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Compared to the rest of Lower Southampton Township I live in the middle of nowhere.  Halloween as a child involved renting a friend’s neighborhood and trying to avoid apples, Good ‘n’ Plentys, and Necco Wafers.  My brother purchased a house this past winter and he was excited to celebrate his first Halloween where he’d dispense rather than strictly gather candy.

I was over early in the evening to drop off some stuff but hung around to notice a trend.  He started off with a pirate hat on and demanded each kid say “Trick or Treat”.  He complained about the hat and stopped wearing it but still excitedly answered the door and demanded the candy pass phrase.  After another hour he’d simply hand the bowl of candy out the door and only demand “Trick or Treat” from kids over 12.  I didn’t stay long enough to see the candy dish left on his stoop with a white flag in it.

Who knew Halloween wasn’t a holiday but an endurance trial?

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Normally, there’s a few people at work in dumb Halloween costumes.  Today, I saw none.  There was recently a wave of firings.  I wonder if I discovered their decision criterion.  I approve.

As a Haiku:
No costumes at work/
Wave of wrath may be the cause/
I approve of this.

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Me: Hi, I’m having a problem with the CAD worker agent not starting properly.
Tech Agent: Ok, please open the console to the CAD worker console. Please hit the “start all” button and you should be done.
Me: I did.  The program immediately shuts off.
Tech Agent: Ok, please hit the “start all” button again.
Me: Done.  The program has immediately shut off.
Tech Agent: Ok, please hit the “start all button” again.
Me: It’s shut off again.  If you tell me to hit the “start all” button again I will scream.  Don’t you think the fact that the first three tries didn’t work suggests something else is wrong?
Tech Agent: Sometimes it takes a try or two before the program figures out what’s going on.
Me: Understood, are you the only technician for CAD worker support?
Tech Agent: No, I work in a group of five.
Me: Thank you, it worked magically.

I think I got the guy who thinks that jamming the elevator door button repeatedly makes it go faster or who patiently presses the crosswalk light for five minutes.  If I wait about five minutes, he’ll probably have another call so I’ll get one of his coworkers.  If that doesn’t work I’m use a British Accent and use the name of a coworker.

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Every year I purchase two pairs of sunglasses from Campmor and lose one every six months like clockwork.  I suppose I don’t buy as much as rent or lease them.  I received my two new pairs to replace the 2nd member of my last pair and tried them out.  I’ve never worn an accessory that makes me look like more of an absolute douche.  But they do an exceptional job blocking out the sun, I mean, I think they may improve my vision.  But I look like a total douche, so douchy Joe’s first response on seeing them was “sweet shades, Bra”.  There’s a plainer pair that’s 10 dollars more costing me about $30 to purge myself of the douchiness incurred by the glasses.  I was thinking of burning them but I think they trap the demon-god that douches with hot girl friends sell their souls to in exchange for hot girlfriends.

Anyone have a bottomless pit or planning on pouring a concrete foundation soon?

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Today marked the six year anniversary of me starting to use the precision fart generator at work.  Later I walked into some technicians holding the door to the hotroom (environmental chamber held at 40°C/75% relative humidity)  open while passing pouches in.

Me: Why are you holding the door open?  Just lift the cart in and put up the pouches.  It doesn’t require three people.
Tech: But it gets hot in there.
Me: Hot! You’ll be in there for five minutes.  When I was your age I spent hours putting up hundreds of pouches.
Tech: That sucks.
Me: I was thankful for it, because <coworker> spent his days in there testing adhesives.
Tech: Oh.
Me: Kids today.

I’m 25 and I just had my first “you kids, get off of my lawn” moment.

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Joe Naylor started working at the same firm as myself.  I thought it’d be fun but things have been far from all roses.  Consider the following:

  • Until he gets web access, if I want to talk to him I’ll have to get up, walk down the hallway and open three doors.
  • My lies regarding the difficulty of my job are far more transparent.
  • He now has an income stream barring my dream of having an indentured servant through debt from purchasing a stick of gun.
  • Someone now understands what I mean when I yell “Are we going to go to Babar’s house!?”

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Leader 1: We have no American Indian Affairs adviser.
Leader 2: Do we really need someone to advise on having affairs with American Indians.

Damn straight!  If you don’t know how to cheat on your spouse with an indigenous person you should have a corner struck from your Disaffected White Suburbanite card.

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A friend of mine apparently has a picture of me on his refrigerator several hundred miles west of here.  I’m not normally a fan of being in posted pictures but I’ll make an exception in his case.  His family was visiting him and whenever one of his relatives walked by the fridge she’d break out laughing, someone else asked her the cause and she said “this guy” pointing to my picture.

For the rest of the stay, whenever she needed a pick-me-up she’d walk by my picture and laugh.  She wanted to make a copy to bring home to help her out of funks.  I wonder if I replaced the people that come in stock frames that’d prove therapeutic for department store workers.

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I needed to get gas on the way to camp and stopped at my regular cheap Jersey station to find long lines as there appeared to be stemming from the station having a single attendant.  I saw one woman step out of her car at the pump, and attempt to operate it only to be stunned by the dizzying array of lights and return to her car to wait for the attendant.   I gunned for an opening, jumped out of my vehicle and began pumping my own gas through the insights into the process I’d gained by reading the damn instructions on the pump.  The attendant made his way over to me and reached for the nozzle where I interposed “Stand back, I’m from Pennsylvania.”  He glared at me, I glared at him, when I heard a beep.  The attendant reached over hit the receipt button, grabbed the receipt and while looking daggers  at me  said “thank you for stopping at Quik-Chek” .

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My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon.  We had n f*#$ing clue why.

We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs.  We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%.  We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%.  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.  The only way we were able to kill it?  By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting.  Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.