I’m finding myself a bit annoyed with my fellow members of the human race this morning.
First of all, I arrived at work, nearly done with my current project, just needed to figure out why a few items aren’t being saved to the database. As you know, I work in Cubicle World, in a big room containing about 20 people. Many of my cubicle neighbors are mainframe programmers who are about 20-25 years older than me. So, this morning, as I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my code, this is the conversation that was struck up in the cubicle behind me.
“I’m going in to the doctor for a procedure… a colonoscopy.”
“OH! I’ve had one of those! Let me tell you ALL ABOUT IT!”
At that point I decided it was time to take a long walk.
As of now (lunchtime) I still haven’t gotten the last bugs out of my project.
So, at lunch I made a run to Bookstar to buy a CSS book (thanks to Justin for e-mailing me some recommendations). Picked out one I wanted, walked to the cash register, where a woman beat me to the front of the line by just a second.
At Bookstar you get 15% off if you have a Barnes & Noble membership card. Well, the woman in front of me didn’t have one. But her mother did. So she asked if she could use her mother’s. But she didn’t have it. They said they could look it up by account number or phone number. She gave a phone number. But it wasn’t the one registered to use the account. So she called her mother at work. And she got the receptionist. And they had to page her mother. Meanwhile she asked if the account number could be looked up by address. It couldn’t. She got her mother on the phone and asked for the correct phone number. Her mother gave her a number. It didn’t work either. So her mother started looking for the B&N card with the account number on it.
By this time more than 5 minutes had passed. I started rolling my eyes to express my annoyance (a trick I learned from The Romanian Sensation, who would roll her eyes when people didn’t tip her well enough), and the cashier saw me and called for backup. A second cashier arrived and I was out in 30 seconds.
Oh, by the way, the major purchase that this woman was trying to save 15% on came to $10.87. That’s not the discount but the amount of the purchase. So she held the line up for more than five minutes to save A DOLLAR.
If it had really been that important, couldn’t she have found out the correct number BEFORE getting in line?
I hate people sometimes.
All right… you’ve kept reading this long, so you get a reward. I discovered a good site last night. A lot of old comedy shorts and classic movies from the ’20s through the ’60s have fallen into the public domain. This means that either their copyrights expired or the studio forgot to renew them, and so they’re free for anyone to distribute. So, if you go to this site, you can watch a lot of movies and comedy shorts online. Some of their offerings include
- Several Three Stooges episodes
- A couple of Bugs Bunny cartoons
- Some Popeye cartoons
- A Tom and Jerry episode (from 1931, I didn’t realize that Tom and Jerry had been around that long)
- An Our Gang episode – “School’s Out” – from 1930. It’s listed as “Spanky and Our Gang,” but this pre-dates Spanky, it’s a Jackie Cooper/Miss Crabtree episode
- Nosferatu, the first classic vampire movie ever, from 1922
- Several Tarzan movies
- And about 100 other classic movies. They have some pre-1927 movies on the site, which means they’re silent. I’ve never seen a silent movie before, and may watch one when I get the chance, just to see what movies were like when my grandmother was little.
… And that’s it for now. Don’t forget the Non-Profit Expo at the Botanic Gardens tonight, 5:30-8:00. Going to power down the laptop, read the first chapter of my CSS book, and head back to work. Hopefully we’re done with colonoscopy discussions for the day.