When Good Cars Go Bad

We all knew it had to happen eventually. My Car of Awesomeness (who is rapidly approaching his first anniversary with me) has started down the dark path that the Truck of Malfunction forged many, many years ago.

I know at first I was a little worried when, less than a month in, we had that brief period where the car was possessed by Satan. But that was resolved in general short order, and there had been no problems since. (Unless you count the fact that it burns through gas so fast that I can literally watch as the gas gauge goes down, which is slightly demoralizing in an age where one gallon of gas costs more than a 12 pack of Coke. But let's not get into that.)

Then, about two months ago I started to notice that my left front tire was a little flat. Almost imperceptibly, but as time went on, it definitely got flatter. So I ran by a gas station, filled it back up, and fully intended to go get it checked out at the tire place.

But time passed and I grew complacent. It wasn't actually getting any flatter anymore, it was just one of those things. And then when it did start to get noticeably flat, I ignored the problem until my car actually started to pull towards the left. And again, I simply filled the tire with air rather than going to the store.

What can I say? I was young. And foolish. And the tire place was totally like at least seven miles up the road.

Okay, so maybe the car isn't so much heading down the TOM path of destruction so much as my own carefully crafted path of willful ignorance, but follow along, it's an exciting story.

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All of this rising action and foreshadowing leads us up to last weekend when I am supposed to drive out into deep East Texas for my Mom's family birthday lunch. As is our family tradition, the diaspora of our clan is temporarily put on hold, as we return together for a single meal on each member's date of birth. Usually held at a delightfully colorful theme restaurant.

We decide to shoot for a late afternoon meal, as going to church Sunday mornings always adds an extra element of complexity to the proceedings. I head out from Dallas just at 12:00 so I should arrive roughly at 2:30-2:45, with some spare room for traffic to make the 3:00 meeting time. I once again notice that my tire is looking a touch low, and thus do a quick fill up before I embark. (Note: this would be the third fill up of its kind in under 2 months. Lord knows I never was called the brightest bulb in the box.)

Things go great as the trip begins. Traffic is super light, I have both the new Hush Sound album and a copy of the latest offering from The National to obsess over/dance around to all the way up there.

Now the trip from Dallas to Longview is a relatively simple one. There is only one highway involved, and it is basically a straight horizontal line connecting the two cities. The only thing of note about the drive is that there is pretty much nothing in between the two places, besides a plethora of empty or cow-ridden fields. There is one city about 30 minutes outside the Metroplex, then the turn off for the only other mid size city (Tyler) and then nothing for upwards of 80 miles.

So of course, my tire chooses the dead center of this Nothing Span in which to completely blow out. I actually had about 15 seconds of warning about this, luckily, as my car started making a peculiar *Wwhoomp* *Wwhoomp* sort of noise as a precursor to becoming completely undrivable. This causes me to slow from 75 to 65 mph, which is probably the only thing that saved me from untimely death, as I still nearly careened straight off the road I was on and into a nearby creek. Instead, I slam on my breaks and am able to instead just crazy swerve my way over to the side of the road, minus a large portion of my tire.

After a couple of fun moments of hyperventilating, personal body checking to make sure all limbs were still intact, and nervous laughing, I make my way out of the car to survey the damage.

I pull out the jack and spend an agonizingly long period of time lying on the ground trying to find the lip of the car body that I'm supposed to brace it against. Then I spend an even longer time lying on the ground attempting to figure out how to pump up the jack using only this coat hanger-like apparatus that was packed in alongside it. Once I get the car up in the air and the old tire off, I'm able to see just how bad a blowout it was - nearly a 5 inch hole on the interior wall of the tire. It looks like the exit wound of a particularly nasty shotgun blast. I have a brief fever dream while lying on the side of the busy highway of an armed robbery gone bad in the interior of my left front tire - their last job before they were going to go straight too - until I shake myself out of it and get the little tiny spare tire attached to the car.

I'm wildly impressed with my tire changing abilities (which, yeah, I probably shouldn't be, but come on. Show of hands, how many of you would think I could change a tire under my own power without dropping a car on my head?) but now face the fact that I'm going to have to drive at least 60 miles in any one direction before I'm going to find civilization advanced enough to help me get off this Baby's First Tire that I've got going on.

