesn't matter. I knew it was a bucket with no sides, despite the fact I haven't been into a KFC in a while, and I knew all I'd have to do it glance up at the menu as I approached the order-here line and I'd be set.
And when did I know what I was going to order? About two seconds after Samson had said, "We should have KFC for dinner" that morning.
Posted by delmer at 5:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 5, 2007
Hot Fuzz
I went to see Hot Fuzz today and read a bit of On the Road while I was in the snack line. I ran across the following bit:
Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
I just thought it was interesting.
Hot Fuzz was pretty good. It's a minute over two hours and it didn't feel anywhere near that long.
Unfortunately, about 10-minutes into the movie a couple of women came in and sat behind me. We were in one of the smaller theaters and I usually sit in the very back row when I'm in one of those; there's more leg room. Today when I walked in to the theater there was just one other person seated and he was in the back row. He'd been sort of talkative in the ticket line and I was afraid he'd misunderstand my going to the movie by myself to mean that I wanted to talk to strangers before the previews started when, in fact, I wanted to read. So I moved forward a row.
Which is how I wound up with two women sitting behind me 10 minutes into the movie.
Of course, they didn't come in and sit right down. The came in, took a position behind my right ear, and talked for about a minute about where they'd sit among the six people who were already seated. They decided sitting in the very back would be best … probably because they brought their own snacks in and they figured they'd be more likely to go undetected if they sat in the very back.
And they might have gone undetected had they not had a bunch of squeaky toys in the bag with the snacks. Each time one of them reached into the bag one of these toys would squeak. For an hour.
And of course, I'm lying. They didn't have a bunch of squeaky toys. But they were eating out of a bag that made an incredibly loud rustling sound. For an hour.
I know what you're thinking. This story sounds familiar. Did you steal this story from Dave? Are you really so uncreative that you have to steal from others?
Well, yes. But, no.
Dave's story involves three rude bitches and a crinkly bag of Doritos whereas my story involves two rude bitches and a rustling bag of some unknown food substance.
I did do the following math though. If it is roughly 2500 miles to Seattle and Dave had trouble with movie wenches about three months ago they would have had to travel 833 miles each month in order to make it to Columbus to eat snacks in my ear in time for Hot Fuzz.
Had they seen the previews for Hot Fuzz before Pan's Labyrinth? How many movies did they see on the way? What happened to the third wench?
Fortunately the snacks were gone by 6 p.m. How do I know? The rustling had stopped about 10 minutes prior to the 6 o'clock alarm on the watch one of the women had received as a gift went off. How do I know it was a gift? She had no idea how to turn it off.
She should get a Timex. I have one and any one of the five buttons around the dial will turn the alarm off when it sounds.
Anyway, I was looking forward to Hot Fuzz since I first saw the previews a while back. It's getting pretty good reviews and I can only guess that attendance was low today due to the fact that Spider-Man 3 was showing on several screens and everybody and their brother were going to see it.
Posted by delmer at 10:18 PM | Comments (2)
May 4, 2007
All aboard for boredom
I've done some more reading of On The Road. It tuns out that the guy that was cruising chicks at the high school is the same guy who was cheating on his wife-to-be with his ex-wife. (I know all that stuff was stricken through in yesterday's entry, but I felt better knowing there was only one dog in the story and I thought I'd share.)
In new news, today was a big day.
I had some dental work done — a filling was replaced. The best thing about the trip to the dentist is that the tooth that gets a pain sometimes has had a root canal. I was a bit concerned as it also has a crown on it and I was afraid we were going to end up drilling through a crown to do a root canal and then, of course, we'd have to replace the crown. While we were trying to figure out what was causing the tooth to ache some X-rays were taken and the bad filling, with a cavity beneath, was discovered.
Actually, my dentist knows why the tooth with the root canal sometimes has a pain and he shared that info with me. I quit actively listening when I determined I wouldn't be paying for a new crown. For what it's worth the tooth never ached in a traditional, tooth achy, way. Sometimes it would get a little electrical-shock feeling like when you touch a fork to a filling.
I also installed a new mail server today. That job isn't really done yet; I need to move the old mail to the new server so that nothing gets lost.
The new server jumps higher and runs faster than the old server. It also makes julienne fries.
Finally, I replaced a tape drive in our NetWare server. The old drive was a DLT8000 which would backup 80 gigs of data (compressed). The new drive is a DLT VS160 which will backup 160 gigs of data (compressed.) It is a very zippy drive.
Could I be any more boring?
Posted by delmer at 10:35 PM | Comments (4)
April 25, 2007
Commercials
There's a television ad in which a woman is riding a fairly full elevator down and changing the configuration of her clothing; she strips off some items which reveals more sports-oriented attire beneath. When the elevator doors open she rushes out the front of the office building to find her gal pal waiting at the curb in a car with bikes on the roof. Girl One hops in, looks forward very seriously and say "let's go."
I don't even know why I hate it. Is it because Girl Two was obviously going to go even without the prodding of Girl One? Is it because the tone Girl One uses is so serious it's as if the gals are on their way to deliver a heart for a life-saving operation? Is it because Girl One was changing clothes in an elevator and Steven Tyler wasn't in the frame?
Another commercial involves a bunch of women on motorcycles chasing two guys down in their vehicle. The leader of the pack returns the driver's cell phone to him, declares "there's a new number in there," turns to the other woman, snaps her finger and says, "let's go."
Again, I'm not sure why I don't like this commercial. I don't think it's the dialog that the two commercials have in common that put me off and I'm a big fan of attractive women.
