The Daily Diversion Archive For March, 2001

3/28/01

No Daily yesterday due to a migraine headache. I get these bastard things from time to time, but I've been fortunate enough to have not had one recently. I'm hoping that they don't become a habit.

I had yet another adventure in retail this evening. After dropping my wife off at MSP (our lovely airport) for her business trip, I went out to purchase a scanner. I really don't have an excuse for not having one. I just don't. Well, not anymore I don't. I have one now, and boy, did I have to pay for it.

No, it wasn't an expensive scanner, so don't come breaking my door down to steal my shit. Its expense lay in the amount of time it took me to buy the damn thing. I was at CompUSA, The Computer Superstore in Edina, my second stop of the evening. I was looking to buy one of a list of scanners I had researched on the web last weekend. The other place I went to didn't have any of the ones I wanted, and the one they had that was on the list had a bunch of junk on it that I would never use. I appreciate the attractiveness of free web space and free internet access, but I have about 11Gb of web space, and cheap DSL and dialup access to the internet. Truly, none of the extras were all that attractive, so I sojourned forth.

I wasn't paying much attention at CompUSA, and this turned out to be my downfall. I strolled around their store, and found their scanners. I looked and they had three of the scanners on my list. Cool. I picked out the one that was just inside my price range according to what the web gods said it should sell for. There was no prices to be found for this item anywhere, so I asked the clerk how much it was. It was another $20.00 higher than the web MSRP. Nope, sorry, not interested.

While strolling around the store, trying to flush the pricey one out of my head, what should I find, but an enclave of more scanners, this time in the Macintosh section. Why on earth would they sell a brand that was clearly labeled PC and Mac compatible solely in the Mac section? Whatever. I looked at the box and checked to see if it was compatible with my wife's and my machines. It was. I looked at the price. It was within my budget by a whopping 3 cents. We have a winner!

I grabbed a box that looked like it hadn't first been shipped to the Outer Mongolian Box Stomping Grounds and proceeded in a round-a-bout way to the checkout counter.

When I got there, a fellow who hadn't been in-country for all that long rang up the sale. It was well over twice my price. Um....There must be some mistake... I was assured that the price was without the service plan I didn't want. Interesting bit of psychology, that. Do many people complain about the price of the service plan? I bet they do, but that was most definitely not why I was shocked by the final price of my item. Upon further inspection, the box I grabbed was the high-end model of the scanner I wanted. The only difference I could see between the one I wanted and this rather pricey item was that this one looked like a box doing a very good impersonation of a Mac G4 laptop. I admit I was in lust with it, but not for a cool C-note more than the other one. I explained to the clerk that I had brought up the wrong one to buy. He seemed to understand, but wanted me to sign the credit card receipt seeing that he'd already rung it through. I balked, but figured that arguing with this guy was going to be fruitless. This, coupled with the fact the line behind me was about 5 deep with customers that all thought I was the biggest bone-head they'd seen this week. I signed the copy and did as I was told...which was to and grab the one I want off the rack, and bring it to the customer service desk.

I went back out into the store and grabbed the one I wanted and put the other one back on the shelf. Why? I dunno. I guess I was just trying to be helpful. I returned to the customer service desk and was served almost immediately by a quiet, young woman. She listened to my idiot story, picked up my receipt and pretty much vanished. 25 minutes later, the Ass-Man (Assistant Manager) comes up to me and asks if he could help me. I told him what was going on, and it was clear that the person behind the counter suspected I was trying to scam them or something. She had said that I'd just walked in with this scanner saying I wanted to exchange it for a cheaper one. This story is true in that it was pretty much what happened, however, the one detail my young friend failed to convey for whatever reason the fact that I HADN'T EVEN LEFT THE STORE, YET! I cleared it up by pointing to the receipt that was still only 1/2 hour old and suggested that it verified my story. Apparently, the looooong wait was caused by a mini-inventory job on this particular item that showed one missing. Nice. I had been waiting for them to count their stock, while I sat up in the front of the store, getting old. I saw the look in the eye of the Ass-Man change from "You're trying to rip me off, aren't you, asshole?" to "Oh, problem solved."