Getting up to 60 mphs is an epic feat and strain for my car at this point, so we stick with about 55 mph, all the while wheezing down the highway as we are passed by 18 wheelers, uHauls, and even old people driving those giant camper houses on wheels, with dumb names like The Summer Breeze, or The Elegant Pelican. I'm thoroughly humiliated for my fancy luxury sedan, but at least it's still operational and we aren't in a sort of Deliverance/Wrong Turn situation where I'm forced to go wandering through the woods for help.

I decide to just head for Longview, as it's probably the closest and biggest place that I can reach without dying, and make it there with little further issue, although minus a large portion of my dignity. I arrive at the restaurant and the hostess blanches at the sight of me, probably thinking that she's going to have to rush some bum out of her fancy establishment. Finally for once I have an excuse for getting this look, as I'm pretty much covered head to toe in gravel, brake dust, jack grease, and God knows what else.

Being pretty sure that there isn't a place that could help me at this point anyways, I enjoy a nice leisurely (if soot covered) dinner with my family, who has awesomely waited around for an extra hour and a half just for me, chowing down on chips and what have you while placing side bets on what sort of disaster had befallen me this time.

Afterwards I make the long journey home to Dallas on the Tire of Stunted Growth, and find that if you just come to accept the fact that everyone on Earth is going to angrily rush by you, usually while flipping you off, driving can be really quiet and relaxing. Almost therapeutic. I'm not sure that it was worth the extra 2 hours of transit time, but it wasn't as horrible as I anticipated.

Still, getting the bird from the elderly driver of The Regal Eagle? It sticks with you.

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The next day I was able to get two new front tires and a front end alignment (the real reason for the blowout, apparently, insomuch as my alignment was far enough off that the inside of the tire was getting worn down about 10 times faster than it should be) with almost no trouble, assuming I didn't mind mortgaging my first born against the costs. Seriously, owning a fancy car is cool and all, but who would have ever expected that an expensive car would have associated expensive repair and maintenance costs? That shit just comes out of nowhere.

So to recap - stupidity and lack of CONSTANT VIGILANCE against potential car problems causes tire explosion and near death of the driver, but plucky ingenuity saves the day over said stupidity and everyone survives, just minus all their disposable income for the month.

Oh, and the bastards at the tire place totally lost one of my lug nuts on the tire they replaced. Which will take them as long to fix as it is taking the city to repair my gas at home. (Meaning they'll both be in place sometime around my 40th birthday.)

Woo and hoo.

A Primitive Lifestyle

About 5 weeks ago, I came home after work and really wanted some cookies. Because I am incredibly handy around the kitchen like that, I set out to whip up a batch from scratch. And by scratch, I mean I added an egg to the Betty Crocker pre-made cookie mix and then spooned the results on to a cookie sheet. I tossed the sheet into the oven and set the timer for 13 minutes, practically drooling in anticipation.

When the alarm (finally) went off, I shook myself out of my cookie-lustful stupor, wiped my chin, and wandered back into the kitchen, expecting shortly to be able to stuff my mouth full of warm chocolaty goodness. Except upon inspection the cookie dough was in the exact same condition as when I put it in the oven.

"Fool!" I thought. "In your haste you forgot to preheat the oven. Now you will have to wait another 15 minutes before you can gorge yourself." I was very sad.

Until I looked over and realized that I had set the oven, it just wasn't getting hot.

This sounds way less ominous than it should, but right at this second you should hear the soundtrack that accompanies my life rise in dreadful anticipation of a horrible reveal.

Because while it may look like just a lack of cookie-making power one night, this one event was the foreshadowing of oh so much doom to come.

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We fast-forward to today, where I am still unable to cook anything. Because the city has shut off our gas. And by the current rate of things, they plan on never turning it back on.

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I feel like I already discussed my problem from a couple of months ago, where my hot water heater kept abruptly refusing to heat any water. Most commonly whenever I was actually in the shower, mid-way through the chorus of George Michael's Faith. But just in case I haven't - the boiler for my condo complex kept repeatedly failing over the course of several weeks. After (futilely) replacing the heating coils multiple times, the HOA board realized that it was actually a problem with the natural gas line going to the boiler. They put an above ground gas line directly to the heater while the real line was fixed, and everything seemed peachy.

That was until the moment 5 weeks ago when the gas line repair company came in and did the test to check the new line. Which indicated that there were at least two, possibly as many as four, huge gas leaks in the overall existing system in our complex, not just the one going to the water heater. And huge is sort of an understatement - according to one workman, had one of these leaks actually ignited it could have easily taken out our entire block.

