Posts by Jonah

Written yesterday

My flight doesn’t leave for another hour and a half. I woke up at 6:50 this morning sans alarm, and after I finished getting ready to go, I knew I would just sit around worry about leaving on time. So I just headed for Denver. There was snow on the ground though not on the roads, and I didn’t want to get stuck in slow traffic on Monument Hill. Maybe I should have spent just a little bit of time worrying; I forgot my hairbrush. Berck has one I can use, though.

As birthdays go, it wasn’t the worst. No one wished me a happy birthday in person, and I spent it virtually alone. After work I headed across the highway to the Texas Roadhouse, where I had a coupon for a free appetizer. It was only 4:30, so they sat me in the bar section, which meant I had the bartender as my waiter. Bartenders make terrible waiters. They need to be full time bartenders, but chain restaurants usually insist on making them wait the tables around the bar as well. All of the bartenders at Tony Roma’s were bad at bartending and waiting at the same time, or maybe they were good at it comparatively but it was impossible to do correctly. Two of them were actually very good servers when someone else was bartending. The main bartender, however, was terrible. He would chat with the folks at the bar while orders for drinks from the other servers piled up. He would take forever to make change; I learned the hard way to carry far more change with me than I thought I would ever need. The other servers would leave his food sitting in the kitchen and refuse to run it out to him because he would never give them their drink orders. I would run it out because I didn’t have anything better to do, and he’d always thank me. But he would still take 10 minutes to open a beer for me (I am not exaggerating). I guess the worst part of it was that we all had to give the bartenders 1 percent of our total tab for the shift, which he would split with the busboys. If I didn’t get a tip from some idiot kids, I personally LOST money.

So I pictured my sweet tea glass sitting empty and my chicken fingers getting cold in the kitchen. It was so slow, however, that the manager would fill my tea whenever it got slightly empty and brought out my appetizer steaming hot. The good thing about being in the bar is that you can watch TV. Normally, I don’t like having a TV around when I’m trying to have dinner with someone, but by myself it’s just fine. It was showing ESPN and college basketball, of course. I’ve recently taken an interest in college basketball.

This is because of my discovery that, if you sign up for chain restaurants’ e-mail lists, they’ll often send you a coupon for your birthday. A lot of them are for buy one entree get one free, which is pretty good, though useless if you’re by yourself. Others are for a free appetizer with an entree. But some are for something outright free. So far I’ve gotten a free burger and fries from Red Robin and a free breakfast at Mimi’s Cafe, though by far the best was anything on the menu at Zio’s Italian Kitchen. I ordered the $18 ribeye steak, which came with roasted potatoes and a loaf of bread.

A family came and sat across from my seat, which is at the gate next to mine but is next to an outlet. They distributed various McDonald’s breakfast items among themselves and began eating. The tween girl greedily ate her chicken biscuit and then stood up and brushed herself off. An enormous cascade of white biscuit crumbs fell to the floor. I looked up first in surprise then with what I thought was an appropriate level of disapproval. Apparently, her father was thinking the same thing, because she paused, looked up at him, and said, “What?” Now a female house sparrow has discovered the crumbs. House sparrows abound in the terminals, and I’ve never seen any attempt to get them out. After a few minutes, the sparrow had cleaned up most of the crumbs and flew off. I think the birds relieve themselves on the criss-crossing beams far above the terminal floor, so their poop is largely unseen. Yet my sparrow cleaned up a mess pretty well. Maybe that’s why they are suffered to stay. I’m eating a loaf of bread Nikki made for me and brought me yesterday as a birthday present. But I’m not leaving any crumbs.

My gate moved, and I’ve lost my outlet. There are several empty ones, but the people sitting next to them aren’t using them. I’ve been assigned a boarding pass for seat 6A! This is fantastic because I’ll be near the front of the line to go through customs.

So I was going to the websites of all the chains I could think of in town and signing up for their e-mail lists. I have a junk e-mail account that I use to give out to all institutions. If I buy anything, I give out my junk e-mail address. I only check it if I need information about an order. Otherwise, it accumulates with junk that I never or rarely look at. I even have a special e-mail address just for Amazon, though that goes directly to my mail program. So I never actually see any of the stuff that gets sent my way unless I specifically log into my junk account to look for it.

