January 18, 2000
Thanks, everybody who's been participating in the forum. I was sort of worried I wouldn't gain critical mass, but my fears have been somewhat assuaged. (You didn't realize you were assuaging me by writing in the forum, did you? I'm sneaky like that.)
So when Keith read my journal entry where I described his poor direction skills, he shrugged and said, "Hey, I work for Microsoft technical support, what do you expect?" So then I threw some pillows at him and he said he was just kidding. He doesn't really work for Microsoft technical support anyway, he works for a contractor of Microsoft, and there's a big difference! There is! I swear! My baby is not a minion of Satan. He's not. So you guys in the back row, you just stop your snickering.
Embarrassment at the grocery store. Last night around 8 pm or so, Keith and I were bored, so we figured, why not go to the store? It would get us out of the house, and besides, we needed groceries. The car was broken so we'd have to walk, but what the heck, it was nice out.
On the way out, Keith was like "Hold on, I don't have my wallet or keys", and I said, "hey, don't worry about, I've got mine." I deposited my big ol' paycheck on Friday, so I was not concerned. Nope. Not worried at all.
We had a leisurely walk there, and then we spent awhile picking out the right kind of ice cream and the stuff for making dinner this week, and a new kind of Snapple that intrigued me, and the new issue of InStyle magazine. It was fun. I like grocery shopping.
So then it was time to check out, and Keith wandered over to the video section while the checker was ringing up our food. $34.00. No problem. I had over $700 in the bank. So I ran my debit card through the machine, and... it was rejected. I ran it again. Rejected again.
I'm not sure but I think that at this point, a big red light saying "Loser" started flashing on my forehead.
I ran over and got Keith and told him he had to pay because my card was rejected, and he gave me this look and said "Um, I left my wallet at home. Remember?" Aaaaugh!
So we had to be incredibly lame and leave all our groceries behind and tell her we'd be back once we went home and got money.
Then, on the walk home, Keith told me that he was starting to feel sicker (he stayed home from work yesterday) and a little dizzy and he wouldn't be able to go back to the store. Aaaaaugh! We had two full bags of groceries. There's no way I was going to go back and carry those home all by myself, through a poorly-lit section of a bad area of town, to boot. So, we had to be even LAMER (the red light is flashing: LOSER! LOSER! LOSER!) and call the store and tell them we wouldn't be able to come back and get our stuff.
I never want to show my face in that grocery store again.
So I called the bank to try to figure out what the hell the problem was, and they told me my balance was $2.00. Two bucks? What the hell happened to my paycheck?
It turns out that the check that I deposited on Friday night in an ATM had not cleared yet by yesterday at 8 pm. Oh, be still my joy at my awesome bank.
I'm going to ask Nalini at work if they cashed the check before last night, because if they did, and didn't credit my account until a day later, I am going to be really pissed. Hell, I'm really pissed anyway. The bank is open on Saturday. There is no way it should take three business days for my check to clear with them. At my old bank in Chicago, I wouldn't have had to wait even one day. Their policy was that as soon as you deposited it into an ATM, it was available in your account. Not this crap with Seafirst, oh wait, I mean Bank of America, since they recently sold out, where I deposit my paycheck and don't get to access it until four days later.
Anyway, it was really depressing because Keith had been looking forward to his Chunky Monkey, and I'd been looking forward to my WhipperSnapple, and we had to come home empty handed because of my stupid bank.
We recovered, though. There's nothing like a pleasant evening of surfing the Web, playing video games, and reading aloud from William Shatner's autobiography to calm your nerves.
Have I mentioned that I've been inflicting William Shatner's autobiography on Keith lately? See, I got "Star Trek Memories" from somebody in my family as a gag gift for Christmas a couple years ago, and it had been languishing on the bookshelf ever since. Then about four months ago, I needed some bathroom reading, so I grabbed it... and I was hooked.
There's just something about the Shatnerian purple prose that drew me in. I thought the book was hilarious. I mean, it was hilarious unintentionally, but also Shatner made some good jokes. I was surprised.. no, I was shocked. Anyway, it sucked me in so much that I sat down with it and finished it in about three hours flat.
