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I am an idiot. I was an idiot. And I will continue to be an idiot.

27 Aug

When I got home from work mid-day Tuesday to walk Shadow, I went to my thermostat to turn off the AC since it was an unseasonably cool 75 degrees outside. But my thermostat was off. The display wasn’t working, and try as I might, I could not figure out what the problem was. (I checked the circuit box and nothing appeared to be tripped.)

I felt fortunate with the timing – it would have SUCKED to lose AC on a typical 95 degree August day in DC. But to lose it at 75? Not bad. I called the company that installed it a year and set up a service appointment for the next day. They gave me a window of between 1-5pm.

So on Wednesday, I arrived home at 1pm and waited for the HVAC tech to arrive. It was 85 degrees out, so we were creeping into uncomfortable territory. I waited. And called to confirm my appointment. And waited. And emailed to confirm my appointment. And the technician NEVER showed up.

First thing yesterday morning I emailed the coordinator and told her that I’d been stood up. Here is her response:

Oh are you serious! Ms Farmer, I am not sure what happen, but yes we will have someone there between 10-2. Again I do apologize I will also talk to the tech and find out what happen.

I forwarded her response to Alan, who commented, “Well, now we know why the timing is off. Clearly she doesn’t understand tenses.”

I offered a counter thought. “Actually, maybe she has never learned the past tense because they never finish anything – so she only ever needs to speak in the present?”

Whatever our theories, the guy ended up showing up at 3pm – an hour past the end of his scheduled window. I couldn’t get too upset though, because he walked in, flipped my circuit breaker (which I swear was still in the on position and had not tripped), and it was fixed. I felt like an idiot for not having done that myself, but did learn a bit about how the moisture sensor works, so it wasn’t a total wash.

As I sit here and deride the nice woman’s grammar on my blog, it occurs to me: it is entirely possible that she is blogging about how a dumb customer just needed to reset her circuit breaker. Anything’s possible, right?

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Should I be scared of my stove, or the guy who labeled it?

18 Jun

The other night when Alan was over, waiting for a flank steak to broil in the oven, we started looking at all the dials on my new stove. And we had a few observations.

First, I’m not sure I understand the function of a “PROOF” button on my stove. Will it spellcheck my meals? Will it demonstrate that the food is, in fact, cooking? Seriously – what the hell is that about? And even more frightening – a “PROBE” function? Are you an appliance or my gyno? And if you are an appliance, what dill-hole named that function?

And this one can only be explained by a bad copywriter (or a witty one):

Seriously. I think even second graders know that burning bridges is not a desirable thing.

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Definition: Occam’s Razor

1 Jun

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this yesterday when I did my whole “I am retarded and disassembled my dishwasher only to find it was a Tupperware lid causing the problem, not a broken dishwasher” post. I should’ve tried to offset my low IQ by offering a vocabulary (or covabulary, as I just typed it) lesson.

So here it is, in a cheap attempt to regain my intellectual standing….

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the term (loosely) means, “The simplest solution is usually the correct one.”

The good news is, I’m not the only person who routinely battles over-complication. If there’s any truth to Alan’s post, then he might be a gold medalist. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one

Anyway. This public service announcement is brought to you by the letter “Dumb” and the number “Ass.” And yes, you probably already knew this term so it has done nothing to cancel my Blond Moment yesterday.

Grrr.

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Grammar Police: A lesson in homophones

24 Apr

You might be scratching you head, saying, “But I thought the word was homonym, Alison?” So let’s start with that.

In the most technical sense, a homonym is a word that is spelled the same and pronounced the same, but has two different meanings. An example would be the word “left” – which can be a direction (turn left!) or a verb (he left). Wikipedia actually does an awesome job mapping out the differences between not only homophones and homonyms, but also some of lesser-known linguistic concepts – as visually represented here:

Wikipedia was nice enough to create this Venn Diagram to help...

So technical framework aside, here’s why I’m all fired up about homophones: one of Alan’s Facebook “friends” (and we’re using the word loosely here) has taken to posting status updates from the toilet. It’s bad enough that she posts from the toilet (might want to warn her real-life friends not to borrow her PDA), but to make matters worse, the subject matter is usually what’s IN the toilet. For example, yesterday she high-fived herself publicly for having three solid stools in three hours. TMI.

Anyway, the tie in to homophones is this: she is trying to coin a phrase (“posting from the throne”) and get popular support for it on urbandictionary (though there’s not evidence that she’s even submitted it yet). The thing is, every time she makes this reference, she says “posting from the thrown.”

Alan and I were discussing it last night and decided he should add a comment saying, “You can post from the throne or you can throw a post, but you can’t post from the thrown” to see if that would help her.

But that kind of reminds me of the saying, “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” Which somehow ALSO strikes me as appropriate for this situation.

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Smarter Than A First-Grader?

5 Jan

I belong to a list-serve where people post requests for graphic/technical assistance. This note came my way earlier today:

I am at a lost…..

I work for a private elementary school.  We are looking fir a logo redesign…we have had several people to volunteer and the product we have gotten back is missing the mark……thus I am searching for a Graphic Designer to do a Logo Redesign for the school.  This would be a volunteer project….  Please feel free to forward off list. For more information, please eMail me.

SERIOUSLY? Since your note says you “work” there, I’m going to assume you’re receiving a paycheck, and not just volunteering. Presumably that means at some point, someone interviewed you or you completed an application. Was your writing this horrific then, or have you helped out in the first grade room a bit too long?

(And PS: This photo is an actual note written by a kindergarten student. Please note that he proofread his work and made appropriate revisions. It’s called editing: try it sometime!)

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