customers suck!

friday, i am going to one of our customers for a meeting with the manager and their electrical contractor. they remodeled last summer, and the fire alarm suffered regular damage while the construction was going on. typically, i would get a call from the manager that they were having trouble. when i got there no one would ever cop to even peripheral involvement in the problem. i would spend a couple of hours tracing a circuit only to find out that "someone" had removed a few detectors. no one knew who took them out, or where they were. i would replace them with new detectors and get the alarm back to normal.

when i wrote the work ticket, the electrical contractor (who was supposed to be taking care of this system) would refuse it sending me to the facility manager, who would kick it back to the electrician. evidently, they have been arguing over who is to pay these bills ever since. i was unaware that we hadn't been paid.

someone is paying them friday! i don't really care who, but my boss has a mechanical lein all set to file. the facility is due for semi annual testing this month. if they owe us money, it will not be done.

someone around here won 365 million in the powerball drawing last night. it wasn't me.

aside from that, sunflower and i had a lovely weekend. it is pretty cold here, but we bundled up and braved the cold. with the increase in the cost of stamps, it has now become cheaper to drop our local bills in person, so we paid our utilities and a couple local stores. we stopped at an estate sale in the upscale neighborhood a few blocks away, but the stuff they had that was worth looking at was way overpriced. we had a late lunch at mimi's cafe in a room full of ladies in red hats.

sunday has been pretty quiet. comp usa had a pretty good sale and i picked up some parts for some much needed repairs on a couple of the desktop computers around here. i made a pot of chili, and now i am sipping a glass of geofranco wineries nero d'avola and relaxing in preparation of the coming work week.

mayby the next big powerball...........

good evening friends,

sunflower and i spent the afternoon at the home and garden show today. there are two of these, and there will be another in about three weeks. there was once a single show, with a single organizational committee. there was some sort of argument, and now there are two.

the most enjoyable part of these shows are the entries avaiable at each booth to win a new grill, or a new tv. by filling out these entries, you are guaranteeing that your name will be on the sales list for the booth sponsor for at least another year. i happily filled melvin's name , address and phone number on each slip.

you may remember melvin as the guy who tried very hard to interfere in my relationship with sunflower back when we were first getting aquainted. over the years i have made it a point to keep my practical joke skills sharp at his expense, sometimes pushing the envelope.

well, he will get plenty of phone calls from window, siding, roofing and various other home improvement firms, and i am sure he will enjoy the vacation plans offerred to him.

too bad it is illegal to sign the petitions to allow gay marriages, or to allow casino gambling in his name. when doing this sort of thing, it is important to remember what is legal. i learned this from my melvin campaign.

we have had a long run of unseasonable warm weather. there were a few days in january that reached 70 degrees.

winter came back today. we woke to a layer of snow with a slick icy base. the wind was out of the north and cut right through to the bone.

it is nice to be inside sipping a glass of gnarly head old vine red zinfandel.

so, what are you drinking?

too cheap to meter?

good evening friends,

i spent the day today testing some fire suppression systems at a nuclear power plant. back in t he beginnings of the atomic age, it was forcast that nuclear power could produce energy so cheaply that there would be no need to meter it. this did not come to pass.

our bill for the service we provide is pretty high. if these systems were anywhere else, it would take me half an hour to forty five minutes each to test and generate a one page report on the system status.

once the nuclear industry gets into the act, i have a procedure to follow that runs fifty or so pages. each and every step has to be verified over and over. i spent half an hour first thing this morning waiting for the shift supervisor to give his permission for an operator to give the tech i was working with the key to open the control panel. this is a standard key. i have a coffee can full of them. once, i used the key on my key ring to open one of these panels. this resulted in three seperate reports file to explain why we deviated from the written procedure.

the tech supervisor offered me a job today. i do not have enough patience to work in an environment like this. i am used to actually working and getting stuff done. these guys are way more concerned with the proper forms being filled out than they are with the proper operation of their fire suppression equipment.

yet another attempt to bore everyone to death. i sure appreciate all of friend tree's hard work at helping us all communicate, but it is time for me to try to manage this blog stuff on my own. the life i lead is quiet and peaceful as i can make it so there is not much exciting news coming from here.

today is the super bowl. not being a sports fan in general or a football fan in particular i plan to avoid it. i have a lovely bottle of spanish wine breathing, and i will sip it as i surf the net.

whomever you root for, i hope your team wins.