actually, VCNJ, by your reckoning, those crazy New Yorkers are going to Florida for the summer! 
If you go by our disconnect/reconnect spikes, Snowbird season starts anywhere from mid Sept to late Oct and ends right before Easter/Passover (after all, they have to be home for Sedar)
The place where I used to work. Anything with a priority level of 1 was considered to be of lesser importance than 2, which was less than 3. Just to make matters even more dramatic, they decided to add a level 4, for those “really important gotta-fix-it-now” things that used to be covered by level 3. This didn’t make any sense to me at all. Makes me wonder if they’ve added a fifth level since I left there.
What’s “lifo/fifo”?
Agreed – use Inform, not TADS.
Last In, First Out
First In, First Out
(two different ways of dealing with items on a stack, with inventory in a warehouse, etc.)
Last In First Out / First In First Out
It’s how you process data stacked in a queue. . .
Tripler
I’m usually the Last to Know what the First finds Out.
When I worked at McDonald’s we used to have a lady who came through the drive-through every day. We all handled her with kid gloves because she was a little bit nuts, and apt to be sweet as could be one day and tear your head off the next. We called her the dog lady because she had a giant Great Dane who was always in the car with her. If you made eye contact with him, he’d get excited and start jumping around, rattling her car so much that it seemed it would flip over. The dog lady told us he was her only friend in the world and he would kill anyone who tried to harm her. We believed her on both counts.
She came through one day and placed her usual order, a regular coffee with 6 creams and 10 sugars. (I told you she was nuts.) We had to brew a fresh pot of coffee, so we had her pull forward and park for a few minutes. When the coffee was ready, the girl in the front drive through had the bright idea of adding all the cream and sugar for her before bringing it out. She was trying to go the extra mile for a regular but difficult customer. So she took it out…and came back a few minutes later crying and being pursued by the dog lady, who was hollering that she knew we were all out to get her and she wasn’t going to drink the coffee because she knew it had been poisoned! She made a big scene, threatened to call the cops, threw the cup on the floor and stormed out…and came back the next day as if it had never happened.
We all pretended it hadn’t happened, too, except for ragging the front drive-through girl that she’d better look out for that Great Dane.
I am a lawyer, and back in prehistoric times when “the law” was in numerous thick books instead of on fancy schmancy internet websites, I once had a person come in to my office and ask if he could use my law library. He didn’t want to hire me, he wanted to use my books so he could try to do it himself. I politely declined his request and he went ballistic and threatened to report me to the bar association. :rolleyes:
I once had a woman throw her donuts at me, and then accuse me of eating them.
Well, to be pedantic, LIFO is how a stack works. FIFO is how a queue works. Both ‘stack’ and ‘queue’ are strictly defined and distinct data structures. A stack is like the stack of plates in the buffet line. A queue is like a, well, you know, queue. Neither of these terms describe the priority system that is the subject has hijacked this thread.
Once upon a time I was working in a hardware store in my home town - which happens to be a very small town in rural Alaska. The town is on an island and was visited from time to time by gigantic tour ships which disgorged a number of tourists onto our streets that actually exceeded our normal population.
My hardware store was located on the main street of town, and, for reasons that continue to escape me, we got a lot of tour ship customers.
What in the name of all that’s sane and holy they were going to do with 2x4’s, handtools and PVC piping on a tour ship I’ll never know. Maybe they just wanted the free popcorn.
Now I was working the register at that point, having been deemed insufficiently burly to move heavy objects by the guys that worked at the store and being equally unwilling to argue with them about the matter because they were generally older than myself (and my mother brought me up to respect my elders) and because, while women’s liberation is all well and good, this way I didn’t have to cart around 5-gallon buckets of paint and 4x8s and other heavy things.
During the two weeks I worked there (before I got a better-paying offer as a gravedigger), I had two especially dim customers.
The first one, with a face filled with shining sincerity, held out a sawbuck to pay for some minor bit of merchandise and asked me with a straight face “Do you take American money here?” I assured the nice gentleman that we did, being as Alaska was, in fact, a state of the United States and had been for some years. 30 or so at that point, I believe.