The cherry on top of this shit sundae, was that the Ass-Man didn't just do the exchange right then and there once we had figured it out. Nope. He walked away, saying the bright bulb that had summoned him in the first place would be back to finish the job. Wonderful. Just great. To her credit, she made it through the process of crediting my account and charging me the new price for the cheaper scanner just fine. Yay. I then walked out of CompUSA to the tune of their anti-theft device going off because someone had forgot to disable the damn thing. Thanks for the kick in the ass, guys!

So what have we learned from this experience, boys and girls? Well, I've learned that I'm going to have to take the first, mangled box on the rack. I'm going to have to double and triple check to see if I actually have the right thing before I get to the checkout lane. If a mistake is made, then I can expect to wait at least a half hour for the Ass-Man to come down from on high, twiddle the magic number boxes in the Star Chamber, interview me to get the real story, and then delegate the problem back to one of the people who had a large part in messing the mess up further. Oh, and one more thing, I will NEVER sign a charge card receipt for something I didn't want again. I will also avoid this particular establishment like the plague.

3/26/01

This was a relaxing weekend. We didn't do much of anything. On Friday, we went to a bar to watch a hockey game.

On Saturday we went to a wedding. Chad and Cheri got married by the big willow tree on the southeast end of Powderhorn Lake in Powderhorn Park. It was bitterly cold and windy, but it was a nice little ceremony with about 10 of us in attendance. When the service was done, we adjourned to a local pub for a very informal reception lunch. We talked for a while, signed the appropriate paperwork, and went home. It was almost as short as our wedding, but we were a bit more comfortable in the judge's office.

The rest of the day passed quickly and we sat around most of the night, then watched the movie High Fidelity. It was pretty good. I like John Cusack and I have to say that I've known music pedants like the ones in the movie. They can be really annoying, and the movie treats them fairly.

I'm not much of a fan of the monologue in movies, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Dune, the biggest waste of celluloid in the history of time, did it the very worst and wrong way. It was gut-wrenchingly bad. They needed to do it because the plot of the book didn't lend itself to a two-hour movie, but that didn't excuse the awful and boring monologues. John Cusack's character in this movie spends a fair bit of time talking to the camera, but you get the feeling that the character might just have the habit of working out his problems in front of an imaginary camera. I don't know, it worked for me.

We dog-sat a bit today. Brutus' friend Naoise-- pronounced neesha--came by and we had doggy play-day. Naoise is a very speedy dog. She's always on the go, always chewing on Brutus, and we know when she comes by, that Brutus will be zonked for the better part of two days. I think our dog needs more exercise.

I've spent the rest of today working on the site, getting a compilation tape together, and trying to avoid a case of the Sunday night blues.

3/22/01

The smoldering mouse fire story is finally at an end. The old oven is outside awaiting pickup, the newish one is in place, and now life can go on. I wish.

In our search for an inexpensive oven, we stumbled upon a scratch and dent, new and used place called Appliance$mart. They were open late, offered delivery and had a nice, older push-button oven that must have been from the early '70s. It was one of the cheapest ones they had, and my wife really liked it because her folks had one like it when she was growing up. We bought it, arranged for delivery, and went home. We were informed the delivery guys would call us before 8 to arrange a time for delivery. We were happy and we went home.

This morning, we had to go a little earlier than usual so I could drive my wife to work. Our other car was in the shop (again) and so we only have one vehicle. We split about 7:20 or so so I could drop her off and get to work on time. I told my lovely that when the delivery guys called the house and left a message, I'd call them back and arrange a time in the afternoon or around lunch. All is well.

I get the messages at 8 and the guys with the delivery company (different company) say "We'll be there between 8 and 10 this morning." Nuts. I'm in the middle of 100 things at work and I'm parked 5 blocks away. The real kicker is that these guys didn't leave a phone number. I guess I was expecting too much for delivery guys to have a way to contact them when I can't be directly contacted, but hey, why should I expect other people to do business the way I would? Am I really this much smarter than the rest of the world?

I call Appliance$mart to try to get a hold of their driver. I get their voice jail which tells me that they're open 9 to 9. I press the appropriate buttons to try to leave a message for the delivery guys. Success! Surely the guys will be calling me shortly for a time. Wrongo, bucko. I get a call about 3:30 in the afternoon by a confused guy. No, he's not part of the delivery crew, and the crews are all back at the warehouse by now. Fine, how about a tomorrow delivery? No luck. Booked solid. OK, I get to save the $30.00 delivery fee by picking it up tonight.