I'm not even sure it's the stupidity of the commercials that offend me. There's one I really like in which an attractive young lady is sort of gyrating around and sweating and words pop up on the screen that say, "When she sweats, it's hot … when you sweat it's smelly," or something like that. See, it's sort of stupid, but it's fun and funny.
Maybe I think the other commercials are trying to take themselves too seriously.
Maybe it's because crap like attractive women changing clothes in elevators just doesn't happen and I doubt there are roving bands of good-looking young-lady motorcycle gangs roaming the southwest.
Who can tell?
I know that I thank God each and every day for the fact that I can't take ten steps in Hilliard without stumbling across a hot, scantily clad, 20-something female gyrating in place to some song only she can hear.
[Last night I saw the spot with the motorcycle gang — it's an ad for Suzuki autos. Just before I posted this the commercial with the elevator came on — it's a Suzuki car commercial as well. I hadn't realized both the commercials were for the same company. I can only assume the advertising agency involved has a big bag filled with dialog tiles that they reach into as they are writing commercials and "let's go" came up twice in two hours.]
Posted by delmer at 10:34 PM | Comments (2)
April 22, 2007
You owe me
If you were in Central Ohio today and if you had a pleasant experience as far as idiots not being around you goes … you have me to thank.
Today, for you my gentle reader, I used my special powers to ensure that each and every idiot in a four-county radius was in front of me in whatever line I was in. And I did it for you.
I'm not certain, but my reach may have extended as far as Florida as one of the idiots I was behind was a 30-ish woman with Florida tags on her car. That may be giving me too much credit. Maybe it was coincidence and, really, the only stupid thing she did was throw trash out her window. What makes a person think, "I've got this piece of trash in my car that I no longer want. Ah! I'll toss it out the window. I am that special. The rules of common courtesy do not apply to me."
My favorite idiot was the guy at one of the large home improvement stores. He was in the self-checkout line and reached the point in his self-checkout where he needed to do something with a handful of loose rubber O-rings.
I assume you know how self-checkout works. You take your items from your cart, scan them, and put them in your bag. Self-checkout is supposed to speed things up for people with a few items. The whole speeding-things-up part is defeated when a goofball shows up with a bunch of loose O-rings. How did he even get them? I thought everything in this big home improvement store was individually wrapped! I'll bet the guy was supposed to put the O-rings in a bag and write a number down on the outside of it.
There was a moment when I wanted to give the guy a round of applause. Somehow he brought up a screen on the terminal that showed a big bunch of (what I think) were O-rings. I had to withhold the applause as he couldn't decide which O-rings he'd purchased and the thought of paying two cents too much screwed with him enough that he had to seek assistance from the employee lording over the self-checkout area. And she was having enough trouble. One of the self-checkout terminals was out of order, though not marked as such so she had to keep telling people it was out of order. Another terminal had some sort of clusterfucky thing going on with it which I honestly think was a user-error of some sort.
This left one terminal that was serving people with any regularity. The woman behind me needed servicing in such a big way that she decided to cut line. I'm guessing she needed to get on the road as she had an SUV full of trash she needed to throw out the window one piece of a time on the way home.
I eventually gave up when a woman got in line behind me and started thinking out loud. It wasn't what she was thinking, just the way she was saying it that got to me. I knew if I had to listen to her too long I'd go nuts. So I returned my two items to their proper location and drove two minutes to the other massive home improvement store.
(Yes, yes, yes. I could have gone to a full-service line at the first place, but the lines were way too long for the piddly little purchase I was going to make.)
At the other massive home improvement store I was in and out in five minutes. I bought the same item I'd had in my hand at the first place. I was second in line at checkout. The store seemed to be primarily idiot free.
As you know my driving skills are second only to yours making the two of us Number One and Number Two in a auto. If you and I were to ever have lunch in a restaurant together I'm certain the waiter, sensing our positions in the World of Driving would affectionately call us Pee and Poo. South of the Equator I suspect we'd be Poo and Pee.
I don't know that I care much for that last paragraph, but it's staying. It sounded funnier (well, funny) as I was riding around on the bike today.
Anyway, on the way home from lunch (At the KFC … and to the idiot in front of me there let me say: It's a frikkin' KFC! Does the menu ever change? Order what you got last time. At the very least read the menu before you get in line. We were the only two people in the store! Would it have delayed you all that much had you said, "I really have no idea what I want, why don't you go ahead of me." I knew what I wanted. It was the same thing I got last time I was there … and the time before … and the time before …).
So, on the way home from KFC I was behind a guy that I knew was going to sit too long through the green left arrow. How did I know? Just before I thought it was about time for the light to change he thought it was time to turn around and face the person in the backseat. You and I, having been blessed with superior driving skills and having a sense of common courtesy as it applies to proper in-an-auto behavior, know that the time to look at the person in the backseat is never. But if you have to do it the proper time is within five seconds of you coming to a complete stop at the red light. The light is red — you know it is going to turn green, it always does — and the longer you sit at a red light the more likely it becomes that it is going to turn green in the next instant. It will turn green, without fail, as soon as you turn around to look at something in the backseat.
Obviously if you have a child in the backseat, or any other thing that could projectile puke without much warning, the rules regarding backseat-looking go out the window. Much like litter does if you are a Floridian.
Rats. There was another moment-of-idiocy that I encountered today.
I've lost it.
Posted by delmer at 8:11 PM | Comments (1)
March 9, 2007
Two weeks ago today I put a call into our Company for some technical support. We've started experiencing some odd e-mail problems and I wanted to get some info from them.
The big problem we're having is that mail coming directly to work will sometimes bounce back to the sender with a "Relaying Denied" message. Mail servers are typically set up to not relay mail as a method of fighting off spammers.
