Here’s the deal: Sarah got an email from some list she was on with a link to some free passes for an early screening of the new Star Trek movie. We’ve done one of these before, when we saw Jack Reacher this past winter. It works on a “first come, first serve” basis, so if you want to get in to see a blockbuster new movie AT ABSOLUTELY NO COST TO YOU, it makes sense that you have to show up a little early and wait in line.

I get this. It’s a trade off. If I didn’t want to stand in line with a bunch of assholes, I could have just waited and shelled out the money for a ticket, even reserved tickets on Fandango so I could just show up, print them out and waltz in. I wanted to see it for free, though, so I walked in a little after six for the nine o’clock screening, knowing this would mean I would have to stand around for two and a half hours before they started letting people into the theater. A trade-off, right?

Well, I walked in and find unoccupied lawn chairs sitting around, jackets thrown on empty patches of floor. A whole lot of attitude about “I’m saving this spot for a friend!” The management came up at one point and asked couple about the large empty space around then. “Well, we have nine friends coming.” The nice lady from the theatre management pointed out the sign that said only one person could wait in line per free pass so there was no holding spots. “They were here, but they left to get food.” I should mention that those spots had been unoccupied for the half hour that I had been waiting by this point. Anyway, the lady from management then informed them this was just too bad, and let everyone else in line behind them know it was cool to go ahead and move forward now, and though this seemed PERFECTLY REASONABLE to me, the couple flashed one another that look. You know the one. The look when someone farts at a formal dinner, or loses their temper when they need to repeat to the person making their burrito at Chipotle that they want absolutely no spiciness on their food. The one that says, “boy, are we embarrassed for how you’re acting right now.”

I just don’t get it. You think you’d be stoked about the chance to see an awesome movie before the general release FOR FREE and not act like it was your God-given right instead of a really cool opportunity that might mean you need to stand around for a little bit first.

Anyway. It’s 7:45 now. I figure I have another forty five minutes until they start letting people in. There were probably twenty people ahead of me when we got here. There might be fifty now. People keep squeezing in, although they have to squeeze a lot tighter now since I steadfastly refuse to step back, and my scowl is working pretty well to discourage anyone from asking me to do so. Perhaps if I’m lucky they’ll start piling on top of one another and reach some sort of critical mass that prompts a savage switch to cannibalism and I won’t have to perform any homicides myself.

Keep an eye out for me on the news tonight, just in case.

Yet Another Way To Keep Up With My Boring Exploits

I started up a Tumblr blog about a year ago because, well, everyone seemed to be doing it, although I admitted I didn’t have the first idea what I was going to use it for.  So it sat, and sat, and then one day I joined Instagram, and then I noticed than an update to the Gowalla client for iPhone allowed you to post your updates to Tumblr, and something clicked in my brain and I realized I could use the Tumblr as a stalker blog.

I freely admit to ripping this idea off from the DaveStalker page on Blogography.  If you visit my own stalker page, you’ll see that it’s Instagram photos tagged with my location at the time, or else photos cross-posted from my Gowalla check-ins.  Every once in a while I might post a check-in from Gowalla if it’s someplace cool (like the Space Needle!  Or the San Diego Zoo!) but probably not if I’m just going out for Mexican food (again).  The page looks pretty boring right now because I haven’t modified the CSS or anything, just pasted in some code to make the last ten Tumblr posts display.  Most of those photos will be posted on Flickr anyway, and if you want to follow the actual Tumblr blog itself it’s here, and isn’t the reason blogs are falling by the wayside because we all have about nine different services we use these days?  No doubt this is a matter for another post entirely but I remember back when I started this silly blog of mine we all just used Bloglines to keep track of new posts, and some of us spent a lot of time commenting on Flickr, and these days there’s Twitter and the Facebook and Tumblr blogs and Goodreads and Foursquare and everything else and I’m having trouble keeping track of what I have out there, just remembering as I write this that I think I have a Friendfeed set up someplace.

But I digress.  I have a stalker blog set up and I will try to make it a little prettier later.

As you were.

