Rants: micro to middlin'

The BBQ Pit
221

Two of them:

  1. At the local recreation center where I go to use their computers sometimes (and work out too): On Thursday evening, I go in and am told (because they know me), “The computer room is closed.” I was there on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. “Why was there no information posted about the closure, so people won’t waste there time coming here for computer room?” Points to a sign on the desk. “This sign was up on the door to the room.” “No, it wasn’t, I would have noticed.”

"And besides, that sign says "The Computer Room will be closed on Friday. Today is Thursday, it wouldn’t have told me anything that would have been useful today, Thursday."

“Uhm, then, we didn’t know they were coming.”

  1. I’m coming in the door of my friend’s building. There is only enough room for one person to pass through. I’m in the opening. Dumb whippersnapper, on his way out and obviously having gotten "F"s in physics for the fifth straight year, tried to insert himself into the one-person portal that I’m already in. Uhm, no. I set my body weight and shove to the left. He goes stumbling sideways.

Physics lesson hopefully learned.

222

I think we have the new poster boy for “All Brains - No Common Sense.”
Though, to be fair, in the past the people I’ve known who met that description weren’t flaming assholes.

223

I have to wonder about the competence of someone who consistently misspells competent (in all its various forms). :smiley:

I guess I shouldn’t expect you to bring me my coffee (cream, sugar, no spit!) now, huh sweetie?

224

**Die, camellia bushes, die! **

Due to the extra cool weather this spring, Camellia #1 has been blooming for about two and a half months now. About a month is the norm around here.

Usually, blooming things are good. More power to them. But camellia bushes suck. They have hundreds of big flowers that turn brown and drop off and make a mess. Add a little moisture and they make a slimy mess. Somebody’s got to clean all those dead flowers up and it’s not the camellia bushes themselves. No way! That would be like asking a toddler to clean up after he’d gotten into the pantry and had gotten hold of your coffee beans, flour and rice. Ain’t gonna happen.

So, Camellia #1 (the hybrid) is just starting to slow down, so that means, of course, Camellia #2 (the species) is starting to ramp up. Arrrrgghh! Two months of dropping flowers, I can handle. Especially when the ground is mostly bare yet under them. But maybe five months? It’s just not fair, I tell you!

However, gardening fever has come on me and I want to get more things into my shade garden under Camellia #1 and try for some partial shade stuff under #2. Which brings me to this little gem: Do you know what dead, slimy, brown (actually a sort of dark ocher) flowers look like crammed into the soles of your shoes? They look remarkably like you’d stepped in something that a dog with severe gastro-intestinal problems left behind. And it’s harder to clean out of the little crevices too.

I keep trying to remind myself that the birds who dine at TikkiDad’s nearby feeders find the bushes a handy hiding spot. That, at this point, is the only reason I haven’t taken a chain saw to them.* I like birds. But I don’t like the poop they leave on the leaves and branches that my head brushes against when I’m attempting to rake dead flowers or plant new stuff. Ick! But I guess that’s a separate rant.

Aaaand then, after the flowers are finally done, the bushes will drop some of their older leaves. Those leaves decompose at roughly the same rate as plutonium. Aaarrghh!
*OK, I just don’t like killing perfectly healthy plants, no matter how much they annoy me. (They can’t be transplanted because whoever planted them put them way too close to the cement slab patio.)

225

Don’t BS me about our rates. I know damn well we don’t have $ImpossiblyCheapRate for those days, I am humoring you because it’s a slow day and looking on our website which you claim to have gotten said deal from and, surprise surprise, am not finding said deal. I tell you I simply can’t find any info about it, either on our site or in my system, and I can’t just give it to you – are you sure you were looking at ExpensiveResortSite dot com? Yes, you are sure. Except that then you can’t remember what site it was exactly, and you aren’t near your computer. But another computer lurks nearby, so you get on it, or so you say.

Oh, you say, it was somebody else’s site. How…convienient. Yes, indeedy. Yes, you would need to go through them. Sorry, no can do. Bye. Scamming cheapskate.

The only way to get anything like $ImpossiblyCheapRate would be to know the boss who is three or so levels above me. And I mean actually know him, not be one of the types who says they do but don’t want me to transfer them to him because – surprise! – they think I’ll roll over and play dead for them and get my ass fired giving them a cheap rate without authorization because they say they know him.

(Most of the people I talk to are fine. A few, though, make me want to bang my head into the wall. Hard.)

226

This takes a bit of backstory before I get to the pitting…

Two of the women I work with are sisters. One, who is in her late 20’s, works a different department. The other, who is in her early 20’s, works with me on a different shift.

Older sister lives at home with her parents and her twin children. She wakes up Thursday morning to find that their mother has died unexpectedly during the night. Yesterday, she informs her younger sister that she has to get the cats - Older Sister doesn’t have time to take care of them.

Younger sister lives in an apartment that requires a $250 deposit plus $10 a month for each pet. EACH PET. It is not very likely that she can come up with $750 on such short notice.

So, fuck you Older Sister. For not even waiting until your mother is cold before giving away her pets. For causing your younger sister even more pain than she is already in. For throwing your weight around just because you think you can. You worthless bitch.