What's worse, is that 99% of the mail (probably more) was coming through without a problem. I'm of the mind that something should always work or never work. Sure, if you have a loose wire in a car it might sometimes start, but when it comes to network problems like this one ... it should be all or nothing. And really, even with the car problem as soon as it quits working altogether it's going to be easier to fix.
The point is -- if the mail didn't work at all, I'd make a change, see if it worked or not, and either make another change if I needed to or sit on my butt drinking Diet Mountain Dew if all was well. If the mail works most of the time anyway, you don't know if the change you made did anything good or not (if it has done something bad you know almost immediately).
Mail from some outside users was bouncing back rarely while the vast majority of other senders never seemed to have a problem.
As part of the troubleshooting I logged into my Hotmail account hoping I'd be able to generate some bouncing mail. The first mail I sent from Hotmail to my work account bounced back and I thought "Aha ... I've lucked out." The next 99 mails I sent through, prior to making any software changes, did not bounce. "Oh-ho!," I thought, "I'm screwed."
Our mail server is a Linux box and, fortunately, Linux comes with no shortage of log files a person can dig through. Unfortunately, many of these log files are written in Latin. Well, "Geek" actually; and a version of Old Geek that I'm not terribly strong in.
I'm sort of trying to make a joke there. There's a lot of info in the log files and having them is certainly a lot better than not having them. Interpretation, however, is a little hard on the eyeballs [Why is it that every time I spell check this entry the spell checker wants to replace the string "little hard on" with "George W. Bush"?].
While I was looking through he log files I thought of the other domains I Lorded over. There are five or six, all set up similarly, (one of them used to run out of my living room on a box with a dynamic IP address that was a bit trickier to set up than any of the others), and none of them having this problem. The difference is that the problematic domain has our mail hosted on a server behind me and our website hosted by an off-site provider.
Maybe, and this isn't my strength ... making obscure references to my toolbox as Ben & Jerrys and killer use of ellipsis is ... the problem is in the way our hosting is split. What I'm getting at, and I may be dead wrong, is that our MX record points to our web hosting company and they point the mail to us. Maybe this would trigger relaying. I don't know.
I also don't know how our MX record is set up. You know, as I type this I can see a possible flaw ... but, let's charge on.
I called our Web hosting Company and spoke with a real live person who was going to pass the info I gave him onto someone else. I assumed that someone else would call me back and didn't give the message taker a long-winded description of the problem. I also steered clear of any references to Ben & Jerrys as either a reference to Ice Cream or The Tools.
I wanted to get, from that someone else, the IP address of any server that might be involved in the route our mail takes in coming to us. And to ask if my thoughts were even remotely possible. And to ask if I couldn't just piddle with our DNS setting so that web requests went to them and mail requests came here. That's a lot of info to give a guy on the phone when you know someone is going to call you back and you'll just have to repeat yourself.
So, I left the message. Two Fridays ago.
In the meantime I made some guesses as to what IP addresses might be involved and made changes based on those guesses. Monday I got a call from the FBI asking me to not refer to George W. Bush as a "little hard on." When I asked how they new I intended to do that the phone filled with static.
No, I made some guesses. I don't want to jinx myself, but the mail problems seem to have settled down since then. I usually make pretty good non-lottery-related guesses.
But -- yesterday I was commenting to one of our Engineers about my tech support request that had gone unfilled. He told me he'd seen the ticket I created when he checked on a Tech Support request he'd made. I asked where he'd seen the ticket and he told me the Web hosting Company had sent him an e-mail with a link in it and that they likely sent me one as well.
I'm certain that had the mail they'd sent to me bounced back to the Web hosting Company, they would have noticed. However, I called in to report an e-mail problem and their answer seems to be to send me an e-mail? Even if they aren't directly involved with our mail, they should suspect it is flaky.
This reminded me of a memo my boss sent out in a previous job. The phones were down and he wanted people to know that his department was working on it. If they had any further questions they were to give him a call. Yes, he realized the error shortly after he distributed the memo.
I logged into the Web hosting Company's website and looked at my ticket. It had been closed with the polite, yet simple. line: "We don't host your mail, though we'd like too."
I knew they didn't host our mail. That't the only thing I knew for sure.
Posted by delmer at 7:14 AM | Comments (2)
March 6, 2007
I have an itch
I have got the worst case of dry skin. EVER. I itch all over.
Honest to God. It is so bad I've been seriously thinking about calling my friend Natalie and begging her to set me up with someone with a nice set of claws. And if not a nice set of claws, maybe just a nice set.
No. The claws are important.
Unfortunately, as it happens, just the other night I sent Natalie a mail explaining that I really wasn't of the mind to meet new women and I'm pretty sure that the rules of friendship require that at least a week pass before e-mails that contradict other e-mails are sent. Of course this only applies to men sending e-mails to women or other men. Women can send messed up crap to each other all day long; mere moments only need pass between their contradictory e-mailings. The governing restriction is set simply by the words-per-minute a woman can type; it's in their handbook.
So it looks like I'm on my own.
I've got plenty of oils and lotions that I could slather on myself to try to get some relief. In the kitchen alone I've got:
In the bathroom I've got a big jug of that yellow lotion that everybody has. It is so common, in fact, that it doesn't even get a bullet point. Neither does the bottle of stuff from Avon that may be called bath oil -- I know the name of the product seems to suggest that you could dump it right in the tub and soak in it.
The big problem I have with any of this stuff is that I don't like the feel of oil on my skin. You know, when I'm alone. And since I can't keep myself from sending e-mails to my friends telling them I'm not in the mood to meet any body lotion applicators women, it looks like I'm out of luck for at least the rest of the week.
