Category: LiveJournal

What a Wicked Thing to Do

Last week, the Orange County Performing Arts Center sent out a notice that tickets for Wicked would go on sale Monday at 10:00 AM. It noted that seating was limited due to “unexpected demand” and recommended using the website for orders:

The quickest way to acquire tickets will be ordering online at the link provided below, choosing your date, and then selecting the “Best Available” seating option, which allows the computer system to select the best seats.

So yesterday morning, I checked the website around 9:30… and the website was already down. I tried calling at 10:00 and couldn’t get through. By 11:00, the website was still down, the phones appeared to have been disconnected, and I decided to take an early lunch and drive up to the box office.

My first clue that something was wrong was that I had to park on the roof of the parking structure. There was no sign of a line from above, but as I approached the stairway leading down to the box office from the main entrance, I started to hear the commotion of lots and lots of voices.

I followed what looked like a loose line back toward the parking structure. As I reached what appeared to be the end of the line, I realized it was actually two lines — or, more accurately, one line making a U-turn at the entrance to the structure. I followed it back toward the box office, and got almost all the way up to the front before finding the end of the line.

There was no way I could get through that in an hour, or even two. I figured I didn’t need to see the show that badly, went to grab lunch and returned to work.

I kept trying both the phone and the website over the course of the day, occasionally able to get a list of showtimes and ticket prices, but not much else. And by the time I could get into the phones or website today, they had completely sold out.

OK, shows sell out. I can deal with that. But there are two things that particularly annoy me about this:

First, some genius planning the tour decided it would be perfectly OK to have a two-week run in Orange County and no stop in Los Angeles. That meant that in addition to everyone locally who wanted to see the show, everyone in LA who missed it last year or wanted to see it again was competing for the same tickets.

Second, OCPAC specifically suggested using the website, which turned out to be incapable of handling the demand even before tickets even went on sale. (This is one case where it would have been better if they’d used Ticketmaster, who would’ve been able to handle the traffic.)

Snew

I ruined someone’s joke today.

I was walking back from the Spectrum, waiting for a walk signal while munching on one of those muffins they have at Jamba Juice, when a car pulled up in the turn lane. A girl, probably in her late teens, rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Sir? Do you have any updog?”

Updog? I thought. What the hell is that, some kind of code word for something? Since my mouth was full, I just kind of shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

“Are you sure? You don’t have any updog?”

Same thing. The light changed, and the car turned into the parking lot.

And then I realized: she had been expecting me to ask what it was. As in, “What’s updog?”

Doom Closed For Repairs

With no warning (or at least none that I noticed), the Ramp of Doom was closed this morning. This led to a line of cars dropping from ~50 MPH to about, let’s see, zero in a short distance, which I suspect isn’t particularly conducive to traffic safety, but never mind that for now.

Anyway, as I crept past the bridge, I looked up to see if some automobile carcass was blocking the ramp entirely. It turned out there were two bright orange construction trucks parked on the shoulder of the bridge, a couple of guys in orange vests and construction helmets, and what looked like plywood in roughly the spot of Wednesday’s accident.

Presumably they were repairing damage to the railing. Though it seems to me that the whole ramp could use some re-engineering.

Flipped

The rain was intermittent this morning. It seemed to have cleared up by the time alenxa and I got up, but was sprinkling by the time we left for work. The first leg of the drive went from light rain to heavy downpour and back to light rain with large chunks of blue sky and even a couple of segments of rainbow.

The rain had mostly stopped by the time I dropped her off, so on the second leg of the drive I mainly had to deal with spray from the cars in front. When they were moving fast enough, anyway.

Had a bit of a shock at the now-infamous Ramp of Doom, though. There was a red pick-up truck, upside-down and backwards, pointed toward the edge and shoved up against the railing of the bridge. It was surrounded by two police cars and a bunch of traffic cones, with the police making observations. No sign of the driver, who I imagine wasn’t in the best shape, though there was a stopped car on the shoulder just before the ramp. The cab looked slightly crunched, but it’s possible the driver could have walked away. Maybe the other car was a friend or co-worker, coming to pick him/her up. Or he could have already been carried out by ambulance.

