Ponderings and Musings

I have mentioned before that I have a master clock system wired throughout our house. Typically found in schools, there is a computer sitting in the basement acting as the “master” clock and once a minute the clocks in each room click-click ahead to the next minute. All of the clocks are made by The Standard Electric Time Company of Springfield, Mass. and even though they’re all from different eras and schools (as my collection has grown over the years), they’re all compatible with one another and theoretically could have existed in the same building, much like they’re wired in our house.

I know, this clock collection makes me even more of a geek, but I have had an interest in the clocks since my first day of kindergarten, sitting on the floor in Room 5, Mrs. Mosher’s room. The clock clicked to 9:00 and a buzzer sounded, signaling the beginning of the day. It was neat.

As I have collected clocks over the years (including three clocks from my elementary school), I have built quite a collection and have connected with others throughout the country that share this interest. There’s some comfort to know that others live in that lunatic fringe of geekdom with me.

I have recently discovered all of the yearbooks available on classmates.com. This has helped me see some of the clocks I have collected in their natural habitat. It has also given me the opportunity to see what kind of clocks are in an abandoned building or some art deco wonder of a school that I may have spotted during our travels. For example, on my bike ride yesterday, I rode by an impressive looking school building in Oxford. A quick look at one of their yearbooks confirmed that they indeed had a Standard Electric system, as seen in this shot from their office.

Going through these old yearbooks I can’t help but notice how much nicer the students and teachers were dressed back in the day. Folks looked well groomed. We might not always agree with the beliefs of the time, but superficially speaking, at least folks looked good. It’s amazing how much times have changed. I don’t know if there’s a lot of schools that have “Future Homemakers of America” or Rifle Clubs these days.

By the way, I’m always curious as to who remembers their clocks from elementary or high school. Here’s a picture of one of the clocks from my collection. Purely designed for functional purposes only, I still find these to be wicked cool.

I have a bit of a pet peeve that I’m going to rant a little bit about. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way and makes me feel judgmental about a person. While it isn’t right to be judgmental about a person based on a superficial aspect of a conversation, I think I have some sort of point here buried in this muddy blog post.

The scenario goes like this: “Picture it, a restaurant, anywhere in the present day.”

Server, noticing you have finished up your meal: “Would you like any dessert?”

Customer: “Sure, I’m in the mood for a little something. What do you have?”

Server: “I have a delicious blueberry pie and a chocolate thunder thighs godiva high cake. I also have some scones leftover from yesterday.”

I. The server said “I”. The server personally has blueberry pie, chocolate thunder things godiva high cake and leftover scones. It makes one wonder what the other servers are serving for dessert. Are there desserts better than the desserts being offered by our server, since it seems like every server has their own desserts to offer? Perhaps the server over yonder has something in vanilla. I was in the mood for something vanilla, too.

My point is the “I”. This was something that was hammered into my head as a young lad when I worked at the family business. “Can I help you?” was a no-no. “What can we do for you?” It’s the team you’re dealing with, all of us that work here have banded together to bring you the best experience possible. To say “I” implies that you bring something that others can’t, which doesn’t really foster teamwork.

“I have Guinness and Coors Lite on tap.”

I want to watch when you push the bartender out of the way to get my Guinness from YOUR tap.

“We have Guinness and Coors Lite on tap.”

Much better.

While I am a loner and a bit of an introvert and one that would rather do things in solitude instead of in the middle of a crowd, I still all I can do to make our team look its best. Teamwork: that is what it’s about in most workplaces today and by using the singular, “my team” or “I fixed it”, you’re basically telling me that you can handle it on your own and/or you’re just out for your own good.

I’m not that insecure. I will always use the “we”. Though I may approach it alone, I’m always part of the team.

Three days in a row at the office this week. How do people handle this five days at work thing? No offense to those that have a cubicle around me, but I’m looking forward to working from home tomorrow.

The community task group team at work is having a fundraiser today. For just $5.00 we could enjoy a picnic lunch of two hot dogs with onions and/or meat sauce, potato salad, chips, a drink and a cookie. I love it. In fact, I rearranged my in-the-office schedule this week so I could participate. I can never resist a good hot dog from the grill and helping out worthy causes is always a good thing. I believe this month’s effort benefits one of the local youth cancer support groups.

One of the things that I like about the company I work for is that efforts like these are absolutely encouraged. We all need to be helping each other when and where we can and even little efforts like these can make a big difference. I always try to support the community team when I can.

Sometimes a little thing can bring a big smile to someone’s face.

This is turning out to be an interesting Monday. I started work a few minutes early this morning and within one minute of logging onto the corporate IM system I was getting hysterical messages telling me to join a conference bridge for troubleshooting purposes.