Posted by delmer at 12:03 AM | Comments (5)
February 27, 2007
Support
I am not the smartest man you'll ever meet.
I may be one of the nicest. I try to treat others well. I know I have good intentions. And the things I do over the course of the day don't eat at me and leave me wondering if I'm doing the right thing.
Nice? Yes.
Smartest man you'll ever meet? No.
And yet, I seem to know more about the wireless network in a big hotel in California than even that hotel's tech support knows. Granted -- I'm in the same country as the big hotel in California even though I'm 2,200 miles away from it while the tech support department for their network is offshore someplace. But nobody has ever approached that hotel on my behalf to sell them my services as a wireless-network technical support person. Somebody must have done that in order to get the current company the support contract ... and those people are not doing a great job.
As I've said before, I love all people. I think everybody deserves a chance to better themselves. I wish we could all get along better.
However, one of the big problems I'd had in the recent past is that it wasn't uncommon for me to end up on the phone with a tech support person that was not able to help me as their English-language skills don't allow them to vary from the script they are reading, I couldn't understand them due to the difference in our accents, or they had been placed into a support position for which they are ill suited (that is, they're in over their head.)
I have gotten in the habit of avoiding companies who I've had tech support problems with and my tech support headaches have dropped to almost zero.
Yesterday one of our sales people called me after work. He'd been trying to connect to a wireless network at a large hotel in LA and was having problems. He'd been on the phone with the hotel's wireless tech support person and they were getting nowhere. The tech support person eventually told our sales guy that he needed a bridge and that he'd have to go downstairs, sign some paperwork, and take the bridge to his room.
Our sales guy had already had a full day and thought he'd call me before trudging down to the lobby. I, and again I'm not the smartest guy you'll ever meet and I'm not necessarily a particularly smart IT guy, had him connected to the Internet in less than five minutes.
It wasn't a bridge problem.
The only part of 'technical' that should apply to my level of support for that hotel in California is that 'technically' I was off work when I got that call.
You know in IT, you can punch out any time you like, but you never really leave ...
(Yea, I know. That's sort of weak. I'm not really the wittiest guy you'll ever meet either. It's a good thing I'm nice. And a damned delight to be around. And I'm salaried -- I never punch in or out.)
Posted by delmer at 11:57 PM | Comments (1)
February 16, 2007
A soldier here ... a soldier there
The United States has a population of almost 300 million people.
Australia has a population of over 20 million.
The United States has 140,000 troops in Iraq and people over most of the rest of the world seem to hate us.
Australia has 1,400 troops and you can't think of Australia without thinking of (and feeling sad about) Steve Irwin. The Aussies, I believe, are universally loved. (And I'm OK with that. The few I know seem very nice ... not Canadian nice, but still not bad.)
The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard (I'm guessing not the John Howard I went to high school with) has suggested that terrorists should be praying for a Democratic victory the next presidential election as one of our Democratic candidates announced a plan for US troop withdrawal and Howard thinks that is a bad idea. More simply said, if the Democrats win, the terrorists win.
This is a very bold statement for a man halfway around the world to make.
John Howard thinks it is just fine that Australia has a mere 1,400 troops in Iraq -- which is fewer than half the number of American soldiers killed since the war began -- as Australia's population is just 20 million. Fourteen-hundred seems just about right to him.
I'm not sure what type of sliding-scale-troop-deployment math tool he's using, but, if you are to consider that the population of the US is (not quite) 15 times that of Australia, it would seem that Australia should have at least 9,333 troops.
Now, in all fairness, it is my thought that Australia and the rest of the Coalition of the Dragged Along, should have zero troops there, as should we. But until Howard is able to arrange for more Australian troops to be sent over to Iraq, and until he arranges to take the Australian funding of the war to just over $24 billion USD ($30 billion AUD), he needs to STFU. (By June of 2006 the Australian contribution to the war in Iraq was $1.2 billion AUD or $938 million USD.)
It is easy to put a dollar price tag on things like war (The NY Times has a nice article here), but that isn't what my anger is all about. I may have more easily been able to dismiss Howard's comments as those from just another dumbass had it not been for the fact that it was just a few weeks ago one of my coworkers was in tears as her grandson had been injured by some sort of anti-personnel device. He, another American soldier and an Iraqi entered a building and the device exploded; the Iraqi was killed, the other American was more seriously injured, and the coworker's grandson had more minor injuries. Of course, had the guys been standing in a different order he could have just as easily been killed. Hours passed between finding out the grandson had been injured in an explosion and finding out he going to be OK.
[Bush has just asked for 100 billion more dollars (where one billion equals 1000 million) to fight the war which will boost the $366 billion we've spent to $466 billion. Should he get it I'll expect Howard to pony up $31 billion USD ($39.6 billion AUD) before sticking his nose in the Democratic process over here.]
[One more bracketed item. I'm not sure all the math above is correct regarding conversion from USD to AUD and numbers of troops. I'm certain my ratios regarding US participation vs. Australian participation in Iraq are more fair based on population -- which seems to be the yardstick Howard is using -- but I may not be dead on. At the very least I put some thought into what I typed here before shooting my mouth off which is more than I can say about the Australian Prime Minister.]
Posted by delmer at 5:59 AM | Comments (1)
January 31, 2007
HP Parts are hard to get
It has been over a year since a friend of mine ordered a notebook keyboard from Hewlett Packard. He's not received it yet. Below are the e-mail exchanges he's had with the HP Parts Store.
-----Original Message-----
From: hp.parts-store@hp.com [mailto:hp.parts-store@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 1:32 PM
To: Gary West
Subject: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
HP Parts Store
Buy Genuine HP computer parts, printer parts and Compaq parts, direct from the HP Parts Store.