I call my buddy Louie and we arrange to meet at the house after work. I leave work, pick up my wife, drop her off at the mechanic's and drive the 20 miles back to the house. I get there and Louie has just pulled up. We go in, I feed Brutus, and then we're off.

Upon our arrival, we hail a salesdude and I realize that the one thing I needed to get from my wife before I dropped her off I forgot to get. Yep, I don't have the receipt. It's OK, because we got a surprise at Appliance$mart. Our cute, little oven has not had such a good day. Somehow, during its travels today, one of the control dials has been broken off, one of the pushbuttons was missing and a burner was somehow lost. This was a decent looking range last night, and tonight it looks like hell. What the hell is going on? The salesdude is apologetic, and tells me that I can go grab something similar off the sales floor. I find our second choice still sitting on the sales floor. "I guess this'll do..." I say with some reluctance. Sarah was pretty hooked on the other one and I don't know how, in a week of other setbacks, I'm going to explain this to her. She's going to be bummed.

The guy says it's going to be a straight up exchange. I pull the truck up and the guy writes up the sale. We get the thing loaded up and strapped down. Time to go in and collect the receipt and the delivery fee. By the time I get back to the counter, he has it all written up. He had said "even trade," but I guess that "even trade" meant "even trade minus your delivery fee." The other stove was $20.00 more than the one we originally wanted, but he wasn't offering any delivery refund. He said that the truck had rolled and we weren't there, therefore no refund. It had been a long day and even though I reminded him that the one we wanted was now broken, he seemed to think ceasing all further business relations with his company and further bad feelings was worth saving the $30.00 it would have taken to make me a happy customer. OK.

I'd had enough and I really didn't even have the stomach to quibble about the $10.00 difference between the price of the original oven and delivery fee and the price of the second oven. We left. Louie and I brought the oven in smoothly enough, plugged it in and wonder of wonders, it worked. The oven light is burned out, but I guess that's just the way it goes.

Checking the messages this evening, the delivery guys did call us at 9:30 from out front of the house. THEY left a phone number. The person from Appliance$mart who called this afternoon to reschedule delivery also left a phone number. Why, oh why didn't the first caller leave a number?!?

I have some questions... Is our life so complicated that we can't even coordinate a simple delivery? Apparently so. Is it so hard to leave a number with a message, especially when people who are supposed to be there, aren't? Why can't I remember things like giving each and every last phone number I have at every transaction? If I had given them my cell number, or Sarah had given hers, then none of this stuff would have happened. Why didn't I remember that we didn't have our other car that morning and that we both would have to get up and out early--early enough, in fact, to be too early to get in contact with the delivery guys? Why did I forget to get the receipt from my wife when I dropped her off? Is it us? Is it me? This isn't rocket science, so why can't we coordinate a simple delivery?

In the end, I'm sore about the whole "even trade" thing. I'm hopping mad about the range we wanted being busted up when I got there to pick it up. I'm annoyed the delivery didn't happen. I'm mad at the original caller for not leaving his number. I'm cheesed off that I didn't remember this was going to be a difficult morning with only one car around. I'm mildly annoyed the delivery guys didn't pick up our old oven, especially when their trip out here cost me $30.00. The worst of all of this, and the thing that has me near apoplexy, is that I'm going to have to tell my wife this whole story when she gets home and it's going to piss her off. It's my job to protect her from this kind of stuff, and having to explain why the oven she really wanted isn't here is probably going to get her as steamed about it as I am. And it's just not worth it.

3/22/01

I heard once that there was an old Chinese curse that went, "May you live in interesting times." I don't know much about the Chinese, curses or any of that, but I would say that we've had some bad house karma lately.

This last visit from the repair guys was the sixth for our dryer. The service guys have thrown a pile of new parts at it, and while it seems to function better when they leave, it isn't long before something else breaks. Our washer and dryer are of a certain age where they are in the later months of their service life. We don't want the world from this duo, we just want to get a couple more years out of them. Money's tight and we would greatly appreciate an effort from our appliances to help out with the cause. Our service plan sure has paid big benefits and the small amount of money we pay for it a month is starting to look like one of our better decisions. Today's service visit would have cost us about ninety dollars. We didn't pay jack.

