From the Shark Tank:

User calls support pilot fish complaining that her spell checker takes 20 minutes to run when she opens a document. Fish checks her settings and turns off grammar and spell check, then notices that there are more than 1,800 pages in the document. "Further digging reveals that the user has only one document," says fish. "She adds pages instead of creating new documents." Why? "To save space."

I swear I have worked with this woman, or twenty people just like her.

There's still 30 minutes to go.

Well, drat. I'll be on the subway by then.

I just spent a few minutes looking up pictures of Abraham Lincoln's nose to send to ChiKat (to back up my story about the urban legend that to rub it brings good luck--every Illinois kid who went on an 8th-grade trip to Springfield knows this).

I hate realizing you just emailed a hundred people without remembering to turn off read receipts.

I have definitely worked with people like this:

User calls help desk to report a gold message that says "thank you" in the lower left corner of her screen. "Believing it to be a virus, I advised her to not touch anything and transferred her to our software support team," says pilot fish who got the call. "The tech took over the call and shadowed the user's desktop but didn't see the message. After asking the user about it, she understood. Once the yellow Post-it note that someone had taped on her monitor was removed, she was able to view her desktop normally."

Upon reading the spacex site, it seems they've put an awful lot of energy into making their rockets reliable. So they probably have a good chance of succeeding.

trying to decide what I'm going to wear to tomorrow's Sisters of Mercy concert.

I feel I should pass on Hec's words of wisdom: Pastels and a touch of bronzer.

Status report, avoiding work:

I'm avoiding it by reading the blogosphere explosion about Ben Domenech. For some reason, perpetrators of literary/journalistic/any sort of writing-for-a-living frauds totally fascinate me; between Domenech, James Frey and JT Leroy, this has been a banner year in crooked-writerdom-related work avoidance for me.

Also, Doctor McWordy has ballsed up her dictaphone somehow so that there's a hideous screechy feedback on her dictaphone tape that can't be eliminated or even minimized by the listener, so I can't listen to more than about 20 seconds at a time. It's incredibly unpleasant and man, do I want to just blow off the rest of the afternoon, shut down my computer, and stroll around looking for the chocolate milk room or something equally constructive.

Timelies all!

Sheesh...we're hosting the first seder this year and my folks are planning the menu. So they send the e-mail with the preliminary list of dishes to G, G's mom and to G's dad and stepmom. And forgot to include me. I had to eplain to my dad(who sent the message) that a) G and I have separate computers and b) I don't read G's e-mail unless he says "have a look at this".

I am avoiding work by doing other, less exciting, work.