/dev/zero

Dear Contractor,

If I write in a ticket that something you did was done incorrectly, I wasn’t just banging randomly on a keyboard. I mean you actually did something incorrectly, which I had to fix. Luckily I caught it before the customer did and the customer ended up being happy with us for a change. Posting a comment in the ticket, in all caps, about how you are “not in the habit of not doing what the customer asked” impresses me not at all. You fucked up. I had to clean up your mess. Believe me, had I not caught that error and the customer saw it, we would have gotten our asses reamed.

Your unimpressed supervisor.

Dear Cow-worker,

My offer to come in on my day off to help you out with a major project != “I’ll do it for you”. I expected I would be in the office for 2 hours or so while I help you sort out what needs to be done. I ended up staying 8 hours while you took off while I was still working. Believe me, I’ll remember that next time you need help.

Your colleague.

Time-Warner must have fixed our cable. Usually when it rains we have 3 days of really crappy Internet service (really low bandwidth).
It rained hard last night. Quite a spectacular thunder storm. And the Internet is acting just fine today. I just downloaded the latest iTunes (7.0.2, ~35MB) in about a minute.

The other day my girl and I were in Barnes & Noble (we stopped for coffee. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!) and while browsing the magazine racks, I saw one of the most unusual sites I’ve seen in a long time: A goth chick, with her mother, wandered by.
Now, goths, by and large, are not too unusual. But you don’t see them very often in full regalia in Texas. And this one actually new how to wear the “white face” makeup. I’ve seen very few that could actually get that right. Usually they have it caked on, and you can see where the makeup ends and their actual skin tone begins. And because they have it so caked on, their acne is that much worse. This girl knew how to do it right. It was just enough to give her that ghostly white look (and was obviously not because she actually has pale skin). She was also quite pretty. I had to bite my tongue before I made any comment. It would have been purely complementary, however not being part of that culture, and this being a teenager with her mother, (and me looking for all the world like a stereo-typical Texan guy with my black cowboy hat, black leather coat and jeans, and shoes that could pass for boots at first glance) didn’t figure it would be well received.
Later, in the car, Kem agreed with me that this girl really had her goth look together and that she was quite pretty.