If you don’t have time to watch it, here’s a brief synopsis of the song for you:  the protagonist is in love with a woman, and in an attempt to prove the extent of this love he lists a number of unlikely situations to which he would willingly subject himself.  In no particular order, these include:

• Catching a grenade.
• Putting his hand on a blade.
• Jump in front of a train.
• Take a bullet through the brain.
• Be run through by a rabid unicorn’s horn.
• Get hammered by the Norse god, Thor.
• Eat his weight in chicken feet.
• Listen to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” on repeat.

I am probably making at least some of those up, as I did not listen to the song too carefully or bother to look up the lyrics prior to writing this post — people, I’m a blogger, which means I’m practically a journalist, so don’t expect me to do things like check facts or verify accuracy on something before hitting publish.  ANYWAY, I think you get the point.

What I am left wondering is how the hell he thought any of this was going to impress his girl, or win her back.  I mean, anyone can promise a bunch of things that sound really impressive because you probably won’t have to deliver on any of them.  I can only imagine the response from Bruno’s beloved to all of his promises.

BRUNO: I would catch a grenade for you, baby!

LADY FRIEND: We live in the O.C., not the Gaza Strip.  Who’s even throwing grenades around here?  UNIMPRESSED FACE.

BRUNO: Well, I would…I would put my hand on a blade for you.

LADY FRIEND: What does that even mean?  You don’t know how to use power tools.  You don’t even own a good socket wrench set!

BRUNO: Listen, I would jump in front of a train for you…

LADY FRIEND: It’s more like, “I would wander out into traffic because I was texting and wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking.”  AMIRITE?

(At this point, no doubt, you can imagine our protagonist getting a little riled up at being called on his bullshit.  So, he switches tactics.)

BRUNO: I don’t understand.  I would go through all this pain.  What do I need to do to prove my love to you?

LADY FRIEND: Instead of telling me you’re going to “take a bullet right through the brain,” how about that you’ll “unclog that slow bathroom drain?”

BRUNO: What?  That’s crazy talk.

LADY FRIEND:   How about you pick up your dirty socks off the floor?  Or if you remember not to slam the door?

BRUNO: I don’t really see what you’re getting at…

LADY FRIEND: Hey, here’s a good one: Don’t dribble on the toilet seat.  Ooh!  Keep off the carpet with your dirty feet.

BRUNO: Man, this is some bullshit right here.  Did I mention the part about how I would catch a grenade….?

LADY FRIEND:  Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, Bruno.  It’s not as terribly glamorous to say that you’ll clean up around the house for your girl, but it’s a lot more believable than a lot of the stuff you put in your song, and will probably even get you laid.

Your email is important to me! Well, let’s be honest, it’s not that important. In fact I could care less that it’s sitting there in my inbox. If your request is urgent or time-sensitive… uh, deal with it. You’re a grown up, you’ve gotten yourself this far in life, right? Surely, despite your hysterical screeching, whatever it is can wait until next week.

I have to tell you, I won’t be thinking about work much at all! In fact, I will be a thousand miles away from here, and all too happy about it. I’m going to see some old friends and some new ones, and I’m going to walk barefoot in the sand, I’m going to eat some REAL Mexican food (or at least as real as I remember it growing up), and I’m going to be looking at a lot of comic books. Also, there will be drinking.

I will attend to your email upon my return to the office. And, well, that’s another lie, isn’t it? Because chances are there’s going to be quite a few stacked up in there, and it will probably be another week before I even think about replying. Again: deal with it.

Cheers!

Dude, that’s pretty much our whole life. Seriously, sometimes working here is like working with handicapped third-graders, only I know that these office types all have college degrees and mortgages, which doesn’t make much sense to me. It’s nothing short of a fucking miracle that someone can get up in the morning, button up their shirt and put their shoes on the right feet, OPERATE A MOTOR VEHICLE AT SPEEDS EXCEEDING 60 MPH WITHOUT TOTALLY DYING, and yet come to work here and call in with something like “I can’t make the door work.” And then you call them back and you’re like “you can’t open a door?” and then they’re all “well, I can open it. But there was this one time, like last week, it didn’t open right away and I almost hurt my finger, ALMOST, but not quite. Also I think we’re out of napkins.” It’s hard not to say, “WTF? Aren’t you a grown-up? Don’t you do your own taxes and feed yourself every day and even somehow fucking RAISE CHILDREN and you’re completely crippled now because there’s not a napkin with five feet of where you’re sitting?”, but if you say that then they go, “I don’t think I care for your tone. I’ve known your Director for like forty years, you know. We were in ‘Nam together.” And then you get your ass chewed.

