“The trouble with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.”
– Unknown
So, while documenting records in our database, I must have tapped some keys in just the right order to summon the devil. Or something. Because this popped up in that scary font only techie types use:
This version requires a [something or other thing that I don’t understand] directory to store your alias files. Shall I create it for you? Y/N
At a loss, I type “N” and assumed it would all go away. The response…
Very well. I won’t create it.
But you may run into difficulties later.
Die, evil computer program, die! Help, my computer has become self aware!
“Not for all the money in the world would I let any children of mine develop into Pendletons!”
– Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs
Dear un-named child of an extremely generous university alumni: I am very grateful for your father’s contributions and service. I am sure that the whole school thanks him for his patronage. You, on the other hand, are not your father and are not entitled to his privileges. He has given us a lifetime of service and hard work, you have give us a series of debilitating migraines because of your rude, unbelievable behavior. I do not care how much money another person has donated, you are an insufferable ass and no amount of money will make you less responsible for your actions.
Wealth doth not a gentleman make.
I got home yesterday absolutely burning with rage after dealing with this boy.
“If,” I snarled at J., “we ever become as successful as we hope, we are donating everything to PBS and cancer research. I’ll be damned before I see any of our family act like that! The things I wish I could have said!”
“You don’t have to take apart every jerk that you deal with you know.”
“But I want to. It would make the world a better place!”
If I be waspish best beware my sting!
I come from some WASP stock myself, but if I ever behaved the way this kid does, my parents would gleefully disown me!
“All writers are copycats, unless they’re bad writers. Then they’re plagiarists.”
– My writing professor
A sample of my writing classes offerings from last night.
You called?
1) The Unintended Romance: one person turned in a piece that had a paragraph including the words “the sun delicately kissing her skin,” “white teeth flashed in his olive-skinned face,” and “thick muscles and strong torso flexed as he picked her up.”
The teacher asked us all to review it and determine what was wrong with the paragraph. Some people said that some alliteration threw them off, other said it was an imagery technique. I said it sounded more like ripped-bodices-and-heaving-bosoms writing than what she was going for (a murder mystery). It’s good she and I get along because half of the class gasped/blushed and murmured things like, “Oh dear!” while she burst out laughing.
This seems...oddly familiar...?
2) Teen Angst: Another girl (a rather rude one who has to have the last word in every group review we do, and likes to toss her editing experience in people’s teeth) turned in a piece that took place in a high school science class between a completely uninteresting girl and a boy acting strangely and awkwardly, seeming tormented by a secret pain. My pal (the bodice ripper) piped up immediately and said one word: “Twilight?”
The whole room dissolved into hysterics and debate. Some people tittered quietly to themselves while one or two started roaring about how amazing the Twilight series was and everyone else wouldn’t know great literature if it smacked them in the face! Others countered that it was adolescent fiction and no more, while some snapped that young adult writers have produced some first-rate literature, though not Twilight they hurried to say. The writer was mortified, while our teacher seemed secretly delighted.
I had a dream the other night that J. and I had a pet fox named Gordon. The major drama of the dream was keeping him a secret from our landlords who were snooping around tried to prove his whereabouts. Gordon was a sleek, sophisticated animal with delightful house manners, directly at odds with what I understand a pet fox to be like.
See, one of my favorite pre-us-kids tales of my parents is that when they were newly married and at university, they rescued a little fox from a fur farm and brought him home. Stanley (for that was his name) repaid their generosity by instantly behaving like a demon from the ninth circle of Hell.
Train ME will you?!
He destroyed things. He ran away multiple times. He chewed everything. He was so hyperactive that they eventually tried tying him up while they were at work/school and he tangled himself in the cord to the point that he dislocated a hip (costing a hefty vet fee for starving newlyweds).
My father thought that foxes were sort of feline so Stanley might be litter-box trained, but that plan backfired. With a dog you can stick their nose in their mess, put the mess in a litter box with them, etc. and they will eventually connect the dots. Evil Stanley, however, only learned to infuriate my dad by trotting into whatever room he was in, defecating on the carpet on purpose, and then running to sit in the litter-box with a smug expression as if to say, “What can you do to me? I’m already here! Pthfffbbt!”