Order confirmation
Thank you for using the HP Parts Store.
Your order has been received and will arrive in one or more packages depending on the number of parts you ordered. Please print this page or write down your order number (see below) so you can track order status using the HP Parts Store.
You can view your orders online, 24 hours a day using the 'Lookup order' link on the HP Parts Store. Please allow about 60 minutes after your order has been placed for our system to process it.
We appreciate your patience.
Parts you are ordering
Part :204278-001 Keyboard
Total price (USD) 42.00
Order subtotal 42.00
Shipping and Handling 0.00
Tax 2.84
Order total (USD) 44.84
Prices: Prices include shipping and handling.
Delivery: Please note that delivery is subject to part availability at the time the order is accepted. HP shall make reasonable efforts to meet any delivery date(s) quoted or acknowledged, but shall not be liable for failure to meet such dates.
That last paragraph is very important.
From: Gary West
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 6:03 AM
To: Hp Parts-store
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
I placed this order in December with a predicted delivery of Feb 2nd. It is now 3 months since I placed this order.
Please can you advise status.
Regards
Gary West
-----Original Message-----
From: Hp Parts-store [mailto:hp.parts-store@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 12:21 PM
To: Gary West
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
Please call 800-227-8164
Regards,
From: Gary West
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 12:39 PM
To: Hp Parts-store
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
I did,
One woman said she couldn't’t help me and another line just says they’re busy and I’ve been waiting for over an hour. I need help and ain’t getting it !!!! I think 3 months to wait for an order is a stretch, but your 1-800 number is wasting my time. I’ve paid for the part and have not got it - Help !
Regards
Gary West
-----Original Message-----
From: Hp Parts-store [mailto:hp.parts-store@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 3:42 PM
To: Gary West
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
It's 800-227-8164 Options 2, 1, 1 to check order status. Your estimated shipping date is 03/18/06.
Regards,
From: Gary West
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 1:44 PM
To: Hp Parts-store
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
Well it’s now 5/15 and not 3/18 and it is now 5 months since I ordered the part. While I am patient, I think HP is stretching things here. Will I get my part or my money back this year ?
Gary West
-----Original Message-----
From: Hp Parts-store [mailto:hp.parts-store@hp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 5:29 PM
To: Gary West
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order # | Order Confirmation
Hello,
This part is on back order. The estimated shipping date is May 21st. If you have any questions, please contact the HP Parts Store at 1-800-227-8164 opt 2.
Thank You,
HPPS
From: Gary West
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 9:18 AM
To: Hp Parts-store
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order #xxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
Dear HP,
While I am noted for my patience. I am beginning to think that no-one actually really cares about my order that is past due by 7 months. I would like either my parts or money back within 7 days. I can confirm that even though this is a small claim I intend to re-coup my loss by all legal means possible.
Regards
Gary West
-----Original Message-----
From: Hp Parts-store [mailto:hp.parts-store@hp.com]
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 5:25 PM
To: Gary West
Subject: RE: HP parts Store Order xxxxxxxxx | Order Confirmation
Hello,
Unfortunately, we do not have the data base to look up your order. You will need to contact the HP Parts Store at 1-800-227-8164 opt 2. Ask to speak with a supervisor. They will be able to assist you with this issue.
Thank You,
HPPS
Sent November 15
Dear HP Parts Store (though something tells me that this is not indeed your genuine name),
Just a gentle reminder that it is now just short of 12 months from when I placed the order with you. I can't wait in anticipation for my first inaugural birthday card from HP celebrating this particular non-event. I am sure you will share with me the celebration of highs and lows of this roller coaster ride during the past year. Indeed, I have seldom witnessed such a variety of excuses and diversionary tactics in order to frustrate a customer, (sorry did I say customer, I meant gullible sod).
So here's looking at yer kid and look forward to another year of pointless banter between us. On the other hand, on the other hand, maybe, just maybe, HP could either supply me with a refund or the part I ordered in the first place - nah, impossible. I look forward with some trepidation to further in-action on your behalf, no, on second thoughts I think I'll just write to your CEO and get someone fired.
Yours with the sincerity of OJ Simpson's latest book.
Regards
Gary West
Posted by delmer at 9:25 PM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2007
Nextel Loves Me
My buddy Roy called the other day. I'd called him over the holidays several times and left messages about getting together and retelling the stories we tell during our almost-annual get-togethers. In the message he left for me, just a few days ago, he apologized for not getting back to me -- but the messages I'd left for him had not made it to his cell phone in a timely fashion. I guess I should have called several more times, I just didn't want to be a bother and wasn't sure he wasn't out of town.
I should have realized that it may have simply been a case of him not getting a voice-mail notification from his cell provider.
I don't know if Roy is a Sprint/Nextel subscriber or if he's with someone else. I do know he seemed to enjoy the voice mail message that greeted him when he called me. I've changed it to let people know that they are more than welcome to leave a message, but that I may not get it in a timely manner. I go on to tell them that there is a pretty good chance that my phone -- which is likely on my hip -- didn't even ring when they called. It's pretty much a rant about my phone problems. Just the other day I added a bit about how pressing '7' will allow them to leave a message immediately.
I was very excited to receive the above ad from Nextel the other day. Excited because it says right on the graphic that in order to take advantage of the offer I have to re-up for a year. I'm sure the similar item I received in the mail said the same thing, it just didn't jump out at me right away.
So, I agree to give them about $720 ... and they agree to give me $36.00 discounted off that amount.
