Everyday Stupidities

Many of today's images came from fails.org -- my favorite image there is The Archies: She's Goth To Have It.

Hello, people. I have good news: I have ordered a Kodak EasyShare Z650 camera from Costco. 6.1 megapixel, 10x optical zoom, decent price, and good online reviews got my attention. I will not look like the guy at right, but will act like him in short order. I really wanted to get a replacement Konica-Minolta Z6 (12x zoom, good not great reviews) but for some reason the price of a new Kodak Z650 is less than the price of a discontinued, or even a refurbished, KM Z6. With the money I'll save, I will invest in a can of MACE to keep those pesky folks who approach to ask what I'm taking pictures of at bay. If you think paparazzi are bad, believe me that the shutterbug kibbitzers are way more aggressive. I'm not sure when I'll be getting the new camera (at this writing I haven't received the shipping notice) but it will be after my birthday, which is fine since there's nothing to see. Speaking of my cold, it's now to the point that stuff is gummed up in the back of my throat, which makes for charmingly nasal talk and the occasional (and necessary) gooey hock.

Just got word that one of my former managers (pictured at right) is leaving the company. I wish him well in his endeavors to be an upstanding whigger. I didn't do much this weekend beside shop and wrestle with my sinuses; we planned to go to home shows in either Seattle or Tacoma (they both were the same day! what fun for the public and vendors!) but made no actual effort. The nearly-last two relevant details of the bathroom remodel -- I swear there are only three more! -- were accomplished last night: I put in the new brushed nickel toilet paper holder, which took a bit more work than it should have (but it's gonna stay up for the rest of the house's existance), and the sidesplash came in a few days ago so we picked that up and I mounted it last night. All that's left [heard that before?] is to use some spray texture on the bare spots on the walls (from the removal of fixtures or chunks of paint falling off the drywall through the years) and paint over it, and my wife's project of making a mosaic on the windowsill (she's got the pieces glued down, now needs to fill the gaps with grey grout), plus replacing the big chrome tap handles with something less large and more nickel-y.

I am now a member of the "You Are A Smartskull" club at work, a list of people who got perfect scores on a customer survey. (That's not the actual name, but it is quite similar and more vapid.) It has no benefits, one perk (an 8"x3" card), and doesn't seem to convince the Quality department that I do my job satisfactorily in the public's eye, and the photo of me on the wall with the recognision could have been made better by me not having a finger up my nose a second prior to the flash, plus I'm with Groucho Marx in that I wouldn't join any group that would have me as a member (admittedly I'd rather be in the Friar's Club, which he was invited to, instead of the Smartskulls), but what the hey, it was free and brings me 0.25 seconds' worth of accolade. They're still sending this department's calls elsewhere, leaving us with calls on stuff we don't do or have been punted to us by that undertrained lower level (and I haven't heard another word about them being prohibited from transferring to us), so life is good between instances of saying "I'm sorry to hear that; I can help you with that by getting you to the right people" [punch buttons and transfer]. There's just a bit more aggro in the air, possibly because the lower-level tech and customer service queues are more than 10 minutes but there's 2 minutes between calls here when they finally get transferred. The customers wait, talk to someone who passes them off, they wait, they talk to someone who can't fix the issue, they get passed again without as much wait, yet they phrase it as "I waited 20 minutes to get to you." That's nice, we'll have this fixed in two minutes if you weren't misdirected here...

Finally, to make reference to a Gilda Radner routine, how could the woman at right not know she smelled like a bucket of carp guts rotting in the sun?