Tag: original status: public

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.

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.

Chain of Coincidence

Woke up early (for a weekend) yesterday and went out to breakfast. As we’d been out last night watching Harry Potter and alenxa was up even later baking cookies and scones for today, this was a more difficult feat than you might imagine…

Spent most of Saturday helping sekl and non_seqvitvr move, with largely the same crowd as the night before. Chances are most of you reading this were there, so there’s not really much point in describing it. We ended up bailing around 7:00 since my brain was starting to shut down.

The plan for the evening was to grab something at Starbucks, get home, at which point I’d go straight to bed while Katie got in a long-delayed round of Puzzle Pirates. It didn’t quite work out that way. First, while packing up the remnants of the home office, she’d found Jim & Stacy’s copy of the “Once More With Feeling” soundtrack. So she fired up the iPod on our drive back, and we listened to our copy. Second, I checked the mail when we got home, and found a box from Amazon… containing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Chosen Collection.”

“You won’t believe what showed up in the mail.”

“Um… okay…”

“Wanna watch ‘Once More with Feeling?’”

So we watched the Buffy musical. Then Katie hunted for the outtakes (which are only on some seasons, and the booklets don’t tell you which special features are on which discs, though you can at least tell which discs have special features by picking the ones that only have three episodes) while the caffeine vanished into the ether and my brain slowly turned off again, and I dragged myself to bed at the (for yesterday) late, late hour of 10:00.

Fogging Things Up

  1. When I got out of bed, alenxa said, “Hey, there’s fog out there!” A half an hour earlier, when she’d gotten up, it had been clear. By the time we left for work, all that was left was just enough haze to maximize glare and make the broken sun visor and lack of sunglasses a problem. We did get a great view of one of the ex-marine base blimp hangars where the near end was perfectly visible, but it faded into the fog so that the far end was completely hidden. (Naturally, by the time I dug the camera out, the light turned green and we didn’t get a picture.)
  2. There’s something fascinating about the high-tech/low-tech contrast in surgery where the instruments consist of a styrofoam cup and a long Q-tip. OK, the cup has to be full of liquid nitrogen, but it just seems so simple.
  3. Last week I got into work and said to a co-worker, “Is it just me, or do people not know how to drive in the rain?” “I think they just don’t know how to drive.” I spent nearly 10 minutes at a turn signal this morning because some idiot didn’t notice it turned green, and the next car was a big two-piece truck with no acceleration capability whatsoever. And then there was the freeway…
  4. Amazon’s shipping decisions just don’t make any sense. Last week I placed an order for three items (so I could hit that magic $25 and get free shipping). I checked the box to lump everything into as few shipments as possible. So of course they decided to just ship two of them. Then they shipped the third the next day. Yesterday, the second shipment arrived, but I’m still waiting for the first. Edit: The first package arrived today. It seems holiday shipping is already in full swing, because the UPS guy showed up around 7:30.
  5. Server room is freezing. This is good. When it isn’t, my boss says things like “You can smell the electronics trying to die!” And things crash. And we have to spend half the day fixing things that crash.
  6. Speaking of things that crash, I’m getting very annoyed at Microsoft’s decision in MFC 7.0 to stop hiding menus and toolbars in Print Preview mode.

Manic Monday? Pfehhh!

While I can’t predict how crazy today will be, I already know tomorrow’s going to be nuts, what with…

  1. The election (all you Californians are planning to vote, aren’t you?).
  2. A deadline at work.
  3. Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

All this means that I can’t stay home with the cold that I picked up on Saturday!

(Reminder to self: must remember to blog when happy.)

Current Mood: busy

The Ramp of Doom Returns!

Usual spot at the SB 405 – NB 133 interchange, just after the ramp on the 133’s bridge over the 405. Three cars, including a Jeep that looked OK from behind, a car in front of it that had completely flipped over, and another car in front of that one that I couldn’t see very clearly, because I was watching the guy standing out in front waving his hands to make sure people slowed down and didn’t plow into the scene. It had clearly just happened, since neither police nor ambulance had arrived.

At least I hope that’s why he was waving his hands. It certainly looked more like “Hey, watch out!” than “Please, stop and help!” Damn, I didn’t even think of that until just now.