My faith in urban safety now completely undermined, the city shut down the gas and has been systematically replacing the whole setup. Which apparently takes the entire length and breadth of time itself, as we are now approaching day 40 without the hint of gas. Do you know what sort of primitive lifestyle one must lead if you have a gas range stove with no gas to power it? Lemme tell you, it is not pretty.

Mostly it involves foraging in the wild (read: eating fast food for every meal), or subjecting yourself to eating radioactive matter (anything zapped in the microwave for extended periods of time). I have easily gained 10 pounds of weight, mostly in the form of french fries, which have directly applied themselves to line my torso, or in tiny microwaved hamburgers, which I feel go straight to my thighs.

Had I expected this little gas siege to last the rest of time, I might have sped up the plan that I put into motion over this weekend: buying an electric skillet to offset this new, even more wildly unhealthy lifestyle that has been thrust upon me. Unfortunately, my taste in skillets runs very cheap, as I'm already poor from the never ending eating out and the surprising expense of pre-made microwavable meals. So the skillet I ended up purchasing tends to only heat things in a very specific manner. Namely: Poorly, most kindly described as 'wildly uneven.'

Thus, to the two other food options we add a third: preservative-laden fast food, radioactive frozen meals, and alternatingly raw and burnt self-prepared delicacies. And not even I will buy the idea that something half raw and half totally blackened actually averages out to properly cooked. I'm a forager, not an idiot.

So still, we are left eating basically hand to mouth, wandering the streets looking for food made by others, all the while wondering if someday they will ever give us back the power to sustain ourselves on our own. And if so, will that day will arrive before I reach the weight of a killer whale, can no longer move under my own power, and approach all problems from the couch while wielding a reaching broom?

The answer most definitely seems to be no, but I lie in wait nonetheless - my pre-made cookie mix at the ready, an egg sitting in the refrigerator, under glass affixed with the words "Break in case of emergency. Or the ability to bake cookies," next to a tiny little hammer.

Someday, my friends, someday.

Love of Consumerism/Hate of Situation

Today I love:

• Vampire Weekend and Jenny Owen Youngs' Batten the Hatches, the two albums I got this weekend. I've had them both on repeat on my iPod for 2 days straight and still can't stop listening. Of particular note: Youngs' Voice on Tape, a song which I cannot get out of my head, and frankly don't even want to.
• This bag of Hershey's Hugs in my hand, who's dual chocolaty goodness is the only thing keeping me alive at this point.
• Brandon Sanderson. Particularly these two books of his, which are just amazing, and easily qualify as the best fantasy writing I've come across in the last 5 years. Have you ever been so into a book that you couldn't sleep until you finished it? That was me with the second one. Except not only would I not go to sleep, I wouldn't physically put the book down - carrying it with me as I took out my contacts, brushed my teeth, ironed my clothes for the next day. . . I was completely unconscious of this fact too, until I was actually in bed about to turn out the lights for the night when I realized I was still reading a book. So good. Also, as an offshoot of this.
• Tor Books, who sent me the first of those as a free eBook, as part of some sort of literary promotion. It was definitely a worthwhile gamble on their part, as it got me to go out and immediately acquire the second book in the series less than 30 minutes after finishing the first, so good on them. They also keep sending another book each week. Which is sweet, except for the fact that the last two they sent me I already owned. Along with the respective sequels for both books. I guess I'm just already too deep inside their demographic. Still, LOVE.

Today I Hate:

• My throat, which has swelled shut for unknown reasons. There is fiery pain whenever I swallow, and croaking noises whenever I try to speak. Do you understand how that might inconvenience someone who's job it is to answer the phones all day?
• Dallas drivers, particularly the Honda Accord who tried to sideswipe me on the way into the office this morning. Because he didn't feel like obeying the giant flashing yellow arrow indicating a lane closure until he was actually at said arrow, and then mistakenly assumed that he had right-of-way to take over my lane since his was gone.
• And also the BMW in my parking garage who tried to run me down once I was on foot, by driving 30 mph in an enclosed garage, while on his cell phone, driving the wrong way down a one way lane, and then veering into the parking spot I was standing in, waiting for his distracted, reckless ass to pass.
• Additionally, a small note to the driver of said BMW - if you are doing the three things noted above (speeding down the wrong way of a one-way lane while on a cell phone) and you try to root around in your passenger seat, resulting in a swerve that almost kills a pedestrian, when you slam on your breaks to stop, please don't honk your horn and yell angrily at the pedestrian. Because in case you didn't notice, it was your negligent ass that was wrong, and had it not been for the car dodging ability of the guy walking, he would now be plastered on your windshield. Particularly considering that your oh-so-amazing response time with those breaks had you shuddering to a stop three feet past where he was standing. That would be why he was able to look at you through your passenger-side window, with a look that indicated he was ready to drag you out of the car and beat the crap out of you, despite his generally non-violent persona. Christ.

