------> I don't know if this news is actually all that great, but Christine the Truck has been brought back from the land of the dead. It turns out that the belt that controls the water pump and alternator had broken. When that happens, there is very little time before the engine itself will blow. If you can believe it, I lost very little water on the ride back to my house yesterday, which is really amazing considering how long I had to drive it with the temperature gauge buried on the wrong side of the "H". Chris's dad came over and helped me put the new belt on, which I was extremely grateful for since I'm not all that mechanically inclined! Had I attempted to do the job by myeself, there is a very good likelihood that 1/3 of the population of this country would have perished a slow and horrible death. So it looks like I'm stuck with this evil incarnate for a while longer. Damnit.
------> I'm sure you all are just on pins and needles waiting for the link to the new website I've created! Well, your wait is now officially over!! I finally have it up and ready for your viewing pleasure! It isn't 100% complete, but enough so to get a little bit of feedback on what it's got so far! So head on over and let me know what you think! The link can be found on my profile page here on Blogstream or you can copy & paste the link below:
http://www.freewebs.com/brym38
------> Alas, today was a sad day in the life of good ol' BryM. I'd said that I was going to have to shave my mustache a few days ago, but I kept putting it off because I REALLY REALLY REALLY didn't want to shave it!! Today I just couldn't stand it any longer. Where the ingrown whisker is was hurting pretty bad today and making my upper lip swell up, so I finally broke down and got the razor out. It was a sad sight. I believe that I even openly sobbed for a few minutes. Yes, I know that it will grow back within a couple of weeks, but during that time I fear that I'm going to be mistaken for a 12 year old kid! And no, I'm not going to post any pictures of my newly bald upper lip!!
That's about it for tonight! Hope everyone has a good Sunday!
When I was a little kid, I always dreaded Saturday nights because my father always made me watch that ridiculous show, “Hee Haw”….even though it was pretty horrible, there were at least a couple of skits that made me chuckle…one of which was the hillbilly guys sitting on the porch singing, “Glooooooom, despair, and agony on meeeeee….if not for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all……..”
I’m officially adopting that tune as the theme song for my life! Yes…I had yet ANOTHER adventure today. It’s just not MY life unless there is some sort of tragedy to be had!
I’ve been having to start my truck about 15 minutes early every morning due to the horrible noise it’s been making…letting it run for a while seems to help the problem a little bit. So this morning I go out and start it up and head back in the house to finish getting ready for work. After that 15 minutes was up, the noise hadn’t stopped…in fact it sounded even worse than normal, so I grabbed the can of WD-40 from under the sink and sprayed it on the pulleys and bolts holding them on…that has worked in the past, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt. To my amazement, it actually WORKED! Or so I thought.
I headed out of the driveway and got ¼ mile from the house when all hell broke loose. I heard the squealing start up again and then all of the gauges lit up at once. I’ve driven enough POS vehicles to know that when something like that happens, it’s a sign that the alternator is about to die (and quickly)!! I decided that I’d turn around and go home….unfortunately, I ended up behind a school bus! Its first stop was in front of this one house where there was a little girl who moved so slow you’d have thought she was standing still! I thought she might have been one of those kids that rides the short school bus until I saw the girl’s mother come out, pick the child up, and then load her onto the school bus! It’s a good thing the mom did that because I was a nanosecond away from telling the child to get her ass in gear and get the hell on the bus!!
To further aggravate me, the bus’s NEXT stop was approximately 30 feet away. You see, here in North Carolina our darling little children are so delicate that walking a few extra steps to catch the bus with other children in the neighborhood would most likely harm them. Heaven forbid a child get his/her feet wet walking in the grass with the morning dew on top of it!!
The bus FINALLY made it to the house right at my subdivision….and then stopped for another kid. Meanwhile, all of the gauges on my dash are still lit up, but to complicate matters even more the temperature gauge was sitting PAST the “H” mark AND smoke started to come out from under the hood!! I knew that if I didn’t get home FAST that my truck would probably blow up right there!! So I FINALLY turn onto my street…I think I was on two wheels when I flew into my driveway!! I came inside and found Chris on the phone with his dad telling him what had happened. Luckily, Chris told me to take his truck to work and he’d get his dad to bring him to work. Word for the day: WHEW!!
You’d think that starting the morning out that way would be enough. Wrong. My adventure was JUST beginning!
I get to work and start to log on to my computer. “Your credentials couldn’t be verified”….the dreaded message that I’ve seen WAY too much of in the last couple of days!! My new ID had gone into effect yesterday, so I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I decided to try my old log on, but that didn’t work either. GRRRRRR…..So I call the “helpless desk” and spend the next half hour listening to some guy in the South Pacific somewhere try and figure out what was wrong….after which he tells me that he can’t figure out what’s wrong! He did tell me that my ID had changed from the new one that had been assigned yesterday. The original one had been MCCOBR, and the new one MCCODO….a combination of my last name and first. So I ask the guy what the new ID was….check THIS shit out:
The new ID was MCDODO. Whether you pronounce it with a long “o” or a short “o”, it’s still pretty insulting. I end up calling my supervisor over and telling him what happened. When I told him what the new ID was, he started laughing. I, however, was NOT amused!!
