Thursday, October 31, 2002

Today is Adobe Acrobat day. I have to install seventy-two copies of Adobe Acrobat 5.

I want to curl into a tiny ball and cry.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:35 AM CST [Link]

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH (head explodes).

Another day of getting into work at 0800, and being so swamped with stuff that I can't even check my e-mail until 9:45.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:33 AM CST [Link]

Sunday, October 27, 2002

Aaaaah, the awfulness of Daylight Saving Time has lifted, and we are once again back on good ol' Standard Time. The next few days are some of my favorite days of the year--I get to go to bed and wake up at what my body thinks is an hour later than normal. Plus, with the sun setting by 1800, I finally feel that the world is running to a normal rhythm. Full darkness by 1830, instead of this lingering-daylight-until-after-2000 crap that goes on in the summer.

Daylight Saving Time sucks, and anyone that likes it is an idiot.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:59 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

I got in to work at 0800. The phone was ringing when I sat down. I didn't get to check my e-mail until 0930.

Too busy. Must escape.

Posted by Keeper @ 11:10 AM CST [Link]

Friday, October 18, 2002

And speaking of movies, according to Cinemark's web site, Sweet Home Alabama pulled in almost fifteen million dollars last week at the box office. This sickens me. This makes me want to gouge out my own eyeballs and pound white-hot steel rebar into the empty sockets.

For some reason, Reese Witherspoon reminds me of all things dishonest and wrong about women, and a predictable, uncreative hack-job of a movie like Sweet Home Alabama should stand side-by-side with Rollerball as evidence of everything that is soulless and wrong with Hollywood.

(Reese, if you're reading this, change your hairstyle--the only way you could make your hair look less attractive would be if you shaved it off and glued it to your face.)

Now excuse me as I delve deeply into my own hypocrisy and go out to see a movie.

Posted by Keeper @ 05:25 PM CST [Link]

My buddies and I used to go see a TON of movies. When we were in high school, we'd to to the local Loews 8 or Point Nasa 6 and see at least one movie a week during the school year, and during the summer we'd sometimes see four or five a week.

I just don't go see movies anymore.

Massurah is spearheading an effort to go out to see a movie all together--our first since One Hour Photo--and I find myself completely unenthusiastic about any of the choices presented. This, coming from an ex-movie junkie. How the mighty have fallen. I probably haven't seen more than ten movies in the theatre this year, if even that many.

Coincidentally, this lack of theatre-going started up around the same time I got a DVD player. It's a billion times nicer to sit on my comfortable couch, eating my own (relatively) cheap junk food, and watch a movie in the privacy of my apartment, rather than have to go brave the crowds, stand in line for forty-five minutes for a decent seat, sit through commercials and previews, and then have to deal for two hours with some asshole's crying child to your left, three cheese-dicks with laser pointers, six teenagers yelling and throwing popcorn in front of you, twelve jerk-offs talking on their cell phones, and a whole motherfucking CLAN of Mexicans sitting behind you, proving a running translation and commentary track en Espanol.

No thanks. Not for me. I deal with inconsiderate pigs all day long at work. I don't want to do it on my time away from work. I'll rent the DVD, thanks.

Posted by Keeper @ 05:17 PM CST [Link]

Monday, October 14, 2002

I didn't talk to $LUSER about Acrobat. The world has not yet ended, so I suppose it wasn't critical.

Do you ever have one of those days where the entire day is spent making a spreadsheet, and then when you're done, you look back at the spreadsheet and it just doesn't look like something that took a whole day to make, and then you feel defeated and insignificant because you realize that while you were busy making a gay-ass spreadsheet, somewhere two hundred and forty miles above the earth there were men and women living and working in an actual for-real space station?

My spreadsheet sucks compared to that. Actually, my spreadsheet sucks anyway.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:29 PM CST [Link]

I arrived at my desk about twenty minutes ago and, after unlocking my workstation, was greeted by an instance of Notepad with the following line of text highlighted: "Talk to $LUSER about Acrobat licenses." Now, I remember writing that note on Friday right before I left, but I have no bloody clue why I needed to talk to this guy. Obviously about licenses for Adobe Acrobat, but WHAT about them? Does he need more of them? Does he have extra? Does he need upgrade licenses from 4.05 to 5?

Then, one of the Win2k upgrade team guys--a group of which I'm nominally in charge, in kind of a responsibility-without-actual-authority kind of way--comes by and tells me that the list of users to upgrade I sent out on Friday ought to keep them busy for at least the rest of today.

List? What list? I sent out a list?

Monday. Ugh. I can't remember a damn thing about work last week.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:18 AM CST [Link]

Tuesday, October 8, 2002

Thanks to Paul, of Sprint PCS's business office, my faith in the fundamental goodness of humankind has been restored.

