Safety First
Hello World,
Happy April! Thursday was the first of the new month, a day beloved by practical jokers and tricksters the world over, as April Fools Day is everyone's annual opportunity to pull their favorite pranks on a (semi) unsuspecting public, which is considerably more tolerant than usual. I admit that I was a little too busy catching up at work to prey on the gullibility of my colleagues, and no one played any tricks on me either, so we certainly did not take advantage of all the day has to offer in the way of entertainment value. However, the first was also Maundy Thursday, and of course, one wants to be careful about doing things that are too outrageous during Holy Week, heaven knows. The company where Bill works is closed on Good Friday, so I take the day off as well, and since this wasn't a week that we were doing time cards at the hospital, it made it a day that I could take off with unfettered serenity. It turned out to be a beautiful day, which has been rare enough to be a special treat around here, so either our old nemesis Comrade Mischka has turned over a new leaf (NYET!) or someone's practical joke was sabotaging the Kremlin's infernal weather machine. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, because I already took the heaters out of the birdbaths, and I'm bracing for late freak blizzards in April, so if they don't happen, I'm thinking it would be a long Siberian winter for whoever put the whoopee cushion on the Comrade's chair.
Also in the realm of notable dates and times, probably no one remembers that this would have been the weekend of the Daylight Saving Time switch-over under the old schedule, and why would they? Well, only someone with outmoded technology that was configured to automatically adjust for DST twice a year, but now does it three weeks too late or too early, since the schedule has been changed but the old software hasn't been. This happened to me all the time with my old computer at work, which was running Windows 2000NT, and you just had to wait it out, having the wrong system time on the desktop, until the computer thought it was time to reset for DST, and catch up with the rest of humanity at long last. As practical jokes go, this one would be a long time coming, which is probably why they invented whoopee cushions in the first place. But then my old work computer died and had to be replaced with a new Dell Optiflex GX-620 running Windows XP, and I was also using a spare computer temporarily that was still using Windows98, and for the first time in recent memory, both of my monitors actually had the right time on them, right now, rather than having to wait for the software to catch up with the idea of changing over to DST three weeks late. Of course, I've been saying for years: "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put my computer there too?" But now all of that is behind me, and I've entered a brave new world where the time is right, the future is bright, and never is heard a discouraging word. Especially during Holy Week, heaven knows.
Speaking of work, since I was taking Friday off, there was a lot that had to happen in order for this to avoid turning into more than the usual short-week disaster, and no time for shilly-shallying, by golly. So you can imagine my displeasure at receiving notice of the Environment of Care Safety Fair on Wednesday, running all day upstairs in the Nursing Office conference room, no doubt with their usual demonstrations, displays, handouts and questionnaires. (Their motto: Be Prepared, Not Scared.) Last year, they sent around notices that said we were all invited to attend the Safety Fair, which I thought was very hospitable of them, but it turned out that when I didn't go voluntarily, they called on the phone, sent email, voice mail, and finally sent someone over to get me, so the "invitation" part of that was like being "invited" by the Mafia hitman to accept a bunch of bullets in the trunk of a car, and thanks so very much not. This time around, I knew that I simply didn't have time to waste on this kind of folderol (which was supposed to be short and sweet, but last year dragged on interminably) and I was prepared to resist attending this clambake to the very last extremity, no matter what they threw at me. It may have been an early practical joke, but I never saw that whoopee cushion coming, and the laugh was on me when the Safety Fair came and went on Wednesday, and apparently nobody cared if I put in an appearance or not, much less anyone else in my department. Since the hospital obviously no longer considers safety a priority for the employees, I'm thinking that they should probably change their motto to: Stand Alone, You're On Your Own.
While we're on the subject of public safety, we get the following from an alert reader (thanks, Bill!) long before anyone else invented this concept as a new holiday or reality TV show:
===================
and speaking of old Christmas trees, in my youth (at college), we had an apartment and kept the darn thing until the end of the school year. a wonder we didn't all go up in flames.
===================
Well, I'm thinking that would certainly have been the champ on Last Tree Standing, if there only was such a thing back then, although I have to say that I'm still not convinced that we've seen the last of these yet, and maybe not by a long shot.
Meanwhile in local news, we recently had two new stores open up right in our midst, which is unusual since the Queen City of the Sound is not renowned as a shopping Mecca by anyone in the vicinity, compared with the likes of White Plains, Yonkers or even Mount Vernon, for example. But an old abandoned soda bottling plant had been converted to a Home Depot Expo a few years ago (this was their home decorating division, sort of like Ikea) and although Bill and I wondered how they could possibly stay in business, they hung on for years before becoming a victim of the economic downturn last year. We were more surprised than anybody when it re-opened a couple of months ago as a shiny new Shop-Rite supermarket, since it's located within hailing distance of two other supermarkets on either side, one practically sharing the same parking lot. So many people showed up for the Grand Opening that the Police were called in to direct traffic, which was certainly never needed when it was the Expo, believe me, and it's just been jammed full of shoppers ever since. Bill and I went to check it out, since they had sent us a discount card in the mail as part of their Grand Opening promotions, and we hurried on over there so as not to miss out on all the fun. Not so fast! They apparently sent out the mailings a bit prematurely, and we got to the store to find the contractors still there, and the parking lot full of construction materials. At that point, it seemed to us they were a long way from being ready to open, but they announced their Grand Opening a week later, with the resulting pandemonium, and frankly, we were just as glad to miss it. We gave it another week for the excitement to die down and then tried it again, and we were suitably impressed with its size and volume of products, if not necessarily its variety, especially of the things that we were looking for. They do have an enormous produce section, plus a real bakery, Sushi Bar, deli, salad bar, Chinese take-out, and hot prepared meals that you can pick up, plus a grill where you can order hot dogs, hamburgers and heroes cooked for you, which I've never seen in a supermarket before. Bill was disappointed in their selection of routine items that we buy, and the fact that they have no self-checkouts, made him just as happy to stick with our regular store, in spite of this fancy new interloper.