One day, Stanley ran away (again) and my parents disgustedly got in the car to search for him (again). After driving for a while, they spotted a furry smudge in the road, a tail fluttering in the traffic wind. My mother peered at it for a second before throwing her hands triumphantly in the air (which my dad likes to impersonate when telling the story) and crowing, “It’s STANLEY!”
Such is their hatred that years later, when they took me to their old university stomping ground to show my their first house, the church they got married in, and so forth, my mother pointed eagerly to a spot on the road and said, “There! That’s where we found that miserable fox! Ha!”
It’s too bad they are such terrors; I think a pet fox would be, well, fantastic!
“Hello, I have a problem. I’m a landlady for a condo rented by students and some of them are reporting that one of them has a…hoooo-cah…? I think that has something to do with drugs and I don’t know what to do. I called the university’s housing department and they refered me to the city police, but they said they couldn’t help me.” “Did they tell you why, ma’am?”
“Well, my tenants said he was smoking tobacco and the police said that that’s all right!” “Er, yes, ma’am. If they are violating your landlord/tenant agreement though, as long as you uphold your end of it in the time you give him to remove himself from your property, you will be able to evict him.”
“But the university forbids drugs!” “Yes, ma’am, but tobacco is legal as long as you are of age. The university does have certain behavioral requirements of all its’ attendees but that is not the same thing as someone breaking a state or federal law. The university may take action against him, you may take action against him as his landlord, but though he’s forming a bad and unhealthy habit, he isn’t doing anything criminal.” “But he has a…hooo-cah! And I don’t even know what that is!” “It’s a sort Middle Eastern pipe that uses water-“
“I’m sure he’s using it for heroin or something!” “I doubt that, ma’am.”
“But what is it?”
WHO are you?
This is the only cultural reference I could come up with that she recognized:
Note: I never knew I knew so much about hookahs! As a non smoker/drinker or druggie of any kind, the only hookah’s I’ve ever come across were on a family trip to Turkey, decor in some Middle Eastern restaraunts…and children’s films.
“I don’t need to compromise my principles because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.”
– Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Chief has squashed my plan of taking a class this coming semester to prep for grad school. The reason given is that Wise (who is enrolled in the very program I’m after) has a lot more leeway to take classes since she doesn’t have a front desk position and work with the public as I do. A decision that makes sense on paper, and which I can grudgingly understand…if it were not for the fact that several police officers and other supervisors for the department take classes very frequently, often for multiple semesters in a row (and shouldn’t police officers deal with the public just as much, if not more than me?). AND if it were also not for the department history and manifesto I retyped and edited four days ago, containing an entire paragraph about how the department strongly encourages and accommodates the further education of its employees through university classes.
Although I find the logic painfully baffling, I also understand that it’s an executive decision on the Chief’s part which, in all fairness, he did mull over for several days (before crushing it into tiny, tiny pieces). And though I admit I wish I could throw my level-headed acceptance of this ruling out the window and throw a (mild) tantrum, that’s not really my style.
I prefer weaseling around the problem. I’ve enrolled in some independent study courses and am looking into evening classes as well, which fall outside supervisor oversight. It’s annoying to try to get into them at this late date, but I have at least three terms between now and when my application would be turned in so I have plenty of time to formulate a new plan of attack!
Small Dog is feeling, er...bulldogish.
I could switch departments (unlikely with the hiring freeze, but I won’t rule it out). My French course, offered through independent study, could potentially count as my final language requirement and remove all obstacles. I could say, “To Hades with it all!” and become a full-time student again (plunging us back into poverty, but only for a year or couple of semesters towards the end of J.s degree – very unlikely, but still possible depending on my level of desperation). I could stage a coup and overthrow the school, take the president hostage, and demand he let me take my one single class (extremely unlikely).
When I graduated university, my parents flew over from England and managed to work my ceremony in with a lot of other traveling. Amid the rejoicing (and I’m sure the feeling of, “Praise Jupiter, we’re rid of one!”) we had a small soiree at my godparents’ house to celebrate, and at said celebration I was given a fabulous present: my car.
This was a victory on three counts. First of all, I had just got my U.S. driver license a couple months earlier. Second, I had a car! After four years of coordinating eating schedules with flatmates so we’d run out of food at the same time and have to go to the store together. Bliss! And finally because my parents had always sworn blind that the one thing they would never do for their kids is buy them a car. I was such an impressive child that I bent the laws of parental rule (…or my parents really are that cool. Probably the latter).