If it's okay with everyone else, I'm just going to call this day a draw and hide in my living room until first light tomorrow. I'm pretty okay with the balance I've struck.

Like a Dr. Seuss Tale, In a Way

So I think we're far enough removed from the events now that I can go ahead and tell this story without flailing around like a prepubescent girl. But we'll see.

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About a week and a half before Christmas, I became completely convinced that there was a mouse in my apartment. I had no direct evidence at first. Only the slow disintegration of the gingerbread house that I left on the dining room table from our Christmas party. As the house wasn't so much made of "gingerbread" as it was "cardboard reconstituted to resemble a hard cookie with gingerbread flavoring," I had assumed it would be fine to leave out and among the elements.

But as more chunks of it would fall off, I became more suspicious, as it seemed very solid and rock-like when we were doing the construction. The final straw came when one morning I found that one of the artificial gingerbread trees in front of the house had been partially gnawed away. As I figured it (pretty) unlikely that Frnak had snuck in during the night and chewed down a bit of tree, I took this as real confirmation that there was indeed a mouse in the house. As it were.

I went to the store to buy some sort of mouse trapping device, after discussing it with Frnak and deciding that it would probably be a bad idea to just kill it outright. That's mean, right? Also, what if it died in the walls? We would have mouse stink, and also possibly a mouse ghost haunting our condo.

Sadly, though, as I was staring at the "humane" mouse deterrent devices in the store, I realized I had no idea what I would do if they actually worked. Most of these things centered around glue. As in a mouse would wander over this trap and be stuck to the glue. As if this solved the problem.

What are these people thinking? One morning I'm going to wake up and find a live mouse glued to a trap. And then what? Do I need to kill it on my own? Drive it to a farm and release it into the wild, minus its feet, which are permanently immersed in the glue? Reason with it until it understands human language and convince it to leave? This is not the mouse from The Rats of NIHM, or that delightful Pixar cartoon.

No sir, the glue was right out. As there was no full-on cage type trap, I was left only with the lethal alternatives. As I had horrifying visions of trying to set up a traditional mouse trap (spring + cheese + SNAP) and losing most of a finger just getting it set, I opted for the old standard of poison. It wasn't the most elegant solution, and it might someday have led to smells and haunting, but I couldn't wrap my mind around dealing with a mouse on my own terms. Poison it was.

My hunting instinct fully honed, I set up these little dishes of poison around various areas of the house and kept the place immaculately clean all the time leading up to and through Christmas.

Immediately we realized that indeed we did have a mouse. Possibly a giant colony of mice, in fact, judging on the amount of poison that was consumed during the first week of trap setting. This box of poison boasted that there was enough materials available to finish off 6-8 mice, and we were burning through the whole thing at a rapid pace. At that point I had visions of the opening scene from Ratatouille, expecting any morning to wake up and find a damnable mouse convention passed out dead in the middle of our floor, or ready to lead a coup d'etat of the apartment.

Either way, I was very tense for about 9 consecutive days there.

(Here we switch to the present tense to do a sort of stream-of-conscious sort of reliving, as I can't objectively run this part down.)

Around day 10 of MouseWatch '07, I'm idly minding my own business and playing around on the computer after a long day at work. Suddenly I sense a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I see this little (gigantic!) brown mouse just sort of wandering around my room, all nonchalant-like, or possibly just horribly disoriented, based on its swerving sort of gait.

I make some manner of noise that I can't do justice to in print, but suffice it to say that even in the mouse's drunken state it recognized the signal of "a 12 year-old girl has just spotted me, perhaps I should hide" and wandered underneath my bed.

Y'all? Let's just pause a second. There was a tiny (gigantic!) brown mouse, alive and presently hiding under my bed. Odds are, if you're reading this, you probably know me. Imagine how you would expect that I would react. And then quadruple it. I never thought I had a real aversion to mice (it's not like they're clowns or something), but sweet damn I suddenly found my real fear of rodents in that moment. And it was under my bed!

