More work, but...

Drew and I both sound like we're about to burn out.

The good news is that the new assignment has some lead time in it, so I don't have to jump on it with dispatch. (Of course, taking a vacation about now is out of the question as well.)

So, I'm going to go visit the realtor's office (said person was not in said office yesterday) and then try to give Drew some time off, or at least help take some of the pressure off.

Maybe that'll do both of us some good.

Cheers...

Shiavo, RIP

I managed to get through the whole Terri Shiavo thing with a minimum exposure to the lunacy that hounded the woman from all sides in the last days of her life. And I would have gotten along quite well, thank you, without having learned, via Wired News, that her ever-loving (sorta) husband (sorta) arranged for the woman to die

a "calm, peaceful and gentle death" at about 9 a.m., a stuffed animal under her arm, flowers arranged around her hospice room, [according to] George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney.

To tell you the truth, that description bothered me. What I found particularly irritating was a second quote attributed to the attorney (which was removed from later versions of that AP story):

"Mr. Schiavo's overriding concern here was to provide for Terri a peaceful death with dignity. This death was not for the siblings, and not for the spouse and not for the parents. This was for Terri."

Pardon me while I experience just a touch of cognitive dissonance. For some time, in those moments before I could get to the remote on the rare occasions when I did try to find out what was happening in the world (beside the Shiavo and Jackson sideshows), I recall being exposed to a fairly convincing stream of comments from People Who Ought To Know™ assuring the public that the anthropomorphic collection of tissue that once was Terri Shiavo was not really a person, but a vegetable. Presumably, this made pulling its feeding tube not much different from, say, deciding to not water the geraniums in the sunroom any more.

But knowing that her ever-loving (sorta) husband (sorta) Mike flowered up the room for and put a stuffed animal under the arm of a "vegetable" solely so that it could, in the words of his paid mouthpiece, "die with dignity" makes me wonder just how sincerely he believed he was bidding goodbye to a "vegetable" this morning.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Although the second quote was removed from the story, the quote can be found on another Wired News page (for now), here.

Gotta love people...

Else you'd run out of places to hide the...

No matter.

Sometimes, it's refreshing to be able to tell a salesperson "no" on the simple basis of their fairly impressive level of incompetence, as occurred today when I reviewed a report from a phone service sales rep who did an "expert" assessment ("x" as in unknown, "spurt" as in "a drip under pressure") of the store's telephone requirements and decided that we should cancel one of two lines that receive pretty heavy use, based on the fact that there are no toll charges or LD charges incurred for the number.  (From the report: "This is evidently a line you do not use.")

More difficult is having to deal with some customers, since it's hard to buck the conventional wisdom of not alienating people who help pay your rent.

Today, for example, I gave the boys a couple of hours off at the end of the day and ended up facing the fearsome Consumeris omniscientis, a species that knows better than you how Things Really Are™ (and is a walking testament to the veracity of Mark Twain's crack about how the really dangerous parts of life are the things you know that aren't so).

What is particularly tricky when dealing with examples of the species is having to cope with instinctively triggered loud and assertive defensive behavior on the part of such exemplars when faced with a challenge to their dominance. In the opposite case, if one makes no contradictory statements when confronted with such behavior and simply lets a C. omniscientis have its way, any result that is later perceived as a Poor Outcome™ by the animal automatically becomes your fault.

* * *There's just under 7,000 source words on the plate for next week, which makes for a cautiously propitious start to April. I think I'm going to have to align some additional files for it, though.

In the meantime, tonight looks like a promising night to catch up on sleep. The cat has been a very bad alarm clock lately, waking me up to insist on being let out at all hours, all before 4 am. I think some of the fatigue I felt last week may have been due to this most uncharitable interruption in my sleep cycle.

Cheers...