and all i wanted was a BB gun

My holiday story involved my laptop. I know, how spiritual. About two or three months ago the left-side of the my MacBook experienced what we call white wine v. power cord connection-hole-area. The initial symptom was not good: no power at all - dead, dead computer with no battery nor AC operation. After a day or so the juice managed to sort itself out and it finally powered up but only worked via AC power; no battery charging. I took it to the Apple store about a week later; they popped it open, and then called me at work to tell me that it appeared exposure to liquid had occurred and it wasn't covered under the one-year warranty (I'll admit that the wine issue was not revealed at initial drop-off). But, for a one-time fee of $750 they could send it back to the plant and get it repaired. Awesome! A one-time $750 fee. That's really nice...only charging me once. I declined and decided to ride it out a bit longer before finally calling a computer repair place in Arlington that we'd used in the past for X's Vaio. I dropped it off a few weeks ago, alerting him to the liquid and the overall problems, paid the $100 up front for labor, and was told he'd order the module power/battery thingy and see if swapping it out would fix the problem. If that worked I'd pay another $125 and have a laptop with a future. After a week he called and said that, unfortunately, the new module hadn't fixed the issue so I was out the door for $100 in labor which was fine by me. Over the last few days I've been using the MacBook with the power cord and rueing the brilliant/not brilliant magnetic connection that pops right off if the cord or computer gets tugged. It's brilliant in that it would protect your computer crashing to a floor; it's not brilliant when any little nudge immediately powers down the unit. The final bit of this saga is what happened last night. With the boys out of the house we were sitting around doing what we do - X reading a fashion mag, me typing something or other on the computer - when I glanced up to the corner of the screen and instead of seeing an "x" declaring no battery power, charge, or connection, I see a 58% charged number. What the what? After another 20 minutes the battery was fully charged and everything is completely operational now. It's a truly miraculous story; I think I have a regenerative, living, computer. What are the odds? I must have passed along some karma over the last week or so; maybe paying all my local merchants in cash and saving them credit/debit card fees has come back to me full circle. Maybe not.

We've had rain and 40+ degrees over the last 24 hours and it's melted away most of the snow that was piled about the area. I'll push off the remaining slush from the driveway this afternoon.

We're doing roasted chicken, mashed, brussel sprouts (on the panini grill), turnip soup, and gravy for second Christmas tomorrow night. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by.

t

hello. how my i be of assistance?

Yesterday morning I discovered that our Verizon internet connection had gone, in the military vernacular, tits up. I didn’t have time to rassle with it in the morning so I waited until the afternoon to take it by the scruff of the neck and shake the life from it.

(As a side story about scruffs and necks: a big, black, tomcat has decided over the last few nights that it likes our house. We’ve discovered him on and under the table the last two mornings and we’re not quite sure how to keep the little freeloader out of the house. The cats have a cat door and he apparently considers it an open invitation to join our little family.)

We’ve had internet issues before but they were initiated by running and stomping children screaming through the wood-floored den where the connection and cables reside. Since the wall jack is behind some bookshelves there was a tendency for the slamming toes and heels to shimmy the connection loose. So, I pulled out the bookshelves after first staring moronically at the lights on the thingamajig and gave everything the old on/off/in/out/powercyle/reset once over; this analytical thinking and action amounted to a total of zero internet. Right, I’ll give Verizon a call. Funny you should ask about that. We have no phone books and I have no bills because my entire Verizon life is online. I realized I’d have to go old school and call information on the phone in order to get a number that’d get me started on the road back to the World Wide Web. On my second call to information I finally get an 800 number that must bode well for my mission. As I stumble through the first automated menu (which is hell bent on me entering the Verizon phone number I’m calling about, even though I don’t have Verizon phone service) I finally arrive at Blockhead #1’s headset. I explain to her that I only have Verizon Internet – no phone, no 200 channels of hypnotic cable, nothing – and it’s stopped working and I just need to figure out what’s happened. She sends me to the Tech Support line where I come across the only person who knows anything. He’s able to find my account via some tech support alchemy and tells me that there was a disconnection notice that morning for my account and that’s why I have no Internet. He lets me know that I need to talk to billing to sort it out. Right-o. He transfers me to billing but instead I end up at sales. To best summarize the next two hours of my life I’ll tell you this: something happened with my auto-payment/billing and my Internet has been disconnected. What I want to do is find out what happened, how I can give them money, check the billing details, and turn my Internet back on. The offices I end up speaking with amongst the two hours of being on hold are these: wireless, landline, wireless, tech support, sales, billing, landline, collections, billing, wireless, and collections. I’m not kidding. I finally snap at the collections lady who tells me I need to make a payment via the computerized payment line – it’s $40! – and then call her back with the confirmation number. FINE!!! I make the payment and call her number back only to be spit into the same automated menu/queue for the 15th time. Shit. When I finally get to Blockhead #16 she’s the worse of the lot. I relay what I’ve done and she decides it would be best to transfer me to the number I just dialed that brought me to her. She tells me I need sales since I need to open a new account. The next sentences out of my mouth aren’t fit for my docile readers and you know I’m not much for holding back the profanity. I slam down my phone – or close the cell as we do these days – and look about for anyone to slay. Fortunately, no one is nearby. As a corollary to what’s happening, I’ve had three calls come in from the WonderTwins and their mother. Now, they’ve nothing to do with any of this, I’m not mad at any of them, but I couldn’t answer because I wasn’t going to lose my place in the phone hold-line of hell. After slamming the phone closed I start to call around to see of the World has collapsed and everyone’s decided to call me as a first option. The World didn’t collapse I find out but my lovely is waiting for me to pick her up at the Metro; her sister and mother were merely calling during this same time in order to leave voice mails and whatnot. I get in the car and drive the mile to West Falls to fetch my lawyer gal. Bear in mind, I am probably more angry at that moment than at any time in my life. We're talking…angry. The word doesn’t do me justice. On our way back I give X a rundown of my Verizon drama – it also included every possible profanity known to man – and she took it quite well…for one sitting next to a very angry and agitated bear. I told her we’d have Internet back when I damn well said we’d have Internet back. I think I apologized for all the ranting in her general area, but if I didn’t then I might need to buy her a new dress.