Current Mood: 🙁guilty

Lunch Lessons Learned

  1. Smoothie-and-sushi, while an excellent combination under summer and fall weather conditions, is less than ideal for a cold, wet day.
  2. Even if you’re convinced that it can’t possibly start raining enough to warrant an umbrella in the next 45 minutes… bring it anyway.
  3. Check the soles of your shoes once in a while so that you discover they no longer have any tread before you find yourself slipping every few steps on a wet sidewalk.
  4. With #3 in mind, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf isn’t particularly close to the food court at the Spectrum. It’s really too bad they kicked out the Diedrich’s instead of, say, moving them into the food court.
  5. Frosty doesn’t know how to pronounce the word chaste. As I got out of the car, they were having a big argument, with listeners IMing in to tell him that Heidi and Frank were pronouncing it correctly and Frosty insisting that he had heard the word more often and therefore knew how it should be pronounced.

Back to UCI (sort of)

I went to see my allergist this morning for a re-eval. I was actually supposed to go in during the summer, but I forgot about it and misplaced the “you’re due for an appointment!” postcard until earlier this week. As it turned out, she had a medical student from UCI shadowing her today, so I got to be both patient and teacher’s aid. (They asked me up front whether it was okay.) It was an odd experience, partly because there was an extra person, partly because she looked like she was close to my age or maybe younger, and partly because my allergist was narrating everything.

While I was there, I got this year’s flu shot. I don’t remember having to sign a waiver last year. Actually it wasn’t so much a waiver as a “Yes, I’ve been informed of the possible side effects, and I know it’s produced using eggs, so if I’m allergic to eggs, I’ll just stop and not get the vaccine, thank you very much.” It may be explained by the fact that the flu vaccine has been added to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I didn’t know this program existed. (Ain’t the intarweb grand?)

Ganging Agley

alenxa and I had everything planned out for Saturday afternoon and evening. We were going to catch Mirrormask for the second time at 4:30, have dinner, then see Serenity again at 8:00-ish. Then if we were up to it, we’d catch a late-night showing of Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Yeah, right.

the tragic story

Current Music: Wallace and Gromit theme (in head)

Wiping beer off the kitchen wall

It’s one of those things you just don’t expect to have to do.

I cleaned out large chunks of the refrigerator today. Among the things I threw out were the remnants of a 4-pack of Murphy’s Stout that I bought for St. Patrick’s Day and never finished. Now, if stout isn’t chilled, it’ll foam out and overflow the can. Apparently 5-month-old stout overflows even if it is chilled, because when I opened the cans over the sink, they sprayed foam onto the wall.

So I wiped the beer of the wall, then went back to cleaning stuff out. Then I noticed that there were brown spots a bit farther away, so I wiped those off. Then I noticed that it was all over the side of the coffee maker, five feet away from where I was opening the cans. Then I noticed it was on the wall on the other side of the coffee maker!

The moral of the story: Finish your stout on March 17.

What Goes Around

I went to Sav-on on Saturday to pick up more NyQuil and DayQuil equivalents. The shelf was practically empty. All sizes of the name-brand boxes (I get the capsules, since I can’t stand taking cough syrup) were completely out.

Yes, they were out of NyQuil and DayQuil.

As for the store brand, which I know from experience works well, they were down to their last few boxes unless you picked up the 40-packs. I think there were two 20-packs of the daytime version, and only the giant boxes for the nighttime.

If anything says “cold season has hit,” it’s a shortage of over-the-counter cold medication!

Current Mood: 🤒sick

Sweet poison

Woke up with a sore throat this morning, almost certainly the same thing Katie’s been fighting all week, so I’ve been drinking tea today. Our lunch room at work has a basket of sugar, Sweet-n-low, and Equal packets which someone has thoughtfully arranged in three wide stripes, making it look oddly like the French tricolor.

When the receptionist cleans the coffee maker, she puts a post-it note on the urn labeled “Poison,” often with a skull and crossbones, to make sure that no one absent-mindedly pours himself a cup of cleaning fluid. (And face it, if you really need the coffee, you won’t notice!)

Disturbingly, someone had set that post-it note on top of the sugar packets.

Now, I’m sure you can find nutritionists, dietitians, and the occasional conspiracy theorist who will agree with that assessment—and throw in aspartame and saccharin as well—but it’s not a label you want to see on something you’re about to put in your own drink. Even when you know it’s safe!

Whoa! That’s real far!

I walked to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum today. On my way back, while waiting at a red light, a 20-ish guy with headphones and a student-sized backpack asked me for directions to UCI — on foot. As it happened, the directions were simple: Take Barranca to Jeffrey, turn left, and keep going.

But 7 miles is a long way to walk!

He did ask if there were any buses that went there. I said there were, but I didn’t know where the stops were for that route.

If he kept walking, he might be just arriving around now.

