Thunder of Wade

It’s been a quiet evening of reading and listening to music. Perhaps a little too quiet – made me a little introspective.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with some friends – and friends-of-friends – and met someone new. The guy was from New York, but had spent the last few months traveling around the country to visit baseball fields. Yes, really.  A former lawyer, he had traveled all over the world – and he somewhat dominated the conversation. I ate my simple meal, folded a small paper box, and listened – since I kinda didn’t really have an option otherwise.

And I felt… small. This guy had traveled all over the planet. Visited exotic locations and met people from all walks of life. All kinds of adventures and a type of courage that bordered on… well… a little crazy.

I’ve been to Canada. Once. And once to Vegas – which nearly counts as another country.

He had stories of strange food and interesting people, of wild car rides and exotic company.

Not boasting, I guess, just really intent on telling his stories.

And the canvas of my life and adventures felt pretty small. I haven’t traveled the world, my circle of friends is small, and my adventures – such as they are – are pretty tame.

It was starting to wear me down a bit, but then the server noted the little paper person I had folded and lit up. We gave it to her and she was delighted.

Maybe a little thing – but it mattered. I always have paper with me and I’ve given away hundreds – perhaps thousands – of little people, birds, flowers, and dragons. There is a wonder with these small paper creations and it’s pretty amazing to watch someone’s eyes light up.  Especially little kids and seniors.

Rarely do the things I do have a huge or lasting impact – I guess. But, for just a few moments, I can make things a little bit better for the people around me.  And I think that’s worth something.

The canvas of my life may be small, but there surprising bursts of color.

There’s a USB flash drive sitting on my desk. It’s tiny – about twice the size of the USB connector. It’s blue, it has a cover, and the ring to connect a strap to it is broken off.

And I have no idea what is on it.

It was found in our office on the floor with no identification. I posted a note in the break-room to see if anyone would claim it and got no response.

So, here it sits.

The logical step would be to just plug the damn thing and see what’s on it – but I’m cautious.

There’s a lot of evil crap out there on the internet and I’m very careful before I plug a strange USB into my computer. Even with strong anti-virus software, there’s still a risk.

A mystery.

Do I take the chance? Plug it in and see?

16 GB. Could be anything.

bootleg movie
“inappropriate content” – you know what I’m talking about
vacation photos
student project
student records (!)
bank statements

Anything.

And, like Pandora, I wonder what’s inside. I’m tempted.

Could be awesome, could be terrible.  Could be all the evils of the world – if they would fit on 16 gb.

Or, truth be told, it could just be blank.

So, here it sits.

A mystery.

On Thursday, at work, one of my co-workers came into my office and said, “You need to come see this,”

Now, anything that we would need to see that isn’t already on a computer is kinda novel.

We went right out of the office area to see a flood of water coming towards us – slowly but surely – down the carpeted hallway.

Apparently, the bathroom upgrades had gone awry and a broken pipe flooded part of the building. They got the water turned off, but not before a number of offices and cubes were flooded. The call went out to evacuate the building and we shut down our computers and headed out. Our area wasn’t really in danger, but there was a concern about electricity shorting out or surges.  I worked from home the rest of the day.

We were back in the office on Friday and other than a bunch of high-powered de-humidifiers things were back to normal. I guess the carpets are going to be cleaned soon in case there’s a mold danger.

Still, pretty crazy. Since we’re all about computers there, a flood is an odd and deeply unnerving thing.
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Just before lunch on Friday, I was working on about three different things and trying to keep some folks on track with other projects. The usual. Then, from down the hall, I heard a phone ring. I recognized it from the conference room and figured that someone was having a participant call in for a meeting.

Except it kept ringing.

And ringing. It was like something out of a Poe novel. It got in my head. It got in my very soul.

Now, I kinda hate attention-getting devices. The fryers at McDonald’s are the worst, but this phone was quickly getting on my nerves. And in my soul – as I mentioned.

And since it’s in a conference room, there’s no voice-mail for it to roll over to. I couldn’t figure out why the caller didn’t give up, but finally took matters into my own hands.

I stopped what I was doing, went down the hall to the empty conference room, and answered the damn phone.

And it was hold music – our own hold music. Someone must have tried to call and things got weird and left the call on hold as they hung up. So, we were essentially getting a call from our own phone system.

If I hadn’t intervened, that thing would have rung forever. Or at least until the next meeting.

I hung up the phone and went back to work.

———————–

Our department employs student assistants to help out with some of our projects. These can range from full-on application development, graphics, or content updates. And on Friday, one of our best had his last day.

And I say that not just because I know he reads my blog (“Hi!”), but because he really was great to work with. Smart, funny, and with an interesting take on modern culture.

