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Yeah, so I said I was taking a couple days off to rest my brain, but I thought I'd share this with you first.
I lost my phone. My iPhone. The one I've only had for a little over a month. Gone. It was raining when I left for work yesterday, and since I was wearing my glasses instead of contacts, I tucked my head down, and ran from my apartment to my car. Apparently, I dropped it between the front door and the door to the car, but I didn't hear it fall. I noticed I was missing it while I was at work, but I just assumed I left it on the back of the couch next to the door. When I came home, it wasn't here. I tore the place apart, but it wasn't anywhere. I drove all the way back to work, thinking maybe I'd left it there. Nope. I called the office of my apartment complex this morning to ask if anyone had turned it in. Nope. This afternoon when my neighbors came home, I asked if they'd seen it. YES! He had! He saw it lying on the ground yesterday as he was running over to the store, but it was gone when he got back. Great. Part of me was ecstatic, because at least I knew it wasn't in my house somewhere and I was just missing it. On the other hand, part of me wanted to smack him a little for not picking it up when he saw it the first time. But, whatever. He mentioned the people upstairs had been out at the time, so I went upstairs to the elephant people and asked if maybe they'd seen it. The girl at the door just kinda stared at me blankly. I repeated it. Twice. Still the blank stare. Finally I asked if she understood me. She said she did, but that she wasn't home yesterday and would ask her brothers and father if they'd seen it. So there's still the possibility that someone upstairs picked it up. If they don't have it, I'm going to start knocking on doors to see if anyone found it.
So yay for me being stupid! Again! What a way to start December, eh?
First, thanks to the lovely people at Apple who came up with the iPhone so that people with no lives like me can post useless drivel on their blogs while sitting in traffic on the way home from vacation. You guys rock.
Second, I think NaBloPoMo might actually be a bad idea, since it’s really just encouraging me to post crap, and not quality writing (assuming there was some quality writing in me somewhere). But, I set a goal, so I’m going to keep posting crap. At least until the end of this month. Any crap after that is not intentional, and I apologize in advance.
Third, I hate people. I know that comes as a shock, seeing as how I’m such a happy cheerful person all the time. But seriously. If there are 2 lanes of traffic doing 20 miles an hour, is it REALLY necessary for you to fly down the shoulder doing 65? Do you think we LIKE going 20 mph? We want to be home relaxing just as much as you do, however, there are these pesky little things called LAWS that we’re supposed to abide by. Those LAWS prohibit us (and YOU, by the way) from driving down the shoulder. They’re in place to keep everyone safe (supposedly). It drives me crazy that some people have this sense of entitlement that makes them believe they’re exempt from these laws. It does not say "It is unlawful for a vehicle to be driving down the shoulder on a highway. Unless your name is Joe and you’re driving a 2006 Silver Honda Civic." There are no exceptions to the rule for the general public. Is that SO hard to understand?
Ok, I’m done. I’m going to sleep until we get home. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have something worth posting.
I’m a little OCD about my online banking. I always have been, and I can’t foresee that changing anytime in the future. Up until my recent computer take down, I had the last SEVEN YEARS of my banking life saved in Quicken. I updated it every single day. (If I blogged as often as I checked my account, you guys would have pages upon pages of my babbling.) Since I was supremely stupid and didn’t back up my hard drive, that info is all gone now. Which, I’ll admit, infuriates me. Sometimes I can’t believe how stupid I was/am.
But I digress…
This morning, as is my habit, I pop online to check the status of my account. The bank account looks good, the loan payment I made went through, and all of my bills have cleared. Excellent! Except…what’s that? The Visa balance looks a little high. I swear I’m going to kill Jason for using this card. Um.. $300 at Magic Mountain? $90 at Red Lobster? $73 at Mexicali? We didn’t charge those.
OH MY HELL SOMEONE STOLE THE CREDIT CARD!
So I run to my purse, and my card is sitting there where it belongs. I tear through his wallet, and his card is also there. Great. Someone has taken the card number, and probably my social security number, and now I’ll have to change my name and address and I’ll never get a new car or house and I’ll be fighting creditors forever!! (That’s how my mind works. Small problem A immediately means Huge Problem C. Logic need not apply.)
