My Shorts

Yeah, yeah... I could come up with a better title, but... screw it. This is just a list of crap going through the noggin today. I could just continually bitch about work and family (lo and behold I do bitch about them), but there's other things going on i there as well and they're ready to spill out.

"My new network" is finally up and running. I had to sell a few things on eBay at really good prices in order to finally go out and buy the network cables. 28 feet in total. 3 feet for the modem/hub connection and 25 feet to go to the upstairs computer. The upstairs one is my oldie Celeron 300, but complete with 24x12x24 CD-RW and a DVD player. Of course, I formatted the drive and then realized that I don't have my Win98 boot disk anymore --took a bit of work, but I managed to find a version to download.

I have some new theories I'm working on. My first new theory is the Customer Service theory. I was talking to a guy at the office the other day. He was complaining because the kids at Wendy's Hamburgers screwed up his order. Cheeseburger --hold the tomatoes-- and an iced tea. He got a cheeseburger with tomatoes and a root beer. "Swear to God," he says, "This happens to me all the time." I believe him. Certain people, I'm thinking, have poor customer service happen in specific retail areas about 10-20% of the time. I get the food problem too. I went into a White Spot "Express" a few weeks back and ordered a cheeseburger, fries, & Coke. There was 1 order ahead of me and 2 behind. And somehow they lost my order. I have a friend at work who always gets the core of the lettuce plant whenever she orders a salad in a restaurant. I've been with her 4 times when it's happened. My sister has things screw up whenever she steps into a bank and talks to a teller. One time they accidentally put an extra $10 (ten!) in her account --small enough to be unnoticeable, right? She wrote a cheque, had it bounce, and got charged $35 because she was $10 overdrawn... Ugh.

My second new theory... just flew out the window. Ah! Thanks to my neighbours down the street, I just remembered it. "There's one in every neighbourhood" is a classic saying --but it's also true. There's one house in every neighbourhood that you just know is going to be the focal point of all your 'neighbourly' problems. I think the ratio is 1:8, 1 bad household for every 8 houses. That's why in my block there's 3... House #1 was a grow op, but that didn't stop them from partying it up every couple of Fridays. They had a concert (the only way to describe it --they had a band!!) start up at 11:30pm on night just after my daughter was born. Idiots. They're also the ones who had a friend drop by who forgot to set his emergency brakes when he parked on the hill. Down the hill came the Mustang, past cars, by 4 houses, across a busy street, in between our 4 rather large trees, over a 5-foot retaining wall and into both our garage doors. House #2, not to be outdone, we refer to as the MVA house. Again, police have been active there, and one guy made it to the front cover of the local paper --spread out over the hood of the squad car. Apparently, he was still supposed to be in jail... My father once backed into one of their cars on a snowy day. The car was worth maybe $500, but the bill to the insurance company was over $3000. They didn't care. There's been 6 families live there since and they're all bad drivers. They come up the hill extremely slowly (WHY do people do that?) and at the last minute signal that they're turning. There's usually a screech and occasionally, someone passes over the double-line because they think the car's slowed even more (if possible). House #3.... oh man. These guys like to party. They buy loud cars and louder stereos. They have fireside sing-alongs in the middle of super-dry (some might say 'tinder dry') summers. They also find the first firecrackers of the season --just like they did this weekend. Bang! Bang! Pop! Noon 'til midnight. Last night, there were 2 go off after midnight and I called the police --again, they don't care. They have the address memorized down there because they're always coming to break up the parties (Thursday nights were their traditional party night --go figure). One day, they had their car stereo cranked so loud that I could clearly make out the song's lyrics despite living 3 houses away. Their neighbour across the street chased after on of them with a baseball bat because it was driving him crazy. Me? I just honk my horn every morning on the way to work --it's not like they're actually awake or anything... until I honk anyway. In my old neighbourhood, 'that house' was across the street from mine. They had 2 rotten kids and the parents could care less. The kids called the police on me once because I took away the 2-litre Coke bottle they were hockey with --at 3 in the freakin' morning!! Their parents (the kids were aged 9 and 6) were at a party up the street --the neighbourhood grow op. They smashed an entire case of bottled fruit juice, which they stole out of the trunk of my father's car. We were unloading groceries and came out and caught the boy rummaging through the trunk. We scared him and he dropped the case of juice and ran home. We confronted the mother and she just laughed it off. We moved soon after. I got my revenge a few years later playing hockey. The kid still looked the same and had the same smart mouth. He called me 'fat ass' while we were playing and 'somehow' ended up needing a number of stitches.... funny, no one saw it happen despite all the friends I was playing with at the time. Oh, condos are worse. We had 'bowling for toddlers' upstairs, 'door crasher' down the hall (she used to slam the stairwell door into our bedroom wall every morning around 6:30), and 'yappy slut' downstairs for a while (she used to go out to the bars and leave her yappy dog locked in the bathroom all night) until she moved out and a 'one song says it all' family moved in. They played the same song for over 45 minutes every morning. Thumping the floor wasn't loud enough so I broke out the hammer.... don't miss living there either.

