Where's The Fire?
Hello World,
Happy December! It doesn't seem possible that a whole year has gone by since the last time I said that, but here we are, like it or not. We've been having some very brisk weather these days, and in fact, last week some of our northern neighbors had snow, so we're starting to get a lot of those indications that the holidays are creeping up on us, slowly but surely. Well, maybe not so slowly, after all, this coming Sunday is the second Sunday in Advent already, which would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. Pretty soon, we'll all be awash in egg nog, candy canes and chocolate Santa's, although personally, I go more for red and green M&M's when it comes to holiday snacking, and which I also find have many fine therapeutic qualities as well. And you know what they say about chocolate, it's not just for breakfast anymore!
Speaking of the holidays, we had one of those little seasonal jollies at work recently. On Monday of this week, we got a call from the President's secretary who said that she hadn't heard who from our department would be going along on a holiday dinner given by one of our medical products vendors on that Wednesday the 30th. All four of us looked at each other sideways, and said that we hadn't said we were going, because this was the very first we were hearing of it. It turned out that none of us could go on that date, but we said they should go ahead and have the dinner anyway, when actually what we felt like saying was thanks so much NOT for letting us know about it sooner. They told us later that they were going to reschedule, although we doubted that they decided that on our account. Yesterday, I saw the sales rep for this company that was hosting the dinner, and he said that he had also gotten a call from the President's secretary, but on Tuesday the 29th, asking him what time was the dinner on the 30th, and he basically said the same thing we did, that this was the first he was hearing about it! He had to break it to them gently that after he suggested taking us all out to dinner, no one got back to him with a date, or how many people were coming, so naturally, he didn't make any reservations or anything. Somehow they decided on their own that it would be the 30th and then told no one about it, including the person who was supposed to be making the arrangements, and then they called him the day before to ask him what time. The poor guy just kept shaking his head, and mind you, he's been calling on us for years now, so you think he'd be hard to surprise at this point.
Speaking of surprises, and unpleasant ones at that, a few weeks ago when I was leaving church and went to set the alarm, I noticed that the yellow trouble light was lit on the display panel, which is never a good sign. Usually it means that the telephone has no dial tone, which happens now and again at church, where the local squirrels seem to make a career out of chewing through our wires, perhaps due to some special "squirrel attractant" that the phone company applies to them as a way to drum up more business. But when I picked up the phone in the office, the dial tone was fine, and none of the doors were ajar, which can also make the trouble light come on. I did notice that the alarm display panel had no date and time, perhaps due to a power failure, and it made me wonder if that might be the problem. So I figured, how hard can this be (don't answer that!) and instead of Daffy Duck showing up and shouting, "Shoot me now! Shoot me now!" I fiddled around with the display to try and find out how to set the date and time. After much fruitless fiddling, and lots of beeps and boops that got me nowhere, I inadvertently set the alarm to Fire Drill, and the alarm downstairs went off shrieking and whooping, and would have raised the dead, if there had been any in the neighborhood at the time. Meanwhile, I was running around upstairs like a total lunatic, wondering if there was any way to at least turn the volume down, so that if I was going to have my very own personal fire drill, as I seemed to be doing, at least I could do it more quietly. I was actually hoping that as a drill, it would do its thing for a few minutes and then stop, figuring that we would have gotten the hang of it by then. But after many long minutes, that seemed like hours, dragged on, I realized that it wasn't going to stop by itself. Try as I might, I couldn't find any way to stop it, so even though it was Sunday, I had no choice but to try and reach the alarm company and ask them to help me. Luckily they were right there and helped me to get it to stop, and even helped me set the time and date, which was a good thing, because I never would have found that on my own. But they said that just by talking with me on the phone, they could tell that there was something wrong with the system (the alarm uses the same phone line as the regular phones at church) and since we have a service contract for it, they said they would send out a technician on Tuesday.
Originally when I had called Customer Service on Sunday, and told them I couldn't turn off the Fire Drill, they said I might have to turn the whole system off at the alarm fuse box. That really gave me pause, as I had no idea where I would find such a thing. I mean, they have so many places they can hide stuff like that, and I didn't remember seeing anything like that anywhere. The nice helpful staff told me it would be a gray box with a lock, and at that, I had to laugh, because I knew that even if I could find the darned thing, there would be no way to locate the key for it, especially the way things go at church, which I don't mind saying, is a building that seems to have a life of its own. Luckily, they were able to help me on Sunday without resorting to the lost cause of using the fuse box, which was a good thing, because otherwise, the fire alarm would probably still be going off even now. On Tuesday morning, I met the service technician, Martin, at church, and of course the first thing he asked me was the location of the alarm fuse box, and I said I had no idea, but we could poke around for it. Martin must do this a lot, so he followed the wires from the display panel, and had no trouble uncovering the alarm fuse box in the boiler room. He said, "It's this gray box with the lock." I said, "I'm not sure we'll be able to find the keys for it." The punchline to this story, of course, is that the brilliant minds at my church LEAVE THE KEY IN THE LOCK, so anyone can open the alarm fuse box. I'm thinking that the burglars would find this extremely helpful.
