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Marc and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

December 4, 2008 / / 3 Comments

Hey kids! You can follow along at home by using this simple step-by-step guide to having a miserable day!

Commute to work: Merge into 20mph traffic on the city’s main thoroughfare, which normally runs around 65mph. While attempting to change lanes, nearly force a sedan off the road because it’s in your blind spot and your car has poor visibility. Wave apologetically. Learn that your car has terrifyingly poor traction in snow when you try to stop for breakfast, and slide past the strip mall’s driveway.

Work, before lunch: Spend an hour babysitting a customer while he works on a server, preventing you from getting any real work done.

Lunch: Go to Tae Soo Do for the first time in more than a week. After the pinched nerve in your leg drops you to your knees in excruciating pain for the fourth time, give up and schedule an appointment with a chiropractor for the following Monday. Get back to work ten minutes late.

After lunch: Spend another hour babysitting the same customer. Accomplish absolutely nothing on the one thing you actually looked forward to doing today.

Commute from work: Buy a bottle of Irish whiskey. Hit inexplicable bumper-to-bumper traffic as you drive home an hour and a half past rush hour.

Home: Have a drink or four. Make an attempt to say something heartfelt and meaningful to your ex-girlfriend/roommate, only to have it thrown back in your face. Fight about it. Upon getting into bed, learn that the nerve problem in your left leg also seems to affect circulation, since that foot is cold to the touch and the other isn’t. Blog.  Sleep.

Just more senseless jabbering

November 17, 2008 / / 0 Comments

I recently started using Craigslist for buying and selling stuff, and I’m loving it.  So far, I’ve bought a set of bedroom furniture (second-hand Ikea, but very nice and far better than anything I had), gave away a laptop I couldn’t bring myself to throw out, sold some laptop RAM, and bought and  sold an aquarium.  I also have a couple ancient Pentium-3 computers that I’m hopefully giving away tomorrow night.

It’s so easy to unload my old junk that I’ve been looking around my apartment, wondering what else I’m willing to part with, and whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for any of it.  It’s certainly tons easier than eBay–I’ll never waste my time on them again.  It’s easy to see why eBay tried to buy Craigslist a while ago.

In a totally unrelated matter, I’ve discovered that it’s ridiculously expensive to find spare parts for my Roomba (those little robotic vacuum cleaners).  Mine stopped picking up dirt a while ago because of a stripped gear–too much cat fur–but I never got around to actually doing anything about it until this weekend.

I think a reasonable price for it would be about two bucks, if that.  It’s just a small chunk of plastic.  But, since it’s a niche product, I expected it would be around ten dollars.  After some searching, I found it for $11… plus a $5 service fee, plus $12 shipping.  I swore at the site for a while and kept looking.

I called every vacuum store in the city with no luck.  The majority of them didn’t even know what a Roomba was.  I then tried calling the manufacturer directly.  My reward for twenty minutes on hold was to be told that they don’t sell spare parts. Finally, after more than an hour of searching, I found another site selling the same part for $20, plus $5 shipping.  Unbelievably, that was still the best deal I could find.