I went to Buffalo Wild Wings to sign up, and they had a big banner ad on their homepage advertising a March Madness contest. Now, I’m a sucker for contests, especially online ones for restaurants. I won $600 worth of gift certificates from Macaroni Grill, which came in handy when Berck was stationed in Chicago and could eat at the Macaroni Grill in the airport there for free. So I went over to the contest page and started filling in my bracket.

Now I know next to nothing about college basketball. I know that Duke has a good team, but that’s about it. So I just filled in teams that I’d heard of. For instance, I picked West Kentucky versus their first match because I’ve heard of the state of Kentucky, but I hadn’t heard of the college they were playing against. I was very pleased the other day to see in the news that West Kentucky had won an upset. So I watched the game in Texas Roadhouse with interest, because I figured I had bet on one or the other of the teams playing.

The appetizers at Texas Roadhouse are huge. My chicken fingers came with fries. You also get as many delicious yeast rolls you can eat (I had all four in my basket and refused more) AND a bucket of peanuts. So with my coupon I got so full I couldn’t even finish all my fries. I did have three glasses of sweet tea, though, and was happily surprised that it only took me an extra five minutes or so that night to fall asleep.

When I couldn’t eat anymore, the bartender came over and asked if I needed anything. I told him just the check. He took a long time getting the bill, during which time I nursed my tea and watched the game. He finally brought it over around 15 minutes later, apologizing for it taking so long. He hadn’t charged me for my tea (the only good thing about being waited on by bartenders) but hadn’t applied the coupon either. He took the bill back. Another 15 minutes passed, and the manager stopped by apologizing for it taking so long, but that the bartender had given her the wrong table number. The appetizer was removed, but the tea was still missing. My total was 0.00. I left my last two ones and decided that could be a tip or pay for the drink.

So now I don’t have any ones to give the shuttle driver when he brings me to the hotel in Vancouver.

Berck asked me how I would spend my birthday all alone. I told him I would spend the evening talking to my family. I’d already talked to Dad that morning. Indeed, as soon as I got home, Ben called. In the middle of talking to him, Berck called. He bought a calling card for $5 that has like 400 minutes on it. Then while I was talking to him Mom called. Then I had to call UPS to tell them to hold the map of Vancouver i’d bought from Amazon with 2-day shipping but which UPS refused to leave at my house because I was at work. While I was on the phone with them, Steph called. So I called Steph back and then Mom back, and then it was time for bed.

I fly out of Denver at 11:30. Like Berck, I won’t be able to use my cell phone up in Canada, but I will have e-mail access.

The trick to E-Baying is to sell a bunch of stuff all at once. That way you won’t get discouraged when stuff doesn’t get a single bid, because you’ll be racking in so much money from officer club ashtrays.

The exception to this, of course, is selling identical items. If two people want the same thing, they’ll both drive up the price, whereas if there are two items, they can each get one for themselves cheap. As a guy at the fur auction said, “All’s you need for an auction is feller with money and another with guts.”

Michele’s been cleaning out the basement. A quarter of the basement is now lined with new shelves from Home Depot with a wide avenue between them. Until recently, it was tricky to walk in there at all. A lot of what was in there has ended up in the trash. A lot more has ended up in the downstairs hall. She threw out all the empty boxes I was collecting to ship the things she has me E-Bay. Then she told me to E-Bay three things.

One was a waterproof sock that you put over your leg cast and then pump it to make it watertight to you can swim in it. It didn’t work for her. It didn’t sell on the first try but then went for 99 cents on the second. Fortunately, I had a box the right size for it stuffed under my desk.

Have I mentioned that I compulsively save empty boxes? I have four on my desk at the moment, plus another one with an unknown number nested inside it, plus peanuts. I have a large box full of small boxes out in the outside storage room, but Berck has blocked it in, so I can’t very well get to it. I’m in charge of selling things on Amazon (which is even easier to use than E-Bay), and it’s very frustrating to be furiously searching for a box the size of one that your husband just threw out when you have to SOLD, SHIP NOW.

