PAgent’s Progress
I share a bathroom with primates
Well, except for the occasional street person that we would find in there, shaving or what-not. And the Phantom Pooper. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Our men’s room was always quite tidy, and I never had reason to complain about the state in which it was left. After all, my coworkers are all professionals, they are all adults, it would be odd if they didn’t leave the bathroom tidy. In fact, I never really thought about it.
The only thing marring this otherwise unremarkable state of affairs was the Phantom Pooper. This was not someone from the second floor, this was some interloper from another floor. His modus operandi was to go to a different floor, seemingly at random, to use the toilet. Once in the stall, he would put town a paper toilet seat cover, and then assemble some kind of … nest on top of it. There would be six, eight, ten layers of toilet paper, laid down in swaths, completely covering the toilet seat. He would do his business. And then he would bolt out of the restroom at a dead run, leaving his ‘nest’ behind.
The next person to enter the men’s room would find this bizarre assemblage of toilet paper, like a shrine to the bowel movement. If you were lucky, the toilet would actually be flushed, but that wasn’t a given by any means. This was, of course, a frequent topic of conversation. How germ phobic do you have to be to require that much insulation between your butt and the toilet seat? Bear in mind, the restrooms were kept quite clean. This isn’t like the men’s room down at the ‘76 station off the interstate.
The Phantom Pooper stopped coming to our men’s room when he was caught in the act, and the receptionist gave him the hairy eyeball as he tried to leave unobtrusively. I think he crossed the second floor off his rotation.
I thought that the Phantom Pooper displayed the most screwed-up bathroom behavior I was ever likely to see. But I was wrong. Oh, so wrong. You see, I subsequently moved to the third floor, where my employer was not the only business on the floor. And I discovered that I had been spoiled indeed, by the neat and tidy bathroom habits of my coworkers.
The Phantom Pooper still visits the third floor. We know this because we find his little toilet seat constructions on a regular basis. Again, he can’t be bothered to clean up the thick cushion of paper he deposits on the toilet seat, he just walks away.
And there is apparently another germ phobe that actually works on the third floor, because the floor of the men’s room is always littered with paper towels. Some are dropped in front of the trash bin, as if it was too much trouble to actually get them into the trash. Some are dropped on the floor next to the door, where clearly someone didn’t want to actually touch the door handle. Inexplicably, there used to be one carefully folded paper towel sitting on top of the urinal, every day. Why? What reason could there be to carry a paper towel over to the urinal? And why leave it there? And in addition to paper towels, any other bit of paper, like scraps of toilet paper, or the cardboard tube from an empty roll, is simply dropped on the floor. So the men’s room always looks like a pig sty. But it gets worse.
The clutter of dirty paper towels is almost charming compared to the effect of the gentleman who, for whatever reason, refuses to use the urinal. Instead, he uses the toilet, straddling it, and letting forth a stream that would do a quarterhorse proud. However, he never, ever, ever, raises the toilet seat before doing so. As a result, on any given day, you will enter the stall only to find the seat covered with big fat drops of piss.
This completely boggles my mind. This is a professional office worker, who wears a suit nearly every day, and yet engages in the kind of behavior that your mother has usually stomped out of you by the time you are five years old. Is there no consideration for anyone else that has to use this facility? No, there is not.
For a while, someone was throwing a paper towel into the urinal, resulting in a stoppage that would nearly cause a torrential overflow. This went on, every single day, until someone posted a sign reading simply “STOP THROWING PAPER TOWELS IN THE URINAL OR I WILL STICK MY FOOT UP YOUR ASS”. It has not happened since. I wish whichever proactive individual that left the sign would put up a similar one for Captain Quarterhorse.
But the last straw, the thing that has convinced me that I’m dealing with lower primates here, is that someone has been using the time they spend standing at the urinal to mine for boogers, and wipe them carefully onto the wall. At first I thought it was a fluke, perhaps some juvenile guest of an employee. But no. Every day the wall is scrubbed clean, and every day they reappear. And you can’t ignore them. They are the only spot of color on an otherwise clean white tile wall right in front of you.
I am completely flummoxed by this; that there are people, employed in an office environment, that have this kind of disregard for hygiene and normal consideration for others. What’s next? Will I enter the men’s room only to find the remains of some kind of poo-flinging contest? I have considered trekking down to the second floor whenever I feel the call of nature, but then the primates will have won, you see.
Honestly, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
Shattering my Serenity
It was cold, crisp and clear this morning, a shocking contrast to the heat wave we were having a week ago. I rode my bike to work, and it would have been a very pleasant ride indeed, except for yet another ass in a car expressing his hatred of cyclists on ‘his’ road.
