One of my colleagues was having a hard time setting up a printer on one of his machines. To be fair, our much-abused, hand-me-down LaserJet 5n is a pain in the ass to set up unless you know the trick; for some reason you have to define tray 3 as the default paper source; otherwise, the stupid thing will either refuse to print anything, or print a few pages of garbage.

The volume and ferocity of his oaths increased as the stubborn printer repeatedly refused to do his bidding. Finally, as his umpteenth attempt to print a test page ended in failure, he let out an exasperated cry for help.

The room was silent for a moment, each of us warily weighing our options, like hungry sharks regarding a bloodied member of the shiver. Finally, the technician who sits next to the printer spun around in his chair, gave the other fellow a steely once-over, then said, "You’re in IT now. You fix it."

Pwned.

The great bird has been rendered into fleshy, boneless, delectable bits. The stovetop, clean at last, reflects the first steely glints of the early morning sun. The quartet of eager feline noses, only days before a ubiquitous kitchen nuisance, no longer jostled each other for choice positions around the garbage can, the scraps and scrapings of the feast long since carted off to quiescently descend into putrefaction in the collection bins.

Another Thanksgiving day has come and gone, though of course its delicious remnants promise to provide another week’s worth of savory echoes. From Thursday morning’s leaf-raking to the rainy, tailor-made-for-a-fireplace Sunday, the long holiday weekend was about as good as one might reasonably wish for. While weekends will always be a welcome respite from The Grind, two days isn’t always enough to fully relax; Saturdays are sometimes uncomfortably crammed with activity, things to do and see before Sunday, over which looms the pall of the next day’s return to wage slavery. But four days? Four days allows the luxury of a full weekend’s worth of indolence before the end of the break even starts to enter one’s mind. The break was nearly perfect.

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The other day a user sauntered into the office complaining that she was having problems with the library’s proxy server. Naturally, she neglected to bring her laptop with her, so I could only suggest some general configuration tips.

It quickly became clear she was not the most computer-literate user on campus; the question "Mac or Windows?" elicited several minutes of brow-furrowing concentration. "Macrosoft, I think" was the eventual response. Gently-posed, ancillary queries regarding her OS went nowhere. "Okay", I replied, "what browser do you use? The program you look at web pages with? Which one do you use?"

She brightened visibly, happy to finally field a question she could answer. "Oh, now, that I remember. I have Mazola Firefox."

It’s dark when I get up in the morning. Out of deference to my slumbering wife, I only turn on a single 25-watt lamp, so as minimize her perturbation when I finally manage to fall out of bed. I get dressed in this half-light, then shamble out the door to inflict my vile presence on the rest of the world.

Yesterday morning my underwear drawer was empty, but fortunately a few loads of laundry had been done the day before, and my unmentionables were merely waiting to be put away. Running late, I quickly fished a pair out of one of the clean baskets and hurled myself out the door.

As I barrelled down the freeway, I became slowly aware of a strange sensation in my pants. No, not that one. A velvety sort of feeling, as if I was wearing silk or rayon on my naughty bits. Since I was late, I really had no time to ponder or investigate the matter until I was able to take a break from my phone shift a few hours later.

At this point, I was feeling more than silky. Lubricated, almost. It felt like my shorts were full of talc. I slithered into the bathroom and sat down in an empty stall to drop my drawers. As the denim slid down my legs, I looked at my underpants under the harsh, unforgiving, industrial flourescent light; barely stifling a gasp of disgust, I gaped at the filthy garment that had until a moment ago had enshrouded my crotch.

Now, by filth, I’m not talking about some bleach-resistant reminder of fecal leakage. I’m quite continent, thank you very much. These were dingy and brown, mottled with dark stains of indeterminate origin, their wretchedness underscored by a narrow, jagged gash running down one side. The kind of squalid garment that one more commonly associates with abject penury and misery, conjuring up images of Dickensian paupers or African child soldiers. They were beyond shabby. They were shameful, resembling nothing so much as an oily rag.

Oily rag. Oh, shit.

Unable to contain myself as realization flooded in, I burst out laughing, to the likely wonder of the next stall’s occupant. I was, quite literally, wearing an oily rag. Along with the clothing, a load of rags had been put through the wash, one of which I was now chagrined to find around my legs. In my morning haze, I’d accidentally rummaged through the rag basket, selecting a discarded pair of boxer briefs whose previous use had been a sop and cleanup rag for a particularly messy oil change. That silky, lubricated feeling? 5W-30.

Now I know why my mechanic always has that contented smirk on his face.

Went to the grocery store the other day to replenish my stocks of some of life’s little necessities like facial-quality personal hygiene tissues and trimethylxanthine solutions. On my way past the shelves of canned vegetables my gaze was arrested by a small sign displaying a great—nay, shockingly—low price for canned corn.

I happen to be a great fan of canned corn, so I scooped up several cans and was just about to resume my leisurely stroll down the aisles when I noticed that I’d inadvertently picked up two different kinds of corn. In my cart next to the bottles of Night Train lolled cans of "Canned Corn" and "Super Sweet Canned Corn". Since there is still an ample supply of sugar to be mined from the kids’ Halloween haul, I figured I didn’t need any extra, and started putting the cans of Super Sweet back on the shelf.

Reading the ingredient label on the back of the last can, I was surprised to find it contained only corn, water, and salt. No sugar. Wondering what the difference between the two kinds was, I picked up a can of the plain stuff to discover it contained corn, water, sugar, and salt. Wondering if this was just some labelling screwup with the store brand, I examined the name-brand cans; they, too added sugar to the cans designated simply "Corn", while "Super Sweet" or "Sweet" contained only the dash of salt.

Am I alone in finding this dichotomous?

This morning’s site outage was the final nudge I needed to leave my current webhosting company (ThinkHost). They’ve been sucking ass off and on for a while now, but today’s outage was absolutely the worst.

Not only was the site down, their mailservers were rejecting my credentials, and test messages to the domain were bounced with a “Relay access denied” error, as if they didn’t even host the domain! The cherry on the top of the sundae, though, was that I even though their site was up, it wasn’t allowing me to log into my hosting control panel, as if they’d summarily cut off my service.

Their status displays showed no trouble, and my frantic email messages (no phone support offered, natch) went unanswered (which was very ominous and unusual; their previous response times were delightfully rapid). My guess is that they suffered some sort of central database failure that bollixed both the hosting and their customer accounts, but I frankly no longer care to hear their explication du jour.

Screw ThinkHost. Their reliability has been horrible; this fifth outage simply pushes them past the Marginal and Unacceptable columns into “Sucks”. I’m jumping ship.