That’s that. Yet, there’s more.

After getting back to the house and unseething, I called back and decided to just be as calm and patient as possible. I explained to the first person, in dulcet, story-reading tones, the story of my day. She takes my confirmation number and enters the payment to my account. She reiterates that I’ll need to open a new contract since it was deactivated and that she’s sending me to someone who can do that for me. Thanks, I say. For the next 45 minutes I go through the entire process as if I were a new customer even though the lovely lady understands what’s led me to this point. As she’s trying to enter a new “connection” date into my new account it keeps telling her the 27th – no sooner. Of course, she recognizes that the central location merely needs to click on my account with a mouse tap and I’ll be back up but she can’t override the system. (There is actually a technician scheduled to come to the Hilltop…for lord knows what.) As she finishing up my account she gets a tech on another line who says he can probably sort it out sometime this evening. We finish our account configurations, say good evening, and go our separate ways. Less then five minutes later my green Internet light illuminates and we’re back in the connected World. How hard could it have been?

Two lessons to pass along and then I’ll let you go:

First, people who work customer service at any company larger than 20 people are going to be clueless, mindless, confused, and uninterested in service about 98% of the time. It’s the nature of the beast.

Second, and I’m generally applying this lesson as a side-light to Barack Obama’s behavior, it’s so hard to not just cut loose on people when they demonstrate incompetence, hatred, stupidity, or any other behavioral defect which hangs so heavily upon them. I was merely trying to get my Internet working and I ended up stark-raving mad at the process. The ability to not lose your marbles is something that graces the very few. To be out there every day for two years while being called a terrorist, a Muslim (!), a socialist, an elitist, unpatriotic, and any other bigoted comment – and to not just breakdown and smack people – is something I’ll never be able to comprehend. It’s truly amazing to watch.

Of course, I didn’t intend this to be an Obama closing but it really was the behavior that flashed before me before I got back on the phone and sorted out my anger and my Internet.

Feel free to leave.

t

clipped

I think I’m going to start a campaign in this season of campaigns: we must be agents of change and eliminate clip art. Not just the stupid “art” but even the phrase. Maybe an IT’er out there can enlighten me on why we still use clip art when we’ve had access to the web – and graphical content – for over a decade. It seems like the original point behind providing us stooges with clip art was because the olden machines didn’t have any other way for the user to access some kind of chuckly graphic for the big Bake Sale / volleyball game / comment box meeting on Tuesday night. But now we do have access to the internets and it’s way beyond time for me to ever see a piece-of-crap clip art rendering in a company meeting. Who uses clip art? I actually browsed the clip art that comes with PowerPoint and pulled out a few random, yet precious, pieces of slag. (As an aside, I’m also about done with PowerPoint; it’s an enabler.

I think the guy with the light bulb would so cute for our “Great Ideas!!!!” campaign at the office; “Remember to only use your computer to create useless charts!”; “Oh! The toast is done!”; “Keep us Geared Up! For Progress!”; “This is a telephone”. Maybe to ingratiate yourself even more with me you can combine these great! symbols with some crappy animation that has each word spin onto the screen during your horrific annual training on refrigerator usage in and around the employee coffee bar. Or, you could create some funny yet misaligned announcement for the jewelry appraising party at your house on Friday and forward it to me via e-mail. That would be awesome! Where did you find the clip art of the man looking through the magnifying glass…ha ha ha ha ha.

