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I needed around 150 eye droppers to make Cartesian divers for my Webelos weekend.  I checked with a scientific supply house to see if they had any.  They were out of 144 packs but still had 12 packs of which I was able to purchase 12.  I wanted to see if I could get the 144 price which was 20% less so I called:

Me:  I see you’re out of 144 packs of medical droppers.  Can I just get 12 12 packs and have it rung up as a 144 pack?
Service Person: No, we’re out of stock of 144 packs and combining 12 12 packs would not be the same as there’s more packaging involved.
Me: But it’s the same number of medical droppers.  Do you have a bulk discount program?
Service Person: Yes, special orders placed with a quantity greater than 11 receive a discount.
Me: How much is that discount?
Service Person: 20%
Me: So I can’t get it listed as a 144 pack but I can buy 12 packs in the same quantity and get 20% off bringing it to the exact same price?
Service Person: Yes, I’m sorry that’s the best I can do.
Me: …. I’ll live.

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I wanted a light box to take some pimp product shots for stuff to post on eBay and Craigslist and looked into getting a light box, a photography tool to give a nice shot of stationary objects.  Kits can be purchased for $60 or so but wanting to save money I considered my options and did the most reasonable thing: Called Teejay Green to see if I could borrow his.   After getting childishly impatient I attempted to make one using a cardboard box and tissue paper and created something that looked like a hobo Helen Keller doing paper mache in a dumpster.  I threw out that attempt and created a new one using a pillow case and a slightly bigger cardboard box lined with paper.  This one looked like a box that decided to dress as an inside-out refrigerator and also met a swift garbage death.  Finally, I decided to drop the half-ass work and picked up nice foam board, good paper for a back drop, a nice cutting tool and real tissue paper as a diffuser. The results weren’t quite where I wanted them so I sprung for some extra light bulbs and desk lamps.

Total cost of my “cheaper” option: $65.00.  A full negative five dollars cheaper than the commercial option.

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Serving as a unit commissioner is one of the easiest jobs in Scouting.  I visit a unit once or twice a month to make sure no one’s dead or dying and provide periodic assistance.  One of these semi-trials is visiting a unit with a special needs Scout that’s taken a particular liking to me.  I was asked occupy this Scout while the rest of the troop did CPR training and after listening to his nonsensical stories cluttered by the words coming out not quite in the right order he got quiet.

Him: Have you ever thought of running track?
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Some schools offer a track, it can help cure disease.
Me: Well, running track can be good for your health.  Why do you ask?
Him: You look like you’ve been melting.  I think it could help.

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I had waded through a morass of odd paperwork regarding patch application and sought the originator of the byzantine crap to finish it off once and for all, this ensued:

Me: Why was my script not approved?
Him: Your failure was in not getting a pre-approval signature.
Me: Wouldn’t pre-approval mean I was already allowed to do it?  I needed an approval signature.
Him: No, it’s pre-approval because it occurred before hand.  Approval would be while I’m actually doing it.
Me: How can you approve something while I’m doing it?  If you want, you can sit down with me as I do the work and countersign as I go.
Him: No, that would be far too wasteful.
Me: Ok, then what?
Him: Then you need a signature once your done to verify that you’re done as well as one stating you’ve completed it correctly.
Me: Two signatures, verification, that’s one; what’s the other one?
Him: Post-approval.
Me: *Silence*
Him: Ok, anything el-
Me: Sir, you or your department should be dragged before the MLA for crimes against English.  Good day.

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I purchased something from MSI a year ago and tried to cash the expired check.  The teller told me I couldn’t but that MSI had to issue a new check if I requested it.  I wrote to MSI with a self-addressed stamped envelope requesting a replacement check fully expecting no response.  Today I received my envelope back and it contained… confusion.  The original item I bought was a MSI motherboard with a 20 dollar MIR.  What I received back was a Tigerdirect.com invoice for a Tony Stark that lives in Yuma, Wa.  The invoice was for $499.99 equipment replacement plan for a laptop.  I can’t think of any laptop MSI sells that could have a 500 dollar replacement plan except if it came with a small Asian man to port it about and buff it.  I could have received a Sanskrit page of the Satanic Verses, a WWII love letter from a Dutch POW or a Spoon-of-the-Month club calendar and I still don’t think I would have been as confused.

I hope this turns into something neat like the Drew Vandendries mystery.

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There’s a faucet in the downstairs powder room/half bath that leaks.  This wouldn’t normally be nothing more than an annoyance, but it’s also the case that the faucet doesn’t work.  One can twirl the handles to one’s heart’s content and not an additional drop will escape.  It’s essentially a leaky pipe with an incredibly ornate catch basin.  That’s my house: A leaky faucet on a non-functioning sink.

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Every company has its set of idiosyncrasies like oddities in work decor or strange holidays or seemingly backwards business practices.  When these occur at my firm I’ve taken to saying “Welcome to <firm name>”.

For the last few days, a coworker and myself have been testing a patch to our CAD system to bring back a piece of functionality lost during an update.  The functionality is non-trivial and involves CAD documents remembering their parameters.  It would be analogous to a document that whenever you opened it all the formatting went away in addition to the information like when it was created and by whom.  After doing a bunch of testing, the patch appeared to function correctly and we got ready to deploy the fix across our servers.

Me: I’m applying the patch to our development server.
Boss: Whoa, you can’t just change the CAD system.
Me: But this is the dev system.  I thought we just had to document changes to our production server.
Boss: Nope, since the dev system receives changes that may eventually reach the production server those changes have to be documented too.
Me: Then, do we have a sandbox that we can just mess around with?
Boss:  Yeah, we have a copy of the development server that runs as a virtual machine that we wipe each week.  You can make any changes you want as long as you document it.

–Later–

Me: Ok, I’ve documented the change on the development server and I’m ready to roll it out to the production server.
Boss: You can’t just change the production server, you need to submit a business justification.
Me: I need to submit a business justification?
Boss: Outline costs, how it will change our operations, any training required.  Yep, tell me when it’s done.

So, I need to write a justification, to get permission to apply a patch that’ll make our non-functioning system functional.  That’s like requiring a business justification to turn on a piece of manufacturing equipment.  I wonder if I should include the cost of doing the business justification in my business justification.

Welcome to <firm name>.

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Each day, the group in charge of providing songs and such for the day would receive a set of large wood beads to be taken with them everywhere.  At the end of their tenure, the group would return the beads with some sort of modification.  The group before my group served attached a “weather” rock to the beads in the name of functionality, easily increasing the mass of the thing by a factor of 10.  I decided to one up them.  When we were asked to return the beads and explain our adornment, I drove a tent spike I’d attached to the beads into the ground and announced that to further enhance the functionality the piece I’d attached the field to it.  The bead owner accepted my adornment and instructed the next group to receive the beads to visit the field once every 15 minutes to make sure it didn’t get lonely.

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The evening of the first day of Woodbadge we played a game called “Who Me?” where players landed on colored spaces and could choose to answer questions to advance or not to stay in place.  There was  a spectrum of questions and I was blessed with the following:

  1. What is your biggest regret in life so far?
  2. Give an example of something you’ve failed to achieve that you thought you would have by now.
  3. What was your most embarrassing life moment?
  4. Give an example of a big mistake you made.
  5. Is there a personal tragedy that’s shaped who you are?

The person immediately to my left got:

  1. What’s your favorite color?
  2. Tell a story about something funny that’s happened to you.
  3. What animal most represents you?
  4. What’s your favorite food?
  5. Give an example of a TV show you like to watch.

The agony and the ecstasy…