Meanwhile in the building where I work, the door from the courtyard opens right into the stairwell on the landing between two flights of steps, which is not only highly inconvenient, but can be dangerous as well. With the door open, people can't get past it to go upstairs or downstairs, and you very often have traffic jams at that spot, as people juggle around each other to go in, out, up or down from where they started. It's even worse on payday, when you have many more people going in and out of the building than usual, to and from the Payroll department upstairs on our floor. So yesterday when I came in, and saw someone coming down the steps toward me, I held the door open, but wanted to find out if the young man was going outside, or continuing downstairs instead, because for one the door needs to be open, while for the other it needs to be closed. So I said, "Are you going out?" as I was holding the door. He replied, "Hello." I'm sorry, I can't give you a prize for that answer, but thank you for playing our game!
I may as well say right now that I have no ax to grind with any of the large and/or monolithic technology vendors, whether they are purveyors of computer hardware, software, electronic services or any combination of the above. I admit that I'm no technophile, but I'm no Luddite either, and I realize that we all need to be willing to change with the times, or be left behind like my dear old friends, the dinosaurs, and how I do miss them, especially at the holidays. But one thing that I just can't understand is why there are perfectly good and useful features, for instance, in Windows95 that are completely eliminated in Windows98, which has its own other useful features tossed out in Windows2000, whose other useful features have been stripped from WindowsXP. I don't see why the programmers can't retain the features that were already built in, such as fonts and screen savers, and add the new ones in the new version to them, rather than starting all over again with only new ones. I hadn't realized when we upgraded at work to WindowsNT that I would be leaving behind all of the screen savers and desktop themes that I had enjoyed in Windows98, and for no good reason that I could ascertain. In fact, I would have expected the reverse to be true, since we all know how they love to give you tons of extra 'fluff" applications in upgrades, rather than anything useful that people might actually need. ("New Ext-Tay lets you see your Instant Messages in Pig Latin! Plus bonus smiley icons of your favorite NASCAR drivers!") I would think that having a wide variety of screen savers would be right up their alley at Microsoft, in terms of irrelevance plus counter-productivity. Now the screen savers are so bad, you may as well do actual work instead, heaven help us. Personally, I'm opting for some holiday-themed junk food, and devil take the hind-most.
Happy December! It doesn't seem possible that a whole year has gone by since the last time I said that, but here we are, like it or not. We've been having some very brisk weather these days, and in fact, last week some of our northern neighbors had snow, so we're starting to get a lot of those indications that the holidays are creeping up on us, slowly but surely. Well, maybe not so slowly, after all, this coming Sunday is the second Sunday in Advent already, which would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. Pretty soon, we'll all be awash in egg nog, candy canes and chocolate Santa's, although personally, I go more for red and green M&M's when it comes to holiday snacking, and which I also find have many fine therapeutic qualities as well. And you know what they say about chocolate, it's not just for breakfast anymore!
Speaking of the holidays, we had one of those little seasonal jollies at work recently. On Monday of this week, we got a call from the President's secretary who said that she hadn't heard who from our department would be going along on a holiday dinner given by one of our medical products vendors on that Wednesday the 30th. All four of us looked at each other sideways, and said that we hadn't said we were going, because this was the very first we were hearing of it. It turned out that none of us could go on that date, but we said they should go ahead and have the dinner anyway, when actually what we felt like saying was thanks so much NOT for letting us know about it sooner. They told us later that they were going to reschedule, although we doubted that they decided that on our account. Yesterday, I saw the sales rep for this company that was hosting the dinner, and he said that he had also gotten a call from the President's secretary, but on Tuesday the 29th, asking him what time was the dinner on the 30th, and he basically said the same thing we did, that this was the first he was hearing about it! He had to break it to them gently that after he suggested taking us all out to dinner, no one got back to him with a date, or how many people were coming, so naturally, he didn't make any reservations or anything. Somehow they decided on their own that it would be the 30th and then told no one about it, including the person who was supposed to be making the arrangements, and then they called him the day before to ask him what time. The poor guy just kept shaking his head, and mind you, he's been calling on us for years now, so you think he'd be hard to surprise at this point.
