Write What You Know

If that were the guiding principle here, the page would be all design-y borders with a big blank space in the middle. Maybe I’ll just write what I’ve seen over the last few days instead. I don’t actually know what’s happening, but that has never stopped me before.

But let’s get the greetings out of the way first:

Welcome Question Refugees!

As I’ve whined elsewhere, not only has my Lovely Writing Partner abandoned the Question Project, but now My Beautiful and Talented Bride™ has as well. We all used to work together over an instant messaging service to cook up a question for your consumption every weekday. My partner would send out email to a group, a task I now handle, and the missus would post to a special companywide bulletin board.

She stopped doing that as of a week or so ago.

She has sent folks here today for their Question fix. I’m glad so many of you decided to visit, and I hope you’ll stick around for some more stupid crap. Henceforth, only from the keyboard of me. I promise to continue the tradition of ill-considered, half-baked nonsense though, so you can stop worrying that anything of substance will change.

[begin rant] Not that I’m bitter that everyone bailed or anything. Circumstances change and I understand that. It was certainly getting much more difficult to get everyone together to collaborate, but still, geez.[end rant]

404 The TLAs

I’m the primary contact at the Omnipresent Non-Profit Charitable Organization for the company installing our new phone system. That’s just fine in itself. I’ve developed a rapport with the programmer who is trying to make the new gizmos retain at least as many functions as the old gizmos. (by the way, they’re not phones, they’re “sets.” get it straight, bub)

Even this wouldn’t be a problem if we knew exactly what the old system actually does. Which numbers ring where? Who can pick up what line? Who is prohibited from picking up what line? What happens when the fax machine tries to get an outside line?

And I’m asking people these questions who don’t know what the right buttons on their mouse does (before the snickering begins, Macs can have two-button mice too. you end up with a control-click unless you change it to do something else, like do all of your work faster in a more stable operating system environment—but I digress.)

The information I need to plan the functions of the phones is trickling in, mostly in the form of a panicky phone call to my boss whenever I publish a new, new revised phone list. By the way, the new system goes live at the end of next week. My contract with said charity ends a week after that.

Happy dialing kids!

Your pal,

bob