Second things first, as I type this I am listening to The Spy, 105.3 FM (Kingfisher, Oklahoma) and I am happy to report that they redesigned the website, complete with the old logo, which I think looks 1000 times cooler than the page when they first launched, or relaunched, a while back. Dare I say it almost looks like a radio station website now, more professional that is for sure. And I have always thought The Spy logo was cool, so glad to see it is back. For those wishing to take a gander as to what it is I am talking about http://www.thespyfmokc.com/
Anyway, it has been a most profitable week since I last blogged, what with me being credited with another $5 Amazon gift card from Swagbucks, with yet another one pending, receiving my DVD from MyCokeRewards that I ordered and having my free mini camcorder show up from Marlboro, roughly 10 or so weeks ahead of schedule.
The last time we spoke I said that I doubted that the change meter would reach $200 by the end of the year, and while it is still a far way off, I can gladly report that I managed to make a dent in it since my last entry. A tidy sum of $12.97 gets added and the new total is $189.77. I still have to come up with $4 a month for the rest of the year, but now it actually seems possible, whereas a couple of weeks ago I wasn't nearly as sure.
Before I get to settled in here, let me go ahead and send the grocery order in for work for Monday. No, I am not at work, just had a very unproductive day there. As I have said before, I usually end up spending a couple of hours at work on Saturday morning, just putting the order together and then sending it in. Well I get to work around 11am and all goes very well, I get Rick's order for the deli in the system in relative short order, followed quickly by my cigarette order and all of a sudden I am being very productive and in a timely fashion. Next I started doing the ordering of the actual groceries and again very few problems, I had to pull some candy out of the stockroom, lest it sit down there and I reorder things we already have. Still the grocery order for the most part went off without a hitch. Last was the tobacco, which is usually the thing I am worst at ordering. Not cigarettes, but stuff like snuff and loose leaf tobacco, cigarillos and the like. I just have a hard time getting my head around all of it, and even when I do, that doesn't mean I have the requisite item numbers to order that which we are missing. But even that today was relatively harmless, I found all of the item numbers I needed and I don't think I screwed anything up for a change. Then came the sending of the order and when everything went to pot. For ordering I use a device called a Texlon, which is a handheld unit that has a wand attached to it. You can entre items one of two ways, either by scanning the shelf tag with the wand, or by manually entering the item number into the handheld unit. Then to place an order, you take the device, which has a a speaker on the back of it and call into a special phone line and send the order as an electronic signal down the phone line. It is much like the first computer modems back in the day, where the phone was connected to the back of the computer and you would get to hear lots of electronic gibberish. Not the most technological of devices, but it works which is all I ask of it. So I dial in to place the order and I get a busy signal. No problem, perhaps someone else is sending in an order at the same time, so I call back. Busy. Again. Busy. Again. Busy. This process repeats itself for roughly 45 minutes before I decide that I will call customer servivce and see just what the problem is. Well customer service isn't manned on Saturday, only during office hours Monday-Friday. But there are a couple of emergency extensions in the company directory if there are problems after normal business hours. Okay, so I opt for one of those and get shoved into voice mail. I leave a message and try calling in again. Still busy. Again. Busy. Again. Busy. We reach the hour and 15 minute mark and I still haven't heard from a live person, nor have I gotten anything but a busy signal when trying to order. So I customer service again and try the other extension for emergencies. Another fucking voice mail box. Another 20 minutes trying to get an order in and I am getting nothing but busy signals. Finally I call Ed, not what I want to do on a weekend, but he has cell phone numbers for some of the higher ups with Sledd (our grocery provider) and the time has come for me to start seriously rattling a few cages. I don't care if they are out of the office, this issue needs addressed. I get a couple of numbers and after dealing with some other issues, like not being able to dial out long distance on the store phone, I finally get to talk to a live voice, and one of the big wigs no less. He proceeds to tell me that they are doing a major upgrade on the phone system and it will be down all day and that he thought everyone who orders on Saturday was supposed to be notified. Well apparently not everyone, as I was kept out of the loop. Still I had to ask if I put the order in on Sunday, would it still be delivered Monday, and he assured me that it would be, so I brought the Texlon home and just sent the order down my phone line here in me olde casa. Had I know this I could have saved myself a trip in on Saturday and just done everything Sunday morning, rather than spend two hours in a futile effort of trying to put an order in.
Of course now that I am sufficiently irked I decide I need to do something to make me less irksome, so I decide I will go home, shower, change and take in a movie. First I wanted to make a call to Phil, to see if maybe he would like to join me. Phil and I used to do lunch around once a month, but after he broke his leg and was laid up for about a month we had lost touch for a small amount of time. A couple of weeks ago I had called him only to get his voicemail, and he returned the favor a few days later calling me and getting my voicemail, though he called at noon on a Tuesday, when I most assuredly would be at work, looking to see if I would like to do lunch. So I figure that I would call him and we could sneak in a movie and lunch, or an early dinner but when I called I found out he had been back in the hospital, another operation on his foot and he is on the shelf for another month. Let me just say, the "Summer of Suck" can't end soon enough.