Sorry

t

incompetency

Sometimes your computer skills, point-and-clicking, typing, and general Internet usage, when viewed by a second party, appear unimpressive. In fact, when a computer is in use and there are two people involved with said computer, you don’t want to be either the controller or the backseat driver. I learned long ago that when the IT guy, or in-flight engineers as I knew them on the plane, show up at your computer to fix a problem you’re best served by heading to the coffee bar – or lunch. Do not do either of the following: stay seated and attempt to type, select, or pull-down any menu that the technician (we’ll call him “Dan”) is telling you to do – what he really wants is for you to simply get out of the way; or, stand behind him as he works “the system” and say self-incriminating things along the lines of “I wouldn’t have thought of that would work”, or “I don’t understand what you’re doing.” I know that in either case you can’t see computer guy’s face but trust me when I tell you there’ll be a slowly simmering recipe of frustration, anger, laughter, and incredulity bubbling across his face. Just walk away.



Stay with me. Last night the Eleven was madly searching for an Æbleskiver recipe for the Holidays – I’ve no idea why we seem unable or unwilling to bookmark these tidbits. I think it’s important that you have the lowdown on set-up in the dining room as this fiasco kicked off so you follow along and see the misery unfold in your mind’s eye. I was using her laptop (soon to be my laptop) because the genesis of the task was the sending a shopping list to my mother in Florida for the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day nosh shopping. X is standing about, doing not much of anything as she does, when I mistakenly asked her to play by saying something important, like “how do you spell Æbleskiver?” The good X correctly spells Æbleskiver (well done); the bad X immediately moves around the table so she can lean over my shoulder and “help”. I’ll tell you this, my google skills are impeccable - apparently she feels the same about her google skills. Maybe it’s why we like each other…some kind of narcissism, but not narcissism, concerning Boolean abilities. As my results for Æbleskiver appear before me eyes I get an earful of this: pick there, click here, not that one, this one (touching the screen), “why would you type it in with quotation marks?”, that won’t work, roll up, roll down, stop, there it is, try it with the word ‘recipe’ (to which I think “oh, should I use quotation marks now!”), you misspelled that, backspace, and finally I get this… “your google skills are horrible.” Remember that intro paragraph up above? Sure you do. Ask for help spelling Æbleskiver and then walk away with nary a word as she sidles across the room; go get a cup of coffee in the kitchen…or go to lunch. Nothing good will come from staying nearby and exposing your computer soul to another…absolutely nothing. There are aspects of relationships that shall never be overcome.

X ordered a new fiberglass duvet cover and matching pillows last week. Our cotton, winter standby cover suddenly gave up the ghost and fell to pieces - emergency action was called for and executed. Let me tell you that nothing feels quite as soft on the skin as a scratchy, pokey, uncomfortable pile of linen misery. I’m not quite as princess-y as the princess so I didn’t notice the horrible feel until shortly after she pointed out that the whole new bedding set sucked. Our bedding set-up in the winter, since you asked, is a bottom sheet with just the duvet colligo cover on top – very European. The problem in America, and I accurately pointed this out based on my middle America upbringing – is that in this here country people sleep with a top sheet all the time so the scratchy duvet cover (or bedspread) never actually touches the body. Also, any pillowcase that loads from the middle back isn’t actually a sleeping pillowcase but a decorative case and it’s usually pitched on the floor to expose the actual sleeping pillow. She had no idea what I was on about but she did remedy the situation immediately by changing pillowcases and getting out a top sheet. Comments?

Right. This is my life.

t

myth reality fantasy truly

Monday AM. X finally decided that in order to survive through Thanksgiving she had to do something dramatic with her laptop. All of her hoity-toity school work was inaccessible because the lil’ guy was having serious power issues. The battery has been inop for a quite awhile and the a/c power had become something of a fantasy over the last week or so. She hit the internet early and found a computer repair shop (or guy, as we discovered) here in Arlington that told her (very informatively at that) to bring it over because he knew just was it needed. The Sonys seem to have an issue with the solde near the power connection coming, as one would say, un-soldered. He e-mailed back that same afternoon, much to her dippity-dance happiness, and told her is was finished. We stopped over around 7:30p to pay-and-go with the newly repaired and cleaned computer. I like this guy: he runs the business out of his very neat office/basement, the bill was ready to go, the computer (with power cord) was on and running when we arrived, and he has a 30-day guarantee on any work he performs. I’d recommend him to anyone – and I better had. As I was waiting for the bill and details to be settled I took a little look around the outer office area and noted the only two pictures on display, and I am not making this up: a signed Patrick Stewart, and a signed Ghostsbusters cast 8 x 10. They call it a stereotype.

T.