If you're a regular reader, it will come as no surprise to hear I'm going to pass on the offer. For some additional bitching you can read how poor message delivery led to a missed doctor's appointment and kidnapping.
You may press '7' at any time to leave a message.
Posted by delmer at 12:32 PM | Comments (2)
January 22, 2007
Tears for Sears
I have had a Sears card for longer than I can remember. It was one of the first credit cards I ever had so I bet I've had it for close to 30 years.
I probably haven't used it in a couple of years and I probably haven't used it twice in the last 7 years.
And Sears is going to take it away. Take it away and replace it with a new Sears/Mastercard combo that I can use anywhere.
Just like my current Visa card. The Visa card I got to replace the Visa card I had that had a 7.9% interest rate because I thought 7.9% was too high ... even if it came with super-duper airline miles and got me on the plane first and came with some sort of companion ticket thing I never used.
Sears sent me a letter telling me about the new card. IF I DON'T WANT THE NEW CARD, and wish to keep the old card, all I have to do is call them and let them know.
All I have to do to let them know I don't want the new card -- that I want to keep the old card -- is call them. If I want to keep things the same as they are now, I have to give them a call.
Having to call them to tell them I want to keep things the same is almost as unbelievable to me as the fact that I actually opened the letter they sent. It looked like junk mail -- like one of those pieces I usually throw away after I make sure I don't recognize with of the "Have You Seen Me" pictures.
The way this should have worked is that IF I WANTED THE NEW CARD I should have to call them.
I don't want a new card. Especially one with the SEARS name on it -- they've pissed me off in the past (Have I written about the bad radio-buying experience? The bad auto-repair experiences (I had just one, but know of several) or the battery-buying experience of a couple years ago? I've checked, and no I haven't. However, here's a tire-buying story with a happy ending (No, I was not buying them at an Asian massage parlor)).
I certainly don't want a card with a 24% interest rate; which is what the new one comes with ... and it could go higher (or lower) depending on whatever current rate they've based it on.
I would have probably had a SEARS card forever. I probably would have used it at some point in the future.
Now I have to call them. And since I'm going to have them on the phone I'm canceling the card altogether. Even if the first call is some sort of automated thing and I never get to a real person, I'll make the second call to Sears and cancel the card I have to make sure this doesn't happen again.
After all, as SEARS was so kind to point out, I don't really need a SEARS card. I already have a VISA, and it's good at SEARS and so many other places.
Posted by delmer at 11:16 PM | Comments (2)
January 9, 2007
Next Tale of Nextel
As I mentioned yesterday, Samson and I went to Monster Jam accompanied by his buddy Alex.
Alex had spent the prior night and I was to call his father when Monster Jam was over.
As I mentioned last month my cell phone service in provided (and I use the term loosely) by Nextel. Maybe you recall how I bitched about their inability to get my voice messages to me in a timely fashion.
Anyway.
Monster Jam ended around 4 p.m. The boys and I hung around for a bit and then hit the road around 5 p.m. I called Alex's dad and left a message for him.
He never called back. Or so it seemed.
At 7:30 I turned my phone off and on as someone had suggested it might trigger a message delivery if one was waiting. No messages came in so I called Alex's dad again. He answered and we decided to meet at CompUSA "in an hour" which made it 8:30 p.m. (This is only important only as it establishes the time I turned my phone off then back on. The boys and I were out having a good time so we were fine having Alex hang with us.)
Move forward to Sunday.
I was relaxing in a recliner and reading a book. My phone was sitting on the table next to me. Sitting and not ringing. And then at 3:52 p.m. the "you've got a voice message" sound started coming out of it. I looked at the display and found I had two messages.
Message 1: Saturday, 6:57 p.m.
It was Alex's dad calling to arrange pick-up.
I guess it's a good thing I didn't wait to hear from him. He may have charged me with kidnapping.
Message 2: Sunday, 3:51 p.m.
It was The Wife at The Time. She had called a minute before ... the phone never rang.
Posted by delmer at 7:55 AM | Comments (4)
December 18, 2006
This Nextel Entry Has Been Renamed
[Edit: This post originally had a less-flattering title. I've renamed it as I've come to appreciate that Nextel has some of the better tech support I've encountered recently.]
I am really a pleasant person. I know this because I tell myself this over and over ... and I always tell the truth.
That is neither here nor there.
Thursday morning I awoke with the felling that I had a doctor's appointment coming up. I checked my wallet for the appointment card and looked in my PDA for anything pressing over the next couple of weeks. There was nothing.
Nothing except a nagging feeling that I had an appointment.
I called the doc's office and left a message asking that someone call me back to let me know when they next expected to see me.
Sunday afternoon I heard the voice-mail-waiting beep come from my phone. The display indicated that I had three new voice messages. I dialed the retrieval number and after punching in my code was greeted with the female voice telling me:
You have three messages waiting. Message one. Friday. 8 a.m.
That message started: Delmer, this is Mike. I'm at work ...
I deleted Mike's message, I'd already talked with him in person.
My voice mail continued: Message two. Friday. 9:44 a.m.
And that message began: Delmer, this is Doctor Smith's office. You have an appointment later today at ...
Sweet.
Now, a couple of years ago I forgot about one of my appointments with Dr. Smith, so I know that when an appointment is missed it costs $80.00 (41 British Pounds, $92 Canadian, $102 Australian, 61 Euros, 401 French Francs ... are French Francs obsolete now?).