That’s pretty much it. Okay. How’s your day going?

I write screenplays involving people from other departments on my floor, I write recaps of conversations I have with incompetent people I speak to on the phone, I write pointed rants about pointless things we all put up with in corporate America. Some of it gets sent to co-workers to seem to appreciate my sense of humor; a lot of it just gets deleted.

I write all this stuff because it keeps me sane, also because it beats doing the crap I’m supposed to do for my job. But you know, I’m tired of feeling like my job is draining me of all my creativity. Actually, I’m just tired of going to work.

Therefore, I am calling for Blogger Ditch Day. This Friday! Let’s all ditch work! Call in sick, forge your own doctor’s notes, even use the old “my grandma is in the hospital” if you have to (although be warned karma will probably bite you in the ass if you do, and then it will be your own damn fault when your grandma actually is in the hospital). If you can’t ditch work all day, then just show up for morning roll call and sneak out at your first break! That way you get credit for showing up.

Then, we’ll all meet at the beach! I’ll bring some beer. If someone brings hot dogs and some wire coat hangers we can totally cook them over a bonfire. We’ll crack open tallboys and smoke cigarettes. There might even be making out! (Please note that I cannot guarantee this last one. Also, although I seem to know a staggering number of smoking hot bloggers, please do not ask me if I can “hook you up” with one of them. Dudes, you are on your own.)

Let’s hear it for ditching! In the meantime, you should continue your subversiveness in the workplace by walking around with some monkey themed flair.

See you at the beach!

“Oh,” said the woman, “do you mind if I take the window seat?”

When I reserve my tickets I usually request a window seat, because I like looking out the window. Occasionally, I even get some good shots. Plus, I’m not one of those people who feels the need to constantly get up and walk around during a flight. I like my window seat.

But…maybe this lady hadn’t flown out of this airport before, and wanted to look out the window, I reasoned. I gestured magnanimously, smiled, and said, “Please.” Whereupon she took my window seat, fastened one of those cybernetic pillow-devices around her neck, closed the shade, and promptly went to sleep.

Needless to say, I was not pleased.

To top it off, I discovered that my complete exhaustion mixed with the two cups of coffee I’d had in the terminal had come together in the losing combination that left me too scatterbrained to focus on my book, but too stimmed up to be able to even close my eyes. Also, since no one in the forward half of the plane was smart enough to figure out that the two bathrooms near the tail were mostly unoccupied, they kept walking forward to wait for the first class lavatory to open up. With my aisle seat right at the boundary between first class and coach, I had someone standing right next to me any time that the “fasten seatbelt” sign wasn’t on. If you’ve ever wondered what’s worse than being stuck on a plane for six hours without being able to read or sleep, the answer is “being stuck on a plane for six hours without being able to read or sleep and having butts in your face the entire time.”

For the second leg of my flight, I boarded as soon as I was able and seized my window seat right away, determined not to be suckered a second time. I looked out the window for most of the flight home, and was rewarded with a view of Mt Hood as we began our descent.

You can see two previous shots from either side of Mt Hood here.

Won’t Someone Please Think Of The Children?

OR

You Can’t Say That On The Internets!

the more-or-less absolutely true tale of how my old site was suspended

Friday before last I logged into my website before going to work to see if I’d had any comments. Dave had left one, and I left a reply; I skimmed over my feeds in Bloglines for a few minutes, glossing over some of the news and noting who among the bloggers I follow had updated. The Internet was largely as I had left it when I’d gone to bed a few hours before.