Someone needs to get the cobwebs out of my head before that sort of thing happens.

Earl started with some sniffles on Friday night. He’s been “meh” throughout the weekend. Last night he was in bed before 7 p.m. and this morning he slept in until just before 8. He ran to work, did what he had to do and then came home and is now parallel parked on the couch. I heated up some chicken noodle soup for him. I’m hoping he feels better because I don’t like seeing my husband sick.

For some insane reason I decided to tackle the “really big hill” this morning on my bike. Turning left out of our driveway is always a bit of an incline, but I usually hop off the hill at the first left turn about a half mile from the house. This morning I just kept going up the hill and two miles later I was feeling like I accomplished something. Plus, I was freezing. The weather has been picture perfect for the past five days and it looks like the trend is going to continue for the next couple of days as well. The abundant sunshine has helped me feel wonderful lately. And feeling wonderful is a wonderful thing.

A friend of mine recently asked about the technical details of creating and maintaining a blog. I hadn’t talked about the mechanics of this blog in a while, so it was fun to kind of remember what it took to get this thing going and what is running in the background to bring this alleged enjoyment to the dear reader. For the curious, this blog runs on WordPress on a wind-powered server in my own server-space. This makes maintaining the blog just a little more challenging in that I need to stay on top of doing software updates and the like so I don’t compromise the security of the site. If anyone has any further questions as to the technicalities of the blog, you’re always free to drop me a line.

After my friend and I discussed the mechanics of the blog and I offered the alternate suggestion of using the wordpress.com platform (which is essentially the same thing that I do, only using WordPress’ own servers, which are always patched), he asked me one more question: “Why do I blog?”

You know, I haven’t thought about this one in a while either. My blog is nearly 12 years old. Back when I started blogging, the whole personal blog thing was in it’s heyday. People were just starting to see the journalistic possibilities of the blogging platform. I didn’t even know it was a “blog” when I started it; I just started writing as an exercise for building webpages.

But what motivates me to blog? Mainly creativity. I don’t do nearly enough creative writing. I love painting a picture with words and it seems like I never have enough time to do that sort of thing. I try to write something at least once a day, but when I put myself on some sort of schedule I run into writer’s block. The words just have to flow when they can flow. Using my iPad to blog has helped a lot in this regard.

I have zero interest in making money off my blog. There are no ads on my blog. There is no paywall. I don’t think there’s a problem with charging to view a blog if you have something credible and interesting to share, but if you’re just writing along the same lines as the things I tend to write about, I don’t think that it’s worth charging users for. It’s just my personal preference.

I know that I write in my blog because I enjoy sharing my slice of life with the world. On the occasions where I’ve wrestled with something, emotional, mentally, physically, psychotically, whatever, there has been some comfort in being able to read the blog of someone have a similar experience. One doesn’t feel nearly alone in the world when evidence points to the contrary.

I guess I also write for my personal amusement. Earl laughs at me because I will occasionally read a blog entry from a few years ago and laugh at myself. That helps me keep in good spirits when I might be feeling the winter blahs or whatever.

So I’m hoping that my friend will start a blog and share his life experience with those that may be interested. There’s not a lot of personal blogs left these days; it seems everyone goes for the quick updates via the social networks.

Once in a while it’s good to let the paragraphs flow. I know I enjoy it.

I mentioned a while back that I really enjoyed the NBC series “The Event”. True to NBC traditional behavior, the network canceled the series before we ever really found out what the event actually was, but that’s what network executives do nowadays.

One of the big themes of the series was that there was some big event that was going to happen. This contributed to the undercurrent of suspense that was always present. What was going to be life altering? What was going to change things? How were things going to change? What was The Event?

I’m feeling that way in life right now. I don’t know that there is an event on my horizon as much as I want an event to be on my horizon. Perhaps this is yet another chapter in some sort of mid-life crisis. I’m basically a happy guy and I love my life, but I feel like there’s something that I should be doing or something that should be happening that hasn’t been done or happened yet. I worry that I might be missing out on something. Whilst many parts of my life wade into the deep water, I feel like there’s way too much going on in the shallow. Do we need to move? Am I challenged enough? Are my current challenges too predictable? Am I in the wrong museum, looking at the wrong big picture, yet again?

I don’t think that last question is the case. I like what I do, I like with whom I do it and I don’t feel a need to change there. That goes for all facets of my life. All of my relationships are rock-solid and I wouldn’t change a thing there. Maybe it’s the landscape. Maybe it’s the last vestiges of cabin fever, though we’ve been traveling enough that one would think that wouldn’t be an issue. Perhaps it’s a fear of a rut.

For lack of a better term, I feel like I’m not deep enough into the waters of life. I feel like I’m wearing a pair of floaties.

