In which there are superdelicious foodz!
The Best Aunt Ever™ picked me up after work last night and took me to College Place for dinner at a tiny little place called Bangkok 103.
College Place is a vegetarian haven because apparently the town is comprised mainly of a Christian sect – Adventist, I believe – that is entirely vegetarian. They have a kick-ass crunchy veggie store I have yet to see the inside of, and the stores in the area all have rather extensive vegetarian food sections because of them.
Bangkok 103 is run by a wife/husband team and is reservation only. I had Thai iced tea and veggie curry with tofu and it was wonderful, as was the company of my dad’s sister (who taught me how to twist and do the monkey when I was quite little, and is therefore practically the most important figure of my formative years).
After dinner, which she paid for, we dropped by her house and she gave me two bags full of books and I fell in love with her handsome boy dog, a sweet shepherd who shared his “bunny” (all stuffed toys are bunnies to him) with me. After that I was SUDDENLY FREAKING EXHAUSTED because of this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned COLD and went home and went to bed, where I slept for fifteen hours before coming back to work.
In other very tragic news. Lips the Office Fish died today. It’s a sad day for the entire office.
In which we revisit lolcats because man, that shit is FUHNEH.
I’m sick and stupid but I love you so here’s some cute:
Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!
In which I can barely even think.
Sunday I woke up sick. And pissed off about it, too, because if you’ll recall I WAS JUST SICK and it isn’t time yet to be sick again. But sick I was. And pissed off about it, too, but I already said that.
Point is, my aunt was calling because my uncle was sick too and needed help setting up his computer and his ‘net connection at the new shop. So I let her come pick me up and then spent about four hours plugging stuff in and then cursing at a stupid little USB wireless adapter until it finally agreed to respeck my authoriteh.
I finally got home and collapsed into bed, where I promptly began to have a terrible fever.
It hurt. It sucked. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I finally managed to crawl to my purse and get a Tylenol into my body and the rest of the weekend passed somewhat more coherently. The few hours I was actually awake, that is.
Now I’m at work. I am dizzy and cold, but I don’t actually feel too bad. I mean, when I’m not coughing I feel alright. Mostly I’m just out of it.
I came to work today because I close, and if I call in sick someone else has to work a ten-hour day. Not to mention that I’m taking 3 days off in two weeks to go to GBM and I’ve only been working here for four months and I don’t want them to know I’m a flake quite just yet.
God, I feel like crap. Stupid germs.
In which I’ll be available for your listening and viewing pleasure.
Tonight I’m gonna sit in with the Coyote Kings at Crossroads sometime between nine and twelve for a few songs. If you’re both local and free, drop on by!
—
*Said by Todd Rundgren on… um, I can’t remember. Some live recording. Back To The Bars, maybe.
In which I give you a picture of call center life.
Yesterday, for my first call of the day I was on the phone with a customer for 106 minutes trying to set up his DSL. It should have been a 10 minute call, tops.
The hardware was properly cabled and all the correct lights were lit on the router, but Vista would not let him login to the modem GUI. I manually put the machine on the proper subnet, disabled all other connectoids, and IE still wouldn’t let the customer into the damned GUI.
It was frustrating because I don’t know Vista, and all Vista users are over 60. Which means I can’t just say, “Close out of that window,” or “Open your firewall application,” because they don’t know what statements like that mean. They need to be directed through absolutely every single click – especially those stupid Windows Vista security pop-ups – and it’s hard because I don’t know exactly what they’re looking at and, to make it even betterer, most people can’t read very well. If I say, “What does the window say?” they gurgle and mumble and I have to guess.
Later I had a guy who was super upset that I couldn’t help him – not wouldn’t, but couldn’t. The problem was that he wanted to connect his computer via USB to a DSL modem but he didn’t have the driver disc. I explained that he had to have the driver disc to go any further, and that since he hadn’t bought the modem from us I didn’t have one I could send him. He insisted that we “should be able to go into Control Panel and Internet Options and install the USB driver in there” because he’d “done it that way before.” (Which is, for you non-techies, utter bullshit and just plain wrong.) While I was trying to explain to him that drivers can only be installed three ways: from files stored in Windows, from a driver disc, or from the Internet, he hung up on me in a fit of pique, but not before telling me that he’d never had such bad service from our company before. And I was being NICE!
I’ve been doing this computer shit for a long time now, and while Windows will typically find drivers for USB cards themselves, there are very specific and particular drivers for weird USB peripherals like, say, ebook readers or DSL FUCKING MODEMS FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
Then there was the guy who ran the CD he got from the telco after ordering DSL from my company, even after we specifically told him not to, and it killed his WinME machine. Killed it, dead. The thing won’t even boot. And I had to tell him it wasn’t our fault and there was really nothing we could do about it. I felt so bad.
Then there were about five calls from DSL orders that had gone strangely awry and had weird, totally unusual things wrong with them. No path, or strange hardware failure, or actual telco outages…
Damn near every call was an exception call, the whole day. My call time average yesterday was about 45 minutes and when I left – after working a nine hour shift – the queue had still not been cleared.
Today my department supervisor was agro because he’d been yelled at all morning by customers who didn’t get called back yesterday. He fired off a few emails to us techs that made me agro too.
Because shit, as they say, flows downhill.
Today it’s slower, thank god, but the morning was all angry voice mails left by customers who can’t connect because they don’t know how to type but think it’s my personal fault and that I’m maliciously keeping them from being able to surf for porn over their cheapo dial-up connections… Okay, maybe it’s not that much about me, but STILL.
Right this second, I’m on my second DSL call in a row with a customer whose order was lost or halted for some reason only the telco knows, and of course it’s after five so I can’t do anything about it until tomorrow…
And even though it’s a new day, the attitude of the great unwashed “them” is pretty much what it was yesterday: pissed off and petulant. And I really do take it personally when I can’t fix it for them, because that’s why I do this job: I like to be able to fix shit for people.