As I was coming up Multnomah, some yahoo pulled the old “blast-the-horn-as-I-pass-the-cyclist” trick. Wow, that NEVER gets old. I should point out that at the time I was in the center of a very wide and well-marked bike lane, and was not anywhere near traffic. So this wasn’t about resentment at ’sharing the road’, unless it was resentment that he has to share any road, at any time, with us two-wheeled bastards.
Needless to say, that took most of the joy out of the morning commute. It’s always depressing to be reminded that there are people out there that hate you, even though they’ve never met you.
Confessions of an idiot
You may have noticed that this blog was offline for about 24 hours over the weekend. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
When I decided to jump from Blogger to my own domain, I was giving up the luxury of having someone else do all the grunt work. But I figured if I got a package like WordPress, I would be able to handle whatever came up.
Well, yes and no. Although I have a basic (very basic) grasp of HTML, WordPress lives in a strange and arcane world of mySQL, php, and XHTML. It’s taken me quite a while to figure out how to tweak even a few simple things. There are still a few things I would change, if I could figure out how to do it.
But things were going pretty well, really. So when I saw that a new version of WordPress had been released, I decided to upgrade. So, I installed WordPress 2.0.4 on Saturday night. It seemed like the thing to do. This version apparently dealt with a bunch of bugs. Besides, all the cool kids were doing it. And the instructions seemed so simple:
1) download the update
2) overwrite all the relevant files on your server with the updated versions
3) profit!
Steps one and two went off without a hitch, but when I went to look at my site, all I got was a blank white page. To make it even odder, I could go to the dashboard without a problem, I just couldn’t get my site to display.
I went to a site that offered ‘detailed’ instructions to perform the update, and the first instruction was “Important! Before you do anything else, back up your database!”
Crap. Well, all my posts were still there. All the customized files for the theme were still there. I just couldn’t see them. I tried reinstalling 2.0.3 from my hard drive, but I still couldn’t see anything.
Thinking I had nuked it, I reloaded the wp-config.php file. No good. Then I saved the wp-config.php file from TextEdit instead of Word, and reloaded it. No good. Then I doublechecked that I was uploading as ASCII, instead of binary. It was.
Then I renamed my plugins file, to remove all the possible conflicts with plugins I had installed. No difference.
So, then I went to bed.
This morning I reinstalled 2.0.4, following the most detailed instructions I could find. Yet when I navigated to pagentsprogress.com, all I got was a blank page. This was infuriating.
Finally, I sent an email to tech support at my hosting service, Laughing Squid. To my amazement in a few short hours, even though it was Sunday, and even though I had labeled it ‘low’ priority, I had a reply in my inbox. The ‘Chief Tentacled Officer’ at Laughing Squid delicately pointed out that I had a nonstandard install of WordPress. Specifically, I had all of my WordPress files in a ‘WordPress’ directory, not in the root directory. So, the new index.php file was pointing to the default location of my files, not where they actually were. He had taken the liberty of adding the single word to that filepath definition that made my blog functional again.
D’oh!
The saddest part is that as soon as I saw that email, I remembered thinking to myself “if I’m going to put this in it’s own directory, I better make sure I remember to allow for that in all my file paths.”
So after all this drama, maybe I should reorganize my file structure to match the WordPress default?
Nah. I’m sure I’ll remember next time.
People Are Stupid
Exhibit One
Exhibit Two
Exhibit Three
The prosecution rests.
Music Video Madness
Okay, this one is getting posted a bit late, but it has a very personal theme: songs that remind me of old loves.
Naked Eyes – Always Something There To Remind Me
Phil Collins – Against All Odds
By the time I heard this next one, I was in college without access to television. I actually never saw this before posting it here, so don’t ask me what the hell is going on in the video.
Bruce Cockburn – Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Although my wife denies it, to me this will always be our song.
Elvis Costello – Alison
Fair is Fair
Married 14 years, I took a look at my wife the other day and said, “Honey, 14 years ago, we had a tiny rental house, a cheap car, slept on a tiny bed and watched a tiny TV with crappy reception, but I got to sleep every night with a hot 30-year-old brunette. Now, we have a nice house, two nice cars, a queen-size bed and a big-screen plasma TV, but I’m sleeping with a 44-year-old woman. It seems to me that you’re not holding up your side of things.”
But my wife is a very reasonable woman.
She told me to go out and find a hot 30-year-old brunette, and she’d make sure that I would once again be living in a tiny rental house, driving a cheap car, and sleeping on a tiny bed.
flotsam- nonobvious
Project Wonderful
My Card
