I am housebound today. That is, voluntarily, as opposed to some people around this town. During which, I caught up on a mild investigation I was planning on a nearby car lot. You would have to see it to believe the hundreds of car lots in South Florida. I count an average of 116 vehicles for sale. The lowest price I found was $13,000 for a Chevrolet piece of tin and plastic. Would you go down the freeway at 70 mph in this thing? I did not even bother to find out if it had a model name.
Steve, the Cancer guy has just reported in with another 11-12 months in prison. My connection with all of this is Pudding [the female cat], and the $35 required to fix the situation. Yeah fine, but the cat already has no idea who Steve is. I’ve received advice to abandon her on the street or call the Humane Society. Softee that I am, I am calling the Society for a new appointment.This morning into the shop, I passed a large brick building. At the same time along came a big delivery truck. If the wind had been any other direction, we could forget it. But that breeze did the one thing that killed any control – it picked the bike straight upwards. I recall thinking that the only control of a boat rudder is when the vessel moves ahead. (Strange what thoughts cross the mind in an emergency.) Same thing here, I was trapped. The bike suddenly felt like zero gravity while I was still moving ahead. No control.
Nobody’s fault but I wound up with knee and elbow damage. If you think I have troubles, let me tell you about today at the shop. I missed the show, but two detectives waltz in with cuffs and guns. They do not announce their purpose, but wanted to know what we “do here”. Sound familiar? The sign and twenty computers do not phase these professionals.
It seems that the laptop guy repaired an item for a senior around a year ago. She fell by hard times, losing her house and such. She claimed that she was taken advantage of. She has done this before. Sound even more familiar? For clarity, she owes big money ($1,000+) for repairs to her laptop and is claiming she was overcharged. She had spilled fluid on it so badly even Sony would not listen to her.
Taking advantage of a senior is an offense. Although all the documentation supported the opposite, the police still took “statements”. This is precisely the type of arbitrary search forbidden by the Constitution. They asked questions before stating their business. The Police were sympathetic to the report, but were fishing for trouble from the moment they arrived. They admitted it was a nonsense report, but show your ID just in case anyway. And, be careful how you say things
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The CLEP exams that have examples on the Internet are worded funny, the exact opposite of an intellectual exam. Don’t you humanist types take this to mean a free ride, for you would find the same. For the life of me, I do not understand how who directed a certain movie back in 1975 qualifies as “knowledge”, but it was the second exam question. Possibly there is no telling when this will become important again.
(I have been pressed for an example of “funny” said above. Okay, if Bill has two more quarters in his pocket than he thought, and he only as quarters in his pocket, and he has $8.75, what is the number of quarters he thought he had than before he began? The answer is not to construct the algebraic equation, but the trick is to get you to go there.) (Divide 875 by 25 and subtract two from the result.)
My business card idea is back in focus at the shop. A combination of new events makes the team idle and in want of a project. Art, the database guy, needs work. Fred’s web page work was farmed out and I have the ideas. The original plan fizzled because it became tedious to scan the cards one by one, and there was just no cheap way to collect thousands of business cards.
ADDENDUM
I have something of a fever. This gets me reading at home, and again I am reading passages from “Hell In A Very Small Place”, the account of the French rout in North Vietnam. I’ve read parts of this book probably eight times. If you ever need a reminder of how screwed up a bureaucracy can get, this is a milestone. It should be required reading for all “managers”. The battle was a needless exercise, in that the Viet Minh were forcing an endless supply of boy-soldiers into the battle at gunpoint, where the French had allowed themselves to be surrounded in the middle of nowhere. (Viet Minh were communist guerillas in North Vietnam, as opposed to the Viet Cong who were guerillas in South Viet Nam.)
Yet, if France had any common sense, the battle was winnable. Instead, they went from bad to worse. The French Army has the long-established “tradition” of making generals out of men who are over-tall, far too pretty, or just plain ride horses well in the Olympics. Along the same lines as Americans make generals out of men whose fathers were generals, or whose parents had money to send them to “academies” on the Atlantic coast. (Scarily, in the Canadian Armed Forces, a barrier to promotion is not having French as a first language.) None seem to value anything like intelligence or skill in warfare. Sure, it sucks, but what the hell? We got the ships, we got the guns, we got the money, too.
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