Candy Man

In junior high, my entrepreneurial spirit took hold and I began selling candy at my school. This was not the sort of sanctioned candy sale put on by one of the school's organizations or at the school book shop. No, this was my own sort of shop, where I wandered around the school with tons of (at the time) kids' favorite candies - Now and Laters, bubble gum, Lemon Heads, Fireballs, etc. The candy was concealed in my long winter coat. Through a twist of fate, the inside pocket of my coat had torn and I was able to use the entire lining of the coat as an enormous pocket for the stashing of my product. Sure, some kids at other schools sold illegal narcotics, but at our school, sugar was our students' drug of choice and I was their supplier.

The profits were enormous, as I was able to markup everything by 100%, and I had no real overhead costs. Sure, in some cases, I had to take the time to repackage everything. For example, when you buy a bag of 100 sticks of gum, you need to break it down into something more palatable to your average junior high consumer, like bags of ten. There was some effort involved, however, as the nearest store from which I could replenish my stash was about 10 miles away - 10 miles of insane, mountainous hills. Fortunately, my mother was supportive of my new found career, once I told her about it.

Unfortunately, my school was not as pleased with my job creation spirit and did not seem to feel I should be aiding the youth of America in their pursuit of a sugar fix and early onset diabetes. I guess they wanted to have the market cornered for themselves. In any event, after much back and forth, and repeated harassment, my budding career was brought to a halt. Mostly as a result of supplier difficulties. I guess the only people more upset with me selling candy to the masses were the ones supplying me with the product. Even though the store that supplied me was in a completely different town and they were incredibly unlikely to be able to sell to these people otherwise, they were somehow outraged that I was able to make such a sweet profit. They probably would have never known I was doing it but I guess sooner or later they got suspicious as to where the seemingly limitless supply of candy I was buying week-in and week-out was going and questions were asked.

Another bright future cut short. In retrospect, however, it was one of my favorite jobs. I set my own prices and my own hours and I never had to worry about someone else slacking off.

People Are Rude

This weekend, I finally dragged myself to go see the second Narnia installment. I am still not sure what to make of the movie, as a whole. I think the ending to the movie left me a little confused or disillusioned, I am not sure which. However, I do know that I am sort of getting tired of going to public events because people are just rude, and often the rudeness comes from directions I never would have expected. For example, I thought for sure the little children sitting down the row from us were not going to be able to sit quietly for a movie with a running time of over two hours. I was proven wrong, possibly owing to the vigilance their father. Although, the 20 or 30 something year old couple that sat at the other end of our row were incredibly annoying - talking and giggling throughout.

I, personally, do not care if you talk or laugh or do whatever you want to do during a movie, as long as I do not have to hear it. However, they were too loud to ignore and they had no sense of volume - they did not get quieter during the softer parts of the film or only try to speak when the louder parts came across the screen. I felt like demanding that they pay me back for my tickets. Apparently, they needed their parents to take them to the film.

I found that most of the theater audiences at the Orlando Fringe Festival were generally quiet and attentive, but there were still some tense moments at the production put on by the youth theater group. We got lucky enough to sit directly in front of some proud parents with every sort of recording device imaginable. I kept hearing one of their digital cameras make its "I just took a picture" sound, and my experience would not have been complete without the mother suddenly freaking out saying, "Oh no, I am out," of film or tape, I presumed.

I am all for people having a good time, but not when it comes at the expense of everyone else around them. If you really needed to talk to one another that badly, you should have rented a DVD.

Vista Sucks

When I got my new laptop, I had no choice but to get it with Windows Vista. While I know some laptops are still available with Windows XP, mine was not and there was not a lot I could do about it. Begrudgingly, I played the Bill Gates game and got my shiny new laptop.

Upon receiving the laptop, I immediately tried to install XP Professional, but quickly realized that it did not have all of the drivers my machine needed and was really just going to be more of a hassle than I wanted. I decided I needed to try to learn to love this new operating system of mine, and there were some things that Vista did better thanXP ever had. For example, my startup time was about 30 seconds and it could go to sleep and wake up almost as well as a Mac. However, its constant warning messages and odd idiosyncrasies were driving me up a wall. After I figured out how to deactivate the bulk of them, I was greeted with the now familiar warning I get every time I start my system, alerting me to the fact that my system is not fully protected. Moreover, the Internet security suite that shipped with my system was not actually compatible with Vista. Yay, for me.