The neighbourhood thing runs in the family. My father's neighbour is a social worker and she called the police accusing my father of stealing her horse. she'd left her gate open (she does it often --I've seen her do it twice and I've only been up there for the equivalent of a month) and the horse wandered through my parents' garden and into the trees in their backyard. My father, laughed off the accusation, which riled her even more. He explained the police officer --over the phone from Wyoming where he'd been for 2 weeks-- that he didn't make a quick trip back to take the horse. Now she lets her dog loose whenever my father works in his garden. He's still a horse-thief after all.

My work thing. I'm just about ready to kill. After a lengthy meeting last Thursday, where I explained to my boss that 4 people sharing 2 offices should be able to communicate a helluva lot more efficiently than we are. Case in point: A major event this weekend, I, and my immediate co-worker were given no information on it until the newspaper advertisement arrived for my approval. That's where I got my information. Couldn't get it out of Drama Queen. For today major project, she left a number of things (naturally) to the very last minute and couldn't figure out why no one was helping her. Why should they? I was busy cleaning up her accounting mess (the girl just can't follow simple policy when filling out expense forms) and had no time to listen to her whine. So, what does my boss say on Thursday? He's going to find a way to keep her around after he contract expires at the end of the month. I had to put in 2 and a half hours of overtime today (which actually works out to 5 hours) to finish off a project she'd forgotten about and it was due today. So..... my old, old, old job has been posted and as of Friday everyone in the department has asked if I'm coming back. I've applied for the position (it is a raise in pay and 'less hours' --which means a regular schedule) and if I get it, I'll know by September 15th. I'll ask for a little while to 'discuss' things with my current boss --meaning that I'm 90% in favour of leaving for the old/new job. The 10% I don't expect to change and I'll write a few more Co-Worker From Hell comments over the next few weeks to drive that point home. Could be by the end of the next 2 weeks it's 100% towards leaving. I think they have to pay me out for all my overtime too. Right now the gross is just shy of $4000.... I could use that.

My Family thing continues as well. I wasn't sure, but decided to go to a concert last night put on my the African Children's Choir. I was finally convinced with the 'try new things' line form my wife. 3/4 of the way through the show, I suddenly realized that I'd seen them before. Now I just have to figure out why I couldn't remember. That or it's the lamest deja-vu EVER. My in-laws have 3 kids and a chaperone staying with them. My wife had to make dinner tonight and I came straight from work (thus, 2 and a half hours after I thought I'd be done). Everyone else was done and the kids were getting ready for bed already. So, I sat by myself at the kitchen table, had a Diet Coke and ate my dinner. I went on a TV remote hunt and asked my wife where it could be. She'd put it away because the TV isn't supposed to be on when the kids are around. "Oh," I said. "I guess I'll watch the news later." "Fine," says the wife, "You're not supposed to have pop around them either." Fine. I took my dinner and sat on the patio and finished it up. She got mad at me and couldn't figure out why I left the room. I didn't want to cause any problems. "But the rules don't apply to you and you're the only one eating dinner in there." So, my question was: "Why mention the pop thing, then? If the rules don't apply to me, why tell them to me. I don't care." She got mad and told me to come inside and be sociable. It was rude of me to walk out of the house like that (still hadn't seen the kids, of course). So, I went to be sociable in the living room and went in to introduce myself.... to my father in-law who was the only one upstairs. The kids were all in bed. I told him that I needed to be sociable and then my wife scolded me and told me to go home. Best idea of the evening.

I went home.

And relaxed for almost an hour.

This wasn't very short was it?