In today’s mail I got my lease renewal and a letter from my bank advising that my secured account is being converted to an unsecured one. I have to admit that both of those things could have been sent in electronic format, but they certainly wouldn’t have been as satisfying.

My lease won’t go up by that much per month starting this May. I’m starting to think my landlord wasn’t kidding when he said I could pretty much stay here for as long as I liked. It’s still a monthly rent that most people not living in DC would hear and say “You pay how much!?” But when I compare it with the prices I see in current ads from around the area, it’s quite reasonable.

The credit card thing may not seem like a big deal, but when my debt was to the point where I was taken to court over one balance — it’s huge. I only put about 5 or 10 dollars a month on the card, but if they see paying that off as responsible, who am I to complain?

I was so good last night, popped a tv show on the PC and went to bed at a decent hour. And I had the oddest dream, well part of it was odd and part of it was more like “Yoo hoo, McFly?”

It started out with me being backstage prepping for a concert, but I had no idea who the performer was. It was completely drama-free, everything goes off without a hitch except that the crowds were not really pouring in. Come to find out after I’m done and seated in the audience that it was Natalie Merchant. I like her but I’m not overwhelmed by her, so maybe the lack of crowds isn’t so odd, but I have no idea what our venue was. It looked about the size of your average high-school cafeteria plus stage except much better decorated. It was a good show and I remember taking her picture afterwards but not checking my camera to see how it came out.

Then there was that odd transition-less transition to somewhere else and I found myself stepping out of my car about to head into an office building. It should be noted that my car was clearly an expensive one, however the lot was full of expensive cars and even a limo, so perhaps it had become the standard. The way this all pieces together is kinda odd. I got to the front desk and was trying to inquire about whether or not they’d sent me an offer letter without actually asking. Maybe not to seem too eager? So I told them that I wanted to be sure they had my correct address for the background check, etc. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the offer letter on one of the admins’ desks, freshly signed, so I stalled the person I was speaking to until I saw it put into an envelope and made ready for sending.

As I turned around, my friend Michael was in ze lobby filling out a job application for the place, I think. He had riding leathers on, a bit more modern style, but definitely leather, so he clearly had a motorcycle out in the parking lot… one would think. This gave me a reason to sit down and chat for a bit. We definitely spoke about a college football game that was coming up over the holiday weekend. (a clear sign that this was a dream) While we were talking, a UPS deliveryman showed up to collect the packages which included my offer letter. As he was walking out, he saw me, looked down at the name and handed it to me. He was the same UPS guy from my office, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he recognized me, but it was a bit weird considering the label had my home address on it.

I finished chatting with Michael and headed back to my car. Not long after that my alarm went off and I started my snooze cycle. I never even opened the letter to see what it said. Still, I don’t think I need the Big Book of Dreams to know there’s some kind of message there.

Or at least that’s what it felt like early this morning. I put together a little happy hour outing last night to Larry’s Lounge on 18th St NW just off Dupont Circle. It’s a great place, but the one benefit and drawback is that primarily you are seated to have your drinks and the server/bartender comes over to take your order and take care of you. I’m used to going to bars/lounges where it’s mostly standing and fighting your way to a spot at the bar to get your booze. This extra effort counts (in my mind) as exercise and also has the potential to delay your imbibing which is a good thing on certain nights. Larry’s does offer food, from the Straits of Malaya just next door, and the bartender is also willing to take your order for that!

I think that I’m so used to going to places that don’t combine the elements of seating plus ordering. Most restaurants with bars that offer happy hour won’t give you the specials if you get seated at a table. Which tends to suck at places such as Merkado because they have great mojitos and margaritas, but their bar section is small with few seats and many people try to do the “these are saved” thing — the bars don’t discourage this, which can annoy one to no end. Bars and lounges are nice but generally standing room only, so when you order martinis and they fill it to the rim, getting back to your spot can be a bit tricky. Though I’m fairly sure that martinis are nature’s sobriety tests, if you can walk steadily enough to carry one more than a few feet then you’re good to keep drinking.