After finally getting Vista to run sort of the way I wanted, and getting the security suite removed, I started finding all the other programs it was not compatible with, including my journal program. Imagine my horror and misery when I found out the program that I was assured would continue to work with Vista no longer worked, and the more I looked, the more problems I had. Suddenly,iTunes was having issues and they were not going away. Now I had programs, and hardware related to those programs that would not work correctly. Bill Gates was ruining my life, piece by piece.

This weekend, I had to replace my flash based mp3 player. The one I used to take to the gym had decided to only turn on when it felt like it, and even once it had turned on, could turn off at any moment, without provocation. I tried negotiating with it. I tried multiple new batteries, but nothing was going to convince it. It was done. So, I went and bought a Sansa Clip. It was really a great little player, about the size of the newer Apple Shuffles but with FM radio and twice the amount of memory, for a much smaller price. Brilliant! Well, it certainly was perfect until I hooked it up to my computer and Vista said, "What the hell is this?"

I called Sandisk and explained the problem to the tech support guy. At first, he tried to tell me that it was just me, until I pointed out that other users on the Sandisk support forums were having my exact same problem. At this point, he confessed that some users did experience this problem because some versions of Vista had shipped with the required drivers and others had not. It seemed to him that mine had not, and what I would need to do is go to this Microsoft Web page and request that Microsoft send me a Hotfix (patch). This was awesome. I could not just go somewhere and download the driver I needed to run my new hardware, I needed to ask the Microsoft gods and hope that they heard my plea.

A few hours later, Microsoft emailed me back stating that they could not find the Hotfix I was looking for and telling me to call them, which I promptly did. The operator could not figure out how I had got this number and was dumbfounded at the idea that someone at Microsoft had told me to call it. Finally, he decided my story was too crazy to be a lie and connected me with technical support. I, once again, explained my issue, in excruciating detail, to the tech support dude (who sounded quite Indian). He was completely baffled as to why I was calling him. You could sense that he was hoping to be able to read to me from a script and "solve" my technical problems. This fell completely outside of the parameters to which he had grown accustomed. However, he made his best efforts, asking me if I was using Windows Vista, and that's where things went downhill.

I replied that I was using Vista and that it was the worst operating system ever. To which he tried to tell me it was an excellent operating system and I lost it. I pointed out every glaring problem with the operating system. I noted how many people and organizations were still unwilling to purchase it and how even Microsoft is starting to promote its next operating system, seemingly trying to brush Vista aside, and say, "Look at this really cool new thing that might actually work in a way you will like." I even pointed out the fact that the new Service Pack release forXP is supposed to add most of the best features of Vista to XP , making it almost completely pointless for anyone to upgrade, at all. It was right around this point that he decided he needed his supervisor, as I clearly knew too much.

The supervisor (another person sounding Indian, dots not feathers) and I traced the same path regarding the horror that is Vista and all the problems I have had with it. However, as we came back to focusing on my problem of the day, she remained completely bewildered as to how I had even gotten transferred to her department and insisted that I needed to provide her with theHotfix ID number. After I asked her for the third time where I was supposed to find such a thing, she decided I needed to call Sandisk back, as obviously Sandisk knows better than Microsoft how to patch Vista.

It was at this point that I took my new Sansa Clip, walked it straight back to Best Buy and spent $20 extra to get a new Shuffle. Sure, it has half the memory and no FM tuner, but it works and keeps me from having to deal with Microsoft, and you simply cannot put a price tag on that. Besides, if I decide to go Mac in the coming months, it will still work with my new system.

Paranoia

It seems that every few weeks, something dramatic happens at my office - an attorney gets disbarred, someone gets fired, a death or illness strikes someone related to the people in our office, etc., and last week was no exception to the rule.

Two weeks ago, another small firm moved into some of our then vacant office space, which formerly housed the offices of an attorney that soon found the need to expeditiously retire from the practice of law. It seems like a great arrangement had emerged, a new happy office coming to join our office of misfits. Of course, that was week one, or as I like to think of it, the calm before the paranoid and psychotic yelling that ended, as all good dramas do, with police involvement. As with all incidents at my office involving the police, and I believe there have been at least two in the last year I have not been there; I am always away when all the cool and exciting stuff goes down.