We did take it on the chin last night, however. The death blow to our range was dealt out by none other than little furry creatures. No, I haven't been out smoking the lawn. It seems we have a little mouse problem. Well, a big little mouse problem. Big in that it's cost us about two hundred dollars to replace our range. We don't know how many mice we have, or how long we've had them. The fact is, we may have just cooked their little mouse-house. And boy did it stink.

Dinner came from the oven last night, but accompanying it was this pervasive reek that just wouldn't stop. My wife and I had noticed mouse evidence in the kitchen recently, and we had noticed there were some hints that they may have been getting in the range. We didn't do much about it other than setting traps and whatnot. Well, last night we realized our folly.

The stink became unbearable and even with the windows open all over the house and every fan we had blowing in, it just wouldn't go away. There was only one thing we could do: Get rid of the range. So, out it went.

We then went range shopping and found a used one for not too much money. We arranged for it to be delivered and that was that. It's funny that such an indispensable piece of equipment such as a range can be so interchangeable. Cheap, too.

So the mouse wars have begun. On my way home tonight, I'm going to stop off at the local hardware store and pick up some brutal traps and we're just going to show who's who. I'm hoping that with the warmer weather, we won't get too many, but we may get a bunch. It's truly too bad I'm allergic to cats, as we could use the help of a good kitty right about now.

3/21/01

Oh my God! Three days in a row I've managed to post to my Daily. This must be some sort of near-term record. I owe it mostly to my laptop. Yay!

I roamed through the skyways today. No, that isn't some sort of euphemism for illicit drug use. The skyway is a sort of human habitrail Minneapolis and St. Paul have implemented to keep their downtowns viable, and to make it convenient to get from building to building.

Imagine, if you will, what a good idea connecting the buildings in your downtown with walkways on the second story. Imagine how much more retail space you gain when suddenly, the whole downtown loop becomes an indoor shopping mall. That's a pretty good description of what's happened to our downtowns. It's not a bad thing, either. It's warm in the winter and cool in the summer and it's a great place to stretch your legs after a morning of sitting at your desk.

Anyway, today at lunch I was doing some parts hunting. I needed a battery for the bios chip in my laptop. I'm getting tired of setting the date every time I start it up. I walked around the skyway looking for the batteries-only chain I heard about. I could not find it, so I detoured to a place that has almost everything electrical: The Shack.

The Radio Shack in downtown is always understaffed even when they're tripping over each other behind the counter. Half the time you're there, they forget (or neglect) to take your address when you do a transaction. I never give them the right address. I just don't need their junk clogging my mailbox. I already have way too much. This particular store is usually well stocked with just the thing for what's broken. Solder, tweezers, fans, connectors, they're all here at just slightly inflated prices. I did find the battery I was looking for and it was a whopping $3.00. I did strike out on something I fully expected them to have: A cooling fan and heat sink for a Socket 370 processor. They had none and no place for them.

Could it be that a thing that's approaching ubiquity is not carried by the mighty Shack?

Probably not.

Anyway, their lack of this specific part will mean I get to go to my favorite computer shop, talk to the sullen, overstressed clerks, and go home with a bunch of parts I then will have to drag back to work in the morning. Drag.

To get back to the point of this whole rant, the skyway today was packed with people as it is everyday. The person who first proposed this idea must be proud of their idea. I think it's rarely that you see a piece of experimental civic engineering like skyways were when they were implemented, that really becomes a functional piece of the cityscape. A piece that's depended on daily to make the lives of the people downtown much more convenient, dryer, warmer, cooler, and safer (no cars). If you couldn't already tell, I'm a big fan of our skyways.

3/20/01

I got yet another notice of a class action lawsuit against one of my credit card companies. This time, the settlement is laughable. I'm not the only one laughing, either. The lawyers and the plaintiff are laughing, too; all the way to the bank.

Mr. Plaintiff got himself ten grand for his trouble and I'd be willing to bet that his lawyers will get their fees deducted from the settlement at large. A nice deal, considering the rest of the class will be getting less than five bucks a head.

My credit card company is charged with violating the RICO act. They've been accused of setting limitations and rules on special rates that are either impossible, or nearly impossible to fulfill, and thereby are breaking the law. It sounds reasonable to me, and it must have sounded reasonable to the credit card company. Well, it probably didn't sound reasonable to the credit card company, but frankly, it probably cost them literally millions of dollars less to settle this one and admit no wrong doing, than to prove their innocence in a trial. Of course, there was also the probability they were being naughty and who knows what would have come to light if they actually went ahead with the trial. They might have even been proven guilty.