Nonetheless I did opt to go to the movies by myself, as I have no problem going alone, unlike some people I can enjoy a movie without the company of others, and I wanted to see "The Social Network" , so what better way to spend the rest of Saturday than in the theater. And without giving away spoilers or anything of the like, most of which could be found online anyway for those that wished to search it, the movie was good, maybe too good at points with characters that otherwise come off as self absorbed nerdish type people, still having the ability to crack wise on a dime as it were. It was a matter of maybe the writer (Aaron Sorkin, who also wrote West Wing a show I loved) writing what he thought would be clever versus what the characters might have actually said in real life. Though that is a fine line, and with all of the characters pretty much unavailable to speak with (due to non disclosure agreements), it becomes much harder if not impossible to nail the characters' voices down and leaves a gaping whole for the writer to, in essence, fill their mouths with words.
Sorry, took a little bit of a break there. Lots of late night typing leaves me very sleepy so I took a nap then got up and went to breakfast. The plan was to get up early enough to catch a bus and have breakfast at De Luca's in the Strip District, but I overslept by a half hour or so so I opted for Pamela's in Oakland. Amazingly I got there about 20 minutes after they opened, 10 minutes until 8am, and the place was almost already full. By the time I ate my eggs and sausage and had one cup of coffee (they weren't to quick on the refills this morning, big thumbs down there) and read a little of my book, it was about 8:30am and already they were running a 20 minute wait for tables. While I know Pamela's gets busy in the mornings, that was the earliest I have seen them be packed, and on a Sunday no less, when most people don't even need to be out of bed.
I have come to the conclusion that while this was the "Summer of Suck", I am pushing for a "Fall of My Content" to help round out the year, and so far it has went fairly well, save for the ordering snafu from Saturday, the pluses have by far outweighed the minuses to this point. Even the minuses have had sort of a cool factor to them. Case in point, by and large while I like rain and sleep much better when it is raining outside and can even get into a thunderstorm or two, the other day I was caught in what was a meteorological nightmare;rain, wind, lightning. just an absolute mess save for the coolness factor of it. Allow me to explain.
Usually when I catch the bus home I ride the 65 Squirrel Hill (formerly the 67H, but the Port Authority figured a cool way to screw with the riders would be to rename the buses. And they wonder why they are always broke, it is genius moves like that that help, no one knows what bus they are supposed to ride anymore, so it is easier to not ride at all, but I digress.) The 65 is pretty much a straight shot from downtown to my apartment, I get on right outside of work, the corner of Smithfield Street and Blvd of the Allies and I get off at the corner of Ward Street and Blvd of the Allies. The route from a geographical perspective runs along the Monongahela River coming out of town, parallel to, but further up the hill side from both Second Avenue and the Parkway East. So I am at work and because of the amount of work that I do, I didn't get off at the scheduled 3pm end of shift time, rather it was after 4pm when I finished. So I step outside and as I do I see that the sky is starting to get dark, ominously so actually but so far no rain. I wait for about 10 minutes or so and my bus arrives, but the bus is pretty packed, school kids that just got out and people getting off of work, so I was left to stand. The bus starts the trek up Blvd of the Allies and I am just standing in the aisle, holding one of the traps so my fat doesn't tumble into somebody's lap and they mistake it for some grotesque sexual advance, and I happen to look out the window, back towards town and I see something incredibly cool. Downtown is disappearing. I am literally watching a storm follow the bus up the Mon River and as it does, those objects that are caught in it no longer remain visible. It was awesome to just watch things like bridges no longer remain visible because of a massive wall of rain. But for now the bus is ahead of the storm, though not by much, probably less than a mile. As the bus approaches Oakland, Blvd of the Allies turns away from the river for a bit, so I can no longer watch the storm follow us, but it also means that we are going to run into traffic lights for the first time since downtown. the first was green and we didn't even have to stop, we just passed right through it, but at the second one we weren't so lucky, it was red. As we are sitting there the storm catches up to us, and in a big way. the wind and rain start pounding the bus. I look out the window toward the hotel (Best Western) on the other side of the street and I see transformers just blow, in a freakishly cool light show. Lightning and thunder become part of the fun as well. We get a green light and make it to my stop, which was about three stops past the hotel, and a dumpster has been blown out into traffic. Yes, the wind had whipped up so much that apparently dumpsters were being moved by it. I go to get off the bus and the wind is so bad the doors will not open, I have to actually push them open just to get off. I step off the bus and into the downpour and lightning is just crackling all around. I know there is an old test, because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound, that if you see a flash of lightning and start counting one one thousand, two one thousand, and roughly the number you stop on is about how far away in miles the lightning actually hit. Now that is far from an exact formula, but at least it is a good starting point for what was to happen next as a bright flash of lightning occurs and before I could even think to myself "One..." a loud boom, certainly something that hit nearby, so close in fact that all of the lights just went out, the traffic light and the intersection I am standing, the store across the street, everything just dark. I manage to get across the street, though that too was perilous as too many drivers have no idea how to behave when a traffic light goes out (kids, its a 4 way stop for future reference) and I trudge the block or so to my apartment, getting soaked the entire time. Almost as if on cue, I no more than get into my apartment and get out of my soaked clothes and the power comes back on, and I can't help but think I was just graced with the coolest natural occurring light and sound extravaganza ever. The timing of everything that happened couldn't have been better, from seeing the storm approach, to being at the right spot for the blow transformer and power outage to just getting in my door and having power restored, it couldn't have timed out any better if it was scripted that way.