Moments of Revelation

While I was helping alenxa get stuff ready for dinner, the Cheesy Poofs song from South Park popped into my head. And then something hit me that I hadn’t noticed in the three years I’ve been listening to KCRW: The Cheesy Poofs song is set to the tune of the “All Things Considered” theme.

This has been another Useless FactTM.

Current Music: All Cheesy Poofs Considered

Rain stalks the Ramp of Doom!

A light pole was knocked down, lying inside the curve of the ramp. It may have been there already, but I hadn’t noticed it before.

Three cars were stopped along the side of the bridge. No obvious damage.

A tow truck sat in the left lane, surrounded by traffic cones.

People stood around on the side of the road, talking on cell phones (presumably calling insurance agents, police, or more tow trucks).

Two SUVs were in the middle of the bridge, one facing forward with its right front wheel assembly ripped off. It was leaning forward, resting on that corner, debris scattered around it. The other was facing backward in the far left lane, aimed slightly toward the center divider. This is an odd pattern: SUVs facing backward in the left lane on that bridge. I think there must be something about their balance that makes them likely to start spinning when drivers take them out of the turn and try to merge left.

Although in this case, the tow truck driver was stopping traffic so that the backwards SUV could turn around. As the driver swung the car around, I saw a huge dent in the rear passenger side door. It became clear that, whatever led into the accident, the other SUV had rammed it, losing its own wheel for the trouble. Now that I think of it, this isn’t the first SUV I’ve seen lose that wheel on this ramp.

Smoke

It’s not particularly smoky or even hazy in the Irvine Spectrum area. It does, however, smell like a campfire outside. Just slightly east of north, a huge plume of smoke is rising from the hills, drifting west in a band across the entire northwestern sky.

Last night on the way home we could just barely see the silhouette of those same hills, outlined by a faint orange glow almost invisible against the glare of street lights and traffic signals.

I took some photos at lunch. I’ll try to post them tonight, along with some that alenxa took yesterday morning. Yesterday was really strange, because it started out foggy. The fog had mostly lifted by the time we left for work, but the beginnings of the smoke from the hours-old fire seemed to blend with the remnants of the fog.

Meanwhile, the LA Times has posted some impressive photos of the smoke and, closer up, the efforts to contain the fire.

Edit: Photos are up at K2R.

WTF weather

It’s 82° outside. That, in itself, is not terribly bizarre for SoCal in January. What’s bizarre is the fact that it’s 15 degrees cooler inside.

Around 11:00 this morning I was seriously considering turning on the heater, until I decided to check the temperature outside. It was 65° in the living room and 78° on the balcony. So I opened all the windows I could. The living room has warmed up, but due to our floorplan, the back room with all the computers hasn’t much.

What makes absolutely no sense is the fact that our apartment has lousy insulation. We would never get this effect on a summer day that reached 78° by 11:00 and 82° by 2:00 when we might actually want it. (Although 65° is a bit extreme.)

Corporate niceness has gone too far

The office is switching to a new payroll company and direct deposit hasn’t kicked in yet, so I stopped at the bank at lunch to deposit my paycheck. I actually ended up at a different branch from the one I intended to visit, since I missed the freeway exit but there was another branch near the next one.

The greeter asked me what they could help me with or something customer service-y sounding, I said I just wanted to make a deposit, and she said, “Would you like to fill out a deposit slip?” while gesturing to the small stand with three different kinds of deposit slips. It was clearly meant as “Deposit slips are over here, fill one out before you get in line.”

But the phrasing — who do they think they’re kidding? And what’s wrong with a simple, “Please fill out a deposit slip.”

