I’m taking it easy today, learning a few new tunes. Sadly, the recording standards in the last century didn’t always produce tunes that were consistently on key. Who recalls “Sea Cruise” by Herman’s Hermits? Great tune, except it is between a D and D-flat, and gradually crawls up to almost a D. Sorry folks, much as I like that version, I finally had to quit trying to fix it digitally. Lots of old Elvis numbers are also off key. Pudding-Tat has been watching “Hunt for Red October” for a week. To this day, I still don’t know why television stations do that. Play the same tired old movie round the clock. Did Sean Connery die again or something? I know guitarists who’ve played the same twenty songs for twenty years, that isn’t quite the same thing.
The neighbors came by and said (in French) that I had a ripe coconut. So I picked it and put it in the fridge. I figured it sooner or later had to begin to look like a coconut instead of a big green pea. That didn’t happen. Finally, I drilled a hole and drained it, getting a cup of delicious liquid. I still don’t know why it never ripened. There is never a coconut farmer around when you need one.
If you think you are the only one who has at least one pushy idiot friend, read about Howard’s episode today. (Howard can’t call him an idiot, but I can.) The idiot (in the Dominican Republic) asks Howard, who is not a computer tech, to take the laptop in for “repairs”. Mike at the shop determines there are sockets shorted out, and that there are Vista programs on an XP system. This is a situation where the cure can be worse than the disease, so I know Mike cleared things 100% before he started.
Worse yet, our Caribbean idiot does not even know if the computer was originally Vista or XP, but clearly the guy is too thick to know there is a difference. A sticker on the case that says XP, but these stickers are available at the flea market. Howard gets the laptop home and can’t get it to connect to a wireless signal. Which could be anything, since Howard does not know how to troubleshoot wireless.
To top it off, the idiot is blaming Howard for everything, with the old “it was working when I gave it to you” scam. Unfortunately, it is a situation where Howard can’t just hand it back and tell him where to stick it. Next, the receipt for the warranty has two dates on it. Ask yourself, what kind of screwball gets a receipt with two dates? You guessed it. While I have no such “friends”, I do admit to often being forced to associate with such people on the job. So it’s not like I have no idea about coconut farmers.
I once had to work with just such a bozo for two years. Bert, at Telus Corporation. An incredibly uneducated bald guy who knew it all. He’d developed a system of constantly getting you to do his job for him, because once a year you’d need him and you couldn’t chance that he’d chose that moment to retaliate. He’s still getting away with it, no doubt, but Bert, this is your 15 seconds of fame and you just went down in history as a deadbeat. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone called Bert that was not a total prick. That does not apply to Burt, the drummer. Different spelling, see?