I run down the hall to Frnak's room and enlist him to help deal with this situation. We both approach my room in the same manner as you see on a television sitcom when someone suspects that there is a burglar in their house, all peering around corners and easily yelping at light provocation. After examination of the room to verify that the mouse has not changed locations, we begin to formulate plans.

First things first.

Jason: Frank, grab my shoes.
Frnak: [Grabs Jason's shoes. Takes one and hands it to Jason. Takes the other, holds it by the toe and wields it like a club.]
Jason: Not as a weapon! I need to put them on! God!
Frnak: Well how am I supposed to know! We need to be able to defend ourselves.
Jason: (breathlessly) Defend ourselves?! It's a tiny mouse! We are totally bigger than it. But seriously, if that mouse were to run over my bare foot, I would have a heart attack and die right there. Wait wait wait. Are you actually planning on killing it? Oh good lord, you are, aren't you? (*Gasp and point*) And you were going to use my shoe to do it! Those are my brand new favorite shoes and you were going to ruin them with mouse blood!
Frnak: (turns and gives Jason a look)
Jason: Yeah, okay, I'll calm down.

The plan is formulated: I cannot kill a mouse. Frnak is less than certain that he can. I decide then that we're going to capture him and release him into the wild, far far away from our house. Suitably armed for such a task (Frnak's Weapon of Choice: White Styrofoam Ice Chest, Jason's WoC: Black Mesh Wire Trash Can from the Bathroom) I sneak over to the bed and start raising up the...

(Sidebar: What the hell is that thing called? The thing that hangs down over the box spring to the floor? Bed curtain? Hanging... yeah I have no idea. But it's that thing.)

... the thing an inch at a time, tucking it under the mattress, all the while expecting the mouse to come shooting out from underneath, possibly going straight for my eyes. An imagination is a terrible, terrible thing to have and don't ever let anyone tell you differently. Finally the suspense is just too much for me and I decide to just move the bed altogether, indicating to Frnak that he should be ready to ice chest the little bastard the second we see him.

I move the bed to the left. No mouse. To the right. No mouse. Away from the wall. No mouse.

Frnak: If this mouse is a figment of your imagination, I swear to God I will beat you with this ice chest.
Jason: NO! It was totally there! I saw it.
Jason's Mind: Oh my God, what if I'm losing my mind? Imaginary mice? They commit people for that kind of thing.

Fueled by my visions of being sent to the nut house, I give the bed a mighty pull and move it entirely to the other side of the room.

Mouse!

Frnak: AHHHHHH!
Mouse: (runs and hides under my nightstand)
Jason: Dammit! What happened to the plan? You were supposed to catch it!
Frnak: I started to think you were making the whole thing up. I wasn't prepared!

So now we have a mouse under a tiny nightstand. Luckily, due to the fact that my apartment leaks heat faster than anything else in the world, I have already sealed off all of the exits to the room by stuffing clothing at the bottom of each door jamb. We know he cannot get out, it's only a matter of time.

That is until we move the nightstand and the mouse starts making his drunken way towards the closet. There is lots of shrieking and flailing, but little catching of the mouse. Somehow it worms its way through the blockade and into the closet.

There are several more minutes of shrieking, flailing, name-calling, and promises to burn every article of clothing the mouse touches, before finally the mouse is trapped under the wire mesh trashcan in the closet. Now we have a very angry mouse scaling the sides of its tiny prison, which is possibly more terrifying than when it was out on the loose. As Frnak leans down to take a closer look, the mouse turns and hisses at him, unnerving him practically to death. The mouse is a satan mouse. But we soldier on. Using our McGuyver-like instincts we upend the mouse, and seal him inside the trashcan with a piece of cardboard.

We make the very long trek from our apartment all the way to the expanse of woods that borders our apartment complex. I feel pretty confident that he's not going to be able to find his way back, seeing as there's a fence, a ditch, a huge lawn, a driveway, a dumpster, and three other apartment buildings he would have to traverse. Also, the little (gigantic!) guy is seriously lethargic, I'm not thinking he is long for this world anyways. I manage to finally shake him free of the trash can after several scary moments wherein I thought he would extract his revenge on me by forever clinging to the side of the can until the opportunity to feast on my flesh arose. He stumbles around drunkenly for a few seconds and then finally wanders into the woods, never to be seen or heard from again.