I bet that would have cost them dearly. Of course, the parent company would have just opened another card services branch to cover the costs. If that didn't do the whole trick, they could always raise their service fees, monthly service charges, annual fees, late fees, transaction fees and whatnot to raise the rest of the loot they needed.

I heard on the radio the other week that most credit card companies are making the balance of their profits on their service fees--specifically their late fees. I'm not surprised. I noted here not too long ago that my bank raped me for nearly $30.00 for an overdraft. Our card companies used to hit us for $20.00 a month for a late fee. Money was much tighter back then, but there were months when we spent $100.00 on late fees alone.

Yes, those were the bad old days, indeed.

We don't use credit cards anymore. They're a chump's game. If you can play them straight, pay them off monthly, and use them like an Amex card, bully for you. Be honest with yourself, though. How many times in a year has it slipped your mind to pay the bill in full or on-time? How much did you spend last year on service fees?

Conventional wisdom has it that one should establish a good credit history so one can use credit later in life. I wonder who is advocating this. Certainly, one will almost undoubtedly have the opportunity to establish some kind of credit history accidentally by the time in your life when you'll need credit to buy a house or a car or something. Unfortunately, this is often used as an excuse for that "my first charge card" with that special probationary rate of 21.5%. Use it in good health, Billy. Oh, and by the way, it's your girlfriend's birthday next week and you really want that CD player you've been eyeing at the Superstore, don't you? Hey, why not charge it? You can pay it off next month...

I think it's a crime that my public education never touched on financial topics.

3/19/01

I went to the AMA Supercross at the Metrodome last night with some friends. It was a good show, and the racing was good, too.

We started the evening at a restaurant that was obviously gearing up for some truly massive sales to people celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Our waitress was cheery, but in a gruff way that sort of gave off the vibe that she was expecting to be really sick of people by the end of the evening. I hope she had a good night. The pizza was really quite good and lived up to this local chain's reputation.

We all piled into my buddy's minivan and drove down to the Dome for an evening of fun. I remarked to my friends that we should see quite a lot of interesting behavior out of the patrons of this event. It was, after all, St. Patrick's Day.

I don't celebrate this particular holiday in any particular way. I have no reason to. I'm not even slightly Irish. My friend Pat was having a party that night and I would have been there had I not had tickets to the Supercross. My brother-in-law's birthday is on this particular day. Happy Birthday to you, fella. I don't like green beer. I was truly an outsider when it came to the peculiar customs of this holiday. The fact the Supercross was on the same day as St. Patrick's Day caused me some concern when I bought the tickets for the event, but I figured that there would just be more stuff to watch. I really had no idea it would be REDNECK NIGHT FROM HELL!!!

No, it wasn't that bad, but it sure was amusing to see what other people thought was a good idea on this special evening.

You know, when I go to the Metrodome to see a show I paid good money to see, I think it's a good idea to drink as much beer and other alcohols as I can hold in my belly. I figure this is a good way to further enjoy my time at this event; to enhance the experience, if you will.

I saw a guy two rows in front of me stone asleep through most of the qualifying rounds. What a waste. It was only partially humorous when his "friends" started throwing trash, nacho trays, popcorn tubs and other waste at him to wake him up. This was only partially humorous because of the young children sitting directly in front of us, taking this idiotic behavior in. I think their father was rather stunned to have to brush popcorn and nacho cheese off his kid's new motocross T-shirt.

The drunken pack of idiots two rows in front of us, truly must have crawled out of some fetid, trailer park swamp somewhere. There were mullets abounding. There were Confederate flag cell phone covers. There were plastic St. Patrick's Day hats. There were handguns.

Did I not previously mention that one of these rocket scientists had a handgun the size of a bazooka stuffed in his ass-crack?

You know, when I go to a family event at the Metrodome on St. Patrick's Day with a gut full of suds, I ALWAYS want to have MY heater with me. Yep, it gives me a sense of security knowing that I can blow the brains out of anyone who crosses me when I've got a head full of buzz. I tell you, there's nothing like the feeling of being knee-walkin' pecker wavin' drunk with a pistol in yer pants.