Here's the skinny, summarized:

I cancelled my Sprint phone on 2.Aug.2002 and was given a final balance. I was told that I would receive a bill for the final amount and that I didn't have to pay until I received the bill (I like paper bills). Then, on 30.Aug.2002, Sprint's collections department called me and told me that I had to pay over the phone, with a credit card, RIGHT NOW, or they would begin to injure my credit rating. They said I had an outstanding balance which was about $17 less than the balance I'd been previously told. The collections lady assured me that she had the proper balance, not the cancellation guy, and that I wouldn't hear anything else from Sprint ever ever again if I paid her RIGHT NOW, so I dug out a credit card and gave her what she wanted.

Today, I receive a paper bill from Sprint, thanking me for my payment, but reminding me that I still owe $23, plus a phone payment processing charge of $5 incurred on 30.Aug.2002 for an over-the-phone credit card payment, for a total of $28.

ARGH! HULK SMASH!

I call Sprint, and I get "Renetta" on the phone. She pulls up my account and I explain my position to her, which is that I'd be happy to pay the original amount I was told to pay, but I do not feel that I should have to pay the $5 processing fee, and I do not feel that I should have to pay any additional money beyond the original fee. At least, that's what I tried to do, but she kept interrupting me and telling me that I'm wrong. She also told me, several times, that the cancellation department has no authority to tell me anything about money, everything I told her was suspect, and that she "seriously doubted" that the collections department ever called me in the first place. After about minutes, I asked her for her name and extension, then hung up and called back.

Let me digress a moment here and tell you about hanging up and calling back. If you feel you haven't gotten anywhere with a customer service rep with a nationwide company, always do this. Your original complaint can't be made any worse by talking to a different rep, and you might just get someone more willing to treat you like a human being.

So, upon calling back and cursing at Claire, the Sprint Virtual Assistant Whose Microchips I Wish To Destroy, I was eventually connected with Paul. Paul, thank God, was an actual person instead of a mindless Anger Droid. Paul pulled up my account and, in stark contrast to Renetta, was able to verify my story. "Yep," he would say, "I see where the cancellation agent wrote that amount in the notes." "Yep," he would say, "I see where collections called you and told you to pay a totally different amount." "Yep," he would say, "It sounds like you got screwed here."

He apologized. The man actually APOLOGIZED to me, instead of treating me like a criminal, and then he CREDITED MY OUTSTANDING BALANCE BACK TO ME AND ZEROED OUT THE ACCOUNT.

I almost wet my pants with shock.

He said that he was very sorry about the rudeness of the previous rep, as well as the inconsistency of the billing, and that he wanted to make sure I came away happy. I babbled incoherent praise at him for several seconds, saying things like "I would buy you beer if I could" and "You kick incredible amounts of ass." Then, I asked Paul to get his supervisor on the phone and said things to the supervisor like, "Paul is the god of customer service. I want to have his baby," and "No finer a human being has ever walked the face of the earth." I also made sure that Renetta was soundly denounced and stepped upon.

So, I feel pretty damn good right now. I had a $28 debt completely forgiven, and I get to introduce a friend to Neon Genesis Evangelion tonight.

Sometimes, things just work out.

Posted by Keeper @ 05:54 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, October 5, 2002

I went today with some friends to Moody Gardens and caught the 3D IMAX International Space Station movie. Knowing that I helped put that up into the sky, even a tiny bit, made me proud to bursting. The movie was supernally beautiful, making very appropriate use of the third dimension (lots of scenes of astro- and cosmonauts flinging tennis balls and M&Ms at the camera) and complete with the requisite ball-shakingly loud space shuttle launch.

Anyone who's within driving distance of an IMAX theatre showing this thing, go ASAP. It's worth it.

Posted by Keeper @ 07:32 PM CST [Link]

Friday, October 4, 2002

I just finished listening to the commentary track on the End of Evangelion DVD. It's a wonderfully funny track, with commentary from the English language version producer and her husband and one of the incidential voice actors. Irreverent and informative, it provided me with a lot of information about stuff I missed the first few times I watched End of Eva. If only it had contained some insight from the Japanese production team, it would've been the perfect commentary track. Unfortunately, the commentators seemed to be as distant from and uninvolved with the Japanese production team as...well, as I am.

Ah, well. It was still a great track. Amanda Winn Lee has an amazingly sexy voice.

Posted by Keeper @ 05:52 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, October 3, 2002

Spent about an hour and a half today installing one hundred and twenty RIMMs into thirteen new Dell Precision 530 workstations (eight RIMMs on two special RAMBUS riser cards for each computer, total of 4GB of RAM each). My fingers are tattered snubs of hamburger. Typing hurts.

Posted by Keeper @ 05:06 PM CST [Link]