Then I kept telling Keith about it, and I don't think he believed me when I told him how funny it was. So two nights ago, he was lying down to go to bed, and I asked him if he wanted me to read to him, and he said yes, and "Star Trek Memories" was the closest thing handy. Also, Keith was sick so he couldn't protest too much.
So, I've been reading aloud from William Shatner's autobiography to Keith for the last two nights. It really is an entertaining book. It makes us laugh. We're also reading the first Harry Potter book to each other in odd moments. Keith read me a chapter before bed three nights ago, and then I read him a chapter while he cooked, and last night he read me a chapter while I ate dinner. It's good too, but not as strangely compelling as "Star Trek Memories".
Family stuff. So it turns out that the person from my hometown who was reading my homepage was... wait for it... my cousin Jill. She sent me a really nice email the other day saying she was sorry she freaked me out, but she thought my page was great. She also sent some news from the homefront about how things were going with her, which was really nice also. I was worried one of my parents was reading my journal, which really WOULD have freaked me out, but it was Jill, so that's OK. She's cool. I promise. We used to hang out sometimes when I was little, and do jigsaw puzzles and play Monopoly tournaments and stuff.
Work irritations.For complex reasons that I won't bore you with, we need a good text editor at work. SimpleText won't cut it, because it can't handle more than 32K. We need a GOOD text editor. So, my boss sends me an email and cc's it to a few other people here, asking me to do research on what the best text editor is to get. I'm cool with that. I can surf cnet and macworld for a couple hours to find out what we should get.
So, no more than five minutes later, I get an email from Teresa cc'ed to my boss. It says:
Gee, thanks Teresa, that's really helpful. Oh wait, except that it's not. See, you might think that saving files in MS Word plain text format would result in plain text, but it doesn't. You can't trust MS Word as far as you can throw it (since it's software, you can probably throw it pretty far, but you get the point). When you tell it to save as text, it saves as what you THINK is text, but really it still has sneaky MS Word formatting in it. We want to rid ourselves of ALL MS Word formatting. That's why we want the text editor. My boss and I understood this. Teresa did not understand this. Why did my boss cc Teresa on the email? I have no idea.
The other annoying part of the email was where she was like, "there may be some text editors, but I don't know what they are." Hmm, maybe that's why he asked me to research them and then get back to him? That's just my simple-minded opinion, though.
Teresa is a nice person, but she gets on my nerves sometimes. Nothing is simple to her. Everything has to be examined and discussed ad infinitum until sometimes I just want to shake her and be like "IT DOESN'T MATTER! NOBODY IS GOING TO NOTICE THAT THIS DOCUMENT IS ONE PIXEL TO THE LEFT FROM WHERE IT WAS LAST TIME WE SENT IT OUT!!" I don't do that, though, because, well, she'd think I was crazy, and my boss probably wouldn't be too happy either. But sometimes when she comes into my office to inform me that she'd like to see fifteen different versions of the same PageMaker file so that she can compare them to see which is the best, I really want to strangle her.
Oh, let the sun shine in.Two nights ago Seattle had a huge-ass windstorm that knocked a bunch of trees down (this is not a trivial thing here, where 90-foot fir trees are a common sight) and killed two people. It also knocked out the power for a lot of people, although we were mostly unscathed.
As a result -- OK, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I like thinking of it this way -- the wind blew all the clouds away. It was beautiful and sunny yesterday, and it's still beautiful and sunny today. I can hardly believe it. It's so weird to see blue skies and cirrus clouds, instead of the ginormous dark clouds that generally cover every inch of the sky.
I think I like living in a place that makes me thankful for the sun. Because, honestly, if I lived in Los Angeles, would I be thankful for the sun? No. Probably not. Would I be thankful for the spring, when the leaves return to the trees? Doubtful. And I like being thankful for those things. I like appreciating the sun and the trees and the blue sky. It's important not to forget how great those things are. And in Seattle, believe me, you never forget.
Phew, was that entry long enough? OK, you slogged all the way through it, here's your reward:
THE FORUM: Do you hate your co-workers?
People are really excited to talk about what they have and haven't done.