Wouldn't you know it? Neither I, my wife, nor any of our friends had our cell phone with us. I will never leave the house without it again. No, we didn't call the police on this pinhead, someone else did. After about the 5th heat race, 4 cops came down the stairs, cuffed this loser and were gone, just like that. The slackjaws in front of us were, well, slackjawed at the efficiency of Minneapolis' finest giving their buddy the bum's rush up the stairs. They looked around in some sort of shock and dismay and then about half of them got up and followed their newly detained sty-mate up the stairs. They must have all gotten their brains jump-started because most of them returned in short order. A couple of them gathered up their stuff and left and that was all the more better for us, as the general level of flying shit subsided a little bit with their parting.

It didn't cease altogether. I got a paper airplane in my beer cup. It just happened to be full at the time. I was just a bit peeved about this. I was even more peeved when one of the largely inadequately supervised children in front of us removed the airplane from my beer. He removed it in such a way that it managed to hold on to quite a lot of this foamy substance, which then commenced to drip on him, his sister, and his father. Perhaps dad wasn't having a good children night or something, because then junior throws the soggy paper airplane just like everyone else's children were doing. I'm sure the person this soggy paper airplane hit was rather peeved about it, as well. I think my dad would have strangled me on the spot for doing something like that.

We got to see all sorts of other fun dominance behaviors from the slimes two rows in front of us. One of the particularly nasty ones had this fun game going with one of his female cohorts. He would grab the green plastic St. Pat's Day hat and slam it down on top of her head, then grin a grin that suggested he was having fun. When she seemed to have had enough of this kind of fun, he then smashed it down harder on her head and rubbed it around. He grinned his sociopath-picking-the-wings-off-a-fly grin again. She struggled and swatted him, but this only seemed to get him going even more. When she finally managed to push him off, he must have figured she'd look better wearing some popcorn. Grinning his grin, he commenced to pour a full bucket of popcorn all over her. She jumped around and started brushing it off, then he pushed the popcorn bucket down hard on top of her head. She had finally had enough and got up and walked down the row to sit away from this fine fellow. Did I mention this grinning psychopath was about 26 years old and sitting DIRECTLY in front of the children in front of us?

There may be a God after all. If I had been seated where those children were, I probably would have said something to this Neanderthal. It probably would have started a fight, and Mr. Heater, who hadn't yet been carted off, probably would have capped me. I consider myself lucky, and I guess I was lucky enough to be seated just far away enough from these people to have been able to look away.

Now it may sound as if I had a bad time at the Supercross. Sure, it sure was a lot more exiting that I would have preferred and for the wrong reasons. I did enjoy myself quite a bit after Mr. Idiot-Felony-Possession-O'Handgun was dragged out. Travis Pastrana won the 125cc race and Ricky Carmichael won the 250cc race. My favorite racer, Jeremy McGrath came in a fairly distant second after Ezra Lusk and Jacques Villiamin went down. He was in it throughout the race, but he just didn't have the stuff to beat Ricky that night. It's really no surprise. Carmichael set the 125cc class on fire for a couple consecutive years before moving to the 250cc bikes. Carmichael is about 10 years younger than McGrath and may have just as much or more natural ability, talent and dedication to winning as McGrath does. If Ricky stays healthy, it could very well happen that McGrath's utter domination of AMA Supercross is at an end.

3/13/01

Once again it's time to set down and spew some drivel because I want to. Not because I have to, but because I want to. Yes, that's right, I WANT to do this. I often don't have a lot to say, but I figure I'm not ever going to write the Great American Novel here, so I don't sweat it. No, as I sit here in the command center, monitors flashing, LEDs blinking, tunes cranked up to be heard above the roar of moving air and cooling fans, I'm happy and content in the chaos I've created.

I can't help thinking that people from the past couldn't have even begun to believe the computing power just one individual would possess at the dawn of the coming century. I've not figured it out to the last cycle per second, but I have a lot of machines running for no real good reason except for convenience. Sure, the webserver does real work, the other server passes out IP's and runs the printer, and the new box creates nice pictures to look at, but I don't really need all these things running simultaneously. Why do I do it?

The answer is that I'm secretly in love with the feeling of writing mad fat checks to the power company.