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I should probably follow that entire story up with the postscript that we were incredibly lucky that a) it was just one mouse, and b) when we found him he had eaten 5 full servings of poison, because seriously had we met that mouse at full strength, it would have bested both of us and would now rule the apartment like a king.

But we did win, and I am happy to report there has not been even a mention of any further mousings, at all. (I've been keeping a vigorous watch over the poison, just in case.) I like to think that it's an all around triumph, even if there was a lot of shrieking and childish name-calling in the process. It's all about the ends, not the means.

Office of Death

I was idly minding my own business on Monday afternoon, wading through various piles of mortgage documents at my desk, when suddenly everything in the office took on a strobe-light quality. All the lights, along with every electrical device, started rapidly flickering off and on. After verifying that I wasn't having a stroke or seizure and this was actually happening in the real world, I went sprinting around the office trying to unplug all the computers and monitors, since I vaguely remembered something from my computer science days about power surges being bad for computers.

That went on for about 3 minutes, non-stop. During that time, my boss patiently continued the phone conversation she was conducting at her desk, while I ran through the office like a frightened squirrel, unplugging things. Finally everything in the office shut down entirely for a couple of seconds and the backup generators came up. That gave us power to the lights in the office, but pretty much nothing else. Also, that meant that the air conditioning stopped blowing, so we could smell the unmistakable scent of an electrical fire.

After some additional frightened squirrel running on my part to verify that nothing in our office was currently aflame, we tried to decide on the best course of action at this point. I was all for bolting for the nearest exit and huddling in the parking lot until a burly fireman personally assured me that the threat of fire was gone. But my boss decided that instead of frightened huddling, we should stay in the office and contact everyone we were working with to let them know we had lost power, so they wouldn't think we had just stopped working because we're slackers. I was slightly against making conversational business calls while the office building around us was consumed in flames, but as I couldn't find any source of fire or smoke (just the hideous smell) and there was no fire alarm, I reluctantly agreed and grabbed the phone.

Around the start of the third call, the floor manager (who already thinks I'm crazy, btw) busted in my office to ask why the hell I was still in the office. I agreed and asked her indeed, what was I doing still there, but the irony was lost on her. Since she had to evacuate everyone from the floor before she got to leave, my little attempts at wit were directly affecting her chances of survival. She had no time for banter and almost flung me bodily from the room. My boss looked over at the two us and calmly held up one finger, like, hold on this call is almost over. The floor manager rolled her eyes so hard I worried that they'll fall from their sockets and she started rushing me down the hall.

We all made it to the ground floor by heading through the stairwell where the lights were still strobing (which made the walk down just a touch treacherous), and were told to hang around in the lobby until the fire department got there and could investigate where the fire was and why the alarms never went off.

My boss decided to screw waiting though, as we are busy people, and sent me off on the numerous errands that we could fill this unproductive standing-around-celebrating-our-escape-with-our-lives time with. I went to the bank to make some deposits (the boss had thoughtfully had me grab our outstanding checks as we fled the building for our lives) and regaled the teller with my harrowing story of near-fire-death. She was less than impressed for some reason (possibly because there was no smoke, or fire, and because I had fled the building based on a smell) which made me generally resentful for the rest of the transaction. At least she offered me a sucker from her jar of bank candy afterwards, which helped sooth my pain.

When I got back to the office, a really nice and cute fireman let me go back up to our floor, as they determined that there was no actual fire. One of the generators, or transformers, or something (he was really cute, it was hard to focus on the words) down in the basement had shorted out, and it had caused everything else to shut down. The smell came from the shorted out unit and just happened to propagate up to us because we have a dedicated air flow line to our floor from the basement.

We still only had backup power, though, for the remainder of the day, which meant absolutely no computers, or air conditioning, and if you wanted to go to the bathroom you had to do so with the lights strobing all around you. It was like peeing in a discotheque.

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And that's the story of how I almost (okay not even close) died in the office. I would have told the story earlier, but as luck would have it, yesterday right around 10 in the morning our corporate office had a catastrophic systems failure at the north branch, which completely cut all of our communication with the Internet, email, and information systems until about 6 this morning.

I swear, it's like my office is turning into the Temple of Doom over here. I expect the next time I head out of my office, a giant boulder of paperwork and discarded coffee mugs will start chasing me down the hallway.

Come to think of it, I really should have brought my fedora in to work.