227

My husband wanted to give me a Mother’s Day gift, so he asked me what to get. I don’t wear jewelry normally, but lately I’ve been wishing I had a pair of sparkly little earrings, and it seemed like an easy thing for him to get. So I told him what I had in mind, and said that he could probably find some nice costume jewelry at Target in the ten to twenty dollar range. I specifically asked for fakes.

If you knew me, and especially if you were married to me, you would know I was dead serious about this.

He gave me not one, but two pairs, of extremely real and costly earrings. I asked him to take them back. He was very unhappy with me, and I with him.

I know this is a stupid problem, but the point is, we had to have a fight yesterday over this ridiculous issue. I felt like a rude, ungrateful bitch. On the other hand, he must have known all along this was never going to fly…WTH?

228

It’s nice of you to offer this pit on yourself on behalf of your husband.

229

Hey, that’s our money he’s spending. And we’ve had this struggle before, starting with my wedding ring. I wasn’t playing some feminine game.

230

This is making a rude hand gesture at you, sir! :smiley:

For some reason I don’t really understand, competence, sentence, and independence I always want to spell with an “a” in that second-to-last vowel slot. No idea why. Unless I have spell checker or stop to look up the spelling, I always bork them up. It’s a curse, I tells ya! :slight_smile:

231

The same solution that worked in school will work for you now. Just sit down and write each one out a hundred or so times. :wink:

No need for rude hand gestures, a simple thank you will suffice. :stuck_out_tongue:

232

Dear residents of [del]hell[/del] South Florida, especially crotchety middle aged men:

Do NOT start an argument with a stranger in line at the grocery store for no fucking reason whatsoever. If you want to carry your sandwich in your arms like it’s your Pwincess Pweciouss, don’t get upset when the groceries I’ve placed at the back end of the conveyor belt trigger the belt to turn on and shuffle my groceries to the front of the line. Conveyor belts have been around for more than twice as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m pretty sure you’re well acquainted with them. If you’re too daft to just put the fucking sandwich on the belt, then you have no right to get angry when I do the standard operating procedure and actually put my groceries where they belong. You are very, very, very lucky I didn’t feel like having an argument with you and told you to just drop it.

233

Yesterday I tried, for the first time, to use the Netflix instant view. This meant, first of all opening IE instead of my preferred browser, Firefox. Then it informed me that I need to upgrade my Media Player. Fine. Jumped through all the hoops for that, and then Netflix finally started to send the movie to my computer, only to hit another snag. A window popped up to inform me that there was a WMP error because of a Microsoft DRM problem. After going through the Netflix non-help system, I finally called their technical support number. He had me run a diagnostic to identify my video card and driver, which identified my problem: My driver was from too old to be compatible with current DRM protocols, and I would need to try to find if the manufacturer had an upgrade I could download.

So I go online and after some Googling locate my video card provider, which has a link to a site which will check my system for available updates. I run the program, and my system locks up. Completely. Not only does my mouse and keyboard not work, but nothing happens when I hit the power-off button. Unfortunately, I’m using my laptop, so unplugging it just means that it starts running off my battery, which is of course fully charged. So I have to wait two and a half hours for the battery to drain before I can do anything.* Fortunately, when I plug it back in after that, everything appears to be working fine. But I guess I won’t be able to watch any instant movies from Netflix on my laptop. :frowning:

  • It wasn’t until much later that I realized I could have just taken my battery out. :smack:
234

Most laptops I’ve used have a kind of forced shutdown feature, where it will immediately power off and restart if I hold down the power-off button for a couple of seconds. I’ve gotten out of a couple of freeze-ups that way. Does yours not have this ability?

235

Ok coffee friend we have been meeting at Ric’s for coffee at 9:30am for 2 fucking years., When you email and ask if I want to meet for coffee on a certain day I say “ok, see you friday for coffee time.” I dont need a fricking email in return confirming the GD place and time. It never fucking changes because you are fucking married to the joint and have issues about going outside your comfort zone, I get that but I don’t need a nudge to be reminded about the fricking place and time GDit! Other than that I am looking forward to coffee time.

236

I’m afraid I have to wish a slow and lingering death on Bill Mumy, much as I liked him on Babylon 5. You see, I have a cold and the song “Fish Heads” has got somehow stuck in my brain. The strange and irregular workings of my diseased mind told me Alvin and the Chipmunks sung it, but that doesn’t make sense because chipmunks don’t eat fish heads. For some reason the song conjured up images of British kittens, but that didn’t seem right, so I googled it. Bill Mumy is half of the team responsible for wrting and singing it. Apparently there’s also a video which I don’t feel like inflicting on myself. I’m going to lie down now and let the cold take me, but, so help me, if that song turns into an ear worm . . .

237

Whatever you do, don’t click on this then. Nooo! Don’t do it! I’m warning you!

238

When I pressed the power-off button nothing happened, but maybe I just wasn’t holding it down long enough. I’ll have to check that out for possible future use.

239

Hold the button in for 10 seconds (arbitrary number, but that would cover the various computers I’ve done it to). Just pushing it and letting go may make it think you’re trying to shut down normally.

240

**I GET IT! I GET IT! **
Your baby does the Hanky Panky.
Now SHUT THE FUCK UP!