Update: Mean Girl’s last day is today. There’s a party.
But yesterday I sat down with her to go over stuff I’ll be taking over and . About the only thing I followed was that it’s a humongous tedious mess.
Owner thinks I can un-f*** some of the workload. I’m sure I can, but that requires understanding what the output is supposed to be. There are about 1,000 things, each tiny, with independent due dates. And while any given thing is probably something I can figure out without too much trouble, the likelihood that I only do 998 or 999 of them seems high. Today or Monday (no, not taking MLK Day off) will be about putting together a schedule, which shockingly doesn’t exist.
On the plus side, she was pretty pleasant going through it all. I think she’s in that space like the last two weeks of high school when you see everything through rose-colored glasses. (HIMYM did an episode about this.)
Today I was listening to the radio in my car quite loudly, and just about 20 seconds after cranking the volume, I get an email alert. For an email about buying hearing aids.
Last night I met a couple I’m friends with for dinner (tacos, as discussed in another thread) and then the wife and I went to the symphony. (Husband does not enjoy symphony, but wife and I do, so this was agreeable to all parties.)
After symphony wife gets a text that a group of people she knows is at a dive bar where an 80s band is playing… shall we go check it out? Sure, why not?
So first of all I am quite certain that we were the only two people who went from the symphony to this dive bar. It was like we unzipped a hole in the space-time continuum… they were literally playing Super Bowl XXIII on TV (grrrr… Joe Montana… grrrr) among other tv shows from the 80s, it was all people my age… which meant I was getting hit on left and right (uh… that doesn’t happen often). The lead singer of the band was wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt. I saw people in the crowd with mullets (through the male-pattern baldness, that is) and poofs (seriously folks… those hair styles didn’t even look good in the 80s!).
What drink to order at a dive bar? I didn’t really trust them to make my usual correctly and everyone else was drinking beer so I ordered a Blue Moon. Well let me tell you, I still stood out like a sore thumb because that was a high end drink by the standards of this bar! Everyone else was drinking Miller Lite or Bud Light or Michelob Ultra.
But what really made me feel like I’d gone back in time was that the beer cost $5.00. Granted, I don’t hang out in dive bars much, but that’s cheap, right? Like, really cheap, I think?!?! I was a little unsure about the safety of the orange slice in the beer (and mildly surprised they bothered, but that might be required by the brewery) but so far no ill effects.
Oh, and wife’s friend that we were meeting? Someone I knew from a totally different walk of life. And then the kid sister of a gal I was in church youth group with in junior high / high school was also in the group of friends we were meeting… totally small world (wait, when did you move to this city???). It really felt like I was back in college randomly bumping into people at a club. Except for all the receding hairlines and wrinkles and everyone was 20-50 pounds heavier.
Anyway, the band was pretty good, I danced my ass off, and it was a fun night of musical dichotomy and small world coincidences.
Cleaning out some old computer stuff…I found a cd for MicroSoft Works 8.5 that was included in my Gateway computer. It includes the certificate of authenticity.
When I was a kid my Dad had an Apricot computer. No, not an Apple… an Apricot. It wasn’t fully IBM-compatible, but you could run most IBM software on it.
I can’t remember the first word processor he had on it, but it was super nice when he upgraded to WordPerfect. Then I could print my papers in Near Letter Quality on his dot matrix printer, separate the pages (being careful to not rip them by accident) and rip off the holes on the sides… it was high class let me tell you!
Do y’all remember Near Letter Quality on dot matrix printers? Or as the cool kids called it, NLQ!
I was trying to explain it to someone at work the other day and she had no idea what it was. I explained it as “it printed once, jiggled the paper, then printed again to fill in the gaps” and she asked “how did it jiggle the paper” and I was like I have no recollection whatsoever!
Did it jiggle the print head? Am I remembering wrong???
I remember that Near Letter Quality existed but had no idea how it worked, not even as much as you remembered. After I typed that sentence, I did remember something called google.
Cool… sounds like it did jiggle the paper. Yeah, it took forever. Like a minute a page or something. You printed something, went to the bathroom, and came back.
But compared to typing on a typewriter where I’d make mistakes and have to start over again… repeatedly… it was still faster than that. Especially because I could do something else while it was printing. Not on the computer of course (Windows didn’t exist yet), but I could make a phone call or go to the bathroom or get a glass of water or something.
I have no recollection whatsoever!