Category Archives: Day In The Life

A Rave at the Fool

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I posted a post yesterday in the Hidden Gems Stocks We Like board at the Motley Fool. At the time of this journal, it had received 36 recommendations or “recs”. (For those who aren’t on the Fool boards, anyone who reads a message can recommend it. You can only recommend a post once, and you have a limited number of recs a day. The top rec earners are sometimes featured on the Fool Post of the Day or week or something).

At the bottom, I also tagged Tom Gardner’s response, which was enough to make me walk around this morning feeling full of myself. It’s nice to be shamelessly self-confident now and then.

The Post

The Case of the Spooky Phone System

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Last night Stacey tells me she couldn’t get either the computer in the spare bedroom nor the computer in the basement to get a dial tone, but the kitchen phone worked fine.

I had wired the basement line at the same junction that goes to the bedroom line, so I figured I’d made the connection loose somehow and the wires had fallen out or something. But it hadn’t.

So why would the bedroom and basement jacks not be working where the rest of the jacks in the house did?

Since moving into the house 3 months ago, we had given up DSL for economy. We were back in the dial up business after a 4 year hiatus. When I went out to buy a modem for my machine and installed it, it hyped how you could receive calls while staying on line. It even had answering machine software. I thought, wow, dial-up has come a long way, because once I’d installed it and logged on, we discovered we could place a call out using our only phone, the kitchen phone! No modem noise on the line! (What should have been our first clue is in italics).

The second clue is, I tried calling our house to test out the answering machine software, and it wouldn’t answer the line!

The third clue is that the back bedroom had been an office for the previous owners of the house.

For those of you much quicker on the uptake than I, you’ve realized that there was a second line in the house that had been left active by the previous owners, and had finally been shut off yesterday.

So, dial-up has gotten even suckier, because we can’t use the landline while we’re online, as we thought we could before. *sigh*

But a big thanks to the previous owners, John and Janet Hagye, for giving us 3 months of a free extra line, even though we didn’t know it at the time.

Overheard at OfficeMax

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I was in OfficeMax today and I was standing next to a lady in the organizer aisle. All of a sudden, a young guy stops and talks to her:

Young Man: Excuse me, but I see you in here all the time and you always look so good. Always so professional, I just wanted to tell you that.

Woman: (unnerved) Uh… well, thank you. I… I buy my office supplies here, that’s why I come.

YM: Well, you look fabulous. What line of work are you in?

Woman: I’m a realtor, I just needed to pick up an organizer–

YM: A realtor, how great! Where do you work generally?

W: Well, I used to be in Florida, but now I work north Atlanta bec–

YM: I’m from Florida! What part?!

W: Uh, Tampa.

YM: Me, too! Listen, I just have to give you my card. If you’re ever thinking of changing careers, I could use someone like you. A lot of people who work with us used to be in real estate. I work for Mary Kay…

W: Oh, I don’t–

YM: Don’t worry I don’t sell anything. I’ve got more important things to do than hawk lipstick. I’m in the seminar-giving part, we teach people about leadership. You’d be great. Do you have a card with you?

W: Well, yes, somewhere (shuffles in purse)

YM: Here’s mine. I just think you’d be fabulous at our seminars.

W: I should have a card more ready, I suppose, as a realtor, but–

YM: I know what you mean. They’re hard to keep up with, those things.

W: Here.

YM: Great! I’m definitely going to give you a call. You’d be great. It was great meeting you! I’ve got to go get MY office supplies! (walks away)

(beat)

W: (turning to me) That was the oddest thing that’s happened to me in a long time.

Me: I’m so excited I could be here for it.

W: (laughs, and walks away shaking her head)

Headset!

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They placed a headset on order for me!

I discovered the way to go about it is to just ask the woman who’s in charge of office supplies to order one. Apparently, I don’t NEED permission from higher ups or the IT guy in charge of phone systems. Go figure.

I also asked for a new desk calendar and laboratory notebook. I’m gonna be so stylin’ with my new office supplies here pretty soon. I feel like Herbert Kornfield or whatever his name is from The Onion.

A Basement Lab

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My wife has a former boss, an arts administrator, that is/was married to an engineer. At the time I met them, they were civil to each other, but essentially separated. For financial reasons, he lived in the basement instead of in his own apartment. It was kind of sad, but the joke around our house (being an arts administrator/engineer couple) is that if I don’t watch my step, I’ll find myself in the basement. Up until now, we haven’t had a basement, so it was a hollow threat.

But now we do. And here I am, in the basement.

Actually, it’s just my computer that moved to the basement to make room in the guest room… for guests. So if anyone wants to stay over, they don’t have to sleep under a computer desk.

I had to wire up a phone line. The line that was in this room crumbled to dust in my hands, and turned out not to be live anyway. I wandered around with a flashlight trying to make sense of the serpentine maze of telephone wires crisscrossing the basement ceiling. I found what may or may not be the nexus of phone wiring in our house. If it is, it’s a piss poor one. Add another task to the 2 page home improvement list: straighten out the phone wires.

I’ll get right on that… probably around 2015.