TWO HOURS later, my supervisor had to log me onto the computer with his ID. I had barely started to pull any orders up when my private phone line rings. It was the knucklehead that had started this whole name change fiasco!! He explained to me that when he was inputting my ID information into the mainframe, he’d made a mistake with the ID.
No shit, Sherlock.
FINALLY after two hours, I was able to get onto the system and do something productive!!
I’m not done yet…..
If all of the above stuff wasn’t enough, something really awful happened at lunch time. I’m munching down on my cheeseburger from McDonald’s when all of a sudden, I get those all too familiar sharp pains coming from my gut. I made a mad dash for the building to use the men’s room. I barely had enough time to get myself situated in the stall when the mud slide hit. That wasn’t the awful part….the awful part came when someone came into the stall beside me!! Yeah, I may be weird, but I’m one of those that absolutely HATES going poo in a stall with someone in the next stall over! I’ve ALWAYS been like that!! Luckily, the guy in the next stall was in and out pretty quick.
The rest of the day ended up being pretty uneventful. Had it been any MORE eventful, I’d probably have jumped off the roof!!!
Is anyone out there a medium? Psychic? Tarot card reader??
I ask because I need to know what it is about my life lately that seems to be cursed with one aggravating event after another!! Did I kick a kitten in a previous life? Am I being paid back for the time that I ran over my brother’s face with a bicycle when I was 6 years old?? WHAT IS IT??!! Moreover, what is it going to take to make amends for whatever it is that I’ve done??!!
My day started out like most days lately. I get up, get ready for work, and then immediately get a knot in the back of my neck because I’m so ANNOYED by the horrible squealing sounds that my truck makes when it’s started up. Or when I slow down. Or when I stop. Or when I turn a corner. When I speed up. When I turn the heater on. When I turn the radio on. You get the idea…the fucker just squeals and won’t stop until I’m in a place where there is absolutely NO chance of anyone hearing that God awful noise!
When I left out this morning, I decided that I’d go by Chik-fil-A and get a biscuit and a large tea. I wanted to stop by mainly for the tea because I didn’t make any last night and therefore had nothing to bring to work in my handy 32oz tumbler that my company gave me! Now, there are two routes I could have taken to accomplish my mission. The first one is going down this country road, across the nuclear lake (it’s beside the nuclear power plant), and then eventually onto the main highway. Taking this route is a little longer miles wise, but there’s not as much traffic. The other route is going in the opposite direction, but it takes me through Cary…a place I really despise driving through because of all the transplants who don’t know how to drive. The upside is that the road I end up on in Cary takes me right by the shopping center where my biscuits were waiting for me. I left in plenty of enough time to get through the slow downs (it was raining this morning) and headed off onto the Cary route. The first half of the trip was uneventful…and then traffic came to a dead stop. Of course this was caused by every transplant in Cary choosing to take the very same route to work as everyone else in the subdivision. Heaven forbid that anyone not travel the same route to work as their neighbors! The traffic jam aside, my frustrations were amplified two fold because every time that I accelerated, that fucking squealing got ten times worse!! It took me over 30 minutes to travel just under ten miles! Needless to say, by the time I was FINALLY able to go at a speed more than 15MPH I was getting dangerously close to being late for work so I had to scrap the idea of a biscuit and tea!! Yes, I was very pissed about that!
So once I finally got to work and settled in, I logged into my computer and looked at the huge mess that is my existence lately. No, the magic scheduling fairies hadn’t come during the night. Damnit! Since I’m so far behind, I’ve been cutting out a few steps of the process…none of them are actually REQUIRED steps but they’re done as a courtesy to the guys in the field. Most of the guys know how far behind I am, so they haven’t really said much about eliminating those few steps. I’m going about my business when I get an email from one of the guys in the field. He tells me that I am NOT to schedule any of his customers without talking to him first. He went on to say that an appointment I’d scheduled was going to conflict with some things he’s got going on for that day. Now had he stopped there, I wouldn’t have had any issues about what he’d said. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there. He then tells me that he’s cancelled the appointment and that I’d better get it rescheduled!! Of course I had to reply with something along the lines of, “you cancelled it so YOU can reschedule it…and furthermore I’m paid to schedule your appointments…not call you and ask your permission if I can do my job the way that the company mandates that I do it.” He rescheduled the appointment.
After that incident was resolved, it was time for the day’s next annoyance. One of my field technicians informed me and his boss that he’s going to be out of work for the next two weeks. Mind you, this turkey has already been out for over two weeks. The story goes that this guy strained his back while mowing his grass a few weeks back and his doctor won’t release him to come back to work for at least another couple of weeks. The result of this guy being out for all this time? He’s got over 30 customers waiting to be scheduled…four of which have a deadline of next week!! Luckily, the guy’s supervisor called me today and we worked out a plan for getting at least those four appointments made and talked about the plan for the other stuff coming up in December.
