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Prepared for the onslaught...
Jul. 2nd, 2001 05:16 pmThe new postal rates went into effect today, which means we here will be dealing with a flood of people wanting two-cent stamps and such over the next few days. (Thank goodness we'll be closed on Wednesday.)
An extreme prototype of such a customer was among my first clients of the day. She came in, asked for a two-cent stamp and offered a dollar bill as payment. I considered letting her have the stamp for free - paying for it out of the penny saucer at the counter - then I considered giving her 98 pennies in change. Then I got real, asked if she had something smaller, got a negative response, and proceeded to give her normal change.
Customer No. 2 came in and made two copies. Total damage: $0.24. Rummaging through her coin purse, she finds several quarters.
Alas! They are of the new "States of the Union" series. She will not part with them. "I don't think I have these yet," she says, with all of the earnestness of a young boy talking about his baseball card collection. She resumes her activites with her coin purse. Other customers are lining up behind her.
After about two minutes of scrabbling, she gives up the search and forks over a dollar bill. I make change the usual way, thinking to myself, "I'm sure the Mint made only so many quarters for each state."
Customer No. 3 comes in and asks to buy three stamps. Total damage: $1.02. Offers a credit card.
"I'm sorry, we don't accept credit cards to pay for postage," I say.
"Well, what do you accept them for?" asks the customer, annoyed.
I give her the friendly explanation, the one that doesn't include the part about how it costs the store money to accept a credit card and how, since we can't pass that cost along to the USPS, it would end up we'd eat the difference. (I don't offer that explanation, any more. Historically, I've found that people's reaction to "I'll lose money," is: "So, what's your point?") She buys one stamp and leaves.
At that point, I stopped thinking about the slings and arrows of outrageous retail fortune... else I'd have worked myself up into a royally lousy mood.
I spend some of yesterday putting a big dent in Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn. It's an interesting read, even if Kahn is no Tom Clancy. I never really realized that, despite the outstanding work of the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in finding ways to attack messages generated by the Enigma cipher machine, the ability to actually solve those messages was due in large part to the capture of enemy documents from German naval vessels (the U-110, if memory serves, and two weather ships).
Nonetheless, it was interesting to read about the various exploits of the cryptanalysis, who included Alan Turing, C. H. O'D. Alexander, and Harry Golombek, who were names familiar to me before I took up an amateur interest in cryptology. The latter two were fairly strong chess players in Britain, and I'd known of them from the literature back when I played.
I knew of Turing from his seminal work in computation theory (which gave us the "Turing machine") and his interesting proposal for determining whether a program is intelligent or not (the "Turing test"). It was a shame that someone so instrumental in helping defeat the Nazi horror was later driven to desperate measures after the war, ending his life, some say, in suicide rather than submit to government-ordered medical treatments that purported to "cure" his homosexual tendencies.
Over the past ten days, I'd also been reading The Legend of Bagger Vance at odd times and places. I finally finished it, and closed the book astounded. While the movie is well-made, reasonably acted, and tells an uplifting tale, the book is all that and... something more. Bagger Vance turns out to be more than simply a character who appears out of the night, helps Rannuph Junah "find his swing" with some righteous talk about the Authentic Swing, and then disappears into the sunset.
At any rate, I suppose if one insists on relating the book to the movie, the latter ends up being a severely dumbed-down version of the former, so I guess maybe it would be better to consider the two items as separate entities that happen to share the same name. The talent it took to make Pearl Harbor come to life could well have been applied to this tale, as well.
Got a call today, while I was at the store... and another translation. I went home for an hour at lunchtime to look at the file and could not download the mail. It turns out (I find out later) that the client sent a 4.2 MB file! My connection at home was timing out before I could get the entire attachment (I proved this by trying to download it twice; each time the connection was terminated by my server after 25 minutes or so). Fortunately, I have a somewhat faster connection at the store, so I was able to get the file in the end. The size is the result of having several rather large graphics embedded, apparently.
Good thing I got an extension on the assignment even before looking at it. I never was able to leave the store until closing after returning after lunch.
In other news, the file I sent on Friday has been processed and I received the final edited version in e-mail. I can't see any revision marks, though, which means I'll have to use MS Word's document comparison feature to see what changes were made. At first glance, it doesn't look as if there were many edits at all, but I'd be deluding myself to think that the case; this client is meticulous in the editing department, and really does improve the product. I'll have to make sure I send an invoice to these folks in a timely manner.
Which further reminds me... before I go home, I'll have to use the Kaufmann Mail Warrior to go in and delete any large mail messages and/or attachments from my work account, (else I'll be cursing my Internet connection all evening long). Too bad the misnamed Outlook Express doesn't have such a feature.
