|
|
Archive for May, 2005
I’ve always disliked the fact that one can’t open windows in contemporary office buildings. I understand the technical requirements behind it, imposed to maximize the efficiency of the HVAC system, but something in the back of my head still tells me that it’s slightly unnatural, a spurning of the ancient relationship between us and the living planet. Once upon a time, even in the urban metropolises, one could still crack open a window and smell the air of the wider world, for good or ill. A couple of people have already threatened to start disrobing if the temperature increases any further. I propped open a door to a relatively cool hallway in the hopes of forestalling such an event; I should otherwise have to put my own eyes out at the sight of our server techs in the buff. Even my G4 is feeling the heat, though; I can hear its fan spinning away. Normally, it is whisper-quiet, but now it rattles as its rotational speed increases, the little machine struggling to keep cool in the midst of all this ambient heat. I myself am beginning to sweat, ever so slightly, on the back of my neck. A nearby thermostat reads 62°, but unless it’s displaying a temperature on the Celsius scale, as one wag suggested, it’s additional evidence that the life-support system in our steel-and-glass cocoon is broken. I had an entirely different post in mind this morning, but the only thing I can manage to think about now is this oppressive and stuffy heat. If you’re reading this, send ice water, or at least some reasonably-priced shorts for our server technicians. Either way, you’ll be saving many people from a terrible fate.
After talking to a number of them, it quickly became clear that our existing rate and monthly payments can’t be beat in the current market. I thanked a few mortgage reps for their time, and ignored the rest, and, within a week, all was peaceful again, and my mobile phone battery was allowed to rest. But then there was Ivan. Actually, Ivan still is. Tenaciously so. Ivan, from Somethingorother Mortgage Company, was one of the unlucky ones whose initial voice messages I never returned; by the time he was in play, it was already clear to us that we weren’t going to pursue refinancing. Fourteen weeks later, he’s still calling me every other day, and has even called on a Sunday once or twice. He doesn’t usually leave a message, he just keeps pinging my phone. For some cruel reason, it has amused me to see how long ol’ Ivan would hang in there. I really thought the two-month mark would be the end of it, but, to my surprise, he keeps on plugging away. Maybe he’s desperate to raise money to pay off the Mafia, or his mother needs an emergency gender reassignment operation, or he’s got this sweet deal cookin’ with a very nice Nigerian man who will make him rich if only he can raise a few thousand dollars for "bank transfer fees". I don’t know. What I do know is that he’s amazingly persistent. If somebody gave me their phone number and invited me to call, then failed to pick up the phone or answer any of my messages from the approximately 47 calls I made over a three-month period, I like to think I’d take the hint to get lost. Not Ivan, though. His name on the floor of the call center is either "Pit Bull" or "Dumbass". It’s hard to say which, from my vantage point. At this point, he may never stop, foolishly pursuing his unrequited lust for closing costs and a meager commission. Heck, if it keeps up much longer, he’ll probably start camping out in his rusted ‘77 Pacer across the street, digging through my trashcan and peeping in my bathroom window. The saddest point to date in the story of the star-crossed Ivan was the rambling message he left just yesterday. It is paraphrased thus:
That’s just sad. When I listened to it, the message came off like a veiled threat to call me forever until I acknowleged his existence. You can’t throw these stalker types any kind of crumb, though; it only fuels their delusions that they were meant to service your real estate finance needs after all, and that if only you would just maybe have coffee with them tomorrow, they could show you how much they love you. I think I’m scaring myself now. For all I know, if I ever return Ivan’s calls, I could find myself waking up at the bottom of a pit with a basket of skin lotion at my feet. Such are the pitfalls of contemporary home ownership.
To reach the Dominion of the Mouse, I drove down Interstate 5 through California, and learned some curious things in the dusty town of Coalinga, near the lonely junction at Highway 198. The first was the most disquieting, but I feel that it is my duty as a patriot to tell the truth: the oil industry, and gasoline market prices in particular, are controlled by homosexuals . The first clue was the word "faggots" spray-painted on a dumpster next to the Union 76 station, but further chilling proof was provided at the Chevron station across the road. The name of the brave soul who uncovered this conspiracy shall forever go unsung, a faceless hero in the eternal battle to keep the internal combustion engine safe from buggery. Nearby, a rest area’s picnic table imparted local culinary tips that were nowhere to be found in my Frommer’s guide.
Since my first choice for lunch was pretty much shot down, I opted for the nearest corporate greasy spoon, which turned out to be a Red Robin in the middle of nowhere. No sooner had I sat down, though, than I realized Nature was issuing its siren call. I found the restroom, and once the formalities were under way, spent a few moments taking stock of my porcelain environment. Interestingly, either the denizens of Coalinga are of an unexpectedly literary bent, or some wandering English major, pen in hand, had recently made the restaurant’s urinals his port of call; the spaces between the wall tiles were graced by such tongue-in-cheek gems as "A Tile of Two Cities" and "Grout Expectations". Ah, my mysterious and exotic Coalinga. What further secrets yet lie hidden in your sleepy streets?
