Tag: door

Yesterday was a good day.

Random Thoughts

It started off like most days, I woke up at the butt-crack of dawn in order to drive to work. Oh, did I not mention? I have a new contract for ITCS, I’m working downtown for BellSouth now, full time. Anyway, so I get up, shower, dress, and head out the door. Its raining. I hate driving in the rain. People, as I have said many times, suck. Somewhere in many people’s heads they actually believe that the chance of getting in an accident is affected by the duration of being on the road… so driving twice as fast means half the time of the road equalling less accidents… *sigh* Anyway, as much as I hate driving in the rain, I achieve a certain “Road Zen”, the opposite of “Road Rage”… traffic sucks, I have accepted that I cannot change this and am at peace with the horrible traffic allowing me to listen to music and smile as opposed to making rude gestures and screaming at people.

By the time I get to work, the rain is over. I park in my usual pay lot, and start the walk to the office. Its Thursday, and as I head down 3rd Street toward Spring, I see a Creative Loafing bin. Jackpot! Open it up, snag myself a hot off the presses copy of the new Loaf. I enter the BellSouth building with a bounce in my step.

At work, I get stuff done. I learn some new programming tricks. All is well. Lunch tastes good. More work gets done. All-in-all a very satisfying day in the trenches for a contract developer like myself. 5:30 rolls around and I punch out for the day.

It hasn’t rained all day, and the reports say it should be sunny but cold all weekend. I round the corner to the parking lot and I see about 5 or 6 people standing around. One guy eyes me and says, “Is this your Cherokee?” I answer affirmatively, and he says, “The cops are already on the way.”

Now I’m worried, I double time it to the car and look it over. At first everything looks fine… no flat tires, no big dents. Then I see the vent glass on my rear driver side door, you know, the smaller window glass that doesn’t move… and its shattered. I look down the row of cars and see that all of them have the same window broken. “Anything stolen?” a woman asks me. I look in and… no. Not a single thing missing. I say so and they start saying that nothing is missing from them either. While we wait for the cops, I call my insurance company, they file the claim, connect me to their repair hotline, who connects me to a glass repair shop who schedules me for a repair the next day… $0 deductable, full coverage. So at this point the only cost to me is time. The cops show, make their report, I call the insurance company back and give them the case number for their files. Then I get on the road and head home.

The whole way home, I think about it… I’ve known people who’ve been burglarized and vandalized before. They always talk about feeling violated, unsafe. I don’t. I wasn’t there.. it likely wouldn’t have if I had been. Nothing is missing. No cost to me for the damage. Just a bit of wasted time. What I am is annoyed.. a touch angry. But why?

See.. I believe in violence, as long as it has a purpose. Frankly, violence when used with direction and guidence has solved more problems in the history of the world than anything else. I believe in war, when other options have failed. People will try to tell you that we need to try to keep everything peaceful, but the true is, world politics is like parenting… at some point you have to realize your child isn’t going to stop screaming, and you send him to his room without supper. The only difference is, its much harder to make a country controller by a dictator with an army behind him sit in his room, they fight back. There must exist that point where you are willing to accept that peace isn’t working and commit to war.

This is, and its bad that I feel I must say this, not a comment on the current situation in the Middle East… that’s a difference monster altogether, because unfortunately we ARE at war… the problem here is that we are at war with an idea, not a country. In all of History I do not believe a war has ever been successfully waged on an idea… countries, of course… cultures, sure… religions, yes… but all “ideas” of the past have been backed by a physical land mass and an identifiable group of people. What we fight in the Middle East is purely an idea… terrorism is fear, and how do you fight fear?

But I digress…

Back to my day… see, I’m annoyed because some schmuck out there walked down a row of cars, breaking a single window on each, stealing nothing. In fact, the window he broke is the most useless window to break… in almost all cars these days there is no locking mechanism on the rear door, its controlled by the front doors or automatically in some other way, and with child safety regulations, most rear doors won’t even open if they are locked and you pull on the handle. And the vent glass… its too far away to reach the lock on the front door. This guys stole nothing… he made no attempt to steal or get into any of the cars. He just broke glass. Violence without purpose. That’s what I hate.