And when it comes to interlopers, a special Queen City raspberry goes to the brand new Walgreens, which just opened its doors on the hallowed ground of the beloved and historic Thruway Diner, which had been sold by its owners after decades of popularity, to the anguished wailing and gnashing of teeth by a distraught public. The diner went down quick enough, but it seemed to take forever for the new store to take shape, and then it seemed to open with no fanfare at all, so that I only found out after the fact in a roundabout way that they were even open in the first place. We never seemed to have time to get over there and give it the once-over, but we finally got around to it last week, and eager to see what it had to offer. As a chain, Walgreens is not as popular around here as some different brand names, and we've been to other places where Walgreens is much more prevalent, and some of their stores are enormous, with a wide-ranging inventory. This isn't one of those, in fact, we were surprised at how small and cramped it was, considering how large the diner seemed in the same space, and we were not at all impressed with their selection of just about everything we went there for. And we've already been to other Walgreens with a much wider variety, so we consider it a failing of the local store and not the chain. We certainly found it a great disappointment, especially considering that they tore down a perfectly good diner for this, and decades of fine family dining down the tubes right along with it. And all we ended up with was a drug store, which - you should pardon the pun - are a drug on the market nowadays, and there's practically one on every corner already, not to mention, one right around the corner from the new Walgreens besides. In terms of drug stores, I might consider this new store as carrying coals to Newcastle, that is, as long as they're not hot coals, and as long as Newcastle is not in the running for Last Tree Standing with a profusion of old desiccated left-over Christmas trees about to blow up like a powder-keg. After all, public safety is our watchword here, and we stick by our motto: "Safety Rules, No April Fools." Say, who left that whoopee cushion on my chair?
Elle
Happy April! Thursday was the first of the new month, a day beloved by practical jokers and tricksters the world over, as April Fools Day is everyone's annual opportunity to pull their favorite pranks on a (semi) unsuspecting public, which is considerably more tolerant than usual. I admit that I was a little too busy catching up at work to prey on the gullibility of my colleagues, and no one played any tricks on me either, so we certainly did not take advantage of all the day has to offer in the way of entertainment value. However, the first was also Maundy Thursday, and of course, one wants to be careful about doing things that are too outrageous during Holy Week, heaven knows. The company where Bill works is closed on Good Friday, so I take the day off as well, and since this wasn't a week that we were doing time cards at the hospital, it made it a day that I could take off with unfettered serenity. It turned out to be a beautiful day, which has been rare enough to be a special treat around here, so either our old nemesis Comrade Mischka has turned over a new leaf (NYET!) or someone's practical joke was sabotaging the Kremlin's infernal weather machine. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, because I already took the heaters out of the birdbaths, and I'm bracing for late freak blizzards in April, so if they don't happen, I'm thinking it would be a long Siberian winter for whoever put the whoopee cushion on the Comrade's chair.
Also in the realm of notable dates and times, probably no one remembers that this would have been the weekend of the Daylight Saving Time switch-over under the old schedule, and why would they? Well, only someone with outmoded technology that was configured to automatically adjust for DST twice a year, but now does it three weeks too late or too early, since the schedule has been changed but the old software hasn't been. This happened to me all the time with my old computer at work, which was running Windows 2000NT, and you just had to wait it out, having the wrong system time on the desktop, until the computer thought it was time to reset for DST, and catch up with the rest of humanity at long last. As practical jokes go, this one would be a long time coming, which is probably why they invented whoopee cushions in the first place. But then my old work computer died and had to be replaced with a new Dell Optiflex GX-620 running Windows XP, and I was also using a spare computer temporarily that was still using Windows98, and for the first time in recent memory, both of my monitors actually had the right time on them, right now, rather than having to wait for the software to catch up with the idea of changing over to DST three weeks late. Of course, I've been saying for years: "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put my computer there too?" But now all of that is behind me, and I've entered a brave new world where the time is right, the future is bright, and never is heard a discouraging word. Especially during Holy Week, heaven knows.