That's 80 bucks people! 80 greenbacks, four Hamiltons, eight sawbucks ... you get the picture. (I invite the What's a Delmer Look Like international readers to apply whatever slang terms you use to describe your much more colorful bills)
Getting messages days late is, unfortunately, not a new Sprint / Nextel feature. This has been going on far too long. Sprint / Nextel seems to know about it as they periodically send me a survey in which the questions ask things like:
Do calls sometimes go right to voice mail without ever ringing to your phone
Do voice messages get delivered days late
Are calls dropped or is reception poor
Do we ever forget to send you a bill
The answers: Yes, Yes, Yes, No.
I've even had their people call me -- not as the result of a complaint I've filed, they are just being proactive -- to see how my service is. The time or two I've mentioned delayed voice messages I was assured someone would get right on it.
Anyway.
Today I called Nextel. Their answering message reminded me of just how proud they are to be part of the Sprint family. It eventually told me to press 5 to speak to a real person.
The real person I spoke with had an American name and accent. This was a good sign. Not once did she end a sentence with an 'eh' so I think she was an honest-to-God American (though, Canadian would have been good too; not French Canadian, however.
Anybody with English as a first language would have been fine in all honesty. As I've said before, I love all people, I just didn't need a language barrier to get between me and a solution to my problem. Now that I think about it, American or Canadian would have been the best ... and a male better. A female, speaking English with an exotic accent (anything non-midwestern actually ... a Minnesotan might have been enough to sway me today and a female Aussie, Brit, Irish person, or Scot would have sent me right to "what are you wearing" and I'd have called back often enough to make up for the $80 ... so about 20-minutes worth) ... um, that's a long parenthetical phrase, so we'll start over: A female, speaking English with an exotic accent may have led me to give up and just eat the $80 without a skirmish (unless she was into that whole what-are-you-wearing thing).
So, Carol picked up after I pressed 5, asked for my phone number (which I had punched in just moments before) and then asked how she could help.
I explained my problem: That an appointment confirmation came in from my doctor three days late. I missed the appointment and was out $80.
I told Carol that I knew this wasn't her fault, but I wondered if she could help me. She asked what I hoped Nextel might do and told me she was wearing a leather skirt and a bustier.
I thanked her for the excellent service Nextel was providing and then caught myself. "Wait wait wait," I stuttered, "before we go any further, when does my contract expire?"
"March."
I told Carol that I'd like Nextel to make up a portion of the $80. That this was not the first time this has happened, and now it was costing me money. She said it was against Nextel policy but she'd see what she could do.
Now ... I want to take a second here to tell you what I thought Nextel might do. That is: Apologize ... nothing else.
A new woman came on the line and asked to hear my problem. She sounded like an American as well. By the tone of her voice I could tell she was wearing stiletto heals and fishnet stockings.
I explained the problem, told her that I knew it wasn't her fault and spit out a little blurb about how awesome cell phones were -- the fact that we can get calls anywhere is amazing ... and I told her I'd just seen a cell phone on a 10-year old television show that was as big as a WWII radio handset (which was an exaggeration) and that the small phones we have today are spectacular -- but despite this, the fact I was not getting messages in a timely fashion was really inconvenient, and costing me money.
I suggested that Nextel / Sprint might want to pay for a portion of my missed doctor's visit.
She suggested they wouldn't. But they would be happy to reimburse me for the time my voice mail service was unavailable. I calculated this to be $1.50 a day (do your own conversions) or $4.50. (I'll bet they would have calculated it to something less.)
"So, my choice is $4.50 or nothing?"
"Yes."
"Well, don't bother."
"And if I cancel my service now, before the contract ends, I receive a fine."
"If you cancel before March 16th there is a $200 penalty."
If I back over the phone in my mini van and don't use it until the contract expiries, it will cost me $150.00.
Don't you think that if not delivering voice mail in a timely fashion -- or even having the phone ring when a call comes in -- was costing Nextel / Sprint a bit of money when it happened that they'd honestly try a bit harder to get the bugs worked out?
Geez. Throw me a bone. I never said I wanted Nextel to pay the whole $80 (and it could be $85, I don't remember [Edit: It was $85.00]). I would have been happy with a month's free service. I don't need free minutes -- I don't use what I have.
Which brings me to something else. I pay about $50.00 a month (whatever you decided the $4.50 equaled in your home currency, multiply by 10 ... it'll be close enough) or $600 a year. I've had two two-year contracts and was between contracts for at least a year once, so I've been a subscriber for at least five years. What are we up to, something like $3000 I've spent with these guys?
I'm 46. I've gotta believe I fall into the class of unlikely to change phone service category of customers. I don't know that any other providers are better. Lately I've been losing calls, reception is bad, etc., but I wasn't necessarily looking to change service; again, everybody might suck.
I think that, in March, I'm likely to move away from cell service altogether and just get residential service. I keep getting notices from AT&T that home service is damn near free these days (some additional charges, not mentioned in the mailing, apply) and I get so few calls that being accessible 24-hours a day is really unnecessary.
Posted by delmer at 2:39 PM | Comments (4)
September 29, 2006
2181
So there I was, yesterday afternoon, pedaling along. I'd just come to where the road I was on crosses Rt. 42.
Route 42 is one of two-lane roads that shoots through small towns (and some big ones) carrying a moderate amount of traffic that rolls along at 60 mph or so. It isn't terribly treacherous but I can't say I'd want to pedal up and down it all day. As it is, I simply shoot across it, take a left and position myself in the bicycle-friendly berm for a quarter mile or less. Then I turn right onto Converse-Huff and continue on the back roads.
As I started my way across 42 I noticed that one of the vehicles coming from my right -- and therefore a vehicle that would be passing from behind me -- was a semi pulling a trailer. I was pretty sure he'd overtake me before I got to Converse-Huff. It wasn't anything to worry about.