My car is not so new, not so shiny, but she is far prettier in my (biased) eyes than this one.
In any event, Mum and I put our heads together immediately to find an appropriate name for my new chariot. Being classical studies/ history types, a number of unusal literary names were tried and dismissed as being too “foofey,” outré, inappropriate, or ridiculous to suit my old but perfectly serviceable and rugged little Honda CR-V. Finally in a burst of inspiration, my eyes stretched wide and I breathed victoriously, “Indy!”
“Yeah!” mom echoed, “Perfect!”
Less of this...
To explain. It is not, as many assume (and J. continues to imply despite my numerous efforts to stop him), a tribute to Indiana Jones. No, no. Rather it is the nickname for the ship HMS Indefatigable from Forrester’s “Hornblower” series. Both Mum and all of us kids love the A&E mini-series, partly from a nerdy liking of the Napoleonic wars, but mostly (on the girls’s end) from a crush on yummy Ioann Gruffudd.
...more of this.
Indefatigable, definition: unwearying, unremitting in labor or effort. Perfect for my car which is a decade old and doesn’t do terribly well on highways, but never lets me down!
Indy has earned her title yet again recently after a series of near-disasters. Last night I went straight from work to GS’s house. Or rather that was the plan. The reality included being stuck in traffic for over an hour, getting hopelessly lost, and ultimately getting rear-ended on an overpass. Defeated (and still lost for a while) I slunk home.
And though I was in a bit of a strop, what of Indy you ask? There was not a scratch on her (the guy who ran into me had a crumpled license plate, i noticed. HAH!), and she made it home with just enough gas. If I hadn’t just bought her new tires I would have now just for being so impressive!
For the record, gentlemen, ladies do not find most of your “awesome” exploits funny in the least. Neither do the police. If you simply mustannoyingly display your affection, stick to pulling our pigtails. Because finding an elk, recently deceased due to an unforeseen run in with a car, decapitating it, and leaving the head on a girl’s kitchen table (shades of The Godfather) does not inspire affection. In fact, it’s considered alarming and creepy.
Also, if you decide to engage in this sort of behavior, don’t post pictures of your exploits on Facebook for the police to find.
A law student came into the office today, demanding more parking for graduate students. With the new parking system, still not completely patched and just limping along, lots of students have been taking advantage of the absence of usual oversight by parking wherever they want: handicapped stalls, dean and administrator lots, etc. Which means that when (and if) this new system starts functioning properly, a whole lot of people are in for a nasty surprise. I forsee the university setting up a new scholarship fund out of the proceeds, but I digress.
We apologized for the inconvenience and said it should be corrected in a month, but that did no good. As Lt. Figaro explained the policy regarding each of her complaints, she kept changing her argument and problem until she was eventually asking for us to build new parking, or take parking away from other people to give to graduate students.
“We already have about one parking space per three grad students and special lots for you,” Figaro said, wearily, “as opposed to one in five for the rest of our students.”
“But we need more!”
“Ma’am,” I said, “we have thousands of students currently attending, plus several thousand more faculty, staff, administrative, service personnel, and contractors who come to this school everyday. Plus there is another university in the next city over. This area was never meant to accomodate nearly XXX thousand extra people, city planning hasn’t kept up with it in the past two generations. You’re asking us for space that we cannot give you, because it literally does not exist.”
“But I spent forty-five minutes circling that parking lot to find a space yesterday!”
“Well,” offered Figaro, “did you try parking at the basketball arena or football stadium and walking?”
She gasped in outrage, “All that way?!”
“These are not spirit fingers. These are spirit fingers!”
-Bring It On (one of them. This franchise seems to be doing the Land Before Time thing…what number are we on now?)
Go TEAM! (Not our school, PS)
A request for privileged parking came through to Red and the girls at parking (still muddling through a hopelessly ridiculous new system) written thus:
“I am a cheerleader and therefore require parking closer to campus. Shouldn’t I be able to park in [names area reserved for administrators and faculty]? It’s really important for me to be able to get to school easily.”
Diagnosis – left secondary education with tragically skewed self perception, grossly underdeveloped logic faculties, and gravitional-force-altering sense of self importance. Good job tired cliches and cliques.
Small Dog Syndrome 