Once lunch time rolled around, I decided to get lunch from the training center which is within walking distance of my office. Since it was still raining, I figured that I’d just drive my truck over. Knowing about the squealing, I saturated every inch of my engine with this stuff called Liquid Wrench. Believe it or not, it WORKED!! I go into the building, get my food, and then head back to my truck. The whole thing only took about 10 minutes or so….you can imagine my fury when I start my truck and sure enough…the squealing was back full force!!
When I’m away from my computer for more than 30 minutes, it goes into lock stage. The only people who can UN-lock it are me or a supervisor. In order for ME to unlock it, I have to enter my user ID and password. So I enter my logon stuff and get this pop up that says my credentials couldn’t be verified. I figured I’d missed a letter or number, so I tried it again. Same pop up message. This happened three more times before it finally dawned on me what the problem was. Remember the whole name change issue? It seems that took effect while I was at lunch, which is why I couldn’t get back onto my computer. No biggie…I entered the new logon info I’d been given when this shit first came up. Voila! I was back in. A little later, I got a call from a customer who needed some copies of invoices for the last 12 months. In order to get this information, I have to go onto the internet. Again, no biggie. Imagine my surprise when I get a message saying that “my credentials couldn’t be verified” again!! As it turns out, until the name change updates in all of our servers I won’t have access to the internet, intranet, and several other different places. Unfortunately for me, the places that I can’t access right now are CRITICAL for me to be able to do my job. I called my supervisor and told him what was going on…and let him know that someone would need to take up the slack while I waited for everything to update. He wasn’t happy about that, but it’s like I told him, “if the company hadn’t dictated to me what my name was and then changed everything during the middle of the day, we wouldn’t have this problem!” I also reminded him that once I legally change my name we’ll be going through this all over again!! Another statement he wasn’t thrilled about. Oh freakin’ WELL!!
The day FINALLY came to an end at 5:30 and I headed out to the bucket of bolts that I call a truck. Once again, I saturated the engine with the Liquid Wrench and started the truck up. It did fine for the first few minutes, but was back to waking the dead before I even got to the main road of the office complex!! As usual, traffic was horrible..and was compounded by my frustration of the day in general!
If you’ve ever wondered what a typical day for BryM is…you just read all about it!!
Now that the day’s FINALLY over, I can look forward to….doing….it….all…again…tomorrow.
Today was a monumental occasion for the general area that I live in: the grand opening of the new Wal-mart!! This is no ordinary Wally World though…it’s the biggest on the East Coast!! So, not wanting to be mistaken for someone who has a bit of individuality, I decided to take a trip out to see what all the buzz was about.
Let’s just say I wasn’t all that impressed with what I saw. Yes, the place is HUGE!! Very huge!! The garden center is three times the size of other Wal-marts, the electronic department is much larger and has a much larger selection of merchandise, and the clothing departments are double the size of a regular store. Other than that, it’s just another Wal-mart! One cool thing I did notice…when you walk by one of the refrigerated or frozen foods, the lights inside the coolers and freezers come on…they’re motion detectors apparently! Pretty neat, huh??
Other stuff:
~~Work is REALLY sucking lately!! I’m sure you all remember that I was in a mandatory training class for three weeks and that the person who was supposed to cover my area while I was in class didn’t do SHIT the entire time I was gone….well, the shit is starting to roll downhill now. Managers and customers are wanting to know why my scheduling is so far behind….one of the field managers actually sent out an email to all of us in the group saying that “there’s no excuse for not having all of these appointments scheduled…..” Naturally, I wrote him back and told him that I for one was not offering EXCUSES for the work being behind…I was in fact offering a REASON for why I’m so far behind, and then proceeded to explain how I’d gotten fucked while I was in training. He was empathetic but said that I “need to try harder to catch up…” Was I furious??!! Absolutely!! I was VERY close to telling this knucklehead that if he felt he could do the job better he was more than welcome to come and sit at my desk for a while!! I maintained my cool though…
~~ I came to the conclusion today that I’m an idiot. Two years ago, I hosted the family gathering for Christmas at my house. It went off without a hitch even though I had members of BOTH sides of my family in attendance. Usually the two sides don’t always get along in close quarters, but they were amazingly nice to each other!! Last year we had the gathering at my brother’s house because I was poor, jobless, and on skid row. Well, now that I’m not on skid row (for the most part) and I actually have a job, I volunteered to have the gathering at my house this year! Clearly, I’ve at some point fallen and hit my head because even though everything went fine 2 years ago, it was VERY nerve wracking, and I vowed not to do it at my house ever again. Yet, here I am..sticking my foot in my mouth!! GAAAAHHHHHHH!!!
~~I’ve got a little blast from the past for those of you from the Baby Boomer generation. I’m sure you all remember The Donna Reed Show from the late 50s and 60s….I found this little video on YouTube of Shelley Fabares after she’d left the show…I think it’s pretty neat, although the bleached blond hair and the fake eyelashes was a bit shocking….
So that's it for tonight!! Have a good Thursday!!
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So it looks like I'm stuck with this evil incarnate for a while longer. Damnit. 
I believe that I even openly sobbed for a few minutes. Yes, I know that it will grow back within a couple of weeks, but during that time I fear that I'm going to be mistaken for a 12 year old kid! 
And no, I'm not going to post any pictures of my newly bald upper lip!! 
