May 26, 2005
Over and Out
You'll find me over at Norton Ink these days.
Thanks Dan, Ian, and Colin for letting me use this space until I could get my server up to speed for MT.
May 08, 2005
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The Thursday before leaving for New York, I was very making sure all my work was done before leaving town. It was a bad traffic day, both for speediness and parking issues. At my first stop of the day, after driving around for fifteen minutes, I finally found a spot. I had to park downwards on a steep hill. So, I left my car in gear, a rarity for me. Got into the restaurant a few minutes late, had a strange visit, but it resulted in a placement so I couldn’t’ complain. Got back out to my car, put the wine away, got in, looked down and thought, “Oh look, the car is already in reverse!” Started the car and let out the E-brake and fed the car a little extra gas because I was trying to reverse on a hill. Too bad the car was in first gear, I lurched forward and smacked the car ahead of me pretty well. So with shaky hands and a lurching stomach I got out and looked at both car bumpers. I hit the car ahead of me with my license plate only and disturbed some dust on both cars. I looked pretty good and I didn’t see anything to worry about. Whew!
As I got into my car to drive away I noticed a pedestrian writing my license plate number down. So I got back out and explained to her that I checked both bumpers and they looked fine so I didn’t think it was any big deal. She just kind of looked at me like I was an asshole and said, “Well it is a government car, and I work for the government so I think a lot of people just walk away from things like that.” I told her I would leave my own note and that seemed to satisfy her and she walked away. Dutifully I left a note, name, number, small explanation. For the rest of the day, every time my phone rang, I thought I was going to throw up.*
At the end of my work day I hurried home to wash clothes for my trip. As usual, I left it until the last minute. This is the time that our washer decided to break, with half of my trip clothes in the machine, all soapy and wet. I thought I had merely underloaded it and it got out off center. (Hi, this is a front loader, do they do that?) So I put a bunch more clothes and soap in, and started it over. No dice. I dried what I could and ended up taking some work clothes along, instead.**
My flight left for New York at midnight, so by 10 p.m. I was starting to get antsy, but the Hub was still dicking around on his computer saying, “Don’t worry, right after I finish this, just another minute.” Whenever he says that I know that I have at least ten minutes to kill. With the car bumping and the broken wash machine it had been a somewhat stressful day so I decided I deserved a glass of wine. I go pour myself a half glass of wine, my only for the evening. Perhaps I should have been drinking since the machine broke down? I go into the computer room and set the glass of wine next to my computer and turn to talk to the Hub and just catch the edge of the glass and send it flying. Flying all over my laptop. It was shut down, yet open, because I am stupid like that. Exactly like parking with your car in gear. Luckily, so I thought, I had a skin over my keyboard and that’s where all the wine landed. I get a towel, wipe everything down, pull off the skin and wash it and set it out to dry. Looks like everything is fine so I go off to NYC feeling as if I had narrowly averted disaster.***
The Monday after I get back from work I decide to update my handheld work computer from home. I plug it into the phone, update it and then the badass thing freezes up. I reset it and lost all my data. I then had to spend 2 hours at the office the next day getting it fixed. Luckily I didn’t lose any orders. Just my sanity.
*The driver of the car never calls back, so I feel very correct in assuming I didn’t do any damage. The one highlight of my fucked up day.
**The Hub calls Sears and gets us an appointment to get the machine fixed the following Monday. He even works from home part of the day so there is someone there when the guy arrives. Except that he doesn’t. Whoever took our call never set our appointment up. So I call them and they say we can’t get an appointment for another two weeks. I get all Customer Service Bitchy and tell them I am not waiting for an appointment when we already HAD one and in any other business they would have a tech out the next day, during a time that would fit OUR schedule. They put us on a waiting list for the next day and PROMISE they will call us later that night to let us know when someone is coming. Of course, no one calls and when we call back the next day, they say they are coming anytime between 1pm and 5pm. HA! Since we can’t swing that between our schedules, we have to make an appointment for Saturday, May 7. Dude shows up, takes 2 minutes to look at our washer only to tell us the part we need has to be ordered. Yet, another week to wait. Which is why I am typing this from a local laundromat. [It has been called to my attention that this sentence indicates that the local laundromat has wifi. It is unfortunately untrue, I was hoping to pull from some neighbor's network. Instead I had to type this out on Word and wait to get home and post it.]
*** Turns out some of the wine seeped into the little grill at the hinge and ruined the monitor. Rather it ruined some light in the monitor but the gist is that it is $600 to fix. I have a 12”, dvd/cdr combo drive, 20g hd, 600 mhz iBook that is a few years old, clearly. For $650 we could buy a refurbished 14”, dvd/cdr combo drive, 30g hd, 800mhz iBook. The choice was clear, but again, there was a week’s wait for the computer to come from Portland, Oregon. It is here, and after a very easy data swap, the whole thing looks and feels like my old computer, but with 10g more hard drive space.
Can I be done, now?