Stupor-stitious
Hey I'm back, back in the New York groove. Did y'all miss me? Hey I've been busy; cut me some slack. It ain't easy being so popular.
OK, so it's friday the 13th. Big deal, right? I don't normally believe in that superstitious crap. But the way my day went, I'm starting to believe.
Woke up to a parking ticket on my car. This being San Francisco, that isn't unusual. Parking tickets provide this city's main source of revenue besides Alcatraz sweatshirts. But the problem is this: the ticket was for not having a parking permit sticker, which I in fact have, as prominently displayed on my bumper as it has always been. Apparently I was targeted by a blind or retarded meter maid. Now I have to go downtown and explain to the idiots at the Department of Parking that one of their idiotic employees made a mistake. Chances are, after standing in line for several hours, they will take a look at my paperwork and decide that I am right. Or maybe they won't. You never know with those morons. Either way, I get to waste some of my precious time dealing with this shit.
But if it ended there, it would not be anything unusual; just annoying. So as you might suspect, it doesn't end there.
I couldn't get my laser printer to work all freekin' day. It just wouldn't print anything. Kept getting an error message, 'printer not responding.' I tried everything: shut it down, restarted it; pulled all the cables and reconnected them; opened up all the doors and checked for jams; etc. Nothing. It worked fine yesterday, and it suddenly started to work again a few minutes ago. But during my critical get-shit-done hours, it seems to have been on strike for better working conditions or something. Who knows? Musta been gremlins or something.
Then my DSL decided to go down halfway through the day. This is not helpful. I do a lot of my work online. So I called my ISP, sat on the phone for awhile, only to be informed that there appeared to be nothing wrong with the line. The oh-so-useful tech support grunt suggested I reboot my system, which of course I had already done about ten times before making the call. A 'trouble ticket' was established, meaning that some time within the next week or two I would get a call from someone to discuss my problem. Nice. The line didn't work for a few hours, and then it magically began working, out of the blue. Gremlins again. I'm sure I'll hear from someone at the ISP someday, and perhaps they'll have an explanation. Most likely they'll say "What did you expect? It was friday the 13th."
Had a dinner date set up with someone I like a lot. The plan was to make some of my world-famous Chinese stir-fry. Yeah, I really mean world-famous. Sometimes I get a knock at the door and it's people from China wanting to come up for dinner. I think I'm in the guidebooks or something. Anyway, I went to the corner store to buy all the ingredients, one of which is of course white rice. Now, white rice wouldn't seem like a difficult item to procure, right? Except that for some reason, the corner store was completely out of it. Why? I don't know. Asian gremlins? Perhaps. So, OK, no big deal -- I head to another local grocery store, where they have shelves and shelves of brown rice -- but no white. Now, I happen to like brown rice, but I knew (from paying attention) that my soon-to-arrive dinner guest does not.
"You've got to be fucking kidding," I said out loud to nobody. And then I went home, deposted the items I had bought, and promptly climbed aboard the light rail to the big Safeway store a few stops up the line. Sure enough, Safeway had plenty of white rice, so I grabbed a package, went swiftly through the express checkout line, and got back on the train, confident that I could at last begin to prepare a proper Chinese dinner.
Got home. Started chopping things. Opened the bag of rice, ready to measure out a cup or two into the rice cooker. Opened the cabinet overhead, to get out the measuring cup. Only it would seem that items in the cabinet had mysteriously shifted during flight, and a torrent of glass bowls immediately toppled out onto my head and the countertop. You can probably guess what happened next, right?
Now I had a relatively painful, walnut-sized lump on the right side of my head, but this was not in fact the problem. Because, you see, one of the bowls had shattered into a thousand tiny glass shards all over the counter and the floor, and another had knocked the bag of rice over, dumping every last grain onto the glass-laden linoleum. Yes, there was not one teaspoon of white rice left in the bag. it was all on the floor, intermingled with glistening crystalline fragments of glass. Not good. I began to laugh -- or maybe cry, or maybe both.
After carefully sweeping up the now-deadly rice/glass/dirt mixture and tossing it uselessly into the garbage pail, I contemplated my next move. My guest was due in half an hour. Should I just make a Chinese dinner sans rice? Is that even legal?
No, I decided, this would not do.
So I heaved a large sigh -- the kind that is usually reserved for getting stuck in traffic on the way to a blind date with a dead cellphone battery -- and re-boarded the train to Safeway. The express checker gave me a strange look as I bought my second bag of plain white rice, and I gave her a look that said "don't ask."
Dinner went well.