Cheers...
An extreme prototype of such a customer was among my first clients of the day. She came in, asked for a two-cent stamp and offered a dollar bill as payment. I considered letting her have the stamp for free - paying for it out of the penny saucer at the counter - then I considered giving her 98 pennies in change. Then I got real, asked if she had something smaller, got a negative response, and proceeded to give her normal change.
Customer No. 2 came in and made two copies. Total damage: $0.24. Rummaging through her coin purse, she finds several quarters.
Alas! They are of the new "States of the Union" series. She will not part with them. "I don't think I have these yet," she says, with all of the earnestness of a young boy talking about his baseball card collection. She resumes her activites with her coin purse. Other customers are lining up behind her.
After about two minutes of scrabbling, she gives up the search and forks over a dollar bill. I make change the usual way, thinking to myself, "I'm sure the Mint made only so many quarters for each state."
Customer No. 3 comes in and asks to buy three stamps. Total damage: $1.02. Offers a credit card.
"I'm sorry, we don't accept credit cards to pay for postage," I say.
"Well, what do you accept them for?" asks the customer, annoyed.
I give her the friendly explanation, the one that doesn't include the part about how it costs the store money to accept a credit card and how, since we can't pass that cost along to the USPS, it would end up we'd eat the difference. (I don't offer that explanation, any more. Historically, I've found that people's reaction to "I'll lose money," is: "So, what's your point?") She buys one stamp and leaves.
At that point, I stopped thinking about the slings and arrows of outrageous retail fortune... else I'd have worked myself up into a royally lousy mood.
I spend some of yesterday putting a big dent in Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn. It's an interesting read, even if Kahn is no Tom Clancy. I never really realized that, despite the outstanding work of the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in finding ways to attack messages generated by the Enigma cipher machine, the ability to actually solve those messages was due in large part to the capture of enemy documents from German naval vessels (the U-110, if memory serves, and two weather ships).
Nonetheless, it was interesting to read about the various exploits of the cryptanalysis, who included Alan Turing, C. H. O'D. Alexander, and Harry Golombek, who were names familiar to me before I took up an amateur interest in cryptology. The latter two were fairly strong chess players in Britain, and I'd known of them from the literature back when I played.
I knew of Turing from his seminal work in computation theory (which gave us the "Turing machine") and his interesting proposal for determining whether a program is intelligent or not (the "Turing test"). It was a shame that someone so instrumental in helping defeat the Nazi horror was later driven to desperate measures after the war, ending his life, some say, in suicide rather than submit to government-ordered medical treatments that purported to "cure" his homosexual tendencies.
Over the past ten days, I'd also been reading The Legend of Bagger Vance at odd times and places. I finally finished it, and closed the book astounded. While the movie is well-made, reasonably acted, and tells an uplifting tale, the book is all that and... something more. Bagger Vance turns out to be more than simply a character who appears out of the night, helps Rannuph Junah "find his swing" with some righteous talk about the Authentic Swing, and then disappears into the sunset.
At any rate, I suppose if one insists on relating the book to the movie, the latter ends up being a severely dumbed-down version of the former, so I guess maybe it would be better to consider the two items as separate entities that happen to share the same name. The talent it took to make Pearl Harbor come to life could well have been applied to this tale, as well.
Got a call today, while I was at the store... and another translation. I went home for an hour at lunchtime to look at the file and could not download the mail. It turns out (I find out later) that the client sent a 4.2 MB file! My connection at home was timing out before I could get the entire attachment (I proved this by trying to download it twice; each time the connection was terminated by my server after 25 minutes or so). Fortunately, I have a somewhat faster connection at the store, so I was able to get the file in the end. The size is the result of having several rather large graphics embedded, apparently.
Good thing I got an extension on the assignment even before looking at it. I never was able to leave the store until closing after returning after lunch.
In other news, the file I sent on Friday has been processed and I received the final edited version in e-mail. I can't see any revision marks, though, which means I'll have to use MS Word's document comparison feature to see what changes were made. At first glance, it doesn't look as if there were many edits at all, but I'd be deluding myself to think that the case; this client is meticulous in the editing department, and really does improve the product. I'll have to make sure I send an invoice to these folks in a timely manner.
Which further reminds me... before I go home, I'll have to use the Kaufmann Mail Warrior to go in and delete any large mail messages and/or attachments from my work account, (else I'll be cursing my Internet connection all evening long). Too bad the misnamed Outlook Express doesn't have such a feature.
Cheers...
