FourBux

You can’t make this stuff up

When did they change this rule?

Yep. There’s an e-How article on how to sneeze. Step Four explains that sneezing into your arm is better.

Tell that to your shirt.

What do you mean you forgot me?

So today I started my new car pool program. The plan was to meet at this person’s home at 6:00 AM, and ride in together, taking advantage of the carpool lane and generally avoiding all the normal traffic pitfalls. Only having to gas up the car once during the week will save some cash, too.

I’ve said on more than one occasion that I’m not a morning person. Really, really, the opposite, actually. Last night, in an effort to not make my new carpool mate late for work, I went to bed early, forgoing my typical late night cup of coffee for fear of oversleeping this morning. I went to be before 11, and true to form, my sleep reservoir was full at 4:00 AM, so I got up, spent some time in the home office, had a pot of coffee, and left on time.

We’d had a ton of rain yesterday and last night, so the roads were slick and flooded. Phoenix isn’t known for the great way it handles the occasional deluge when it comes to the city streets. When I found her road, there was some sort of flooded wash that I had to cross. Those of you who’ve been on here for a while know my car is not made for crossing washes…in fact the bottom of the car sits about four inches off the ground. Illuminated by my headlights in the pre-dawn darkness I thought that it probably looked more dangerous than it really was, I decided to chance it. The idiot’s last words, right?
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I spent my day on the can

I swear. There are some days that I really wonder if the job is worth the frustration. It isn’t a difficult job, in fact I’ve often said a trained monkey could probably pull this off. It certainly isn’t strenuous. It’s just the stupid things that give me pause. Or maybe it’s the number of stupid things that give me pause.

Today’s case in point:

The icon at the above, in full-size glory, is the result of a request from our internal development group. What they asked for was, and I quote, a “small, simple trash can icon.” We went back and forth all morning about the dimensions, then colors, and followed that up with a rousing conversation about the pros and cons of corrugated metal versus metal wire basket styles. That little thing above is the final artwork that got approved.

Long story short, I just spent my day creating a low bandwidth, high-contrast, empty version of the the default trash icon from Apple’s OSX dock.

I just wish they’d requested that from the beginning.

Yep. It’s Monday.

Don’t you hate it when people flake on the job? Pet peeve du jour goes out to the guy whose job it is to make sure the paper cowboy hat dispenser in the restroom is stocked. Come on!

Maybe it’s just me, but I tend wait until the absolute last possible minute before leaving my comfy cubicle and making my way to the restroom, more out of laziness than dedication to my job. Once there I inevitably find the protector sheets in fanned disarray, the result of shoving a new bunch back down through the dispenser hole, rather than opening up the box and going in the right way. Attempting to pull just one of these out results in one of two scenarios:

1. The one you are trying to remove tears apart, with subsequent attempts to remove it only yielding little wax-paper snowflakes all over the stall floor.
2. The one you extract is seemingly linked to all the others in the box . The result is a magic show for one, drawing one sheet after another out of the box, unable to find the seam between them, ending in a display similar to the image above.

Add the fact that you waited too long to get in there in the first place, and you’ve got yourself a real potential crisis. Sure, you can say poor planning is to blame, but that points to me and I’m just not cool with that. Blame always goes away from yourself.

For what it’s worth, there used to be a woman who restocked our bathroom at the office, and she did a pretty good job. Sure, occasionally you wouldn’t here her soft knock on the door and she’d walk in on you, but I’m sure it was no picnic for her, either. At least her attention to detail made sure everything was stocked correctly.

I miss her.

Oh, and by way of a Post Script, I finally had a real insurance adjuster come out and look at my car today. The national people told me that the shop I had quote the work was so expensive that it would almost certainly get totaled…I asked them to get a second opinion.

And the hits just keep on coming!

So, I talked to the CIA today

One of the things I like about working for The Company is that a place this size affords me many opportunities that I didn’t have as a freelancer. One such opportunity is the joy of the fire drill. Haven’t gotten to do one of those for a while. Really set my Tuesday off on the right foot. Sadly we all thought the sound was the fax machine choking on a timeshare offer so we ignored it. Looks like we’ll be getting safety training for that one!

Another opportunity I had was to attend a mini-seminar given by a member of the CIA’s Cyber Crimes unit. This little pep-talk was given as part of our internal Information Security folks’ open house, which I thought was going to be a snoozer, but turned out to be fun. Not because of the content. There was candy, which I needed like a hole in the head, popcorn, cookies and sodas. It was like trick or treating at Fox Mulder’s house.

I have to say, I learned a lot from the speaker. Sure, I’m thinking some of it was the mystique of listening to an actual CIA agent, but I think there were some nuggets too, and I feel like I should pass them on. After all, we are all connected on the web, and you really should know this stuff:
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