Speaking of work, since I was taking Friday off, there was a lot that had to happen in order for this to avoid turning into more than the usual short-week disaster, and no time for shilly-shallying, by golly. So you can imagine my displeasure at receiving notice of the Environment of Care Safety Fair on Wednesday, running all day upstairs in the Nursing Office conference room, no doubt with their usual demonstrations, displays, handouts and questionnaires. (Their motto: Be Prepared, Not Scared.) Last year, they sent around notices that said we were all invited to attend the Safety Fair, which I thought was very hospitable of them, but it turned out that when I didn't go voluntarily, they called on the phone, sent email, voice mail, and finally sent someone over to get me, so the "invitation" part of that was like being "invited" by the Mafia hitman to accept a bunch of bullets in the trunk of a car, and thanks so very much not. This time around, I knew that I simply didn't have time to waste on this kind of folderol (which was supposed to be short and sweet, but last year dragged on interminably) and I was prepared to resist attending this clambake to the very last extremity, no matter what they threw at me. It may have been an early practical joke, but I never saw that whoopee cushion coming, and the laugh was on me when the Safety Fair came and went on Wednesday, and apparently nobody cared if I put in an appearance or not, much less anyone else in my department. Since the hospital obviously no longer considers safety a priority for the employees, I'm thinking that they should probably change their motto to: Stand Alone, You're On Your Own.
While we're on the subject of public safety, we get the following from an alert reader (thanks, Bill!) long before anyone else invented this concept as a new holiday or reality TV show:
===================
and speaking of old Christmas trees, in my youth (at college), we had an apartment and kept the darn thing until the end of the school year. a wonder we didn't all go up in flames.
===================
Well, I'm thinking that would certainly have been the champ on Last Tree Standing, if there only was such a thing back then, although I have to say that I'm still not convinced that we've seen the last of these yet, and maybe not by a long shot.
Meanwhile in local news, we recently had two new stores open up right in our midst, which is unusual since the Queen City of the Sound is not renowned as a shopping Mecca by anyone in the vicinity, compared with the likes of White Plains, Yonkers or even Mount Vernon, for example. But an old abandoned soda bottling plant had been converted to a Home Depot Expo a few years ago (this was their home decorating division, sort of like Ikea) and although Bill and I wondered how they could possibly stay in business, they hung on for years before becoming a victim of the economic downturn last year. We were more surprised than anybody when it re-opened a couple of months ago as a shiny new Shop-Rite supermarket, since it's located within hailing distance of two other supermarkets on either side, one practically sharing the same parking lot. So many people showed up for the Grand Opening that the Police were called in to direct traffic, which was certainly never needed when it was the Expo, believe me, and it's just been jammed full of shoppers ever since. Bill and I went to check it out, since they had sent us a discount card in the mail as part of their Grand Opening promotions, and we hurried on over there so as not to miss out on all the fun. Not so fast! They apparently sent out the mailings a bit prematurely, and we got to the store to find the contractors still there, and the parking lot full of construction materials. At that point, it seemed to us they were a long way from being ready to open, but they announced their Grand Opening a week later, with the resulting pandemonium, and frankly, we were just as glad to miss it. We gave it another week for the excitement to die down and then tried it again, and we were suitably impressed with its size and volume of products, if not necessarily its variety, especially of the things that we were looking for. They do have an enormous produce section, plus a real bakery, Sushi Bar, deli, salad bar, Chinese take-out, and hot prepared meals that you can pick up, plus a grill where you can order hot dogs, hamburgers and heroes cooked for you, which I've never seen in a supermarket before. Bill was disappointed in their selection of routine items that we buy, and the fact that they have no self-checkouts, made him just as happy to stick with our regular store, in spite of this fancy new interloper.
And when it comes to interlopers, a special Queen City raspberry goes to the brand new Walgreens, which just opened its doors on the hallowed ground of the beloved and historic Thruway Diner, which had been sold by its owners after decades of popularity, to the anguished wailing and gnashing of teeth by a distraught public. The diner went down quick enough, but it seemed to take forever for the new store to take shape, and then it seemed to open with no fanfare at all, so that I only found out after the fact in a roundabout way that they were even open in the first place. We never seemed to have time to get over there and give it the once-over, but we finally got around to it last week, and eager to see what it had to offer. As a chain, Walgreens is not as popular around here as some different brand names, and we've been to other places where Walgreens is much more prevalent, and some of their stores are enormous, with a wide-ranging inventory. This isn't one of those, in fact, we were surprised at how small and cramped it was, considering how large the diner seemed in the same space, and we were not at all impressed with their selection of just about everything we went there for. And we've already been to other Walgreens with a much wider variety, so we consider it a failing of the local store and not the chain. We certainly found it a great disappointment, especially considering that they tore down a perfectly good diner for this, and decades of fine family dining down the tubes right along with it. And all we ended up with was a drug store, which - you should pardon the pun - are a drug on the market nowadays, and there's practically one on every corner already, not to mention, one right around the corner from the new Walgreens besides. In terms of drug stores, I might consider this new store as carrying coals to Newcastle, that is, as long as they're not hot coals, and as long as Newcastle is not in the running for Last Tree Standing with a profusion of old desiccated left-over Christmas trees about to blow up like a powder-keg. After all, public safety is our watchword here, and we stick by our motto: "Safety Rules, No April Fools." Say, who left that whoopee cushion on my chair?
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home