Just sitting around

A beautiful Sunday afternoon and we are sitting here relaxing with the TV on. I was surfing the interweb and what did I come across but my very own neglected blog. Almost forgot I had it. So, what's been up. Here we are on the last Sunday of June and things are OK. Haven't won the lottery yet. Still working. Psoriasis lousy. Really lousy. Had a nice May, a nice June. The weather has been marvelous (it doesn't get any better than this).

Good stuff and tough stuff coming soon. July will bring a first week trip to Dallas for the summer meeting of my favorite company. My favorite kind of weather in Dallas--hotter than hell and humid. Lord, I hope that I can get from the airport to the shuttle and the shuttle to the hotel quickly--like before I burn up like a vampire in the sun.

Then I come home to a wonderful weekend up at Point Bob with our favorite Canadians followed by work and prep for our summer workshop that I run coming up the last week of the month. So let's see--31 days in July and two of them are good ones. WOW! I love July.

It's Friday!

I can't believe it's finally Friday. Seems like I have been waiting for it all year. This has not been a good week. First Kathleen got shingles on Sunday, then on Wednesday I got one of the worst sinus headaches I have had in years. And work-wise this has been a typically before-I-fly stressful week. I have to head out to Jostens National Sales meeting on Sunday and getting ready for it and getting everything done before I leave can be a real pain. Especially when my head hurts so much that I am seeing double. 

Finally yesterday afternoon we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Kathleen's shingles seems to have turned the corner and started getting better. She is certainly in a better mood. And I am sitting here right now with only the slightest tinge of a headache left. The rest of my body is a little sore but that's just the end of my exercise week. Tomorrow is my day off the bike but right back on it on Sunday morning before I fly to Orlando. 

I will try and post on this blog for the week that I am gone but I am never quite sure how much internet access I will have at the hotel. I don't mind paying for internet access but I hate paying an arm and a leg. It's just wrong. Especially in a $175 a night hotel room. Thankfully I don't have to pay that, this one is on Jostens. Ever since Jostens developed a partnership with Disney we have had our meetings at a Disney hotel. My hopes are that this year's WDW hotel will be better than last years. Last year we were at the Coronado Beach Resort. Sounds nice doesn't it? It was OK room wise (kind of Motel 6 ambience) but the rooms were literally more than a mile from the meetings rooms. You had to get up 30 minutes early just to be at breakfast on time and no chance going back to your room if you forget anything. 

This year we are at the Contemporary Hotel which is one of WDW's oldest hotels but recently renovated. But it is an indoor motel. Everything under one roof. That's how a convention hotel should be. Where you can run back to your room if you forget something and you can do it in under 15 minutes. 

It's also funny how everyone I told I was going to Florida today said something like this, "Oh, at least you'll be warm," or "Sun! There's sun!." Well let me describe my day trip. I fly on Sunday and get in around 9:30 pm. I go right to the hotel and go to bed so I can be up for breakfast by 7:00 and teaching a class in Photoshop by 8:00. I teach until lunch then we have a group lunch, then I teach Photoshop 2 from 1:00 pm to 5:00. Then an hour for a group dinner and I teach InDesign until 10:00 pm. That's my day. Then I stagger back to my room and try and talk on the phone with Kathleen. Then off to bed to basically repeat the day the next day except that after noon, I no longer teach, I am now just in the audience until Thursday evening when I dress for an awards banquet. We have no free time other than one evening when I will probably have dinner with friends and that's it. No sun, no warm (they keep the meeting rooms freezing) for the week. I will have to wait to enjoy Florida until we go back to sail on Solstice in March.

Nothing makes me feel smaller

Today I was made to feel small. And then I made myself feel smaller still. Let me explain, no let me sum up. (PB reference, sorry.)

This morning Kathleen had to go in to work for a little while. I went and did the grocery shopping but before that I got to go to my FAAAVVVOOORRRIIIITTTEEE store, (please hear Steve Martin Excuuuuuuussseee Me sarcasm there) Home Depot. There is no place I can think of that I feel smaller than a home improvement store. I would actually rather go to the dentist than a Lowe's or a Home Depot. Hell, I would rather have a prostate exam. 

When I go into a home improvement store I feel like a total moron. I know absolutely nothing about so called "do it yourself." Now, as you saw a few days ago, I can handle it around the house. I hire someone to fix things. And thankfully, I now have someone who I can hire. But I should be able to go and buy the things that my "handyman" can install or maybe, I can.

So this morning, I went to get a replacement for the timer that runs our laundry room fan. My new handyman guy had pulled it off for me, given me some instructions of how to hook it back up once I had it in hand. So off I went to buy one. Home Depot is in the midst of the recession like no other store I have seen. There were probably four or six employees standing around talking all over the store. Talking to each other. I was one of probably 15 customers in the store. 