My bank is awesome. They had already noticed the change in usage (the last time I used the card was in August) and had put a fraud notice on it, awaiting confirmation. I was to get a telephone call today, asking me to verify the sudden unusual charges on the account. I just beat them to it. The card had already been denied for an additional $400 in charges, on top of the $565 they’d already spent. I’m guessing the bastards who took it weren’t too pleased that my bank is on top of things. But they’re super wonderful and I love them to bits! All we have to do is fill out a fraud form and send it back in to them. The account balance has already been transfered to a new account, and our new cards are already in progress. Done! 15 minutes on the phone, and life was back in order. Of course, I checked with Experian and put a little safety alert thing on our accounts, just in case someone has our Social Security numbers too. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about, but I felt better after doing it.
After I handled it, I got a lecture on proper card safety and care from my dearest darling husband. Apparently, you should cover the keypad when at the store or gas station and entering in your PIN or Zip Code. OH MY SAINTED AUNT, really? I never would have known to do that, since I’ve not had a credit card and/or debit card for the last TEN YEARS! I know, I know he’s just trying to help, but I was a little offended that he assumed this was my fault. Then I was told it HAD to be because of that virus that killed the computer. Um, no.
- I don’t keep a record of any credit card or account numbers on the computer. Ever.
- I dump my cache and clear my history EVERY SINGLE TIME I pay the bills online. Overkill and probably useless? Possibly. But it makes me feel better.
- As soon as I realized there was potentially a bug in the machine (within 15 seconds of it crashing) I disconnected the internet. Even if there WAS information on my hard drive, there’s no way it could find it and send it that quickly.
So, yes, he’s worried and he was trying to help me be a little safer, but did I need a lecture? Particularly after I’d already discovered and handled the problem? I think not.
And to the person and/or peoples who stole the card: I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. All 3 days of it. I hope that you REALLY needed whatever it was you purchased. And that you had a great time at Magic Mountain (even if I wasn’t invited) and brought home souvenirs. Because Karma is a bitch. And she’s coming after your ass.
Dear Southern California Drivers,
Please learn to drive.
This seems like a simple task, but some of you are having trouble. For example, if I am in Lane 1 driving slightly over the speed limit, and you are ahead of me in Lane 2 driving slower than I am, there is no reason for you to switch lanes in front of me and cause me to slow down. If you desperately need to get into my lane, perhaps you could wait until I pass you, and THEN move over. A novel concept, I know! It might cost you a few extra precious seconds of being in your lane, but I promise you’ll get to move over very soon.
Additionally, I know many of you enjoy multitasking while driving. I don’t judge you for that. I do the same thing. However, if you are multitasking, you should continue driving the speed of traffic. If you cannot do that, you should immediately cease whatever extracurricular activities you are engaged in and DRIVE! This will get you to your destination faster, and will keep me from screaming expletive laden Offspring lyrics at you as I drive past.
I’m sure I have other helpful suggestions for you, but as I have spent all my energy screaming at the idiots I encountered on the way home, I can no longer think clearly.
Have a lovely day!
Denora
The man threw the ball.
The ball was thrown by the man.
Can someone tell me what the difference between those two sentence are, other than tense? Nothing, right? They get the same point across, right? So why do we need to spend so much time arguing over which is better? Is our time not better spent doing something productive? Or at the very least, arguing about something worthwhile? It frustrates me to no end that we spend time on things like this. I didn’t travel across the country to come to a meeting so my time could be wasted.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the organization I belong to. I like what we stand for. I like the majority of the people involved, and I like the conference that we put on every year. It’s just the ticky tacky little crap that I hate.