I took him out for lunch and then we wrapped up a couple of projects. He’s extra busy this semester and just didn’t have the hours to keep working with us. I’m hoping he remembers our little team when he becomes crazy successful.

So, planning a vacation at a condo out of state. I’m not going say where or when, but there will be a beach involved. I made the reservation online and the first payment – just over a month ago – failed. I ended up going to the bank to get the security hold taken off. Which is a good thing – I mean, odd purchases should trigger warnings – but they had tried to call me to verify and had the wrong number somehow.

For the second payment online, I got a Declined message. This was an evening last week and I decided to try and work this out with my bank’s customer service myself by phone.

I called the number on the back of my card, suffered through the prompts, and then said “credit card declined” when it asked me about the problem. I then put in the number and was then curtly told by the machine that it wasn’t a credit card. I didn’t have a chance to say, “sorry, it’s a check card” and got transferred to the queue for the Next Available Customer Service Associate.

After being warned about the “unusually high call volume”, I hung up and tried again – this time, telling it “check card declined”. I got more prompts that didn’t match the issue, then got transferred back to the queue again.

I waited and waited and then talked to a very helpful staff member. Who then transferred me to an equally helpful staff member. They both were tripping over themselves to apologize to me for the inconvenience – which was nice, but pointless. I’m glad the system is in place, but I just wanted to skip ahead to the verification and the fix.

We got it resolved and I told the guy I’d try it again since I still had the page up on the screen. Except that it had timed out in all the time I spent on hold.

I thanked them for the help and hung up – then tried it again to success. I then got the all important receipt email of a successful paid in full and called it a night.

———————-

Out in the woods today on a hike and my phone rings. I let it go to voice mail and when I hear the message it’s the bank again. I figure it’s related to the issues last week and didn’t deal with it right then – hey, I was in the middle of the woods. I didn’t realize how serious it was until my card got denied at Arby’s. And when you can’t get a roast beef – it’s serious.

I called the bank when I got home and it was trouble. My card was being used in Philadelphia and somewhere in Georgia – pretty much at the same time. We went through the transactions and sorted out which ones were valid from recently and which were bogus. They canceled my card and said they would issue a new one in a few days. If the transactions posted, I would need to go to the bank and get them sorted.

Could have been a lot worse and I’m glad they got things stopped. Still, annoying. And stressful. And, well, disappointing in humanity. I don’t know where the breach occurred – might have been the vacation thing, might have been the Target problem back in the day. Tonight, I need to get groceries and I’ll need to use my BP credit card. And I’m hoping I don’t trigger some kind of warning since I usually use this only to buy gas.

People.

[sigh]

Think I need to get out my Red Lantern ring of Rage and go bust some heads. And yes, I do have the ring in my possession AND I have the oath memorized to charge it up. Don’t mess with me.

Last week, I went to a festival in downtown Akron. It was after work and a section of street was closed off on either end for shops and artwork. I met up with several people I knew and had some fun conversations. Had a bite to eat at a downtown deli, gave my opinion to a business-man who wanted to open a gourmet hotdog stand, bought some art (a decorative box), and saw someone on stilts. And in and among all that – I realized that I don’t like crowds.

Too much noise, too much distraction. There were several times when the press of people made me want to run – but, of course, that was impossible by the very nature of the problem.

I did okay and didn’t freak-out, but I’m once again glad that when I get home it’s just me and the cat. A little peace and quiet is kinda awesome.

– ————–

For lunch today, I took the Ladies from New York out to eat. Well, the Younger, anyway. The Elder was not up to lunch – though she was excited to be headed to the casino later that day. They both commented on how they nearly didn’t recognize me since I had gained so much weight since I last saw them. I thought perhaps they had noted that I’m sturdier because I’ve been exercising – but, no, they told me that it was just because I was getting older.

Ummmm… thanks? I guess I could have been a little cranky, but I know for certain that they didn’t mean anything negative by it. It was as straight-forward as they could have been.

Now, I’m a little softer around the middle than I would like, but I’m by no means heavy. So, I’m not going to let it get to me.

Lunch was nice – I had a sensible chicken sandwich and the Younger had a half rack of ribs.

Shrug.
– —————–

After lunch, I went home and got changed into my swim gear and went to the lake. There’s a small public beach at the park and I dropped off my bag on the sand and hit the water.

And it hit me right back. Coooooold. Worse than the pool, but of course not as cold as the Polar Bear Jump. I swam for a while, avoided the only other serious swimmer (in a wetsuit, no less), and took a short break to drink some clean water. I swam a bit longer and realized I was bored. So, I gathered up my gear and headed for home. I’m glad I went – apparently, I need the exercise – but I just wasn’t feeling it. I think it was that I didn’t really have much of a goal – just sort of swimming around. If there had been lane markers or some kind of final point to swim to, I think I would have done better. But, without a specific goal, I’m out of my element. I should have just kept an eye out for boats and swum across the lake.