If that weren't enough, I have a couple of new guys at work, my crew as it were if I were one to get all big headed about my level of authority, which I am not, and they both seem to be relatively decent. We had hired a couple of guys since the bad Josh episode, one who lasted all of three days, the other had potential but for the most part lived to far away, at least to far away to be able to work for us and continue going to school without one or the other suffering. Ray attends the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and while he did okay at first, they had final exams a couple of weeks ago, then they have a two week break before classes kick in again. During his break he wanted to pick up some hours, so he could make a few extra dollars until he had to go back. I had no problem with it, Ed gave him extra hours but then he starts showing up late and trying to compensate for that by staying after he was scheduled. Normally we don't have a problem with people staying if they are working, but if you are just staying because you couldn't be there on time to begin with, that is another matter. So he is scheduled for 8am on a Saturday and then doesn't show up until noon. The plan was for him to work until 3pm, he writes himself in for 6pm, without ever clearing it with Ed. See, we already had someone coming in at 3pm to replace Ray, and Ed doesn't want two guys there stocking on a Saturday, which is typically a slow day for us. But Ray did it anyway, and as a result Ray no longer has a job. And what sucks is he wasn't bad at it, and he wasn't a person who was just biding his time in hopes he could get an easier task, like running register. But when you are a new hire Ed keeps you on a relative short leash, and the leash officially snapped. Instead I have two guys who are making my job somewhat easier, Sammy and Brian, who actually get what we are trying to do and picking things up relatively quickly for having been there for only a week. They are good enough that Ed wants me to worry more about ordering and leave the more physically demand stuff (carrying cases, catching trucks, etc.) to them. Not that that is going to happen, I told Ed I will not ask anyone to do something on my crew that I don't do myself, they need to see that I am just as willing to catch a truck, stock a cooler or anything else as they are asked to be, otherwise it will just look like I am a lazy piece of shit and they are almost slave labor. So if they are catching a truck, either I am doing it with them or I am catching a truck in another location. I may be old, but I am not so old that I can't throw around cases with the best of them.
Damn I type a lot, so much so that it is almost 1pm and time for football games to kick off. I would go get me some wings and fries to go with the festivities, but I am still pretty full from breakfast, even if I settled for Pamela's. Not that I have anything really against them, their chocolate chip and banana pancakes are still pretty awesome, but between the lack of refills on my coffee today and my omelet last week, they have dropped a notch or two. Last Saturday I stopped in and got a Western omelet (green peppers, onions, ham, cheese) and while the eggs were fine, it was the toppings that were off. Rather than cook everything in the eggs, only the ham was cooked with them, the veggies were laid inside the folded over omelet. That in and of itself isn't a problem for me, but the veggies weren't even fried, it was like they were boiled or something, then kept on a warming table until needed, as they were just soggy rather than crisp. I don't mind if they are underdone if they are crisp, I would rather have that than what I got which was wet veggies that left water on the plate. Not cool, not cool at all. But I talked to my aunt yesterday, we are planning the October breakfast in the monthly breakfast get together, and I know the place we chose, Jo Jo's Diner, is known locally for their omelets.
The bar league fantasy football team is off to a 2-1 start. I don't know if it is a testament to how well we play against each other or how poorly we do, but after three weeks there are no undefeated teams in the league, and only one winless one out of 12 teams. So technically I am tied for first, but I am playing one of the other 2-1 teams this week. I figure worst case scenario I will be one game back after this week, and 6 of the 12 teams make the playoffs at the end of the year, which is good because I don't like my chances this week with Adrian Peterson on a bye, probably the best running back I have.
Well I guess I better call it a wrap. The games have started and I am being a bit distracted by both the Steelers and my fantasy team. Till we meet again.
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