In any event, the window is fixed now, and life goes on. People continue to suck.

Hey you!

Random Thoughts

Yeah, you.

I’m going to level with you.

I’m going to be honest with you in a way that none of your friends will.

Honest in a way that even your family has yet to attempt.

No matter how much money you spend, no matter what kind of tires, or head lights, or tail lights, or spoilers, or decals, or hub caps you put on. No matter what kind of stereo you put in. No matter how often you wash and detail it. No matter how much effort you put in. No matter how hard you try. You are still driving a 4 door Honda Civic.

You are not cool.

Quit lying to yourself.

This vehicular delusion intervention has been brought to you by probablynot.com, because frankly, we don’t like you.

Public Facilities.

Random Thoughts

Okay, enough with all the serious shit and on with some serious shit talk.

Nine times out of ten, I really have no problem with using a public restroom, but then there is always that one time…

First off, I realize that handicapped people need a little more room to manuver in the stall, but do they really need a stall that’s 3 times the size of the rest of the bathroom? You know the kind I’m talking about, where when you sit down it feels like you are on the crapper in the middle of a room and not behind a little locked door, where if the lock fails and someone starts to open it you have no chance in hell of being able to push it shut from where you are sitting, so you either wait for them to notice you sitting there, or you hop up and waddle with your pants at your ankles, one-eyed winky waving in the wind, and slam the door shut on their fingers. Sure, you could just yell, “Hey, someone’s in here!” but they don’t always listen.

Continuing with handicapped toilets, why are they so much taller? I’m 5’10” and normally when I sit down on the john my feet fit snugly on the floor, which is a good thing. I personally find that things work themselves out much more smoothly if I can apply a little pressure to the floor, much like driving (try it some time if you don’t drive stick, use your left foot and apply a little pressure to the floor with your heel, you’ll find that your right foot moves more accurately and quickly over the other pedals making driving and stopping just a bit easier). However, in a handicapped stall my heels hover about a half inch over the ground at maximum stretch. No leverage. Most times, if I walk into a bathroom and see that only the handicapped stall remains, I’ll leave. Sometimes though, the “special” stall is the only stall and one has no options.

Beyond those design flaws, most bathrooms are pretty nice. Paper, seat covers, soap, towls, sink, urinal, stalls (with locks on doors). Of course, men’s rooms typically lack the couches and free coffee that some women’s rooms have, but that’s the price we pay for being allowed to pee standing up I suppose.

What really makes most public facilities bad are the other patrons. Some men can’t aim. Or because they don’t want to wash their hands will try to piss “freestyle”. Sometimes this works, other times it works like any other hose. As a kid, we used to unhook the garden hose from the sprinkler then crank up the power from the faucet. It would fling around and spray everywhere and we’d run through it yelling and screaming. Thank god they finally invented that toy that sprayed water around like that, getting hit by the metal flying end fo the hose hurt! But the point is, freestylers tend to piss all over the place. The urinal, the floor, their shoes (don’t they care???), their pants, the divider between the urinals (if there is one). The only saving grace is that they usually don’t piss on the flush handle. Put a freestyler in a stall, however, and all bets are off. This is why most men flush with their foot. Automatic flushers were invented by men for just this reason.

And I won’t even get in to the guys who appearantly either eat whole cows or don’t shit for 2 weeks, and then follow that with 2 rolls of paper. Its not that they don’t flush, its that flushing, as this juncture, becomes moot.

And whatever happened to the shit house poet? I miss the days of amusing myself with the writing on the walls. The phone numbers, the dirty jokes, the crude pictures. Ahh, the good ole days….

Ah well, enough with my ranting…