Returning from lunch, I saw a police car parked downstairs. Briefly, I considered that perhaps they were here for our office but then quickly dismissed this notion, assuming that they must have other important business to attend to within the hallowed walls of our building. It was not until I set foot in the office that I learned that not only had someone been fired, but that the police had to be called on the terminated employee. It took until the following day for me to get all the relevant details, not from a lack of trying to bury my head in the stand and remain aloof and uninvolved. Sometimes, people just *need* to share and I seem to be close at hand.

Apparently, one of the legal secretaries for the law firm that just moved in to our office became convinced that a member of her staff, one of the attorneys or another secretary, was stealing her passwords and messing around with her bank accounts and email. This led to outbursts of racial slurs against not only another legal secretary who is dating a black man, but also against one of Florida's finest. Needless to say, the law firm had no trouble convincing the police that the woman had quite possibly come unhinged and they were more than willing to assist in any way they could. Unfortunately, there really was not too much they could do and the people in the office had to leave the building later with caution, as the one taking a ride over the cuckoo's nest was taking a detour, circling our parking lot.

One may think the story stops there, but one would be wrong, as now there seems to be people thinking that perhaps the woman that only days before was considered delusional and potentially dangerous was on the right track and that this new firm is not all nice and friendly but sneaky, dirty, and underhanded, or maybe there is just one bad apple in the bunch. I have no idea if they are right, but if they are, I am sure it will lead to another exciting installment down the road.

Thoughtless

A friend of mine recently complained that my blog is not introspective enough for her anymore. She feels that the posts are not as thought provoking as they once were and she is left having to try and find her inspiration in horoscopes and Post Secret. "Now it's just all about your life." I guess my life has lost its luster. The intrigue and excitement traded in for a steady girlfriend. Now my largest daily crusade is trying to find the time to go to the gym and have hours of sex. It is torture.

On the bright side, I still have an incompetent bank. I have held an account with Washington Mutual Bank ("WAMU") for over nine years now. Sure, we got off to a rocky start when they accused me of larceny because they failed to process my opening deposit check correctly and believed that I had tried to defraud them for hundreds of dollars. However, that was all water under the bridge. We had moved on with our respective lives and were now the best of friends. I had cajoled at least two other people into opening accounts with them in the last six months, and they had sent me more free checks, even though my account is so old that it does not actually qualify for free checks. And when I went overseas, no bank treated me better. They gave me a free international 800 number to use and a number to call collect, in case anything happened. They also typically respond to the emails I send to them within 6 to 10 minutes. Always a nice feature to have when you are planning for your trip or trapped in some small Italian town, unable to access your cash because the Italian bank you are using does not give out more than 150 Euros at a time, but they tell you it is because your bank has frozen your account.

Last week, WAMU sent me a little message. "Open a savings account with us and get a 5% APR." Not a bad deal. I already have an online account with HSBC that gives me a little bit of a higher interest rate, but WAMU would be local for me, and I have a longer history with them. There's a connection - I see it when our eyes meet and they tell me they love me. So I decided to apply for a new account. This is when I learned that WAMU had only been plying me with nice words and cheap wine so that they could bend me over and give me the shaft.

As it turns out, WAMU had kept a notation on my account, from back when I first opened the darn thing, saying that I was a bad account holder and had attempted to commit larceny with them. Note that I never actually did anything wrong and that nine years ago they wrote me an apology letter for the incident. No matter, the notation was there and I could not open my account. Not only that, no one could figure out: (A) why the notation was still there after over nine years and (B) how to remove it.

It took me almost two weeks and multiple phone calls to various departments, from which I was often disconnected in the middle of a transfer. After day 8, I was convinced that Sprint's customer service had infiltrated and taken over WAMU's. It was fantastic, but in that bad way that makes you feel like you just did something you are going to regret and are going to need to get tested. At the end of the day, it was not even WAMU that fixed the problem. They had told me it was fixed, but I later learned that nothing had actually been done, despite all their little account notations to the contrary. To top it all off, after they realized that my life was still a living hell and that they were at fault, they told me that there was nothing more that they could do. The customer service woman told me she would completely understand if I wanted to close my accounts and take my business elsewhere. Desperate for some closure to all of this, I went to WAMU's "Early Warning" fraud company and explained to them what was happening. They also saw lots of account notations, but also explained to me quite politely that there was nothing that they could do either, except pass it up the food chain of management again and see if possibly something got done this time. Miraculously, a day later, it was fixed. Two weeks, twenty service reps and hours of painful frustration later, and I could go ahead and give WAMU more of my money.

