Crappy Customer Service

Hook, Line and Sinker

This weekend past I was at my parents' place, which is situated in the middle of nowhere, SK, on my uncle's mixed farm.  It was time to brand, vaccinate, chip, ear tag and castrate the calves.  It's an easy task to sign up for when the dividend is a year of free-range, grass-fed, custom-cut beef at $4 a pound.  I posted some pictures on my Flickr photostream, with a few more to come. 

My mother, aunt and I catered lunch and dinner for the cowpokes.  During this meal my second cousin Dwayne was telling stories about my Uncle Bill, who was present at the time.  Bill loves to mess with kids' heads because he knows they are very gullible.  He doesn't have his own kids but he has scores of nieces and nephews so there's plenty of time and opportunity for pranks.

I reminded my uncle of a time he gulled me and my three cousins.  He had a motorboat that was rigged for waterskiing.  My family spent time with him and his various girlfriends every summer because my dad loved to waterski.  The boat had those seats up front in the nose.

Once, Bill took the four of us out to the centre of a lake and pretended to run out of gas.  He handed each of us an oar and told us we had to row the boat back to shore!  Now, I don't know if you guys know anything about boats but a motorboat with an outboard big enough to haul two grown men is insanely heavy.  I know this because I rowed one back to shore from the nose seats at the age of six.

I told Bill this story - he didn't remember, having played so many other tricks on relatives and friends dumb enough to believe his line of bullshit that this one was lost in the mists.  After pondering on it for a moment, and asking me which lake it was, he said, "Well...that does sound like me."

Wherein I Make A Controversial Statement

I hate jeans.  Hate 'em.  I know that every other person on the planet will disagree with me and I'm down with that.  You go on wearing your jeans however you like - I don't hate your jeans.  I hate mine!

I wore jeans today for the first time in a couple of months and all I could think of all day was how long it would be until I could get home and take those suckers off.  I feel like I'm being squeezed in a vise.  The best pair of jeans will never fit me as well as a lousy pair of pants.

And it's not that my jeans are too tight.  It's my various Fit Issues.  I am 4" taller than the average woman, yet I have a normal inseam length.  This means that all my height is in my torso - yes that's right, the LEAST attractive way to be tall, I managed it.  So I have a long rise as well as an actual ass.  Jean waistbands never even get within shouting distance of my waist.  And let's not even talk about low-rise jeans, which I can actually walk out of.

I'm too old to be uncomfortable in my clothes.  So no more jeans!

June FOTM

Now June, June's easy.  It's the peak of everything.  The fruit stands come out of the woodwork with their deliveries from British Columbian tree-grown plenty.  But I pass up the many choices there to discuss a fruit that is, recently, available year-round.

Where do wintertime watermelons come from?  The intense growing conditions lead me to think of South America.  Still, I can't bring myself to buy a watermelon outside of their season - it just ain't right.  Perhaps it's about anticipation.  Or a watermelon loses something, being trucked through -40C weather to its destination.

I am an expert picker-outer of the tastiest watermelons and I never go wrong.  I think I've written about the subject before, but it must've been on my LiveJournal blog, therefore it is lost in the mists of time and I can write about it again.  Feel free to roll your eyes at any time.

1.  There must be a good contrast in the skin.  Dark green and bright green stripes, not pale green and paler green.

2.  There is a pale spot where the watermelon rested on the ground as it grew.  This should be a buttery colour, not white.

3.  When you gently tap on the surface of an uncut watermelon, it should thrum against your fingers.  If it does not, it could be dried out and hollow in the centre.

The watermelon above was damn good.  Mr. W discovered a new way to bring it home from the grocery store without bumping around the trunk - my delicate baby is resting on my neck pillow, which is otherwise employed during long road trips since I'm susceptible to road hypnosis as a passenger.

I believe it's best eaten cold, which is a heresy to some.  Don't mess with it, either.  Don't put it in recipes or blend it into drinks.  Just eat it one inch-thick section at a time and don't stop until your stomach hurts.

Oh, and as I said before - WASH your baby with soap and water when you get it home.  It keeps the food poisoning away...trust me.

BriefLOLy

I just got an e-mail from an account rep who addressed me as "Carlolyn" (good God, that's hard to type, even).  This had not occurred to me before, how easily corrLOLrupted my name is!

There Goes Another Paycheque!

Back in the day, when Lush first came to Canada, I spent far too much money on every single thing they made - and that's saying something, since I don't like patchouli and they use it everywhere.  I'm an expert in all things relaxation so naturally the bath bomb came as a revelation.  I still like to shop there but it's become a little difficult to work around their decision to keep parabens in their cosmetics line.  (I get hives from too high a concentration of parabens.)

I also didn't agree with the introduction of talc-based items.  Lush presents itself as a eco-friendly choice.  Talc is mined, and even though it doesn't bother me that much in itself, I think that Lush should really stay away from products with talc.  Walk the talk, as they say.

I was excited to see that Lush is bringing back discontinued golden oldies that have been requested.  Am I the last person to know this?  I got my favourite late, lamented Ice Blue shampoo again!  Tingly!!  And not too many parabens!!!