Let me give you an example. A few years ago I went to my very first committee meeting in Chicago, with the Chairperson, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and 4 or 5 other members. The big wigs, if you will. Our task was to flesh out the agenda for the large board meeting we were having the following month. We met in a hotel suite, and talked about many issues that we were interested in. Fund raising was the last issue we had to deal with before lunch time. Now, fund raising is something important to any organization that wants to survive, correct? It took us 5 whole minutes to figure out what we wanted to propose, and who was going to propose it. FIVE minutes. So our next task was getting lunch. It took us TWENTY minute to decide what toppings to get on the pizza. Twenty minutes. Four times the amount of time we took on fund raising. Twenty minutes. To choose pizza toppings.
It’s been 5 years since that day, (I have a hard time letting go, I know) and some things haven’t changed. Our committee meeting in August set up the agenda for this weekend, wrote language for policies we wanted to introduce, and outlined plans of actions. Today we went over the same language and policies that we’d written earlier. One of the women who helped write this stuff in August, starts complaining about it today. SHE HELPED WRITE IT! What the hell is she doing? So, what should have been a 15 minute conversation, turned into a 55 minute argument.
The man might have thrown the ball, but I’m about to throw a fist. Or a fist will be thrown by me. Whichever.
Since November is National Blog Posting Month, I’ve decided to step up my blogging and join the challenge. All you have to do is blog every day for the entire month of November. Seems easy, right? I’ve been having trouble writing something a few times a week, so this is going to be interesting. NaBloPoMo is an offshoot of NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The object of that little happening is to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of a month. That’s a wee bit too far out of my league, so I’m going to stick with the blogging. I can’t promise all of it (or any of it) will be interesting, but I’m hoping you’ll be entertained at least once or twice. Some will be serious, as I’m trying to be honest here, but I’m quite certain my sarcasm will come shining through for your enjoyment.
So! To start the festivities, I’ll share with you how incredibly stupid I am. That’s always good for a laugh, right?
I’ve been working with computers all my life. I built my first one when I was in 4th grade, and it’s been a love/hate relationship ever since. I am not afraid to admit that I’m a geek, and that playing with a new computer or software is far more exciting to me than going to a club or bar. You’d think that based on my love for computers and my past experience, that I would be very cautious when it comes to backing up, viruses, updates, etc.
Not so much.
Monday, my computer decided to make a mockery of me and died. Just up and quit. Black screen of death. It won’t start Windows, fights the diagnostic check, and only runs the backup CD once every 5 attempts. Glorious. Do I have an external hard drive where I’ve backed up all my most important documents? Nope! Do I have a server where I could have potentially backed up my things? Yep! Sitting in the second bedroom right next to my desktop collecting dust. Is it hooked up? Nope. Hadn’t got around to that yet. *sigh* This is the Computer God’s way of punishing me for my trust in my own ability to repair things, should a problem occur (read: being too cheap to buy the extended warranty). So now my buddy Brian, who serves as the computer guru at my office (If Denora can’t fix it, CALL BRIAN!), is taking a look at it, and it doesn’t look good. It appears that a virus has hacked its lovely little way into my hard drive and rendered it stupid. Which means I have potentially lost all of my wedding photos, vacation photos, 20GB of music, my website files, and various other odds and ends that I’ve saved over the last 3 years. My sister told me that she has copies of my wedding pics, so I’ve stopped freaking out about that. But everything else is potentially gone. There’s still the slight possibility that the data, if not the drive, can be salvaged, so keep your fingers crossed! Regardless, I’m going to have to go get another hard drive. I’m less than pleased about this. I am, however, aware that this is entirely my fault, and that I deserve it for being so lackadaisical about net security and backups. Will I learn from this? Only time, and my Best Buy credit card, will tell.
A chunk of my ceiling has fallen.
No, I’m not kidding. We have one of those stucco ceilings that all apartment complexes have, because they’re cheap. A small chunk of the stucco just floated down to the floor as I sat there watching the television. Why did my ceiling fall? Funny you should ask that. The apartment above us has recently been inhabited by large thundering elephants.