Weekend of Movies

alenxa and I don’t go to movies very often. Usually we just don’t get around to it until whatever film it was isn’t in theaters anymore (unless it’s something one or both of us really wants to see). Sometime last year we started making a list of movies we’d missed, movies one of us wanted to show the other, and movies we wanted to see again. We watched a few, and then the list got buried on my desk, and then I had to clean off my desk and it got buried in a pile on the floor in front of a shelf.

After we rented Underworld a few weeks ago (a film which takes itself waaay too seriously, and which gets misfiled in Horror instead of Action because it has vampires and werewolves in it), I tracked down the list and we started working through it. We don’t watch enough to justify paying for Netflix (though I keep meaning to check out their selection, which would be the tipping point), but we can get a 2-for-1 deal at Blockbuster if we rent early in the week. It makes it easier to rent movies that we know are going to be MSTK fodder in a couple of decades, since we can get them free with a better film.

Anyway, to this weekend. On Thursday, I went with wayens to see a showing of Ghostbusters in an actual movie theater. It really holds up. The jokes are still funny, the story still works, and even the effects hold up pretty well. (The main exception would be the stop-motion version of the terror dogs, which is probably a combination of compositing and lack of motion blur). One thing I noticed was that the story itself is treated 100% seriously. The humor is in the characters, the dialogue, the attitude. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow man, for instance, is incredibly silly — but because there’s a logical in-sroty reason for it, and the characters treat it as a real threat, it works. Wayne was remarking about how tightly the movie is put together. It goes from their breakthrough, to their first case, to the main plot, with montages serving to fill in the gaps.

Saturday I finally watched From Hell while Katie was blockading. Since it’s been over a year since I read the book, and I knew to expect a historical drama/horror rather than a documentary, I actually thought it was a fairly decent Jack the Ripper film (if there is such a thing). Unfortunately they ripped out some of the key parts of the book — all the symbolism in London’s architecture, for instance, wouldn’t have fit onscreen anyway, but I rather liked the flash-forwards to the 20th century during his psychotic break after the final murder. One of the main points was that this version of Jack believed he was ushering in the future. They kept the line, but left out everything that supported it.

Then last night we watched Ben-Hur. I hadn’t seen it before, but Katie had, and she recommended it especially for the chariot race. Now I knew that the pod race in The Phantom Menace was full of homages to this, but I hadn’t realized it was practically a blow-by-blow remake… even down to the music!

Finally, today we went out to the nearby second-run theater to watch Madagascar. The last time we went there, we were surprised that the theater was in better condition than it had been back when it showed first-run films. They were charging something like $2 for matinees and $4 for evenings. There were maybe 10-20 people in the theater with us. Now, they’ve lowered their prices. Matinees are only $1. I have no idea how they plan on staying in business…but you know what, the theater was almost full. Lower prices + more customers = more revenue (if the coefficients are right). Fun movie, nothing I’d want to rush out and see again, though I was amazed how much of the music was chosen as in-jokes. Who in their target audience is going to recognize Chariots of Fire?

So, has anyone seen The Brothers Grimm? Is it any good?

Mirror Madness

Remember when the rear-view mirror in my car fell off? I picked up some appropriate glue that evening and stuck it back on, but what I didn’t realize until the next morning was that I hadn’t gotten it in exactly the right place. The driver’s-side sun visor would hit the corner of the mirror every time I moved it. So I grabbed a new tube of the adhesive, then put off actually removing and reattaching the mirror for a week and a half. (The mirror was in place, and I could aim it properly, I just had to be careful about moving the visor around.)

Today I decided I was finally going to fix it, so I pulled the mirror off the mounting button and tried to remove it from the windshield with a razor. No luck. I pulled out the package, looking for removal directions, and discovered that when they said “permanent,” they meant it. Directions for fixing a botched job were to mount a second button on top of the first.

So, back to the auto parts store looking for an extra button. It turns out they’re not standardized, so I have to get one for this particular mirror. Not likely to be at a generic auto parts store. And if I go to the Nissan dealer, it’ll probably cost as much as a new mirror. (Buying OEM parts is annoyingly expensive. I spent upwards of $40 for a replacement wheel cover because I wanted it to match the other three.) I did not want to buy a new mirror just because I glued the original one a quarter-inch out of place!

They did have a mounting arm on its own, so I went back out to see if my mirror would hook up to it. I pulled it off of the button, and noticed something about the arm: It had ball-and-socket joints at both ends.

Problem solved! I just swiveled the arm out to the right so that it clears the visor, and I can still position it correctly using the other socket.

Current Mood: accomplished