January 16, 1997
...back on-line
Praise the Lord and pass the martinis.
Yes folks, the rejoicing may commence: Donut is back in my arms again. I have a life once more. Darin told me yesterday that it had gotten fixed and was on its way via FedEx. This immediately brightened up my whole day. The downside was, of course, that I had to wait a whole day. I wondered if I could overdose on melatonin.
 I got in the shower this morning, got out, and discovered I had a message on the machine. I expected it would be my manager saying, Hi, I have a package for you. Instead, what I heard was: "This is Federal Express, I tried ringing your manager, no answer, you're not here, your package number is (blah), we'll try to redeliver tomorrow by 5 p.m." Uh, no. No no no. I don't think so. I'm sure I'm not the most obnoxious customer FedEx has ever dealt with, but I probably cracked the Top Twenty. I kept calling and calling, asking when the delivery person could return, asking if I could go meet the delivery person somewhere. Wondered if I should drive around, stopping random FedEx trucks. I'm sure that I called so many times that the FedEx dispatcher ordered the driver to take my package by the drug-sniffing dogs. Finally the FedEx driver returned and I ran downstairs to the front door of the apartment complex. The driver was standing by the elevator door holding a couple of packages. "Who are you?" she asked me, obviously concerned for her own safety. She handed me my package and I ran away with it. Victory! Freedom! PPP Access! I set it up -- it's really damn slow again, which worries me to no end -- collected my mail, started downloading about 14 megs of stuff off of goonsquad, like all the recent Paperwork entries. Then I headed off to school.
Today was Script Analysis again. This is going to be a cool class. We watch a film one week, then analyze it the second week for how different situations are set up, planting and payoff, and so on. After Analysis my team from the Directing class met to discuss the group project we have to have done by the Monday after MLK. I like everybody in my group except one, who I'll call *Bernice. I have a running joke with Glenn that Bernice's problem is that she's an android and she hasn't quite gotten all the nuances of imitating a human down. She stares, she doesn't blink, she uses the most artificial sentence constructions. She's also quite bossy. She wanted to run the whole show, and rather than fight (or be intensely rude) after a while, I just let her. The other members of the group decided that long before I had, I noticed. I have a really bad habit, I've discovered. Whenever I'm annoyed with someone -- not necessarily angry, just annoyed -- I can't look at them. I had the hardest time looking at Bernice during the whole Directing team meeting. Oh yeah -- I ended up with the job of Director on this group project. Oh this is going to be fun. This is why I'm not spending a four-day weekend up in Northern California. But I have my computer. That's something, I guess. |