We got more snow here again. Yep, 9" of more fun that you can shake a shovel at. I've burned through 2 gallons of gas this year for the snowblower. What's that all about? I really have to figure out a better way to dispose of my snow. We have an alley and there's just no place to put the stuff. I have a largish cement apron in front of my garage and my driveway is about 4' lower than the yard. I can't blow it high enough to make the lawn, so it gets blown into the alley and redistributed to all my neighbors' driveways. Yes, I feel like a moron about this, but I'm no where near the only one doing it. One year a few years back, I loaded up the back of freetruck several times and dumped it in a lot near where I worked. I can't do that any longer because there's a building there now, and I don't work anywhere near there anymore. Nobody wants my snow, and I don't really want to pay good money to remove something that will eventually melt away of its own accord.

Which leads me into the next story. My pal Paul quit his job where we used to work. I used to be a Safety Officer in a small bus company and I just happened to have the job through a particularly tough time for the company. The company had just been acquired by a mega-conglomerate and I had been brought in as someone who had a clue to help straighten several pressing Safety Issues out. It was a tough assignment, but we got through it. It turned out that it was a pretty hard assignment, and I ended up getting "downsized" after all was said and done. One of the things I was tasked with was to stem our seemingly endless string of accidents. It seemed we just couldn't stop our drivers from bending bus. I thought it was an impossible job to expect zero accidents given the people we had to work with and the metro area we were driving in.

It seemed I was wrong, for the next couple of years, the accident rate at the place was pretty low. The guy who stepped in after me looked like a genius, and I just gave him credit for a job well done. Well, it seems that all events have come full circle. We finally had a real winter and I hear that accidents at that location are, once again, through the roof. The same guy is still there, doing the same stuff. Is he falling down on the job? No, he finally had a real winter on his hands.

I'm not gloating. I just feel somewhat vindicated in that someone else had the same results I did in a really bad winter for driving. All along I had been denying the fact that my tenure was across two fairly severe winters. When we had a couple of El Nino winters, everything mellowed out and accident rates dwindled. It's nice to know that it wasn't just me. Comforting, really...

3/10/01

This certainly marks a new low in my sloth. However, it's a piece of slovenlyness that could ultimately prove useful.

Last fall, I decided to network my computers together. The purpose was to get ready for the coming DSL connection. It was very nice to be able to shuttle files back and forth between computers if only to back them up. When DSL finally came, having a network was necessary to give internet access to the various machines we have around the house. The web server needed access, the file server needed access, and our personal computers needed access so that we could surf. Networking became essential for my and our operations here. It's become an indispensable tool.

Given this, I've started to find new and more fun ways to use it. The new low in my sloth is finally getting a crappy old laptop so that I can join my wife in surfing and working from the couch. As a matter of fact, this very Daily is being written from my seat on our lovely couch. So, here I sit watching I Claudius on the DVD, tapping away on the latest Daily, and having my ass fall asleep beneath me. What fun, this.

Recently, I've had quite a few people contact me about this site. This is good. I really like hearing what people think about these works and I really like getting email from people I don't know who aren't trying to sell me something.

Thank you all for writing. Your letters make all this worthwhile.

On a different subject, living where we do--in a neighborhood on the rise--we get solicitations daily in the mail and on the phone asking me to borrow their money or "leverage the equity in my house against your current high-interest debts..." or some other such blather.

I figure it this way: If I wanted a loan, I'd ASK for a loan. If I wanted to fill my trash bin on the porch weekly with junkmail, I'd ASK for more junk mail or perhaps a friendly stop by the trash truck to fill it up as needed. If I wanted to hear music, I'd put some music on. What I don't want is to be bothered endlessly by predictive dialers, bored call center drones reading scripts offering me stuff I couldn't care less about. I don't want any junk mail, nor do I want to listen to the music other people seem to insist upon inflicting on me. Bass lines in music are interesting, but most crap I hear thumping down the street is pure, unadulterated shit. If I wanted to hear it, I would have put it on myself

Not bloody likely

3/9/01

I said about a week ago that I'd rant a bit about paranoia. Well, here I go...

Paranoia is a disease of the mind. It, much like depression, tends to skew the victim's perceptions of the outside world. The paranoid sees the world as the world's not. Paranoia is like a filter for reality. Some people use pot, more people use alcohol, and all of us try to cut reality's sting with something once in a while. If we don't, we end up getting beaten down. I figure it this way: A paranoid is someone who has somehow had their invoked filters short-circuited and now the filter is innate and skewed.