The second one looked me in my very blue eyes, which were located in my fish-belly white face and topped by my red, red hair and asked me if I were an Eskimo. My best friend, who was a Native Alaskan, although not Inuit, was standing beside me and almost died laughing. Not having some baseline of knowledge about Native Alasakan tribal demographics and distribution is perfectly understandable - it’s not what you’d call common knowledge. It was why the lady chose to ask the amazingly white girl (as opposed to her quite-obviously Native compatriot) about her tribal ancestry that baffles me.
Of course these two pale in comparison to the tourist couple who let themselves into my family’s home one morning as I was cooking breakfast for the family and wanted to know what I was making them for breakfast and where the bathroom was. I had to threaten to call the cops to get them to leave. They refused to believe that it was a private residence and not a part of some grand Theme Park Scheme. :smack: I would probably have been more sympathetic if they’d knocked on the door instead of just wandering in - or if they’d been even marginally polite or embarassed about their error. They were neither. The lady ordered pancakes. She was quite offended when I told her to get the hell out - she informed me that I would be getting no tip from her today! Broke my little heart, it did.
Customer service story!
Customer: How much is your water? points to the Mount Franklin
Me: $2.10
Customer: That’s quite expensive.
Me: Ice water is free.
Customer: I’ll have the ice water, then.
(I get her a cup of ice water)
Customer: How much for the mineral water?
Me: It’s free, and it’s tap water.
Customer: But I wanted mineral water.
Me: That’s $2.10
Customer: Sorry, but that’s MUCH too expensive for water.
Me: Well, I didn’t set the prices. Cup water is free though.
Customer: Can’t you pour the mineral water into a cup for me?
Me: No.
(Customer huffs and walks out the door)
You know what? You win, hands down.
Here’s an actual e-mail exchange between a customer and me. The customer could not read our DOC file, which was created in WordPad:
>
>>My computer tells me that “This is not an MS word document”. My fax
number
>>is xxx-xxx-xxxx which is also, the voice line.
>>Thanks for your help.
>>
>Hi,
>
> That’s strange. Do you have a very old version of MS Word?
>
> I just faxed the help file to you, sorry I didn’t think of that earlier.
>
Yep…my MS Word dates back to the late eighty’s. There in may be the
problem. Thanks for your help.
Not “before”. If they have different numbers, it’s “one or the other”, not in order.
The problem is in that in many languages (in English for sure, in Spanish it depends on who you talk to) we use the word “higher” differently when speaking of “a higher number” and “a higher priority”. It’s actually a misuse; every other customer I’ve had did a double-check but then laughed and pointed out the lingiustic inconsistency.
This guy has no problem with “priority 2” being slammed by “priority 3”, it’s only the 1 that gives him problems; he’s been stuck on it for 6 months. His female partner told me she intends to change the priorities so they begin at “2”, maybe that way he won’t have a problem.
My dad was seriously aggravated by that particular incident. So much so that he put up a large sign on the beach in front of our house (which is where the tourists had come from - they were visiting a sightseeing location 150 yards or so down the beachfront) informing people that if anyone else should do such a foolish thing, he’d be forced to shoot them.
The sign lasted almost a whole week before my mom got tired of people knocking on her door asking if she and my dad would pose with the gun in front of the sign and took it down.
My brother and I took the simpler, but more violent, expedient of winging whatever small object was at hand when tourists wandered onto our property sporting the assumption we were all part of AlaskaLand! ™. I went through nearly a case of Coke one day when I was working in the garden in a sports bra and short-shorts (hey - it was 75 degrees and humid!). Mostly I aimed to near-miss, but a few were offensive enough I actually hit them. Like the guy who was taking pictures of my ass. A gentleman shouldn’t take a picture of a lady’s ass without permission!
By the way… would y’all have a problem if the priorities were identified using letters?
Most likely not.
The priority case is the only one I know of where “1” is higher than “2”, and only in some languages. My apologies for picking one that apparently just translates badly.
Reminds me of some of the results that can pop out when a system automatically generates e-mail addresses by concatenating the first initial, middle initial, and last name together (e.g. “Cheryl O. Jones” -> “cojones”, “Douglas O. Graper” -> “dograper”).
I’d like to believe there was a reasonable explanation for WoodGirl’s actions, but she had that “Light’s on, but nobody’s home” look about her.
And wood DOES NOT grow on trees. Everybody knows that if you offer a bowl of Cool Whip to Knotholimus the Lumber God on a full moon at midnight, a slab of wood will appear somewhere in the world the next morning.
Well, that explains the strange lights and noises over at Home Depot every full moon, then…