And I could do it, too.

I read somewhere that a quirk of memory causes it to reset when a person walks through a doorway. It’s not usually an issue for me since the things I need to do occur in one place or another. If I need to do something work related, I’m usually already at work. If it’s something at home, well, I’m usually home when it occurs to me. Rarely do I need to think about something at work that I’ll need to cover at home.

But, we had a system that wasn’t behaving properly at work and my boss wanted me to test at home on my own network  –  we talked about it just before I left the office.

And there are a lot of doors to go through to get outside. I made it through the first door, repeated the thing I needed to check out loud, then made it through the second door. By the third door, the memory had been blasted out of my head by a reset and I totally forgot about it.

Until this morning. I was lying in bed, arguing with the clock about what time it really was, when the memory popped back up into my head. I drifted in and out of sleep, thrashing about in my head as I wrestled with that memory to keep it from slipping away.

The alarm clock finally won and I got up and went right to the computer.

Except the site I needed to check wouldn’t come up in IE. The site in this case being the University of Akron homepage. Bing just sat there like a lump and couldn’t even be bothered to give me an error message. Chrome and Google fared no better – it looked like we were down.

I headed into work so I could check on things and report in. Home page still down, but so was the support site. And yahoo. And Google. It was the worst – the network was down.

I verified that it was not just me and some network disrupting karma that I’d built up.  Nope, it was real.

So, now, we wait for the network crew to get us back online. And for a web guy, that’s a quiet time. Nothing we can do to help – and not much we can do for work.

And it feels odd. Like some internal organ that isn’t quite there, but you didn’t know you missed it until you needed that odd bit of food digested.

Well, I could write. Except my favorite editor is online so I’m in notepad. I could listen to music, but youtube isn’t accessible. So, I’m listening to the same few songs I have saved on my machine.

I can get to 3g on my phone, but I’m wary of network overages – and the Wifi is down.

The computer center is un-naturally still and there’s a sort of hush over things – like the wake of a natural disaster as we wait for news of rescue or another aftershock.

And it’s all so damn odd. I mean, really, humanity has existed for a very long time without a network.

But for the web geeks, well, we might as well be banging rocks together.

—————

In happier news, I started my Halloween costume construction in earnest last evening. It felt really good to see the shape in my head begin to have a physical reality. Kind of amazing, really, to be able to see something in the mind that doesn’t yet exist and then make it exist.

I still have a long way to go, but the shape is there. This might be the last year of doing this – it’s a lot of work – but in any case I’m going to try and make it a good one.

—————–

Finally, a language lesson from my nieces. The oldest one came up with “focentrate” – a combination of focus and concentrate – a while back and used it again this past weekend. The younger invented “applecone” – her version of “pineapple”.

Consider yourself educated.

——————-

And now we’re back up, so it’s time to get to work.

I went to visit my family for my youngest niece’s birthday. She had just turned two and I struggled with what to get her. Shopping for a 2 year old girl is not exactly my wheelhouse.

With a little guidance from my sister, I found a little tikes pink airplane. I was irritated by the pink – do all toys for girls have to have pink? – but the female pilot made it a little better.

The best part was the song it played.

Every time the wheels rolled.

Every.

Time.

By the end of the evening, all the adults had the song memorized. Several of them did a little dance when it came on.

I recorded it on my phone and may use it as a ring-tone.

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The two year old is cute, smart, and funny. But her wrath is a terrible thing. On Saturday evening she got tired and then got upset when it was time to put away the stickers. And by “upset”, I mean she totally lost her shit. Kind of stunned at this, I commented to my brother-in-law that this was pretty intense. With a knowing and tired shake of his head, he sadly commented that “no, it wasn’t”.

We did have a lot of fun and she’s pretty fond of her “un-til”, but you do not want to get on her bad side.

Two years old and already ruling the world. 🙂

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One of my tasks at work is to answer or route email that comes into the “webmaster” email account. In among the “How do I contact admissions?” and “Where is the student union?”, I got a terribly sad email. It was from a mother who’s daughter had passed away a few weeks ago and wanted her daughter’s name taken off our lists – the notifications were a reminder of what the daughter wouldn’t have.

It pretty much broke my heart.

I forwarded this to the right people and they are going to get the notices halted and will reach out to the family.

Today, the country is mourning the loss of a celebrity. But I’m still thinking about that college student who didn’t get to start classes this fall. And the mom who mourns when she gets another overly enthusiastic “Welcome to Fall Semester” letter.

I didn’t know this family. I didn’t have a connection other than getting and forwarding that message. But it still hit me. I guess that’s why I’m here – trying to help our students become successful in the world.

And quietly feeling the loss of those that don’t get the chance.