So Michael, Gregory and I met up with James, then Wesley and Jamie, then Vincent. Lotsa chat, lotsa laughs… lotsa drinks! We left around 11 and OMG it was cold out. I mean it was pretty cold walking there before drinking, but I’m sure there were a lot of frozen nuts at our respective apartments around midnight. I believe I downed a vodka cranberry, two fuzzy navels and 1½ kamikazes. These were not for the meek, they weren’t holding back because it was happy hour, he wasn’t trying to pace the liquor. It’s definitely a good spot to go if you like a drink or two, but take friends. The chatting and goofing around made for good natural breaks between cocktails.

“However, the day after…!” — I was hurting today, I got good sleep, I wasn’t sick, but I woke up really dehydrated You know you’re dehydrated when just the water hitting your skin in the shower makes you feel better. Work was rough, but I had a fairly mindless task I was able to throw myself into and aside from the slight lack of focus, I was pretty good. The post-3 hour closing for retraining Starbucks coffee packs a much bigger caffeine punch but I hit a bit of a wall when I got home. Still, managed to get a few dozen cookies baked for an office potluck tomorrow and I think tonight will be an early bedtime.

I hope you’re already reading xkcd, but if not, you really should. Especially the geeks and most especially the math geeks. This one is more for the current and former band geeks out there, and I just kinda lost it at the office with a really loud cackle. Thankfully, they already assume that I’m pretty much insane, so no biggie.

Ctrl+Alt+Del also brings the funny with a well-worn, but brilliantly executed, joke: “Intelligence Optional”. Does anyone know what GTFO means?

Y’know, it’s been a while since I’ve had a really bad customer service experience so I suppose I was way overdue. Thankfully it didn’t exactly happen to me, though considering where we were, we should have already learned our lessons. Gregory and I were at Prince George’s Plaza last night in the newer retail development where there’s a Staples and a Circuit City. Yes, the same Circuit City where the employee couldn’t be bothered to help me make an informed decision about an HDTV, cutting me off and walking away mid-sentence. Still, he needed some, in my opinion, overly-specialized and immediately redundant equipment (an Easy Transfer cable for Windows Vista), and since he lives barely down the road from the stores they seem the most likely options in which to make the purchase.

He spotted the device at Staples, but also thought that he might be better off with a USB flash drive which apparently can accomplish the same result and would have a lot more use after the transfer of data. So he plucks a good candidate (8GB) off the shelf, not the actual product of course but a box with label inside, and finds an employee to retrieve it for him. I didn’t hear whether there was an actual exchange, but she took it from him and headed towards “the back” after also getting a similar request from another customer. Since he needed other items, we wandered around a bit through the aisles. At one point, I did try to get her attention to ask if she found it, but she ignored me completely while trying to serve a customer. (I say “serve”, she was actually trying to desperately upsell him to something he didn’t need) So I joined Gregory in browsing. Both of us used to love going to office supply stores, but lately it’s just sort of a *meh* experience.

After enough time we headed back to the flash drive area and found the same woman that had helped us before. She was working on unboxing and stocking some items and he asked her if she found it. She told him that they were still looking for it. This seemed only a tiny bit unreasonable, but not completely unbelievable so we kept browsing. After another bit of time we found her joking around with another employee, both of them playing around on laptops. He asked her to check on it again and she asked him which item it was. He told her again (we couldn’t show her the box because it was still “in the back”) and she said, “Oh I had another customer asking about that!” to which he responded, “Yeah, that was me.” She then said that they were out of stock for that particular item. Showing remarkable but not exactly complete restraint, he made an issue of having his time wasted while waiting for her to get back to him when she knew that they didn’t have the item. And the main kicker that turns this from a minor inconvenience to a crap experience was that she listened to him and then walked away. She didn’t offer the slightest apology or mention alternate solutions, nothing at all. And we did try to look at other items that might be suitable, but at that point we just put down our potential purchases and left.

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