fine whine

Sometimes I can be such a goober. Despite having previously been master of a PBX and having root power over everybody and their phones, at my current job I am as much uninformed about what all the buttons do as anybody else. Add to that my pathological distrust of technology and it all comes together into a really weird attitude about any phone features more advanced than ordinary dialing. Take the case of transferring calls. I know that a good half of the time I am supposed to transfer a call I end up just hanging up (or at least I think so, and warn the other person of such).

What foolishness, me with my experience and computer engineering degree and all, to be stymied by a simple phone button. So today I knuckled down and attempted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I shanghaied my co-worker (thanks again, Ros!) and we did a quick three-phone test. Basically I called her, she transferred to me and I ended up answering my own phone call. She ran to the phone to say something to me but I cut here off with a "Can you hear me now? Good." and both of us laughed for a good minute or two, and sat down to return to work after a botched high-five.

And all I have to regret for it is the knowledge that I couldn't come up with anything funnier to say. But now I can transfer calls with confidence, and that's all that matters.

Snowfall turned to rain
now I have a headache and
I named it Norman.

This being Valentine's day and all (so sayeth Hallmark) the wife and I were out hunting for houses most of the afternoon. We returned to see the answering machine's light blinking, to which my response is "ooh! somebody loves us!" but inevitably a press of the PLAY button will reveal merely a hangup or some solicitor. Today, though, was something totally unique (well, for us here). I have transcribed the entirety of a message:

... to accept charges, press zero.
To refuse charges, press one.
To prevent calls from this facility, press six.
For a rate quote, press seven.

Hello.
This is a collect call from
Twah
an inmate at the county jail.
To accept charges, press zero.
To refuse charges, press one.
To prevent calls from this facility, press six.
For a rate quote, press seven.

I'm not quite sure how the guy's name is spelled but each of the four times he had called and left a message it sounded like something between "Twah", "Twon" or maybe "T'Juan". He had tried to call at 3:53, 4:01, 4:43 and 6:03 PM while we were out, end every time it was the automated Mabel asking us if we wanted to accept the call. But we have no clue who this guy is nor where he got our number, let alone what he did to get thrown in the coop.

Microsoft Outlook sure has some funny quirks. I've got genuine complaints to level against that bloated p.o.s. but for the sake of not boring the heck out of everybody I'm not going to list them. That, and I only have ten megabytes of webspace. Instead, I'll point out something funny that happens and makes me laugh. And then start muttering...

I work for a company that uses Outlook to communicate with vendors in Mexico. What the Mexicans use for their email is not known (by me) but somewhere between the two countries a little extra gets added into messages.

Funny, that sounds like smuggling, doesn't it? Inadvertent humour, gotta love it.

Anyway, the names of the people at one company do funny things in the email headers. Every time an email is replied to or forwarded it gets an extra first name tacked onto it. Such that I had an email today that was CCed to Deborah Deborah Deborah Deborah Deborah Deborah Deborah Deborah R----- and Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes Lourdes H----- and Mirena Mirena Mirena Mirena P-----. There's some method to the madness, as I can determine that Deborah's been on eight iterations of the message, Lourdes on all twelve and Mirena on four. Oddly enough, Mirena had been CCed back at the beginning and removed, and re-added by the time it reached me. In fact, three other people were removed after four or five repetitions. Though that is strange, with office politics and all it is not surprising.

What is really funny about this whole thing is that ever since I was exposed to a flash animation by Weebls, any time I see or hear any repetition I latch onto it with "badger badger badger..." ad nauseam. I mutter it under my breath like a mantra.

Oh, for those of impressionable minds like mine, don't click on that link.

In an odd turn of events, I just noticed that my toothpaste tube has a cap that can both be flipped open and screwed off. I know this only because it says so in little letters right on it. My only question is, "Why?"

