Home at last...
Nov. 18th, 2003 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterYou know, there's nothing quite like the feeling of having spent 10 minutes of a 15-minute break period typing up a multiparagraph entry only to have the whole thing vanish just a couple of sentences from the end when you accidentally hit Control-W when you mean to hit Shift-W. I speak from personal experience.
As you might surmise, Monday's luck held on and stayed with me, only tapering off about midway through the afternoon. It started this morning, when I was awakened from my doze by the mellow tones of a mufflerless car across the street from me at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. Said tones stayed around for ten minutes; when I went across the street to confront the neighbor about it he said unrepentantly that he was warming up the car to go to work. I let it go this once. But if it happens again, I'm going to call the police and put in a noise complaint. (I almost hope it does happen again.)
After I got up, I logged onto AT&T's website and attempted to use their java-based tech-support chatserver to try to get resolved the issue of the white/yellow pages, as I had failed to do the night before. I had to exhaust the web browsers of three different computers before I found one that worked. Despite my having installed the complete JREs for both Windows and Linux, Mozilla Firebird would only give me the puzzle-piece plugin picture on both platforms. MSIE wouldn't see a plugin there, Opera gave me a big blank space with no plugin in it. Finally Safari on my Powerbook pulled it up (and even then it managed to go into a lockup on me twice). The crux of the problem was that apparently for whatever reason my mmode menu is just not displaying the white/yellow pages/reverse phone number lookup where they're supposed to be—where they in fact are on the techie's own display. But I suppose that's better than the ditzy "did we ever offer anything like that? uh...maybe you should check google" that I got from last night's rep. And in the end, he did give me the URL of the WAP site that provides the services, and I was able to bookmark that, and it did work.
I also called the bank to see if my debit card had come back from the ATM—as they hadn't called me "first thing" like they had said they were going to. No dice, it wasn't there, "but maybe it'll be in tomorrow," the person to whom I spoke suggested. This left me uncertain about whether I should go ahead and cancel the card on the off chance someone had gotten ahold of it before the ATM could slurp it down, or wait another day just in case they hadn't retrieved it for some reason. But as it happened, when Monday's luck thinned out further along in the day, I got a call back from the bank saying that some nice person had found the card and turned it in. So I guess good things do happen sometimes, and there are good people left in the world.
In other news, it's time to pay the piper for winning all that money last month; the tax on the prize money comes out of this paycheck, which is consequently less than half the size they usually are...and that's with very little undertime, too. Fortunately, I kept back enough of a percentage of the prize money to buffet me against the impact for the most part...and the money I've been putting in savings month to month should cover the rest. I'll be glad when the next few checks come in, though. I've also arranged to work a shift on Thanksgiving Friday, for holiday pay, and that'll help considerably (though, granted, not as much as when holidays were a 10-hour instead of an 8-hour shift).
And one coincidence that interested me greatly today: I handled the account of a fellow who used to run a well-known and prolific cheap-Linux-CD distribution company that had subsequently sold to a competitor. Had shipped as many as 2,000 CDs a day at the height of business the fellow told me. It's funny that, out of all the CS reps, I, probably the only one who even knows what Linux is, should get that particular call, don't you think?
Today I also read most of a wickedly funny (and funnily wicked) book—Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David. It's a hilarious little deconstruction of fairy tale myth, sprinkled liberally with "I can't believe he wrote that" puns, featuring a(n anti)hero who should be completely unlikeable yet manages to get audience empathy through dint of David's wonderful writing. It makes me look forward to going back to work tomorrow just so I can find out how it comes out (and read the sequel, The Woad to Wuin).
Anyway, that's about all I have to say. In a while, I think I'll order something delicious and affordable from that Chinese place down the road, and then go fetch it. Right now, I'm just going to relax for a while.
As you might surmise, Monday's luck held on and stayed with me, only tapering off about midway through the afternoon. It started this morning, when I was awakened from my doze by the mellow tones of a mufflerless car across the street from me at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. Said tones stayed around for ten minutes; when I went across the street to confront the neighbor about it he said unrepentantly that he was warming up the car to go to work. I let it go this once. But if it happens again, I'm going to call the police and put in a noise complaint. (I almost hope it does happen again.)
After I got up, I logged onto AT&T's website and attempted to use their java-based tech-support chatserver to try to get resolved the issue of the white/yellow pages, as I had failed to do the night before. I had to exhaust the web browsers of three different computers before I found one that worked. Despite my having installed the complete JREs for both Windows and Linux, Mozilla Firebird would only give me the puzzle-piece plugin picture on both platforms. MSIE wouldn't see a plugin there, Opera gave me a big blank space with no plugin in it. Finally Safari on my Powerbook pulled it up (and even then it managed to go into a lockup on me twice). The crux of the problem was that apparently for whatever reason my mmode menu is just not displaying the white/yellow pages/reverse phone number lookup where they're supposed to be—where they in fact are on the techie's own display. But I suppose that's better than the ditzy "did we ever offer anything like that? uh...maybe you should check google" that I got from last night's rep. And in the end, he did give me the URL of the WAP site that provides the services, and I was able to bookmark that, and it did work.
I also called the bank to see if my debit card had come back from the ATM—as they hadn't called me "first thing" like they had said they were going to. No dice, it wasn't there, "but maybe it'll be in tomorrow," the person to whom I spoke suggested. This left me uncertain about whether I should go ahead and cancel the card on the off chance someone had gotten ahold of it before the ATM could slurp it down, or wait another day just in case they hadn't retrieved it for some reason. But as it happened, when Monday's luck thinned out further along in the day, I got a call back from the bank saying that some nice person had found the card and turned it in. So I guess good things do happen sometimes, and there are good people left in the world.
In other news, it's time to pay the piper for winning all that money last month; the tax on the prize money comes out of this paycheck, which is consequently less than half the size they usually are...and that's with very little undertime, too. Fortunately, I kept back enough of a percentage of the prize money to buffet me against the impact for the most part...and the money I've been putting in savings month to month should cover the rest. I'll be glad when the next few checks come in, though. I've also arranged to work a shift on Thanksgiving Friday, for holiday pay, and that'll help considerably (though, granted, not as much as when holidays were a 10-hour instead of an 8-hour shift).
And one coincidence that interested me greatly today: I handled the account of a fellow who used to run a well-known and prolific cheap-Linux-CD distribution company that had subsequently sold to a competitor. Had shipped as many as 2,000 CDs a day at the height of business the fellow told me. It's funny that, out of all the CS reps, I, probably the only one who even knows what Linux is, should get that particular call, don't you think?
Today I also read most of a wickedly funny (and funnily wicked) book—Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David. It's a hilarious little deconstruction of fairy tale myth, sprinkled liberally with "I can't believe he wrote that" puns, featuring a(n anti)hero who should be completely unlikeable yet manages to get audience empathy through dint of David's wonderful writing. It makes me look forward to going back to work tomorrow just so I can find out how it comes out (and read the sequel, The Woad to Wuin).
Anyway, that's about all I have to say. In a while, I think I'll order something delicious and affordable from that Chinese place down the road, and then go fetch it. Right now, I'm just going to relax for a while.