Dessert was even better. ;)
But next time I make a date for friday the 13th, we're going to a goddamned restaurant.
* * *
OK, so it's friday the 13th. Big deal, right? I don't normally believe in that superstitious crap. But the way my day went, I'm starting to believe.
Woke up to a parking ticket on my car. This being San Francisco, that isn't unusual. Parking tickets provide this city's main source of revenue besides Alcatraz sweatshirts. But the problem is this: the ticket was for not having a parking permit sticker, which I in fact have, as prominently displayed on my bumper as it has always been. Apparently I was targeted by a blind or retarded meter maid. Now I have to go downtown and explain to the idiots at the Department of Parking that one of their idiotic employees made a mistake. Chances are, after standing in line for several hours, they will take a look at my paperwork and decide that I am right. Or maybe they won't. You never know with those morons. Either way, I get to waste some of my precious time dealing with this shit.
But if it ended there, it would not be anything unusual; just annoying. So as you might suspect, it doesn't end there.
I couldn't get my laser printer to work all freekin' day. It just wouldn't print anything. Kept getting an error message, 'printer not responding.' I tried everything: shut it down, restarted it; pulled all the cables and reconnected them; opened up all the doors and checked for jams; etc. Nothing. It worked fine yesterday, and it suddenly started to work again a few minutes ago. But during my critical get-shit-done hours, it seems to have been on strike for better working conditions or something. Who knows? Musta been gremlins or something.
Then my DSL decided to go down halfway through the day. This is not helpful. I do a lot of my work online. So I called my ISP, sat on the phone for awhile, only to be informed that there appeared to be nothing wrong with the line. The oh-so-useful tech support grunt suggested I reboot my system, which of course I had already done about ten times before making the call. A 'trouble ticket' was established, meaning that some time within the next week or two I would get a call from someone to discuss my problem. Nice. The line didn't work for a few hours, and then it magically began working, out of the blue. Gremlins again. I'm sure I'll hear from someone at the ISP someday, and perhaps they'll have an explanation. Most likely they'll say "What did you expect? It was friday the 13th."
Had a dinner date set up with someone I like a lot. The plan was to make some of my world-famous Chinese stir-fry. Yeah, I really mean world-famous. Sometimes I get a knock at the door and it's people from China wanting to come up for dinner. I think I'm in the guidebooks or something. Anyway, I went to the corner store to buy all the ingredients, one of which is of course white rice. Now, white rice wouldn't seem like a difficult item to procure, right? Except that for some reason, the corner store was completely out of it. Why? I don't know. Asian gremlins? Perhaps. So, OK, no big deal -- I head to another local grocery store, where they have shelves and shelves of brown rice -- but no white. Now, I happen to like brown rice, but I knew (from paying attention) that my soon-to-arrive dinner guest does not.
"You've got to be fucking kidding," I said out loud to nobody. And then I went home, deposted the items I had bought, and promptly climbed aboard the light rail to the big Safeway store a few stops up the line. Sure enough, Safeway had plenty of white rice, so I grabbed a package, went swiftly through the express checkout line, and got back on the train, confident that I could at last begin to prepare a proper Chinese dinner.
Got home. Started chopping things. Opened the bag of rice, ready to measure out a cup or two into the rice cooker. Opened the cabinet overhead, to get out the measuring cup. Only it would seem that items in the cabinet had mysteriously shifted during flight, and a torrent of glass bowls immediately toppled out onto my head and the countertop. You can probably guess what happened next, right?
Now I had a relatively painful, walnut-sized lump on the right side of my head, but this was not in fact the problem. Because, you see, one of the bowls had shattered into a thousand tiny glass shards all over the counter and the floor, and another had knocked the bag of rice over, dumping every last grain onto the glass-laden linoleum. Yes, there was not one teaspoon of white rice left in the bag. it was all on the floor, intermingled with glistening crystalline fragments of glass. Not good. I began to laugh -- or maybe cry, or maybe both.
After carefully sweeping up the now-deadly rice/glass/dirt mixture and tossing it uselessly into the garbage pail, I contemplated my next move. My guest was due in half an hour. Should I just make a Chinese dinner sans rice? Is that even legal?
No, I decided, this would not do.
So I heaved a large sigh -- the kind that is usually reserved for getting stuck in traffic on the way to a blind date with a dead cellphone battery -- and re-boarded the train to Safeway. The express checker gave me a strange look as I bought my second bag of plain white rice, and I gave her a look that said "don't ask."
Dinner went well.
Dessert was even better. ;)
But next time I make a date for friday the 13th, we're going to a goddamned restaurant.
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 11:59 PM
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