Speaking of surprises, and unpleasant ones at that, a few weeks ago when I was leaving church and went to set the alarm, I noticed that the yellow trouble light was lit on the display panel, which is never a good sign. Usually it means that the telephone has no dial tone, which happens now and again at church, where the local squirrels seem to make a career out of chewing through our wires, perhaps due to some special "squirrel attractant" that the phone company applies to them as a way to drum up more business. But when I picked up the phone in the office, the dial tone was fine, and none of the doors were ajar, which can also make the trouble light come on. I did notice that the alarm display panel had no date and time, perhaps due to a power failure, and it made me wonder if that might be the problem. So I figured, how hard can this be (don't answer that!) and instead of Daffy Duck showing up and shouting, "Shoot me now! Shoot me now!" I fiddled around with the display to try and find out how to set the date and time. After much fruitless fiddling, and lots of beeps and boops that got me nowhere, I inadvertently set the alarm to Fire Drill, and the alarm downstairs went off shrieking and whooping, and would have raised the dead, if there had been any in the neighborhood at the time. Meanwhile, I was running around upstairs like a total lunatic, wondering if there was any way to at least turn the volume down, so that if I was going to have my very own personal fire drill, as I seemed to be doing, at least I could do it more quietly. I was actually hoping that as a drill, it would do its thing for a few minutes and then stop, figuring that we would have gotten the hang of it by then. But after many long minutes, that seemed like hours, dragged on, I realized that it wasn't going to stop by itself. Try as I might, I couldn't find any way to stop it, so even though it was Sunday, I had no choice but to try and reach the alarm company and ask them to help me. Luckily they were right there and helped me to get it to stop, and even helped me set the time and date, which was a good thing, because I never would have found that on my own. But they said that just by talking with me on the phone, they could tell that there was something wrong with the system (the alarm uses the same phone line as the regular phones at church) and since we have a service contract for it, they said they would send out a technician on Tuesday.
Originally when I had called Customer Service on Sunday, and told them I couldn't turn off the Fire Drill, they said I might have to turn the whole system off at the alarm fuse box. That really gave me pause, as I had no idea where I would find such a thing. I mean, they have so many places they can hide stuff like that, and I didn't remember seeing anything like that anywhere. The nice helpful staff told me it would be a gray box with a lock, and at that, I had to laugh, because I knew that even if I could find the darned thing, there would be no way to locate the key for it, especially the way things go at church, which I don't mind saying, is a building that seems to have a life of its own. Luckily, they were able to help me on Sunday without resorting to the lost cause of using the fuse box, which was a good thing, because otherwise, the fire alarm would probably still be going off even now. On Tuesday morning, I met the service technician, Martin, at church, and of course the first thing he asked me was the location of the alarm fuse box, and I said I had no idea, but we could poke around for it. Martin must do this a lot, so he followed the wires from the display panel, and had no trouble uncovering the alarm fuse box in the boiler room. He said, "It's this gray box with the lock." I said, "I'm not sure we'll be able to find the keys for it." The punchline to this story, of course, is that the brilliant minds at my church LEAVE THE KEY IN THE LOCK, so anyone can open the alarm fuse box. I'm thinking that the burglars would find this extremely helpful.
Meanwhile in the building where I work, the door from the courtyard opens right into the stairwell on the landing between two flights of steps, which is not only highly inconvenient, but can be dangerous as well. With the door open, people can't get past it to go upstairs or downstairs, and you very often have traffic jams at that spot, as people juggle around each other to go in, out, up or down from where they started. It's even worse on payday, when you have many more people going in and out of the building than usual, to and from the Payroll department upstairs on our floor. So yesterday when I came in, and saw someone coming down the steps toward me, I held the door open, but wanted to find out if the young man was going outside, or continuing downstairs instead, because for one the door needs to be open, while for the other it needs to be closed. So I said, "Are you going out?" as I was holding the door. He replied, "Hello." I'm sorry, I can't give you a prize for that answer, but thank you for playing our game!
I may as well say right now that I have no ax to grind with any of the large and/or monolithic technology vendors, whether they are purveyors of computer hardware, software, electronic services or any combination of the above. I admit that I'm no technophile, but I'm no Luddite either, and I realize that we all need to be willing to change with the times, or be left behind like my dear old friends, the dinosaurs, and how I do miss them, especially at the holidays. But one thing that I just can't understand is why there are perfectly good and useful features, for instance, in Windows95 that are completely eliminated in Windows98, which has its own other useful features tossed out in Windows2000, whose other useful features have been stripped from WindowsXP. I don't see why the programmers can't retain the features that were already built in, such as fonts and screen savers, and add the new ones in the new version to them, rather than starting all over again with only new ones. I hadn't realized when we upgraded at work to WindowsNT that I would be leaving behind all of the screen savers and desktop themes that I had enjoyed in Windows98, and for no good reason that I could ascertain. In fact, I would have expected the reverse to be true, since we all know how they love to give you tons of extra 'fluff" applications in upgrades, rather than anything useful that people might actually need. ("New Ext-Tay lets you see your Instant Messages in Pig Latin! Plus bonus smiley icons of your favorite NASCAR drivers!") I would think that having a wide variety of screen savers would be right up their alley at Microsoft, in terms of irrelevance plus counter-productivity. Now the screen savers are so bad, you may as well do actual work instead, heaven help us. Personally, I'm opting for some holiday-themed junk food, and devil take the hind-most.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:43 PM
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