Maybe I need to jump out of an airplane or something.

So after a busy day yesterday, Earl and I were frankly too lazy to do anything about making supper last night. So we decided to go out. Not wanting to spend a lot of money and not in the mood for anything extravagant, but still wanting a relatively healthy menu to choose from, we went to a diner that isn’t too far away. We go to this diner often, but I don’t think we had ever been there on a Monday night. We figured it wouldn’t be too busy.

It wasn’t busy at all and before we knew it, we were seated in a large booth and looking over the menu. It was kind of weird being in the place on a Monday night because it was a completely different staff; it was kind of like watching a Broadway show with all understudies or something (nothing against understudies, by the way). The energy of the diner was more subdued than usual. We figured it was the Monday vibe.

Looking around I noticed a table of older woman sitting directly behind Earl and Jamie. They looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place where I knew them from. Had I encountered them at the grocery store? At a bank, perhaps? This gave me something to ponder for a while.

The server came over and didn’t really seem interested in pleasantries. She just kind of asked what we wanted to drink and shuffled off. When she came back, Jamie asked if he could have a plain, grilled-cheese sandwich to go along with a bowl of the tomato soup he had just ordered. She kind of clucked and said, “of course we can make a plain, grilled-cheese sandwich.” Her reply felt incomplete, like it was missing the words “you idiot” at the end, but perhaps she was into word conservation. Earl asked for a hamburger. She looked at him incredulously as he continued with his order.

“Uh, how would you like the hamburger cooked?”, again, with “you idiot” silently implied. Her cluck was accompanied by an eye roll.

At this moment I decided to keep my mouth shut and tweeted my frustration instead with a vague tweet:

tweet

I placed my order, filling in all the gaps that I already knew about because I always order the same thing and the pleasant server just confirms. There was no way anyone was going to cluck or roll on my watch.

She shuffled off to do her thing and I watched her busy herself around the diner. The kitchen door would wave open far enough where I could see food assembly in progress. A few observations:

1. She doesn’t like ice scoops. She’d rather use the serving glass as a shovel. That’s a NYS Health Department no-no.
2. She doesn’t like tongs. She’d rather throw a lemon wedge in a glass of water with her hands. That’s a NYS Health Department no-no.
3. She doesn’t like tongs. She’d rather throw the a pre-made lettuce salad into the bowl with her hands and then casually wipe her nose. That’s a NYS Health Department no-no.

I wasn’t in the mood to be confrontational so I let these things go because honestly, I had observed this behavior after we had all of our food and drinks and I figured I was already going to die so I might as well have a crowd join me in the better place.

As we made our way through the meal, she stopped by once and without ever looking us in the eye, she asked if everything was ok and then shot away. No refills for you!

She stopped by the table behind Earl and Jamie before stopping by our table to give us our check. Jamie snickered as he overheard the conversation at the next table. They had decided not to tip the waitress because of her rude demeanor. And that’s when it hit me.

The ladies at the table worked at the local DMV office. They worked with the woman I had called Donut Breath!

Now, if the ladies at the DMV think the woman is rude, there is no doubt in my mind that we weren’t being overly sensitive last night. So we learned a couple of things:

1. The diner shall never be visited on a Monday night.
2. The diner probably won’t be visited in a long, long while due to the health concerns that were observed.
3. If you’re having a cantankerous time at the DMV, remember, there are places where it is worse.

I have considered calling the county health department to set up an inspection, but I don’t want bad things to happen to the diner. However, I will probably send an anonymous letter to the location to let them know what I observed.

I just gave a presentation on software that I wrote this week. The software was conceived on Monday and the first draft was presented today. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

As the kind people in the audience made comments about the software and provided a couple of suggestions, my mind went into overdrive with the six ways from Sunday that I could improve what I had already written. They could hear the excitement in my voice and I had to admit that I’m full-blown geek and I love doing projects like this. Part of it’s a control issue; I’m writing the software so I know how it’s suppose to behave versus the other half of my job where I help maintain software that was purchased by the company. Anyone want to venture a guess as to which half of my job I’d rather be on all the time?

Because they could hear the excitement in my voice, there was a comment that I was just ramping up on a Friday when everyone else seemed to be ramping down for the weekend. That’s true. I find a lot of energy on Fridays for some reason. I get a lot done on Fridays. It’s just my own drum beat out of sync with the drumbeat of everyone around me. I’m used to that. I think I relax and get stuff done on Fridays because I don’t feel the pressure of the work week ahead of me. Maybe in addition to control issues I also have stress issues. I wouldn’t be surprised about that.

So now I’m all geared up to get my to-do list cleared off and head into the weekend with a smile on my face. If you were sitting near me as I type this I’d make a ‘w00t!’ noise or something of the sort.