I ran riot through the refrigerators this morning, with even more zeal than usual, since I won’t be here next Monday. Today’s notable finds were the Dalmatian-style provolone cheese and the Mystery Grab Bag of Sticky Stink that some thoughtless cad had left behind. I won’t go into the details on that last one, but let’s just say that after that experience, I’m about to finance some therapist’s third home in Aspen. The real apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of this morning’s actions in the War on Rot, however, was the bag of bubbly, frothing fruit mash. This menacing sack of fermenting slime had either somehow escaped my vigilance last week, or someone had stashed it under their desk all last week to give the sugars the warm environment they needed in order to decompose more effectively. The expanding gas given off by the putrefying purée was just beginning to pull the seams of the Ziploc bag taut, though there was still some "give" to it; it hadn’t yet reached that critical point where the labile matter inside is straining at the limits of its plastic prison, a dangerous, overstuffed pillow-shaped bomb of pestiferous, alcoholic pus, an artifact from some elder, forgotten lunch, as mysterious as the statues of Easter Island, only capable of provoking a much more visceral response of disgust rather than awe. The sort of thing that makes hard men quail and send in the robots while they cower like whimpering schoolchildren behind reinforced concrete, hoping against hope that it’s all just a bad dream. Mercifully, though, it hadn’t reached that point. It was, however, well on its way to turning into a sack of strawberry pruno, make no mistake. As tempting as it would have been to sample the wares and spend the rest of the day enjoying a psychotic episode, I pitched it into the trash. If you read a "weird news" item about a garbage truck or dumpster spontaneously detonating in the next few days, you’ll know the real reason.
What’s got me foaming at the mouth is how Word 2004 for OS X keeps taking a big ol’ crap on my desktop every so often. I’m trying to finish a 50-page technical document, and it keeps locking up. I’m pretty confident it’s not my system at fault - a dual-processor 1.25GHz G4 with 768MB of RAM - and none of my other apps have been flaky like this. Maybe I’ll reinstall it. Maybe it’s because I’m running OS X 10.4. I don’t know. All I do know is it’s the only thing crashing, and it’s so bad even its crashes are crashing. Check this out:
Nice. Where would you like to crash today? "Microsoft: Your potential, our crashin’ ".
Yesterday one of the phone techs comes over and tells us about this weird case where a particular student record (for some Vietnamese kid with a name of Dong - I know, "ha ha, he said "Dong", but it gets better, trust me) in their database seems to be screwing up searches. Without getting into boring specifics, there was something about adding that kid’s record, with that particular surname, into the database that was triggering the behavior somehow. The tech sought help from one of the floor supervisor to help resolve the case, which got tagged for escalation to the engineering group. For whatever reason, the floor supervisor suggested a subject/title for the support case. The school was named "Sweet Home", after its town (it turns out there’s towns named Sweet Home in both Oregon and Texas). The name of the case? "Cannot Insert Mr. Dong into Sweet Home". I kid you not. This is the kind of stuff you simply can’t make up. |
I got into the office a little after 4:00 AM this morning, and, as soon as I opened the door to the cube farm, I was met by a stifling heat. Our best guess in the early morning team is that the air conditioning has been inoperative since sometime during the long holiday weekend, and the glass-walled building in which we wearily toil has been dutifully retaining all the solar energy sent its way, like a good little greenhouse.
Over three months ago my wife and I were considering refinancing our home. We wanted to see what current mortgage rates were like, so we started sniffing around. My wife went to one of those "send us some information and a pack of lenders will hold a cage match to find the best rate for you" sort of websites. She submitted my contact information, and, sure enough, the very next day a dozen companies were calling my mobile phone, hungrily barking after my business. 
I’m back from an enjoyable excursion to Disneyland. There’s not much to tell of the visit to the Magic Kingdom itself, except for the three transgendered, barely feminine, still somewhat androgynous individuals who chatted away in front of me in the ridiculously huge and glacially-paced snack line on Main Street (one of whom, I kid you not, was called "Pat"), and the weird fact that our two-year-old didn’t bat an eyelash at the Haunted Mansion, but found the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh mildly frightening. Oh, and the fireworks were superb. Some of the most excellent pyrotechnics I’ve witnessed in a long while.
I can’t remember (read: I’m too lazy to search previous posts too look) if I previously mentioned that I go through the refrigerators at work on Monday mornings at about 4:30 AM, dauntlessly poking my nose into all sorts of barely-contained evil to keep the lunch room safe from baggies of God Knows What that my colleagues drag in from the gutter. I’m not currently sure which lunchroom behavior I find more irritating and/or perplexing- the people who insist on keeping a jar of mayonnaise or peanut putter by itself in a huge plastic bag, or the people who save things like the freakin’ parsley garnish and lemon wedge from their takeout meal, bread crusts, or three grapes in a styrofoam container. For a week. Would it have killed you fuckers to have polished these scraps off instead of leaving them to develop a fœtor in the fridge? I shudder to think what some of your kitchens look like at home. 
Today I hate Microsoft. While I’m certainly no particular cheerleader for the Redmond Mob, I don’t particularly dislike them, either. XP is a pretty decent OS, at least when you compare it to its predecessors.