The work morning went along quickly enough, and a little after ten I dropped down by the cafe in my building for a coffee refill, and to use the PC in the lobby to check my site. I was more than a little surprised to find that instead of the regular colors of my blog I found a splash page from my web host announcing that my account had been disabled. I hit refresh a couple of times, thinking this must be some sort of error. When my site failed to resolve, I logged into my email, and found an email from the support desk of what shall hereafter be known as ‘PuritanHost’ with the subject line ACCOUNT SUSPENDED. “Oh, great,” I thought. I clicked on the email, which was short and to the point.

You web-hosting account has been deactivated (reason: call customer support). Although your website has been disabled, your data may still be available.

If you feel this deactivation was in error, please contact customer service as soon as possible.

Well, no shit I felt this deactivation was in error. I dialed the 800 number for PuritanHost listed in the email, and spent several minutes on hold wondering what had happened. It wasn’t like I used my site to do anything illegal. I ran through any number of increasingly implausible scenarios: someone had hacked my account passwords and set up email accounts to send out spam; a malicious script had been introduced to my page; my ftp server had been loaded full of movies by the Russian Mafia to be downloaded by data pirates in Malabar; my site had been demolished by script kiddies and they’d put up a picture of goat$e in its place.

Finally the help desk took my call. The agent on the other end of the line asked for my domain; I gave it to him.

“Uh huh. Okay. What can I do for you today?”

“Well, my account has been deactivated.”

“Okay.”

“I’d like to get it reactivated.”

“Okay. Hmm. Okay. Looks like your account was suspended.”

“Right. Can you tell me why?”

“Uhh, it looks like you used, ah, vulgarity?”

I blinked. Blinked again. Surely I must have heard him incorrectly. “Say again?”

“You, ah, have vulgarity on your site.”

I took a second to process that. “Yeah. Is that illegal?”

“Well, it’s against the Terms of Service.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, it’s in there.”

“FUCK.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Look, okay, look, how do we go about remedying this? I want to get my site back up and running.”

“Well…you can remove the vulgarities you used. Sir.”

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Okay. Listen, what’s the story? I’ve been with you guys for over a year now. What set this off? Were there complaints about my site?” Even as I said this I found it hard to believe. I’m hardly Andrew Dice Clay; I run a fairly innocuous little site for my own amusement, and I drop the occasional F-bomb, but who doesn’t?

“Uh, well, no. I mean, I don’t see that there are any records of any complaints.”

“If there weren’t any complaints, then what set this off? What was the trigger?”

“Well…sometimes we go through the domains that we host. You know. Just to be sure.” And he might have said some more words by way of explanation, but I didn’t hear them. It turns out that as with other forms of sub-lethal trauma, the human brain will black out once absurdity reaches a certain critical level, to save your head from imploding. This is what happened to me as I began to contemplate the fact that, in a world where you can dig up some pretty sick and twisted stuff on the Internet with a minimum of effort, my web host had gone through the trouble to scan through my entire site to make sure that I wasn’t USING ANY NAUGHTY LANGUAGE.

“Fine,” I said abruptly as I returned to consciousness. “I’ll take care of it and call you back.” And by “take care of it”, I meant “pack up all my files and move them to another host without a completely bullshit acceptable use policy.”

That’s why my site has been down this last week. Jenny recommended Laughing Squid, and I zipped up my database tables and pulled all my theme files and have spent the last few days porting everything over to its new home. I haven’t got everything quite the way it was yet — I’ve gotten rid of some old plug-ins and updated others and still need to do a little more configuring before all is as it was. So, bear with me.

There are worse things in life than having your site 86ed by your host because you aren’t always PG-13, but it was still pretty annoying.

Think me getting my site shut down for ‘off-color language’ is a bunch of bullshit? Please feel free to exercise your right to free speech in my comments.

Take, for example, my old work. They seemed understanding enough when I told them I was quitting, even though I was taking business away from them by doing so since the contract they had to provide work for my new employers dissolved on the last day I was there. They even were happy to let me work for them an extra week when my new job was having trouble getting all my paperwork assembled in time. But some how this efficiency and diligence didn’t carry over to making sure I got my last paycheck on time.