By the time I left, I’d lost count of the number of “Have a nice day,” “Have a wonderful afternoon,” etc. types of comments, and I was beginning to feel like I’d been banking in Stepford. It was seriously creepy.

Oh, and the teller thanked me for filling out the deposit slip.

Ugh.

5:00 on a Friday afternoon is not an appropriate time to think to yourself, “All right! I can finally get started!”

Today was Office clean-up day. I junked a bunch of old, unused computer parts, tried to put more memory in my brand-new computer — which refused to boot until I took the memory out again, cut a bunch of wires from our old phone/network so I could get the crap out of my cubicle (some panels and jacks have been sitting in the corner since we installed the new network, still attached to the wires coming out of the column), answered email, installed the WMF security patch on a bunch of computers, updated software on a couple of servers, dusted the artificial plant, adjusted the paper clips holding the real vine in place, put a bunch of stuff into a cabinet, moved papers around so I could wipe off my desk, made tea, looked through everyone else’s discarded junk for anything usable, shredded some of the old papers, spent an hour trying to un-jam the shredder… with the occasional trip to the web for sanity’s sake.

I think I’m going to just have to send what I’ve got on this review document and come in for an afternoon on the weekend to deal with the actual programming. I was going to stay late anyway today, but how much can I really get done in 1.5 hours?

Current Mood: 😡stressed

Hint taken

This morning I looked at the vine that I’ve routed along the top of my cubicle wall and thought it was just getting long enough to warrant a new paper clip to hold it in place. (I have clips at two to three-foot intervals.) Just now it flopped down off the wall to hang in front of my calendar.

Hint taken, plant! New clips are in place.

Seeing the light(s)

Monday night, as I parked the car in the “garage”, I noticed the light looked funny. Sure enough, one of the headlights had gone out. I didn’t have time to pick up a replacement bulb on Tuesday, so I grabbed one last night, picked up some work gloves that weren’t all covered with gardening dirt and plant bits, and called alenxa to ask whether we had any safety glasses since the bulb package had a warning about how it was pressurized and could explode in your face if handled incorrectly.

Now, you probably haven’t noticed this unless you’ve watched me turn into a driveway, but the front left turn signal is white instead of yellow. This is because when it burned out a year(?) ago, the store only had clear bulbs of the right type, and I had somehow gotten it into my head that the glass in the turn signal assembly was amber (it isn’t). I went with what I had, and checked back at the nearby auto parts store a week or so later to see if they’d gotten the amber bulbs in. Once I had them, I let them sit on my desk for a year because I didn’t feel like messing with it, and hey, the signal worked, didn’t it?

So I figured as long as I was replacing the headlight, I’d take care of the turn signal at the same time. Only one problem: I’d bought the wrong bulb. I needed 1157NA, and picked up 1156NA. The bulb was the right size, but it had the wrong number of filaments, the wrong number of contacts, and the pegs on the base were in the wrong spot.

So the car has a full set of headlights now, but the turn signal is still off-color.

Meh.

Christmas Coffee Calypso

I’d forgotten about it overnight, but today was the office building’s annual holiday party. This means that they set up a cappuccino cart, a pastry/fruit tray, and a calypso band playing Christmas songs on steel drums and a keyboard out in front of the building. (There’s also one in summer, not connected with any holidays, with smoothies instead.)

I just grabbed a plate, since I was carrying a travel mug of coffee from home, and the line for coffee was about 5 times as long. Unfortunately this meant I had extra food, which I forgot to put in the refrigerator. Not a problem for the raisin bread, but the yogurt’s probably toast. Oh, well…

Ended up grabbing a chai at Starbucks after lunch (and reminding myself why I usually don’t get chai there), which led to a conversation in the elevator with someone who works on the same floor. This was unusual on several accounts, since I don’t always take the elevator and when I do, I rarely talk with anyone beyond “What floor?”

Work itself involved a lot of frustration, a tale that I’ll have to tell in another post.