To Coin a Phrase

I minted a new one this morning, so copyright Captain Chlorophyll (or however that works). You’re hearing it here second. Because I used it in our managers’ meeting this morning, that’s why.

I was explaining that the employee I counseled for a safety violation walked out of the room with a completely different understanding of the problem, no matter how many times or ways I phrased it. I was giving him a verbal warning for using a vehicle without working headlights -- a problem which he himself reported to me not two minutes before -- and after I had instructed him to use my vehicle instead. “So if I didn’t come to you, I wouldn’t have been caught, right?” was his take on the situation.

He used a different vehicle this morning. No problem, right? Uh-uh. My crew can’t leave things alone. A different employee, seeing the truck not in use, thought he could use it, jumped in, and took off onto campus. I made the mistake of assuming that employees won’t use vehicles that they weren’t granted leave to use.

As I was explaining this to Skippy this morning, I apologized for not being able to figure out my employees. “I know I’m not the fastest guy,” I explained, “but there’s no way I can be faster than the speed of stupid.”

A Waste of Time

I have barred myself from eating out for the time being (except my weekly cheesesteak). My checking account took a serious hit, what with the gift cards for my employees and my airplane ticket to NM coming at the same time, so I'm going to stop all frivolous expenditures until it recovers.

It would be easier, though, if I had a microwave. I mean, that way, I could actually fix myself something more than a sandwich because I'd have a way to reheat the leftovers. I have myself a quest!

What is your name?
Captain Chlorophyll.

What is your quest?
To find an inexpensive microwave... and a rubbery, yellow raincoat.

What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
I don't know, but the formula is here.

I wasted a good amount of time on Saturday driving from thrift shop to thrift shop. (I didn't waste all my time, though, as I got a cheap pair of sneakers from K-Mart and the Dr. Pepper that was on sale at Dollar General, which were errands I was able to do while on my quest.)

I visited five thrift stores (would've been more, but two appeared to have closed down since the phone book was printed) in the greater Noog area (to include Fort O.), and none of them had a microwave. Does no one give away useful stuff any more? I suppose most people nowadays would just throw out a broken microwave and buy a new one, instead of seeing if it could be fixed. But what about when they feel theirs is "too old" and just want a new one? What about when Grandma or Old Aunt Ethel dies and the heirs have to dispose of her household goods? (However, if you're in the market for an electric bread machine, go for it. There were dozens of them on the shelves.)

One of the stores actually had a raincoat -- and it was yellow! -- and it was rubbery! -- and it even had reflecty bits on it! Alas, it was a size medium, and I require at least a large, or an extra large, to accommodate my gorilla arms. (Um, that means extra long, not extra hairy, in case you were wondering, although... Um, let's not go there right now, okay?)

The good news is that, if you're looking for a men's suit, you can pick one up for only $8. I used to think that $100 was a good deal on a suit, but that was ten years ago, and the last time I wore a suit was when my father died, but eight bucks is a steal!

Okay, so I didn't buy a suit I don't need, and I didn't even buy those three owl figurines, even though they were just a dollar apiece. (If I'm not allowed to eat out, then something to sit on a shelf and collect dust is even more of a superfluous expense.) However, I did weaken and pick up six books (fifty cents each at two stores and a dollar each at another). The guilt there is that it feels just as wrong to pay nothing but fifty cents for a book as it would to pay just eight bucks for a suit.

Oh, and when you die, Betty, will your books to your sister or a library or someone else who would appreciate them. (Maybe the Tech library will name its science fiction wing after you.) Don't let anyone take them to a thrift store, because they seem to be the depositories for some of the most useless books imaginable (although it appears that someone once read them). Your collection is far more worthy than that!

If I had known, I would've brought a book.

Our client (who eerily resembles a St. Bernard) asked me yesterday to offer my employees some off-the-clock work for him to remove some plywood from his trailer. One employee could do it for $40, or two employees could do it for $20 each.

Naturally, I'm too conscientious to just hand over the money to the employees and go home, so I sat in my office and twiddled my thumbs (my friends weren't online to chat) until they had finished. I approved the work, paid the employees, and reported to Bernard.

It struck me, as I had nothing to do but itch to go home, that I felt like a teacher who had drawn the short straw and was stuck monitoring after-school detention.

National Technophobe Day

I don't know if there is such a thing, but I celebrated it yesterday. (I'm greatly condensing this story because I won't have time to type it all, not because you won't appreciate my wit. Incidentally, one of my coworkers (the housekeeping supervisor, whom I'm thinking of nicknaming Miss Kitty) said yesterday, to the newest employee, that my "sense of humor is very dry". Froggy chimed in, "Dusty.")

The company web page I check daily for my employees timecard swipes from the previous day said that every single one of my employees didn't show up to work on Monday, didn't clock in, didn't go to lunch, and didn't clock out -- but the maintenance and housekeeping crews did. They're in different buildings, so they use different timeclocks.

The company web page I needed to put through the request to get my employee his three-month probationary raise was down.

I brought up my issues at our daily managers meeting, and the best suggestion they (who are even less computer literate than I) could come up with was to wait until today and look again -- oh, and put in a help desk request for computer support to check the phone line, since our leaky building has done this before, so maybe the data transfer didn't happen because the phone line was wet again (thanks both to melting snow from the weekend and rain overnight).

I submitted the help request then went back to the timesheet web page to review past weeks and verify I had logged all my employee's absences properly. At this point, all of Monday's time appeared correct after all, but it was Tuesday's times with the little red stop signs that indicate errors. The computer claimed now that my employees did work on Monday after all but that they had clocked in Tuesday but didn't take lunch nor go home. This is highly unusual because, the way the system is set up, it's not possible to view the current day's timecard swipes. Oh, fugeddaboutit. I'll just wait until (today) to check again. (I'll keep you posted.)

