oops

Not a Happy Customer

If there’s one thing I hate more than slamming my finger in a rusty door, or stepping on a squeaky nail, it’s got to be incompetence in customer service. When I’m in a store inquiring about a product, your sales staff should know the answers to all my questions. Whatever happened to training the employees on the merchandise they are selling? When I worked in the Wal Mart Photo Lab, I took time every day to stand there reading the boxes of all the cameras. I learned what the best features were on every one of them, and was able to effectively compare and discuss intelligibly the best options for the customer. So if I go into Best Buy or Circuit City, why can I not expect someone working in the television department to do the same thing?

There’s nothing I hate more than asking someone a very specific question and having them look at the damn tag. Dude, I can do that myself. And already have. For instance, yesterday, I was in Micro Center, picking up an IDE/SATA I/O controller board for my home PC. I’ve troubleshot the problem down and determined that the root cause must be a bad IDE controller on my mother board. And since the computer I built is around three years old now, it’s a little outdated. It’s still a bad ass machine. I have a Pentium 4, and a good amount of RAM. But you know how quickly technology upgrades and supersedes itself. So my point is that it’s hard to find a socket 775 mother board that still supports the type of memory sticks I have. DDR2 is the new thing.

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  • Reading time:6 mins read

Where are the good cats?

This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

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  • Reading time:5 mins read

Why I’m So Cynical

Well, I don’t really know why. But I can share with you a few examples of how I’m cynical.

A friend an I were talking about looking at the stars, and I made a joke about it not mattering if there are clouds or not, because the telescope sort of puts you out past the clouds. You’re looking at stuff much further away than the clouds, you see.

I know, it’s a rolleyes for me too. But you’d be surprised at how many people won’t laugh at that joke. But rather say, “Uh, what’s the joke, Spacey?”

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  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’m just a cracker.

I have a friend named Keith who likes to use the word “nigger” a lot. Maybe it’s because he’s black, maybe not. I don’t like to associate behaviors with colors. But a few months after we met and started hanging out, he began insisting that I call him nigger. Not like every time I talk to him. But he wanted me to be comfortable saying that to him. Why?

We stood in the hall one day for several minutes while he tried to talk me into saying the word. I had been talking about this black client of ours who was an asshole, and I said something like, “I can’t stand that big dumb…” and I didn’t finish the sentence. The joke was that I was saying it to Keith to see if he’d catch what I was throwing. And he did, and he called me out on it. He said, “Go ahead, say it.” I shook my head. No, I don’t want to say it, because I don’t really feel that way.

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A Nice Christmas Dinner

It was this time – Christmas – of 1997, and the whole world was happy. I had just gotten back from Panama, and with my hazardous duty pay and my Christmas bonus, I bought a brand new shiny black Dodge 4×4 pickup. It had the works. Everything from leather seats to CD player, heated mirrors and one of those bitchin’ built-in cell phones that looks like a pocket calculator embedded in the visor. It was Wednesday, December 24, and I had spent the better part of three hours negotiating this buy at the dealership. I finally fiinished and tore off across I-20 for Dallas to go pick up my family for dinner. We would head to Three Forks for steak and brandy, followed by lavish dessert and maybe the men would venture outside for a cigar. Well, my Pops and I at least. My grandpa wasn’t much into that.

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  • Reading time:5 mins read

Is there a woman who can drive?

I had to miss work yesterday because of an injury. Let me tell you what happened. I (once again) was the victim of a CWDOCP – a Careless Woman Driver On a Cell Phone. Not a big deal, but it did render my vehicle undrivable this time. I was sitting at the intersection of my street and the main street, waiting patiently to get out of my neighborhood when a woman comes barrelling into the entrance, aiming for the wrong side of the median! It was obvious she had been going too fast, and since she didn’t want to set the phone down, she couldn’t stop fast enough, and rather than keep going and u-turn to come back to the entrance of the neighborhood, she decided to turn into the wrong side of the median. While I was there.

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  • Reading time:4 mins read

Part-Time Badass

A friend of mine relayed a story the other day that I was quite fond of, as it sounds a lot like something that would happen to me. She was sitting in the right-turn lane at a stop light and saw that the person in front of her started pulling out. So Rebecca (SheBang) looks back to check the traffic, and steps on the gas. SLAM.

The person in the car ahead had started pulling out. But then stopped. So Rebecca gets out of the car and starts walking up to assess the damage and talk to the other driver. As she gets halfway to the driver’s window, the old coot takes off. She had no clue she’d just been rear-ended.

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The Pool Party That Sank

Yesterday we celebrated my hot cousin’s 20th birthday with a whole bunch of drinking, swimming, music and drinking, and a little sunburn on the side. The party was a wild success. We played water polo, pin the tail on the donkey, simon says, and a rousing game of marco / polo. A good time was had by all!

Space & Hot Cousin LaraSome friends of mine came over to assist in the partyship, and everything seemed dandy. Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, one of the pretty girls splashed a little too wildly and her top came down just a little bit. I’m not talking full boobal exposure – just a tad bit of nipple peeked out. And one of the other girls saw it and made a comment to some of the men who were sitting on the deck (and were not fortunate [as I was] to get to be part of the audience).

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  • Post category:event
  • Reading time:3 mins read

The Long Way to Aquaintance

I was sitting in a bar, watching the tiny television in the corner. This isn't something I do very often. I stopped into this place to have a cold pint before meeting with a client of mine at the Internet Data Center right down the road. I was to be giving him a tour of the facilities and showing him where his equipment was racked. Anyway, I'm sitting in there enjoying my pint when a girl comes in and walks up to the bar. As she was standing there at the bar, right next to my stool, I casually looked at her, noticing she wasn't wearing much. She smelled like a cheap hooker – cigarettes and perfume, and perhaps a little sweaty. Her hair was greasy and matted and her tank top was stained and dirty. She leaned on her elbows against the bar, and I could see through the…

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  • Post category:saga
  • Reading time:1 mins read

The Great Canine Collision of 2004

Saturday, before I left the house, I let my dogs out in the back yard. Being a relatively nice day, I decided to step out with them for a few minutes. I was admiring the weather and the scenery (I live on a beautiful green belt). I have a fence that’s almost entirely see-through in the back, being made of what I call dog-wire. Much like chicken wire, but the wire is thicker and forms larger rectangles – great stuff for keeping dogs in but maintaining a pleasant appeal. It’s a very rustic looking fence, and – wait… You didn’t come to read about my fence…

Anyway, I saw a rabbit through the fence and decided it would be nice to let my dogs chase it away down toward the creek. My dogs are some fast mother bitches, but never have they come close to catching one of these rabbits. Well, I opened the gate and my dogs tore out like bullets, running right past the damn rabbit. They love to run in the greenbelt, where they can really stretch their legs and run for five or six hundred yards in each direction.

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  • Reading time:5 mins read