The thing I find most frustrating in dealing with telephone customer service, today, is the fact that no one speaks English as their primary language, and they are all dumb. I nearly always have to get transferred to a supervisor or some other higher-end department to reach someone who sounds like they might have a glimpse of a thought dancing in their head and that might comprehend the English language beyond, "Thank you. Come again." And it is not the fact that English is not their primary language that is so frustrating (granted, it can be a little frustrating on a phone call - where you have to rely on the English language to convey all that you are thinking and feeling), it's the fact that they are dumb as toast. Reading from their little scripts and annoyed and angered when you ask to speak to a supervisor that might actually be able to understand what you are saying and help you.

I feel like customer service, across the board, has taken a dramatic cut in the corporate model. Almost no company seems to emphasize it anymore because they are all too busy saving money with shipping it overseas. And I get the fact that a lot of customers are dumb and annoying too and that they can approach you with questions that baffle the mind and make you want to sign them up for the first manned space flight to Pluto, but there are also people like me that would rather not waste hours and hours on the phone, having to fight with a company to get them to do their blasted jobs.

Now that Mattel is in the middle of doing its second recall of toys in the past month, I begin to wonder if maybe more companies will begin to question the wisdom of shipping things overseas just so that they can save a buck. I wonder if maybe companies will begin to realize that, "Hey, maybe you really do get what you pay for." And maybe they will begin to emphasize education in their workers, rather than just someone that can fill a seat. Or maybe they are all waiting for the market to force them to take these steps.

And ... Cut

"It was more like a cliche."

"I hate cliches."

"They really do suck until one of them actually comes true and then they can be profound. No longer is it happening in some silky sweet scene of flashing lights upon an expansive screen. Now you are suddenly the player and as amazing and intense as it feels, no one is really experiencing it with you, and if they are, they probably aren't partaking of popcorn and Coke as the scene unfolds."

"Oh, please, let me experience it with you. My heart is all a flutter."

"Your Ben Stein impressions are completely lost on me."

"That is most unfortunate. Maybe we should just go see a movie. That new James Bond flick is out. Eva Green is hot and I bet there will even be some daring cliffhangers."

"So there I was, in the middle of absolute chaos. I felt like the whole world was coming in on me at once. Phone calls, deadlines, demands on my time and everyone wanted everything immediately. And suddenly she appeared, melting everything and everyone else away and I knew it would be ok."

"You make me sick."

"It was like one of those scenes where the whole room is teaming with people as they swirl past the hero until suddenly his eyes land upon the woman across the room, and immediately nothing else is in focus or even matters."

"No wonder why I always feel sick after chic flicks. Couldn't you be simple and feel that way about a car?"

"It might get better mileage."

"Definitely more than you will out of that story. You don't share that one in mixed company, do you?"

Flying

She sat in the car and began adjusting the stereo. The music, quite obviously, did not suit her mood. However, the next selection only suited her briefly. In the interim, she began moving objects in my car, thoroughly distracting me from driving. I started to wonder if I had ever ridden in the same car with her before, as such constant fidgeting would normally have been punishable by death or at least avoidance of the same vehicle. Suddenly I realized that I had known her for a year; we went lots of places together; of course, I had ridden with her before, but she had never been like this. What the heck was wrong with her?

One cannot ask these questions of her because not only will you not get a response, you'll make it less likely that you'll ever actually find the answer you ultimately seek. No, with her it is much more like fishing, where you wait in the bitter, bitter cold, and hope that something bites. (In Florida the fishing is comparably warmer, but not at all what I am used to.)

Traffic was quite a nuisance and we were late as it was. Her flight was leaving in a couple of hours and I needed to get her there in time for check-in. In my world, check-in is merely a guideline and not a rule, as I've sailed through security in as little as ten minutes as the airport crew rush me through all the procedures. However, the hour minimum to her was mandatory and not to be deviated from. I had arrived to her house on-time but she, of course, was late. The story of her life, late for everything but always moving like a small tornado. Truly a marvel to watch.

She picked up my iPod. The nice thing about an iPod is that even if you have never touched one before in your life, you quickly figure out how to access everything on it without much direction. The cooing sounds of Norah Jones seemed to be calming her down, or maybe I had just gotten used to her colorful animation. No, she was slowing. Something was about to come out of her; she was getting to that stage where lucid communication was possible.

"I'm afraid of flying."

"What?"

...

"Well I guess that explains things."