We used to live under Two Ton Tina. She was a very large black woman that would rattle the pictures on my wall when she walked up the stairs. She was a very, very nice woman, which is why I never complained about her. Although she didn’t move around much, she was pretty loud when she did. She was nothing, however, compared to the new upstairs residents. They’re unbelievable. The only time that place is quiet is when they’re not home. I can tell exactly where in the apartment they are just by the noise their steps make. I’ve seen a couple people that may or may not live there (it seems they’re fond of gatherings), and no one looks heavy enough to cause the amount of rumbling that they cause. It’s almost like they’re afraid the carpet is going to suddenly spring up and whack them in the face, and they’re stamping it down as a preventative measure.
So how do I handle it? Do I march up there (potentially destroying more of my own ceiling) and demand they return the elephants to the circus, and resume walking like normal humans? Do I bake them some laxative-laced brownies and hope they spend the rest of their existence on the toilet, rather than tromping around the apartment? I think I’ll try calling the front office about it. Not to tattle on them, but to ask if maybe a letter can be sent to the entire complex reminding people of general courtesies. Yanno, things like not driving through the parking lot at 4am with your radio blaring, and picking up after your mangy little mutt when she poops right in the center of the steps to my apartment.
I hate flying. I’m afraid of it. Being that high off the ground, and having zero control over my mode of transportation terrifies the hell out of me. I have, however, become much better at controlling my panic. It usually just creeps out during turbulence. I’ve had the super fun experience of intimately gripping the thigh of the man next to me in terror. Turns out he wasn’t my husband. Oops. Lucky for me he wasn’t the biggest fan of flying either, so he understood my irrational fear, and didn’t make me feel guilty. Or he was mentally screaming "GET THIS FREAK WOMAN AWAY FROM ME!" It was hard to tell.
So even with my immense fear of flying, I find that I am reasonably relaxed when it comes to delays at the airport. And it completely floors me that some people get SO uptight about it. Does your constant sighing or angry glares at the poor ticket counter associates make you feel better? Do you really think getting all agitated and shifty will make the rain stop, so the plane can take off? I don’t get it.
I watched a very angry man scream and yell at the guy behind the baggage claim counter for at least 20 minutes. Now, here’s the thing. The guy behind the counter was not responsible for loading the bag in the origination city, he was not responsible for moving the bag in the layover city, and he was not responsible for putting the bag on the appropriate carousel in the destination city. How is it ok to scream at him? In fact, wouldn’t it be better to speak to him nicely, and make him want to help out? Would that I ever had his job, your claim would be filed in the large trash bin marked "ASSHATS" in lovely block letters.
Me (on phone with customer): That component comes in Red, Royal Blue, or Hunter Green
Customer: Ok, I’ll take Yellow.
Me: (pregnant pause)
Customer: Hello?
Me: Um, we don’t have it in yellow. We have Red, Royal Blue, and Hunter Green only.
Customer: Do you have it in White?
Me: <slamming head on desk> NO. We have it in Red, Royal Blue and Hunter Green.
Customer: I’ll have to check with the board and call you back.
Me: ok. Thank you, bye.
*cut to a few hours later*
Customer: Ok, I’ve spoken with the board.
Me: Fantastic. Which color did they choose?
Customer: Can we get it in Tan?
I hung up.
My sister amuses me greatly. She’s got the best "I couldn’t possibly care less what you think of me" attitude I’ve ever seen. We went down to the beach yesterday (because pasty white is apparently NOT the look of the summer). So we’re driving around and around looking for a parking spot. Finally she spots one, but there’s a teenage girl standing there, attempting to save it for someone. Jen isn’t having it. She continues to drive right at Spot Holder Girl, as if she’s not there. SHG keeps trying to say she’s saving it, and Jen just keeps shaking her head and driving. Then SHG makes a stupid decision. She’s going to abandon her space and walk over to Jen’s window in an attempt to explain the situation. Right. Because Jen’s persistent driving into the space while shaking her head meant that she’s totally open to listening to the forthcoming explanation. As SHG walks around to Jen’s window, Jen drives right past her into the space. SHG’s mother pulls up right behind us and looks furious. Fortunately for them, I suppose, the spot right next to us opened up and they got their space. Didn’t stop them from slamming their doors and aiming death looks in our direction. Evil Spot Stealer’s that we are!
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