I absolutely hate the word “blog”

This morning I came in to work late because I had been at the dentist earlier, so I was already a bit stressed about missing extra hours during this potential crunch time for us. Thus, to maximize efficiency and minimize unpleasantness, I wasted no time in getting to my computer to turn it on so it could boot up while I got my daily mug of tea, checked on orders, said hellos to coworkers, etc. But alas, my computer would not turn on.

The power button on my computer’s tower has always been kind of difficult to push - you have to depress the sides rather than the middle, and even then it has to be done rather forcefully. Sometimes it even hurts my fingers, and often my coworkers are stymied by it in my absence. So I figured it was just being extra-testy - but no, upon repeated firm beatings, no such luck. After three of us had attempted it, we tried to open up the computer’s casing to fiddle with it internally and see what was wrong, but we couldn’t get the case off.

After a call to tech support confirming that our warranty did not allow for calls to tech support, I managed to get an online chat guy who sent me a link to a page telling me how to install memory - he said that page should include instructions for how to remove the casing. Even though the page he sent had instructions for a different model than mine, I managed to a) detach the casing on the computer, b) figure out exactly what the problem was, and c) fix it myself, making it no longer testy and hard to push in the future. I’ve never fixed a mechanical device by opening it up and tinkering with it before - I felt super-intelligent, victorious, thrilled, skilled, brilliant, etc. All those things. I told Danny the tech support guy that victory was mine and I had fixed my machine, as he had insisted on waiting in the chat window until I had the thing open.

But you know what my favorite aspect of all that was? It was when he then asked me if I was typing to him from the same computer THAT HE HAD DIRECTED ME TO DISASSEMBLE and that I had SUCCESSFULLY DISASSEMBLED. Yes, Danny H, HP ID#46839. Yes, I am typing to you from the perfectly-safely-disassembled computer tower which I left plugged in whilst tinkering with its electronic components. That is what I am doing. Aaahhh, Danny. Danny made my day. Hooray for the Internet and all that, but far more hoorays to ME. I’m never calling tech support again. Okay, that’s a lie, and laptops are probably way harder to tinker with, but I’m still pleased with myself.

So this is uncharacteristically after the fact of me, but here is an article from the P-I a couple weeks ago about my cell phone woes and the resultant happy aftermath. Long story short, I was having massive troubles with my crappy phone and crappy T-Mobile service - it had been good for ages and then both the service and the actual phone and battery started sucking all at once, hard. Plus I started suddenly texting with a certain few people a lot more (you know who you are!) so I was getting ridiculously expensive charges for that, and I didn’t want to pay $10/month for texting. So I sat around whining about it a lot and missing a lot of calls.

But as serendipity would have it, a friend at the P-I who used to have great advice column submissions decided to call in a “favor” - you’ll see why the quotations are merited in a few lines - for a colleague of hers. Seems the colleague needed a submission to her own Consumer Alerts type column, and well, my friend thought of me… which was quite convenient for me. So I wrote the friend’s friend (Candace, who wrote the article) and blathered on and on (of course, in my typical fashion, not realizing until after the fact that everything I said was in fact on the record) and she did all this awesome research, pitting companies against each other to win me as a customer given my ridiculous and lengthy and particular list of requirements, etc.

In the end, Verizon won, and I got myself one of them kickass Chocolate phones from LG. I was skeptical about having a phone that to me seemed like a 13 year old’s wet dream, plus I wasn’t sure about LG after having had Motorollas for my past three phones… but I got a great deal by quoting the Internet price to the in-store rep, and I got a bunch of free and discounted accessories (which is important for me since I never remember to charge my phone so I always just keep a charger at home, one at work, and one in the car. Memory therapy would probably be cheaper, in hindsight). It was a great deal, a great phone (with the slight exception that it’s easy to accidentally mute calls with your face if you use a touch-tone menu, because typing any number key unlocks the touch-sensitive panel your cheek rests against) and I’m excited to learn how to load mp3s onto it, something I have yet to find the time to do. But soon! And it takes pictures and videos, and has a pseudo Palm Pilot-y agenda function.

Best of all, this was ME doing a “favor” to HER. I kept asking my friend where I should send the fruit basket as a thank-you, and they seemed to think I was kidding…

I just watched my roommate hold her leftover corn cob (mostly removed of corn via her human teeth) so her dog could nibble the remnants off, exactly like people eat corn (except for the whole someone-else-having-to-hold-it-for-her part).

A random anecdote, perhaps, but it made me want to get with the digital age. Lately, lots of things have - lately I totally want to catch up with the rest of the world and get the following:

-a CD player for my car that actually plays burned CDs instead of just store-bought ones, sometimes, and badly

-an iPod - ’nuff said. I would love one o’ them.

-a digital camera/video thingy. I have seen so many things I wanted to take pictures of lately, and I have a crappy camera in my phone, but I only recently learned how to get pictures *out* of my phone, and even then, it costs like $4 every time I do so, and the pictures suck, and I don’t know how to send them anywhere other than another person’s phone. So if, for example, I wanted to take a picture of my roommate’s dog eating corn on the cob in an eerily human-like fashion, let alone upload a short videoclip of such activity, I would be hard-pressed to do so.

You see my dilemma, I trust. I was about to type “Bob Saget, eat my heart out!” but then I realized he probably doesn’t host America’s Funniest Home Videos anymore. Now I feel old on two counts, awesome. Three if you count that I seriously don’t know what you call a “digital video thingy” in tech-speak.

So I’ve decided I’m sticking with the crappy BlogTastic beta, I think. Why? Well, I could go on about how it was fate that I picked this one, or about how the universe has directed me to a comment-free bugged beta bloghost for a cosmically salient reason - but the truth is, I’m too lazy to learn a new interface, plus I like the grass. So BlogTastic it is, my friends. Oops, I mean my imaginary readers. Because, see, with no comments function, I actually have very little clue as to how many of you there might be. Alas. I might have an e-ARMY! Hey if I ever decide to mobilize for a just cause, will y’all join me? I’ll keep you posted. Anyway, it’s probably better off that I can’t get comments, because then I’d just be sad when no one actually wrote any comments - whereas now, I can imagine that there’s this mass of readers who are just DYING to tell me all about how great/funny/annoying/witty/embarrassing/boring/other I am, but they can’t, for lack of a functional “comments” section. See how easy that is?

On a completely unrelated subject, I’m reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, and it made me start thinking — why is it that some trends stick in fashion, and not others? And don’t go telling me that some are cute and some not so much — because, can I just say, there are some ugly-ass trends out there these days. I’m not going to list them all, because, if nothing else, I’d probably offend some of my friends who read this, but I have to just complain about one trend here: capri pants with boots. NOT OKAY. Never gonna be okay. Boots are for cold weather, capris are for warm weather. Mixing them is like mixing, I dunno, piña coladas and apple cider, or chopped liver and maraschino cherries, or oil and water, or Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher. OK, I’m done for now.