Have You Ever Met a Person Without a Nutshell?

I know someone with no nutshell.  When he tells you about something that happened to him you have to hear about every detail, relevant or not.  He is incapable of summing up anything.  Today he mentioned that someone he knows has made off with his A/C unit; he was storing it at their house and they moved without giving it back.  Now think about how long it took you to read that sentence.  Let's say three seconds?  He told the story about it, first to me, then to someone else, and it took five minutes each time. 

He mentioned the names of everyone involved, even though I know none of them.  He told me where they had stored the unit and why they couldn't get it earlier in the year.  He told me about how they stopped at the convenience store on the way there and itemized his shopping list.  By the time the story was done I was looking around for a sharp point upon which to throw myself.

The art of good conversation involves constant consideration of the listener.  If you don't, you are just listening to yourself talk for the pleasure given to you by your own voice.  You are a bastard.

Let Me Just Wave My Magic Fairy Wand!

There's this woman at The Sporting Company - she doesn't work in my department.  Every once in a while she comes into the office I share with my cow-orker and asks for stuff.  It's really odd.

She doesn't start a conversation and slide her request in, or anything like that.  She will walk in, interrupting whatever conversations we might be having (unless it looks like someone important in a business suit).  She'll ask, "Do you have a loonie?"  Uhhh, no, and if I did, you wouldn't get it because there is never any reciprocation.  "Got any gum?"  She bums cigs off my smoking office mate.  She'll clean out any communal candy/doughnuts/cookies by our coffee machine, despite having their own in her department.  We suffered from ridiculous levels of toilet paper theft until recently and I think I know where to point the finger.

The requests get weirder.  The other day I'm working away on my computer, my cow-orker is listening to her voice mail and this lady walks into our office and says, "Do either of you have a hockey puck?"  My cow-orker is so astonished she hangs up the phone to hear the rest of this conversation.  I look around my office.

"No, we don't have a hockey puck.  Why do you ask?"  I say.

"I need one for my gas tank," she says.  Cow-orker and I look at each other.

Before either one of us could think of a reply, she went down the hall after the shipper who'd just passed by.  "Got a hockey puck?"

I'm thinking she must have lost her gas cap?  That's the only reasonable explanation I could formulate.  But why would she come and ask a couple of women working in an office if they had a hockey puck?  I mean, yeah, I'm a buyer for a sporting company but my desk isn't stuffed with hockey pucks, lacrosse sticks and swimming caps.

The Meta-Post

Maybe I Should Just Get a Long Shiny Weave.

I am in the midst of becoming a long-haired person.  It's not something I've had the opportunity to do a lot in my life.  My mom had short hair herself and didn't much care for the responsibility of a little girl's hair, especially after I got lice in school a couple of times.  Back in the 70's it was very unusual to see a little girl with short hair, so I got mistaken for a boy in spite of my unmistakably feminine face and girly clothes.  Even more asinine were the people who knew me and my mom - they'd see us together and look at my mom and say, "How's your little boy today?  HA HA".  I had short hair from the time I was five until I was nearly 30.  I spent a lot of time in a lab or in front of a 30 000 rpm machine and it was always easier to have it short.

The strange thing is that my hair isn't what it was in my youth.  I always had poker-straight hair and now it's wavy. Not curly and nice, just wavy and bunchy and strange.  I've always had strange hair but having it collarbone-length just emphasizes it.  I straightened my hair every day so I could tolerate the growing-out stage but I can't stand the heat of the iron in the summer so I'm trying something more natural.  I would hope that people would think it's tousled, can we use that word?

Not having grown up with the lessons of long hair, I don't really know what to do.  It's not long enough to braid in any way and I can't braid my own hair worth a damn anyway.  I never know when to comb it or how to keep the flyaways down.  I'm like a person who just got a weird new wig.

Fun House

The building I work in is a big shambolic crazy house.  It was originally some sort of educational admin building that The Sporting Company bought and converted for their purposes.  It's been annexed and added on to several times.  I work in the heart of the original old building. 

There's half-staircases connecting bits.  The fresh air intake is right next to the sewer gas outlet.  The A/C breaker had to be flipped every 20 minutes last summer or we all would've fried; someone with sufficient arm strength (AKA me) had to go out and flip an 18 inch breaker switch.  It's heated with steam and there's two positions:  Off and Full Blast.  Tiny bits of foil insulation occasionally drift down onto my desk. The toilets flushed full bore, 24/7 for about a month once.  Another time we sat in the dark and watched the nearest transformer set a telephone pole on fire. All in all it's a bit like working in the Poltergeist house.

But as annoying as our old building can be, we aren't ready to give it up.  A management-type passed by today with rough sketches for the new building.  They will build it on an adjacent section of land and then demolish our old building.  I think we will probably have to drag my boss out of there when it's time to go.  The new plans have our offices much closer to management, instead of on the opposite side of the building.  We like it the way it is now, though.  We want them to have to think good and hard before deciding to come and see us. 

We laugh a lot more on our end of the building.  A LOT more.  Sometimes I go to the other end and it's like someone just died.  I expect to hear quiet sobbing behind me.