I lied. I have more questions:

• Are there people out there so dedicated to flipping or screwing?
• Would these people rule out a potential toothpaste just because it has the wrong type of cap?
• Are there people out there who need to be told how to use the cap of a toothpaste tube?
• Where are these people and can I sell them things?

And in other news, I made it through the library's entire stock of Transmetropolitan, and enjoyed it thoroughly. My forays into graphic novels have been somewhat limited, but this time around Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson really impressed me. It's funny, it's witty and intelligent, and ultimately optimistic for the future. Sure, Ellis paints a pretty oppressive picture of The City and its downtrodden inhabitants, but also reveals that they are somewhat avid readers, and also that acid rain has been eliminated entirely. Not too bad, really, when one thinks about it.

My personal vision for the future (at least one that I'd try to write into a poor imitation of Blade runner) is of illiterates who rely entirely on spoken and pictorial communication. This is not a new idea, though the way I envision it happening is new and edgy: Say the media producers of the world are really trying to capture the youth and 18-24 year old male markets. They shrewdly turn to the video game industry, whose designers and artists have long littered visual displays and scenery with pseudo-language gibberish. Broadcasted video is littered with these meaningless hieroglyphics interspersed with real information but to a varying degree until the real information is wiped off the screen and only the gibberish remains. It looks cool, though, and without needing it to watch TV nobody gets around to learning how to read, since books have long since been replaced by video media. Of course the e-book makes an appearance, but only as a stepping stone to having some dullard just read the damn thing out loud. Surprisingly, nobody complains.

Anyway, while you can still read, pick up some volumes of Transmetropolitan. And if you notice some recurrent graffiti, say, "FREE STEVE CHUNG", you can search the internet to find out what it means. At least, I did.

And speaking of revelations, apparently the proper term for screwing off the cap of a toothpaste tube is "twisting". So now you know.

Chuck Palahniuk is a really cool guy. According to some marketing copy on Diary he's a nihilist, but that's nothing to hold against him, ha ha ha. I finished reading Diary tonight, having also started it tonight. There is a lot to be said about a book that can be read cover to cover in one evening; take notes here Clancy and Ludlum and all your word-heavy ilk. I enjoyed as thoroughly as I would've any longer book by a good author, because that's the key: Chuck's a good author and Diary's a good book.

Having finished reading it, I also feel purged of my earlier reading today, Bernard Levy's Who killed Danny Pearl? which is one of those self-important novels about writing a novel that hides the actual material in with page after page of filler about that tiny bit of actual writing. I hate those books, and I've even written a miniature version of one now just to prove a point or other. Levy's dust cover proclaims him to be France's finest philosopher and many other things, yadda yadda yadda. France's finest? Says who, asks I? Maybe it was the translation, but I didn't stumble across any great philosophy in the book I read, just a day by day account of what he did, where he went, and the events he may be imagining or fictionalizing but without separating them from the actual facts. That's not philosophizing, that's called bullshitting. And I slogged through that tome for several days for that revelation. Maybe I'm being hard on the guy but I wasn't engrossed in reading his book nearly to the degree he was engrossed in writing about writing it. How does a great philosopher and prominent author go about outlining such a book?

A self indulgent work of staggering banality

• Introduction
• write this a year later
• better yet, have a good friend write it and gush praise on with a trowel
• Chapter 1
• write about getting ready to write chapter 1
• drop lots of hints about what you will be writing about writing in subsequent chapters
• note for later: never write anything as promised
• Chapter 2
• write as though you're getting ready to start getting into the real meat of things
• write about how difficult something like chapter 2 is to write
• note for later: never get into the real meat of things
• Chapter 3
• ...

And so on? Or do they just keep writing and writing until deadline and ship it off to a publisher? I've gained a lot of respect for Jack Kerouac, who apparently (or better, supposedly) submitted the manuscript for On the road as a single piece of paper in a continuous stream of writing. Now that's cool, and I bet you he didn't have an outline planned out beforehand. Just as I had no plan for this rant before it started but it just started flowing, HTML syntax and all.