I thought I'd witnessed the pinnacle of bad taste the time I heard a guy come into the washroom, sit down in the neighboring stall, and while doing what people do while sitting where he was sitting proceed to call a woman (I assume) on his cell phone to make a dinner date. Being the ornery creature I am, I flushed the (loud, institutional model) American Standard a couple times, and still the guy nattered on, completely unfazed, as if he were sitting in the sun having a latté at some sidewalk café.
The worst, right? Au contraire.
This morning, I was in the men's and after—how can I put this delicately?—some telltale noises from the next stall, I swear I heard the same sound my new camera phone makes when I snap a picture.
I don't want to know. Really.
Meanwhile...
I think I may be in real danger of having my geek card pulled—and rightly so.One day last year, my aging 700Mhz Win98 computer hiccuped. Blue screen, applications open, corruption... bits everywhere. I worked and worked to sort out the damage and finally got things limping along, but it was never quite right again.
Finally, after some soul searching, I broke down last week and ordered a new machine, which arrived on our doorstep before I got home from work.
"I guess you'll want to get right to work setting it up," Sweetie said, making the safe assumption.
"Nope," I said. "I'm not sure when I'll get to it."
I could hardly believe the words that had just come out of my mouth. There was a time when Sweetie would have been absolutely right. I would have torn into the box and had the thing running with all applications transferred by bedtime.
This time, it just seems like another item on my to-do list. Right after clearing away enough of the junk in my office to find a place to set up the computer.
That said, I'm really looking forward to being able to run the latest/greatest versions of things like Dreamweaver and Adobe Acrobat. I really hadn't realized just how completely pre-XP operating systems had been abandoned until I discovered that even the supporting software for my new PDA wouldn't run on anything less than XP.
Okay... I'm starting to feel a bit more enthusiastic now. And once I've got all my crap treasures transferred from the old computer to the new one, I'm going to reformat the old one and install Linux on it. Now, that should get my geek status reinstated!
Now playing: The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli
8 comments:
tim ... the enchanter?
i'm thinking the camera one is pretty hard to beat (i've found the cell phone one to be quite common here at work).
however ... i find a certain comfort in going to the bathroom here at work. it's the only place i feel almost untouchable. it's virtually impossible to get in trouble there.
well, i'm sitting there in my sanctuary and i hear a loud clanging. the light above me is out. next thing, i realize it's a ladder being set up. surely whoever this is will know someone is in the stall and he'll wait. but no, he climbs to the top looks down and says, "oh, i'm sorry."
my last refuge is gone forever, at least psychologically.
e+
I LOVE the fact that you flushed the toilet on the Stall-caller. I would hang up on someone who called me while in the loo. And the camera phone noise? Ewwww. No scenario makes that OK.
Eric: LMAO! You didn't think to yell at him BEFORE he got to the top? That's so funny.
Eric: No sanctuary here. We have housekeeping staff whose mutant superpower seems to be Awkward Moment Intensification. Somehow linked to feminine intuition, I suspect, because they know when I'm in there and... am not in a position to up and leave.
I hear the door open and bang against the service cart as it's shoved in to wedge it open.
"Housekeepeeng," she calls.
"Somebody's in here."
"Sir, housekeepeeng."
"Yeahyeah," I say. "I'm busy here."
"Housekeepeeeeng..."
Desperately, I send my brain 25 years back in time to Mrs. Brown's Spanish I class.
"Uh... el baño es occupado." Then, for good measure, "Va... awayamos! Por favor."
Silence. Praise Mr. Whipple, she's gone!
For about 30 seconds, I think I've successfully handled the situation, then...
"Housekeepeeng..."
I guess she figures my superpower is invisibility, because that's pretty much the only way I could have gotten out of the washroom without her having seen me.
i was in shock. i didn't even say a word. i'm real particular about that. i won't sit down in a stall where someone is in another one next to me. i also won't go in if someone knows i'm going to the shitter.
you know, tim the enchanter, i have that same problem, although they tend to understand the english version here.
the thing is ... the lady gets mad when i say, "somebody's in here." i hear her sigh real loud and bang the cart back out the door.
the worst part is, it makes me rush when i was enjoying the newspaper or planning out the rest of my day.
i also halfway expect her to be out there leaning against a wall glaring at me when i come out. but she never is.
ok, enough about me. i believe this is somebody else's blog. ;)
e+
Okay, I can't even comment now. I am laughing so hard!!!!!!!!!
Thanks!!!
P.S. Foo, you're a geek no matter what. :)
Susie: Frankly, I'm not positive what I said in Spanish. I was attempting to say "The restroom is occupied. Go away. Please."
I should have just told her, "Entrada." Her funeral, at that point.
About your Compaq. I can't know that your repair guy didn't remove or destroy half your memory; however, if you've upgraded from Win98 to WinXP without adding memory, you almost certainly are running with about half what you need. Like all Microsoft products, Windows XP is a great bloated pig of a thing and requires much more memory than Windows 98—and that's before taking into account the great bloated pigs that memory-resident applications like anti-virus have become.
A Windows XP system is going to be pretty sluggish with anything less than 512MB of memory, and most are recommending 1GB.
I'm not sure why your repairman wouldn't have at least offered you the option of upgrading your memory, unless maybe there's something about your Compaq that made it impossible.
Okay, NOW I really can't post. Badoozer just put the icing on the cake!
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