I had dropped by the offices of my old work about a week after I transitioned to the new job, as my old boss had called to tell me that they had some checks for me. I dropped by and picked up one check for one day’s worth of work to cover the time they forgot to pay me for Labor Day, and another that was a payout of my accumulated vacation hours. I was surprised that I didn’t get my last week’s worth of work on either of those checks, but assumed it would just be deposited to my account the next Friday on the usual scheduled payday.

Well, Friday came and went, and no money appeared in my account. Concerned, I sent an email to my old boss, asking her what the story was.

Corporate automatically sends you your last check when they process the termination paperwork [she replied]. I don’t quite understand what went wrong.

“I don’t really understand what went wrong either,” I sent back. “But that’s okay, I don’t really need to know. Please just send me a check for the week’s worth of work that I am owed, and we’ll call it good.”

Time passes. A week later I send another email asking if they’d figured out yet how to write a check for the amount I was owed.

Well, they are going back and forth at corporate, trying to figure out who is responsible for paying you. I will let you know when I hear something.

“Do they have a check-writing department?” I asked. “Really, I think that they would be best suited to meeting my needs, by writing me a check. I don’t really care who is responsible. I don’t need a CSI: Bureaucracy Land-style forensic break down of what went wrong. I really just want my money.”

By the end of the week, after a few more email exchanges (if you call me repeatedly sending emails asking about the status of my last check an ‘exchange’) I found the following email in my inbox:

The corporate office says they sent you a check in the mail late last week. So you should see it any day now. Thank you.

“Fantastic!” I sent back. “I’m assuming you processed the change-of-address I sent you over a month ago, before my last day, right?”

I didn’t get a reply to this.

The Post Office came through for me and forwarded my last check; it came in the mail last Friday. Rejoicing that I had been paid, I went out to a show that night without giving it another thought. The next morning I sat down and opened up the envelope, and — you know what’s coming, right? — it was for the wrong amount. I had been shorted by a day.

Amazed by the incompetence of this organization, and frustrated by their almost total inability to get a simple thing right like paying me for a single week’s wages, I thought at first about just forgetting about it and saying “close enough”, but then I realized that this would mean that I worked a whole day for them for free.

It’s back to emailing morons again this week. Wish me luck.

ARRRGGH! All I gotta say is those other pages had better be working in the morning.

Update: Now everything works. Go figure. Stupid webserver.

Please just shut up. I don’t need this today.

Normally I am distantly amused by your griping about things that matter not a whit in the larger scheme of things, and your pettiness, and in your case, C., your incredibly stunted emotional maturity level, but today just take it somewhere else.

“Did you take care of this request for me?”

Did you follow the protocol like you’re supposed to?

“What? Can’t you just set it up?”

If you haven’t gotten the authorization you need then the answer is no. We went through this all last time so I know this is nothing new to you.

“I don’t want to have to call you at home tomorrow if this isn’t set up right.”

Well. It turns out I don’t want you to call me at home, either. So kindly follow the fucking steps we’re required to go through in the future instead of dumping this on me at the last minute.

Yes, K., go home. That’s fine. You would just end up making needless work for me if you stayed by asking me questions that have nothing to do with what we’re working on. No, C., I’m not going to go to lunch and gossip with you, I’m not in the mood for your childishness today. Make that sulky pouting face if you want, it might make your boyfriend knuckle under but you should have figured out by now it has no effect on me. For fuck’s sake, D., I don’t know how much more explicit I can make this email so you can understand what I’m trying to ask you.

Of all the days to have an issue with connecting to the remote site, today this is not what I needed. We need better equipment, I swear these Win-boxes were thrown together by monkeys.

Would it have killed me to have swallowed my goddamn pride and said goodbye to her last night before I left? Asshole.

“Is this all set up and ready to go now?”

It’s as set up as it’s going to get considering you didn’t want to make the arrangements you were supposed to make.

I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore, some days.

I am going to glare at this monitor until the tube explodes or it turns into a starfish.