When I write a post, I usually throw some occasionally misleading keywords into the title – and then write my post about those.

Last time, I put “lazy” in the title and was apparently too lazy to even write about it.

Sunday morning was an incredibly lazy time. Now, I’m generally not good at napping or sitting quietly and doing nothing – I’ve usually either got a book, some paper to fold, or a game going. Or I’m, you know, thinking really hard about something. I don’t go into “idle” mode very easily.

But I was freaking Idle on Sunday morning. I did the mental equivalent of glancing at the idea of doing some laundry, but I mostly just vegged out. I read a book, then took a break from that to play a video game. Then reversed that. And then, for a few minutes, I did nothing. Just stretched out on the couch and got as close as I ever do to meditating. I should have just gone full out and actually meditated – but it seemed like too much work.

Just a few minutes of awake non-activity.

It was damn weird. I didn’t care for it and I’m not likely to repeat it.

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Today, after my swim at lunch, I headed back to my locker to get dressed. I usually take a shower after the swim and I think it’s a hassle to have to worry about the towel. So, my trip through the locker room is usually naked and damp. Which is not a big deal except that my habit of going to the pool at same time and getting the same locker happens to coincidence with the new VP for our division doing the same thing. I’ve met him three times before in various meetings and he still doesn’t know me – though I think this time may have been hampered by the fact that I was naked. I re-introduced myself while he was moving his stuff out of the way so I could get to my locker. He made a comment about still not knowing everyone in the division and I said something to the effect that I’m “usually not this damp”.

Which, given the mental stress and circumstances – was damn clever.

I got my locker open and quickly used the shammy to dry myself off. Not a lot of coverage with a shammy, but it does work fast. I was mostly dressed by the time he headed out.

Now, I’m not a prude by any means and I’m perfectly fine being naked in a socially appropriate setting – but this really pushed the limits of keeping my cool. In fact, I was flustered enough that I missed the deodorant step and had to untuck my shirt and apply before heading out.

He seems like a nice guy and I wish he would remember me so that when I do run into him at the pool, we can finally get past the awkward introduction phase.

If this keeps up, I’m going to run into him in the hallway and all he’s going to have is, “Hey, you’re the guy from the pool with a penis,”

And that, my friends, is not the kind of impression I want to leave the VP with.

I volunteered to help one of my friends move on Saturday. He got an apartment in Highland Square – on the 10th floor. There was an elevator, fortunately – and even more fortunately was the extra tall ceiling in the elevator on the left. But not on the right, for some reason. There wasn’t a lot to move, but much of it was heavy or awkward. It’s not a big place, but it has an amazing view of Akron. Yeah, Akron – who knew? I guess if you get up high enough, everything looks good. It was a lot of work, but I’m glad I was able to help. And my strong back and reasonably strong arms got a good workout. Though, I will admit, the chipotle he bought us for lunch may have been the best part. 🙂

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Later that evening, I went out to dinner with another group of friends. I got the sushi and it was good, except they had included cucumber in the roll.

And I’m not really a fan.

I am pretty good with chopsticks, though, and I was able to carefully tweeze each piece out of the sushi. One of my friends said it looked like I was playing operation and I made a joke out of touching the rice and getting buzzed.

Perhaps you had to be there.

—————–

We met up at my place after dinner for games and played a new game – called Nuts. You play as a squirrel trying to acquire nuts for your stash. There are cards like “Grab everyone’s nuts”, “Hands off my nuts”, and “A handful of nuts”. All perfectly innocent, of course – it’s about squirrels, right? I’m not going to document the conversation here – other than to say that it went right to the gutter and stayed there. And those are the best games, aren’t they? If you can’t trash talk a little, what’s the point?

——————-

On Sunday evening, we tried a new Mexican place for dinner. It promised “authentic” Mexican food and, well, I like my Mexican food a little less authentic. I settled on the american chicken tacos with lettuce only and a side of beans. When the tacos came out, they were kinda small and essentially shampooed with onions.

I imagine some time, long ago, when some idiot dug up an onion, thought it was food, and ate it. He then apparently decided that it should go on everything. Because he was an idiot, as I believe I have already theorized.

Now, I know I’ll get some argument on this, but onions are terrible. They were not meant to be and are not actually a food item.

They are poison.

I picked though the chicken and got the worst of the onions out and ate the rest. Dessert was at Rita’s Ice and Custard and that made up for it. Oh, I suppose I should mention the amusing story the server told us at the front while we were paying the bill about how someone tried to steal the entire cash register, got hung up on the cords, and knocked themselves out. Which is why the cash register was now in the back of the restaurant.

Well, at least the beans were really good.

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Busy day tomorrow at work. Then home and I begin earnest construction on the Halloween costume. Wish me luck. And, no, I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to be. 🙂