Incidentally, the computer geek checked the phone line and pronounced it problem-free. Beats the heck out of me. I'm a technophobe, remember?

I Shoulda Stood in Bed

That wouldn't have kept Skippy from phoning or texting me, though.

We had a bunch of snow on Friday. I can't tell you how much because it was too dark to see, but it had been snowing for six hours by that point. Overnight, the snow became rain, so the snow on the ground matted down, but I think we got a couple of inches.

Saturday morning, I woke up at my usual time, picked up a shovel from the shop, and made sure that the students had clear (albeit narrow) paths from their dorms to the dining hall, and also around the activity building, since the swimming coach perversely did not cancel or reschedule his weekend swim meet, like every other event coordinator around town had done. (People here appear as ignorant about driving in snow as those of us from the desert, but this guy must be from North Dakota or someplace.) I didn't have to worry about the roads around the activity center, though, because some nice elves had come in overnight and cleared them for me. (Thanks, elves!) After four hours of shoveling, I went home and shoveled the sidewalk and driveway of my apartment -- but did my neighbors thank me? I think you can guess the answer to that. (Maybe they thought elves did it.)

Sunday morning, I sprinkled ice melt on occasional spots on sidewalks and roads which had frozen overnight. It turns out Saturday was warm enough to melt some of the snow, and I was a bit miffed that my shoveling was made redundant that quickly. At least I was done with the ice melt in less time than I had spent shoveling.

You know you wake up early when: You go to work for two hours. You return home and eat breakfast. You read a while. You decide to take a nap. You wake up, refreshed. You look at the clock and realize it's not even noon yet.

What was the worst part of the whole weekend? I didn't even get a cheesesteak in appreciation of my hard work. I drove all the way (over the river and through the woods) to Tubby's on Saturday afternoon and discovered that they were closed. I decided to eat instead at Aretha Frankenstein's, since I was in the area, and since it had been several months since my last visit, and I figured that they would have restocked their T-shirts by then. Not only were they sold out of men's shirts yet again, the ground beef burrito was terrible. (It tasted like a sloppy joe poured into a dry tortilla instead of a bun.)

Did I mention the tree branches that fell on Saturday?

It appears I'm not as witty when I'm flirting with a woman.

In the earlier dream, Lena Horne asked me how the cheesecake that she had just fed me was. I said, "As smooth as your voice." (Even in the dream, I knew that was a clunker.)

In the later dream, I had just been seated with a stranger in a brewpub. The guy asked our waitress, "Do you have anything with less than 1% alcohol content?" I interjected, "Yeah, the entrees." (Unfortunately, the alarm woke me up before I could take the first sip of my porter.)

While You Were Out

I amassed nearly 200 e-mails to my campus account and 34 to my company account while I was on vacation. Only a few were interesting, and barely any of them were worth commenting on.

In "Stuff for Paper Bag Game" a teacher named Skeeter (honestly -- we also have "Buck" Rogers working here) invited us to donate items for an economics game to be played by his students. He wrote, "If you have 'stuff' of more or less value to teenaged boys that you are willing to part with..." (If he sent this e-mail to the parents, he might get more than a few replies about teenagers the parents are willing to part with!)

"Request to paint an office" was, naturally, a request to paint an office prior to a new employee starting work. The employee's name is Joe Painter. (Why don't they just ask him to do it himself once he gets here?)

The guy who wrote "Mice still around..." has a problem I'm not qualified to handle. "We still have mice roaming around the Tate Hall 3rd floor office. They seem to be avoiding the sticky traps entirely; there are several around our office. Since that wasn't working, I purchased two containers of D-Con. After they devoured the first one in December, I bought a large one, which they have now eaten entirely. This morning, I found two of them in the D-Con box. They promptly ran away. What should we do next?" (My first instinct is that he should sue D-Con for making a faulty product. Then notify the EPA or somebody that we have poison-resistant mice running around.)

I also got a message via the address I use for e-clubs and coupons. A nationally known discount store offered me "20-20-10" -- not fertilizer, but if I spend $20 or more on my next 20 visits, they'll take 10% off of a future purchase. No deal, Howie. This was my second visit to the store in seven months, and all I bought was four light bulbs for $1.50. At that rate, it would take me ten years to shop there 20 times, and I'd never need $20 worth of anything they have. Their 10% (which isn't much of a discount anyway) is safe from me.

Everything New is Old Again

This story occurred while I was in New Mexico for vacation. It regards the new dorm at New Mexico Highlands University, where I spent my first two years of college.

A decrepit dorm is nothing new for them (although it is a twist to have something like this happen in a brand new building). The old dorm which this replaced was where I lived, and it did everything but fall down around our ears. The elevators repeatedly broke down. (Why anyone would try using them in the first place, considering what some of the boys did in them regularly, is beyond me. I used the stairs.) The fire alarms went off at least once a month, usually in the middle of the night (although they had help for most of those instances). Then, when it rained, the roof leaked -- and the walls. That's the only explanation I can imagine for how my room flooded when it was on the sixth floor of a nine story building. I knew a student there who had been an electrician working on the dorm when it was constructed (he was what they called a "non-traditional student", getting his degree later in life). Knowing how it was constructed, he once said he was surprised the building had lasted that long (about 30 years, by the time I moved into it).

Now it sounds as if the school is starting over. I'm glad I'm not there.