September 30, 2009

Exposure.

I’m a tech geek. I love all things techy and cool. To feed my tech geek needs, I watch many of the CNET TV podcasts that are released daily. I’m a big fan of “Loaded“, “Mailbag“, “Top 5” and many others. (I do wish they would do more Linux based shows, though.)

A couple of weeks ago my friend Greg was sick in bed with the flu. Trying to be the concerned friend that I am, I sent him a text message with the advice to get plenty of liquids, except my iPhone thought I should say “get plenty of liquor” in it’s attempt to be all knowing. I thought this was humourous, so I sent it into the CNET Mailbag “Autoincorrect” segment, where Molly Wood features humourous autocorrect snafus that many geeks can share a hearty laugh about.

My autoincorrect was featured on yesterday’s show. It made me giggle to hear someone else read it.

cnetautoincorrect.png

As a quick aside, I really enjoy Molly’s style. She seems like she’d be fun to have dinner with.

Idle.

So I am on-call this week, hence the reason for my lack of blog updates over the past couple of days. On-call week is going as expected when the weather forecast calls for rain, rain, thunderstorms, wind and more rain. I’m not swamped at the moment but I have been busy right along.

Being on-call for this job is so much different than being on-call for the radio station gig. At the radio station I was on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This would mean that I would get called once in a while by anyone at the radio station with any given crisis: “I’ve plugged the vacuum cleaner into the server rack and everything went dark and the radio stopped playing”, “Why are we playing ‘Oops I Did It Again’ by Britney Spears?” or “The computer in the studio has gone crazy and keeps playing the weather forecast over and over again!”

My current on-call gig is a whole ‘nother bunch of wires; I basically do my job 24 hours a day seven days a week for a week on an as needed basis. Last night I dealt with a power outage, a very surly Verizon technician who couldn’t be bothered to put the food he was eating down to speak to me, multiple broken DSL connections and an ornery Outlook Express inbox that kept hiding an AARP newsletter. I’m not complaining as I’ll be quite happy with my choice of extra days off or the overtime in return, but nevertheless it does like I put my life on hold for a week whilst I do the on-call thing.

It’s sort of like sitting at a traffic light that has just turned red. I have to wait until it turns green (at least in theory). While I wait at the light, I can’t do much but look around and see what’s going on around me. I’ll answer a text message or phone call or I’ll busy myself by picking up the stray fries that are wedged under the stick shift.

But until that light turns green, I’m just sitting there idling.