Long story short:: work’s been kicking my arse these past two days. Gah.
In which the weather is totally gorgeous.
I took this picture with my cell yesterday. It’s March and this is what’s happening outside. Spring!
I asked Gramma if there’d be another cold snap yet, and she declined to speculate. She never gives weather predictions; she just shrugs and says, “We’ll see. I’ve seen years when Les had his potatoes in by St. Patrick’s Day, and I’ve seen in snow in May.”
Perhaps my life isn’t much besides working and sleeping with occasional bright spots of music, but at least I’m not shivering my arse off in an ice storm. And the benefit of working is that not only am I paying off bills but I get to go to DC next month, just for the hell of it. Small favors, no?
In other news, I had two books in the mail this morning. Booyah!
In which I do one thing in place of another.
I couldn’t install my new 120Gb hard drive because I need a hard drive caddy because I can’t get the one on my current hard drive OFF because of un-ideal tools and a lack of significant hand/wrist strength. This whole hard drive replacement project is one stupid thing after another. I went to eBay and bought a second caddy and also an Ultrabay caddy so I can have both damn hard drives in the machine at the same time.
Moral being that quite often, throwing money – in this case, about $27 – at something does make it all better.
On the subject of money, only two paydays between me and the Global Blogger Meetup in DC next month. I’m so excited! I’ve already purchased my tickets, and now I really should schedule a hair appointment.
Oh, anyway: yeah, with the hard drive project hung I installed a new WP template here on the ‘box instead. (I even tested it in Internet Exploder! Go me!)
In which I tell you about my plans for my weekend, but you find it boring. Because it is. Boring, I mean.
I’m working until six. After that, I’m going to type up some lyrics for my band book and organize some MP3s for band practice tomorrow afternoon. After that, I’ll probably stop for a quick cocktail and then head home…
…where I have a brand new hard drive and a Windows XP CD waiting for me. UPGRADE TO A BIGGER HARD DRIVE!!! YAY!!!
This really is terribly exciting. Really.
In which I’m felled by microorganisms.
Gramma and I both have rotten colds. We’ve been drinking hot lemonade with ginger in it, and lazing about, and coughing, and sounding scratchy-voiced.
I have it worse than she does (her immune system’s been fighting germs now for 85 years and has wicked mad germ-fu), and slept 20 out of 24 hours the first day we came down with it. I missed a day and a half of work, too.
Right now I’m at work craving cheesy, fried foods, like I always do when I have a rotten cold.
In other news, you may have noticed the ‘box has been in Maintenance Mode a few times recently. I’ve been trying to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, but it keeps telling me it still needs to be upgraded. I’ll probably mess with it more later. It will respect my authoriteh! …eventually.
In which I go out and have a lot of fun. And FAR too much wine!
Saturday afternoon Syl texted me; she and C were in town. Turns out RB had gotten a recording gig and had hired the rest of the band to schlep gear. C worked while Syl and I hung out Saturday night. When C was done, I invited them to crash in the front room to save them sleeping in the studio, which is filthy.
Sunday I made brunch and we had a lovely lazy morning. Syl & C left. I read and took a nap and generally lazed around. Gramma took me to Applebee’s for dinner that afternoon.
Sunday night C & Syl picked me up and gave me a comp ticket for night two of the recording event and we all went downtown to see the Randy Oxford Band.
The hostess tried to get RB to introduce the band. He didn’t feel like it, so I volunteered because I knew he would strip it out of the recording later and do a voice-over. (I hadn’t realized at the time that they were filming too.) I forgot to tell the crowd to turn off their cell phone ringers, and had to read both the venue’s and the band’s names off of a post-it note, but it was fun anyway.
The band opened with a jazz funk chart, then moved into Motown and blues. I liked them a lot, especially the rhythm section. The bass player was a monster player, with a lovely doo-wop falsetto he broke out on some Marvin Gaye covers. The drummer was solid as a rock; he also sang a medley during the third set.
The band leader, a trombone player, was a solid player and fun to watch but primarily his gift is in coalescing a kick-ass band around himself. Everybody got a chance to solo, and he invited a few local players up to sit in. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to be invited up myself, but it didn’t happen… a good thing in the long run, ’cause I was shitfaced by halfway through the second set.
I befriended their vocalist, a fierce little black chick named Patty. After the first set (during which she did ‘Dr. Feelgood’: omfg I love that chart!) I explained that the mic she was using needed her to get right up on it or she’d sound thin. “Why didn’t they tell me that?” she asked, tilting her head toward the guys behind the board. “Because they’re men?” I said. She laughed and hugged me. I bugged her in between all her sets, and at the end of the night she gifted me with a heavily sequined blingy shawl she wears around her hips for gigs. “It’s very sparkly, so you don’t have to move that much,” she told me. She’s been singing for 40 years and had a lot of presence. The local folks told me I have way better chops, but chops don’t always matter. She had the gig, not me, and I thought she was wonderful and gracious.
The bass player said, “You’re the chick in that recording R played? Yeah? So when you movin’ to Tacoma?” It’s so nice when a monster player says something like that to a girl, don’t you find?
Later in the evening I met a flaming creature who danced with me and then invited me to a gay bar in the Tri Cities for his birthday in a few weeks.
After the gig, I packed microphones and ran around being a friendly, stupidly drunken spaz. Then C and I went to Shari’s and ate, then went back to the house where Syl was already asleep from when we’d brought her home between sets. I went to bed…
…and stayed in bed pretty much consistently until I had to come to work this morning. Wine hangovers? Suck.
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4 random books from my Library!