One often thinks of the chronic paranoid as someone who wears tinfoil hats and has delusions about the FBI. Protection is what paranoia is all about. The paranoid needs protection from his/her anxiety and fears, and that fear becomes the reason he/she does anything.

The fear may have been real at one time, but maybe not. We here in America, have very little to fear. We don't have war, pestilence, famine or anything else that keeps us from getting on with our lives. Sure we have traffic jams, boom cars and questionable President, but we largely don't have the jack-booted thugs kicking in our front door. That is, unless we're doing something pretty far out of the ordinary. Because we have so little to really fear, people with anxiety problems make stuff up to fear. Pay your taxes and the IRS couldn't give less of a crap about you. Don't do anything illegal and the Police, CIA, FBI, NSA, INTERPOL, and the ATF don't even know you exist. The paranoid, through delusions of grandeur, not only thinks they're special enough to be noticed, but think that they're important enough to be tracked by these various agencies. Paranoia is silly, but the paranoid do not see it that way.

Paranoia comes on so gradually, the paranoid never really notices that they are acting really strangely. Paranoia is a feedback loop: The person fears, and can't deal with it, so they try to explain it away. Then they start believing their explanations. First, they may start feeling persecuted for either good or no good reason. The perfect vessel for this persecution is the yearly specter of our more or less benign IRS. There may be years of feeling persecuted, and then someday somebody looks at them askance. Suddenly, that person is tracking them, and then it's the "Guh-buh-mint" that's doing the persecution. If the paranoid gets this far, then they can choose which agency could be out to get them. Government agencies are convenient to blame because they are authority figures, and they can be ascribed oppressive tendencies and nearly spectacular powers. Since the agency doesn't care, no real feedback ever counters their ideas. The paranoid fears what they can't control, and ascribing menace to governmental agencies who don't know they even exist is a perfect way to not ever be proven wrong. The IRS has a special penchant for this because they even acknowledge the paranoid exists--they send him/her mail, so they know where he/she lives.

After months and years of explaining to their friends these whacked ideas, the paranoid will become more and more isolated. Not only because none of their friends believe their BS, but because the farther out these ideas become, the more scary the paranoid becomes. This ultimately leads to the number one reason that paranoids are so odd. They've alienated everyone who cares about them with obsessive stories of persecution, and their one-track-mindedness. It's within this period of their illness that the explanations they used to protect themselves, turn into filters which filter out anything that doesn't jibe with their spiel. An example:

"Jeff, I really think the FBI couldn't give a crap about you. What have you ever done in your life that would make them take notice of you?"

"Hey buddy, they're watching us, they're watching us ALL. They have a file on you and me and even your daughter. They know what car I drive, they know where I go because of the stoplight sensors, I see them watching us all from those helicopters they have flying around."

"Man, those are TRAFFIC helicopters. Can't you see the big TV call letters on them?"

"Jimbo, I hate to break it to you, but there's always 3 helicopters flying around in the morning and only one, ONE TV station that's doing helicopter traffic updates. Those TV call letters are just a scam anyway. The TV stations are in on this as well. Haven't you heard of subliminal messages? They exist, you know..."

You can't reason with a paranoid, because their bullshit filters are gone. Everything you say gets run through their warped perception and gets applied to their spiel. If it doesn't fit, it gets ignored. If it does fit, it reinforces the spiel. Soon, 1+1 doesn't equal two anymore.

"Jeff, one and one are two. You know that, don't be an idiot!"

"Jimbo, that's what they want you to think. The Man wants you to think one and one are two, but I know the real answer."

"...which would be...?"

"I can't tell you. They'd find me and kill me within hours."

Yes, you can do anything with paranoia; All you need are isolation, mental illness, and a steady stream of bullshit--either from TV, or tabloids or from other paranoids.

So, just what the hell are you trying to say, Tim?

My point here is that paranoia is illness. It's a disease of the mind. It springs from the fertile ground minds of bright people who don't watch what they feed their head. I once heard that if you keep an open mind, people with try to throw garbage into it. I believe that's true. Be careful with your head. Choose wisely what you read and limit your exposure to talk radio, tabloid TV, tabloids and other trash that poses as entertainment. Sure it's entertaining, and candy is good to eat, but a steady diet of candy will rot your teeth.

I am not a doctor, just a guy with an opinion. Paranoia is terrible, and it causes great pain when it's left untreated. Severe paranoia needs to be treated by professionals. Do not contact me for referrals.