The two identical items Michele had me sell were two Iceman cold therapy units. They’re not cheap, so she was hopeful they’d bring in some cash. Only one of them had a power adapter, but I managed to find one that worked out of the power adapter drawer. I spread out a sheet, took pictures of both ensembles, and put one of them up to end on a Sunday night. The next Monday morning, it had sold for $29. I sent out an invoice, got paid, and shipped it out. Michele had been kind enough to save two boxes the right size for them. Got good feedback too!

Then I listed the second one. A week later it had sold for $73! Identical item. If I had sold it a week earlier, they probably would have both gone for $15. Or maybe $28.

Auctions are weird.

I have to say that E-Bay has made it a lot easier to ship things these days. Used to be you had to figure it all out for yourself and hope you weren’t losing money. Now you can just put it into the embedded shipping calculator. And when it’s time to ship, you just head over to PayPal, and it gives you a postage paid label to put tape on your package. Then you just drop it off at UPS or USPS.

I hope the last package gets there. I sent it to Canada, and the guy at the UPS store wasn’t sure how to handle the customs situation. We ended up taping a photocopied piece of paper on the side of the box listing the contents and value, which is all you should have to do.

Dad is in town. We went to a recording at New Life tonight.

Berck is in Vancouver. His sim partner failed his oral exam, but they’re letting him go through the simulators anyway and retake his oral exam afterward. Berck isn’t using his phone in Canada, as it would cost $.69 a minute, but he has Internet access. If you really wanted to call him, I can give you his hotel number.

It’s official: I still have a job. My salary will go to 75% of what it currently is, but I’ll get a 10% take of whatever Bremer Associates brings in. I currently get 4%. If we do as well as we did last year, I’ll make 5k more this year.

On Thursday Michele yelled up the stairs to me. We have an intercom system on the phones, but she can never remember how to use it. So she walks from one end of the downstairs to the other to yell up the stairs to me whenever she needs something. My desk is at the top of the stairs, and I can hear her fine from there.

“Joanna?”

“Yo.”

“Have you been having trouble with your applications this morning?”

“My applications?”

“I’ve been having horrible problems with Firefox and InfoSelect. Do you think it’s the wind?”

“Uh, why would the wind…nevermind.* Have you restarted your computer?”

“No, I probably should have done that first.”

“If you’re still having problems after you restart, I’ll be happy to try to fix them.”

I didn’t hear of any further problems after that until the next morning.

“Joanna?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having horrible problems with Firefox.”

“Firefox just installed a new update, so you should be better soon.”

“Okay.”

I sat down at my computer for the first time. On Fridays I clean the house, so I hadn’t been doing my usual scouring of the Internet. Sure enough, the load times on major sites I visit every day were unreasonably sluggish. I checked my bandwidth, which was much slower than usual.

So I called Qwest. I hate talking to tech support people. He had me turn the modem off and back on again, which worked remarkable well, once I plugged the Ethernet cable back in after it had become unhooked from the modem to the router when he had me turn the modem around to find out what model it was. I really should replace that cable.

“What was wrong?” asked Michele.

“We had to turn the modem off and back on again.

“Everyone had to get out of the car and get back in?”

“Exactly.”

She was referring to this joke. There are three engineers in a car; an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Microsoft engineer.

Suddenly the car just stops by the side of the road, and the three engineers look at each other wondering what could be wrong. The electrical engineer suggests stripping down the electronics of the car and trying to trace where a fault might have occurred. The chemical engineer, not knowing much about cars, suggests that maybe the fuel is becoming emulsified and getting blocked somewhere.

Then, the Microsoft engineer, not knowing much about anything, comes up with a suggestion “Why don’t close all the windows, get out, get back in, then open the windows again, and maybe it’ll work!?”

Here’s a conversation I had with Duncan recently:

“Joanna, Outlook isn’t working right.”

“Did you restart the computer?”

“Yes! Three times!”

I wasn’t sure I should be happy he’d restarted it before coming to me or to tell him the definition of insanity. Instead I just sighed and fiddled with stuff until it started working again.

Yes, I am the IT department.

*The house is in the middle of nowhere, and up until recently the only broadband we could get was either satellite or line of sight. Our line of sight antenna would jiggle whenever it was windy, making our Internet connection go in and out. In March the Chinook winds come. This whole last week the wind was blowing at about 40 miles per hour constantly.

But we’ve had DSL for 2 years now.