Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

There’s an airfield there somewhere.

(And stopped to throw it in the dumpster.)

Dumpster is such a weird, pretentious word.

An interesting aspect of my job is that my boss is brother to someone very famous. He may still have a price on his head of 1 kilogram of gold (though, I’m not sure how one would collect that from Al Qaeda). And he just came out with a new book last week.

I’m talking about L. Paul Bremer. We call him “Jerry.”

Mostly, this past week this triva has meant taking a break from entering 2005 receipts and statements into a tax database and watching Jerry on the Today show or listening to him on Fresh Air. Jerry is going to be on the Daily Show, which Berck and I try to watch every day (actually, the day after, since we don’t have a TV). So I wrote him an e-mail telling him what to expect from an interview with Jon Stewart. There are enough people on there who don’t seem to know what they’re getting into.

I know what Jerry’s e-mail address is because Duncan called me from a meeting on Friday asking me to look it up Jerry’s number. He’d gotten a call from a Polish journalist seeing if they could get an interview with Jerry that day. Duncan told me to call Jerry’s assistant and see what they wanted to do. I called the number marked “Business” in Duncan’s contact folder. But Duncan is bad about putting people’s home numbers in the “Business” field, so I either reached his assistant or his wife. In either case, she told me that I should give the Polish journalist Jerry’s e-mail address because Jerry was doing interviews all day and would have his cell phone off. I jotted down the e-mail address Duncan had listed there and waited for the journalist to call back.

He did rather quickly. (Caller ID said it was a call “outside of area.”) I identified myself and read the e-mail address off to him, spelling the first part of it out.

“Okay,” he said in his fluent but unmistakable Polish accent, “I will read it to you again.
J as in ‘Joanna,’
B as in ‘brotherhood,’
R as in ‘republic,’
E as in ‘England,’
M as in ‘motherland’…”
and so on.

I almost burst out laughing, but he was being quite serious. When I told Michele about it later, she laughed and asked, “Was he being funny?”

“No,” I answered. “He was being Polish!”

On Thursday, a truck stopped in front of our apartment. Three guys got out and dug two potholes with a jackhammer and drove off. On Friday, a truck came and left a T-handle sticking out of the hole, with water coming out of it. Water has continued to come out of the hole. Today, a backhoe and a dump truck came by and they started putting the road into the dumptruck. In addition, we no longer have water.

I called the 800 number on my Land’s End order confirmation email. It didn’t even ring.

“Hi, this is Marsha at Land’s End. How can I help you?” No computer, no hold, no anything.

“UPS lost my package, and they won’t do anything unless they talk to the shipper.”

“We’re very sorry about that, what’s your order number?”

I gave it to them. “We’ll just send you some more. Oh, I’m sorry, but we’re out of the buttercup color of those sheets, would you like some other color?”

Now this was just funny. I only ordered buttercup because the choices were buttercup or pink. From Land’s End overstock. I don’t know if she didn’t realize it was overstock or didn’t care. I’m amused that they were selling buttercup as overstock when I ordered it, but now they’re out. I wanted blue.

I told her I wanted a blue. She said no problem, and started to go into a diatribe about the different blue colors. I interrupted her and picked one, then asked her to send it any-which-way but UPS. “But UPS is the fastest way.” “Not to me it’s not.” “Okay, how about FedEx?” “Perfect!”

And that’s all there was to it.