As I approached Converse-Huff I noticed that the rig had reduced speed so as to not run me down. As he was going to make the same right I was going to make I slowed, and stopped at the corner in the grass. I didn't want to hold traffic up on 42 and, well, this guy was working and I didn't think he really needed to be waiting on me. As he completed his turn I got a look at his trailer tag: TNH 2181.
At that point in time I would have bet anything that the rig behind him was pulling a Cornhusker trailer with the tag TNH 2182. I mean, it made sense. Tags are given out in numerical order. If a guy owns ten trailers I'd imagine that he could have TNH 2180 through 2189. I figured the owner of 2181 probably had his guys working together.
(I've often thought that the guys who, back in the early '80s, got the tags 68 ME and 70 ME spent the longest time thinking, Dammit! Missed it by one. I remember passing 69 ME (the corner of Manchester and Dixie Highway ... or that other intersection just up the road on Dixie) and getting the biggest kick out of it. Of course, I was in my early 20's and it takes something like seeing an Ohio tag with WTF DOOD on it to do it for me now; I saw that one about a year ago.)
The second rig passed me. The tag, and I'm sure you won't be surprised, was TNF 2182 on the back of a Cornhusker 800 trailer.
Aha!
To say I followed the rigs to find out where they were going would be giving me too much credit. It would be true, but only because they went up the road about half a city block before making a left. The other day I wasn't able to find the trailer I had issues with because I'd turned the Mighty Schwinn around and backtracked too soon.
Not last night buddy!
I would have zoomed in after the rigs had they been going fast enough to permit zooming. As it was I sort of crept in after them. I parked the Schwinn and strode around the side of the Cornhusker 800 and approached the tractor that had been pulling it. As I walked (purposefully, by the way) I thought about what I was going to say to the driver.
The driver's door was opening as I neared the back tires. He turned toward me as he climbed down from the driver's seat.
OK. It wasn't. But wouldn't that have been cool in a you've got to be kidding sort of way.
I didn't follow the rigs anymore than I had to to get around them. I was a lot more mellow -- not having just had an air horn blown at me and all. And it could have been a different driver. And the rigs had given me plenty of room during our brief stint down 42 together.
And I had better things to do.
(Would you care to know that airhorn is tagged by Ecto as a misspelling and that the suggested replacement is Ohioan.
Posted by delmer at 2:22 PM | Comments (2)
September 27, 2006
TNH 2182
At some point in your driving life you will find yourself behind a person on a bicycle who is riding right down the center of his lane or who, at the very least, seems to be taking up more of the lane than you think is appropriate. You will wonder why he doesn't move more to the berm to allow you to pass.
He is probably trying to discourage you from passing him. But why me? you ask.
It isn't about you. Maybe the road is just a tad too narrow to safely allow for same-lane passing and the rider isn't comfortable providing you the extra space that might encourage you to try to pass him in his lane. Maybe the rider has encountered one to many jerks in automobiles and has just quit trying to play nice.
This rider probably started out as a very car-friendly rider.
And then, one day, he was tooling up High Street in Columbus, Ohio. Probably about 1987. Many many many cars maneuvered past him without any trouble. He was very polite ... keeping as far right as possible ... one eye on the parked cars in the curb lane looking out for the person eagerly waiting to open a door in front of him. The whole scenario was just a bit nerve wracking. Probably.
And then someone honked a horn. The rider looked back to find a petite, dumb, blond bitch in an SUV giving him the 'get out of my way' look.
Did you see the part about many many many cars passing successfully? If a petite dumb blond bitch is incapable of driving a vehicle because it's too big -- too freakin' bad for her.
I've always regretted not putting my kickstand down in the middle of the lane and walking back to the woman to ask her what her problem was. Honking is not a help. It's a startler.
I was as far right as practically possible. I was obeying the rules of the road. I had every right to be there. I was making room to pass.
Time would come and go. So much, in fact, that it was last night at 5:50 p.m. on Converse-Huff Road heading east and just before Lafayette-Plain City Road. So, actually, I guess time and distance passed.
Converse-Huff is narrow, but not so narrow that two semis couldn't pass each other in opposite directions if they slowed down and used some common sense. The Mighty Schwinn is big, but not semi big.
I was far right so, what little traffic there was, could pass when the rig -- I don't know what kind of tractor it was but it was pulling a trailer that had Cornhusker on it and spelled out on the trailer as if that was part of the name of the type of trailer. I'd really need to see the back end of this trailer to know if it was the exact same style ... I'll bet that if it isn't, that trailer, the trailer in question could be found at that website. (And that looks a lot like the trailer.)
So, there I was. I could tell by the sound the approaching vehicle made that it was a rig. As he rolled past I became a little bit nervous. And then he tooted his air horn. As you know these things are loud when they're blown in response to your kids making that pumping-arm motion and the noise rolls in through closed windows. They're louder when you're hoping the semi isn't going to crush you and the only thing deflecting the sound is a $30.00 bike helmet.
I was a tad upset.
And this would be a good time to note that had I been riding in the middle of the road the guy would have never gotten around me. He could have tooted all day. I'd have know why. I'd have expected it. I would have not almost crapped my bike shorts.
As the rig rolled by I got the trailer's license number. I don't know why. Just in case. It was TNH 2182. It was an Ohio tag.
We came to a stop sign. The rig was not pulling away from me all that fast. And then, somehow, he disappeared. For a minute I was convinced he'd turned down one of the farm lanes.
I thought back to the petite, dumb, blond bitch and how I'd regretted not parking in front of her and asking her what her problem was.
I turned the Mighty Schwinn around and went looking for TNH 2182. I figured that if the driver was hired help that the farmer he w