Now, I have no clue where the timers are so I ask. I am not the kind of person who can't ask directions. I have no problem with that. I was told there on aisle 48 and the guy who told me pointed to the right. Since I was at aisle 4, and he pointed to the right, I started walking. As I approached the other end of the store I got to row 24. That meant that row 48 was in the back of the store so I started walking to the back of the store and back the other way. Got all the way to the other end of the store and there was row 48 was right behind my original row 4. 

Then I found the timers but nothing looked remotely like the one I was replacing. I was kind of expecting that since the one I am replacing is 10 years old. So I had to find someone to ask which one they thought would work to replace the one I had. 

That meant that I had to walk back to about row 24 where there were six employees standing and talking with each other. After standing patiently while they finished their conversation, one finally noticed me and asked if he could help me. He walked with me back down to the timer aisle and on the way said he knew nothing about timers but would call someone who did. And the guy they call, the expert, he's the one who always does the best job of making me feel small. His entire attitude is an unspoken, "You're a guy. Can't you figure this out yourself?" By that I mean he walked up and looked at me with disdain, looked at my old timer and snorted that "we aren't going to be able to replace this." 

But eventually he handed me a new electronic timer and said that it should work. I asked how the small little timer would fill the much larger hole in the wall that had housed the original timer. He said I could buy a plate separately and that they were "down that way," and he pointed off up the aisle. Then walked away shaking his head as if to say, "What an idiot." 

Well this idiot (that's me) then spent about 25 minutes trying to find the plate to go over it that he undoubtedly could have found in his sleep in about two seconds. After finding it, finding a new snow shovel I wanted to buy to ward off any future snowstorms, talking to the manager about how much I hate coming to Home Depot I went home to unload the groceries and to try and install the timer. 

Before I had unhooked the old timer, I had labeled all the wires with the color of wire they had come off of. There were three of them. Red, black and white. They were connected on the old timer to red, black and white wires. As fun as it sounds, when I opened the new timer it had a red, blue, green and black wire. No white in site and the directions said what to do when you had two or four wires coming out of the wall. I had three. 

There you have it folks. I can't feel a lot stupider and smaller than that. I packed everything up in a bag and tomorrow I will call my new handyman guy and pay him $50 to come back and put in my new timer cause maybe he can figure it out. The instructions might as well have been printed in Greek to me.

Why can't...

Consider this the first rant of my blog. In this rant, I want to ask why can't a company be consistent in their service and product. 

I have a company that I have proofread most of the publications I produce. They are based just south of Toronto. I have been using them for two years and up until about a two months ago, they were outstanding. I would complete a project, export it as a PDF, upload it on their website, pay with my VISA and the next morning I get get back the PDF with corrections highlighted in pink. I make the corrections and I go to press. It was a great system. 

But two months ago they sent me back a document with mistakes still in place. After two years of using them with no known problems, I went to press with those mistakes and it cost me a customer. Others were more forgiving. 

Last Friday I uploaded my monthly newsletter and was expecting to have it back this morning. The first strange thing that happened was that I got an e-mail saying the project was ready in about an hour. Usually it takes 24 hours but I figured, what the heck, maybe business was slow that day. So I downloaded the file but couldn't see any corrections. I e-mailed asking them for a new one. They said it was my problem and I should look again but they still redownloaded the file for me. Again, nothing. I e-mailed them again and asked them to redownload it for me before Monday (this morning). 

This morning, there was a new copy to download but when I opened it, nothing. Then I zoomed in closer and sure enough there were some edits. They were so tiny it was almost impossible to see them except when enlarged to about 250%. That was ridiculous. I was sure I would miss something. But I had a deadline today so I decided to go ahead and work with what they had sent. 

But once I got into the actual edits I had a problem. I have parts of the newsletter that I reuse on a yearly basis with minor changes. For instance there is a monthly calendar of reminders. They really don't change that much from year to year and the format NEVER changes. Well, this editor said that the way I had been doing it was wrong. Wrong grammatically, wrong punctuation-wise. Wrong. 

So who was right? The editor that told me to change everything this month or the editor that has been doing my stuff for the last two years? This was ridiculous. So I e-mailed them again (they have no phone number) and about two hours later I got back a file that was done by my regular editor, the regular way.

So, the company came through, finally. But my question is this, isn't grammar always right or wrong? I thought it was like math. 2 + 2=4, right? How can one editor say one thing and another something else?

And how can a business change the basic format of their work. That would like me publishing me my newsletter in Spanish next month. You could still read it but you would have do some really hard work to do it. 

So that's my first rant. Did I decide to dump the company (www.scribendi.com)? Nope, I will give them another chance. Mainly because finding them originally was a real pain and I really don't want to go through that again. But I will be more vigilant and plan my publications with time to get things redone.