Preaching to the choir here.

He just (as far as I can tell) disagrees with the fundamental job of government, regardless of what's in the official documents from way back when.

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I am completely failing to be interested in this meeting, because I'm leaving for the airport in a couple of hours.

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What is this dating you speak of?

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Your friend is Ron Swanson?

Hee.

I thought the government's job is to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. But what do I know, it's not like it's written down someplace.

THIS.

I was going to quote "Cabinet Battle #1" ("These are wise words, enterprising men quote 'em/Don't act surprised, you guys, cuz I wrote 'em") but then I googled and learned that apparently Gouverneur Morris wrote the preamble.

Meanwhile, I sit next to the CEO's EA, and she's over here answering the phone, "AT&T." Because (a) she has caller ID and (b) he is out of the office.

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Dating.

I have no clue.

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"If people won't take care of their neighbors out of altruism, it's not the government's job to do it."

I'm getting real close to answering this sort of talk with, "So was it the orphan trains or the dying in the streets you like best about this approach?"

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I was going to quote "Cabinet Battle #1" ("These are wise words, enterprising men quote 'em/Don't act surprised, you guys, cuz I wrote 'em") but then I googled and learned that apparently Gouverneur Morris wrote the preamble.

Different document.

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The Perseids meteor shower is peaking tonight, and it's supposed to be the best one in a decade.

Looks like it'll be cloudy and rainy tonight in Chicago. Do I want to stay up all night and drive two to four hours south to see the Perseids?

I'm torn between "that would be awesome" and "no, sleep is good."

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Perhaps the hivemind would help me brainstorm a solution to this problem. Faux-niece (my BFF's daughter) is 18 and has a job, and she needs to learn to drive asap. Because her mom is worn out from driving her to work and now to school. They live in a rural area and everything is far away, and there's no public transportation. (Also, if she doesn't learn to drive soon, she'll have spent ALL of her inheritance on clothes and make-up and there'll be no money left to buy her a car.) This sitch is getting dire. But her high school doesn't offer driver's ed (wtf), there are NO driver's ed schools within a reasonable distance, and her mom has wisely decided it would be a disaster for her to teach the kid herself. And they really need her to be taught on an automatic transmission, but both their cars are manual, so she needs a teacher with a car she can learn on.

How do people learn to drive?

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Rant incoming!

Last week the person who manages our technology insisted that my old tower be replaced with a new laptop in a docking station. I protested - pointed out that I never travel for business and was perfectly happy with the old one - but he said it was necessary. Lost almost an entire day as the person who did the actual work set up the laptop, connected everything, then had to attach an external CD drive to install all the special programs I use.

And it's been almost nothing but issues. There are a bunch of extra email boxes I monitor - we use them for mass emailings so no one (except me) gets the huge numbers of bounce-backs from either "out of office" messages or bad address notifications. I'd sent the manager a list of those email boxes and he later came by with a print-out to check off the ones I said I needed. New computer's set up and none of them are there, including one I'd discussed with the guy the day before. So I sent him a message listing the email boxes I needed ... and he comes back with a new print-out to check off and I start rattling off the addresses and he tells me to slow down so he can mark them off on his print-out. I came in Monday and one of the email boxes was the wrong one ... and I couldn't access the office calendar.

Got that straightened out, but the new computer is noticeably SLOWER than the old one - I have to sit and twiddle my thumbs as programs open, files save or download. They keep telling me there's no reason for it and I must be mistaken.

They forced me to a new version of Internet Explorer, which is the best browser to use for updating pages on our website, which was built in Sharepoint. New IE doesn't work with the older version of Sharepoint we have ... tabs don't come up, it takes multiple tries to get to the HTML and, frankly, it's a bitch having to do all the work in the HTML code. I can work with Chrome, but that inserts weird code that messes up the layout of the pages and affects the way things work.

So our manager guy is out this entire week, only sporadically available by email ... and tech support is not being very supportive.

I am NOT a happy camper. I've seriously considered digging out my old tower and putting it back.

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