To the hospital!

L has had a sore throat all week, with a low-grade ear-infection-feeling thingy to go along.  She dismissed it, thinking it was her normal cedar fever that she always has this time of year.  Wednesday the throat and ear worsened, to the point she got very little sleep.

Through last night the sore throat got a LOT worse, so bad that it was visibly painful for her to swallow.  Along with this, she started feeling like her salivary glands were producing a lot more than usual.  Those added up to no sleep at all on Thursday.

This morning she didn’t even try to go to work.  I took M to school and went on to the Empire, about 45 minutes late.

L called me in the middle of the morning and left a message:  “This isn’t getting better and it may be worse.”  (By now it hurt her so to open her mouth that she was mumbling and slurring her words as though drunk.)  “I called Dr. V. and I have an appointment with his physician assistant at 3:15.  Please come get me and take me to his office.”

I came home and got her, and she was right that she needed to be taken.  Eyes drooping, shuffling gait, wobbly, very very VERY obviously unwell.  For a mercy, the PA ran almost to time and we were shown back to the examining room quite soon.  L’s vitals didn’t seem far off:  BP 124/78 (a little high on systolic for her), temp 99.9, lungs clear.  When asked about what was hurting and where and how, L said ”The very best place I can imagine being right now is in a hospital bed with a shot of Demerol to knock me out so I can forget how much this hurts, a course of antibiotics, and one of those little dentist’s oral vacuums to keep me from drowning in my own spit.”  (This was significant; if she talks about going into hospital without being prompted, she feels bad indeed.)  The PA tried to get her mouth open to do a throat exam, but the most L could manage was about half an inch, which didn’t give much scope for an exam.  The best the PA could see was that her left tonsil appeared to be tremendously swollen and abscessed, and the right one might be infected as well; she called in the doctor to look, and he agreed that what little he could see was disturbing.  He said had it not been Friday, he might have given her an injectable antibiotic and sent her home with instructions to come back the next day, but as it was Friday and the weekend was on us, and in light of L’s continuing compromised immune system (her white-cell counts are back around 2,200 per cubic millimeter when they should be above 4,000), he thought it best to admit her to the hospital for the weekend and start her on IV antibiotics.  While his staff was arranging all that, I walked the five blocks from the hospital to M’s school and got her, then came back to find her already swept up and installed in a room on Five West at Saint David’s.  M and I stayed a few minutes to see her settled, then went home.  We couldn’t do any more, and she certainly wasn’t encouraging any company—all she wanted to do was sleep, for a night and a day if she could.

I’m re-arranging my weekend to take M to a classmate’s birthday party tomorrow, which L would normally have covered.  I have no idea what this is going to do to our already precarious finances, but it can’t be good.  January was looking like a bad enough month already, and now this.

 

The Gnomes of Zurich rubber-cement some peppermints in the jonquil bed.  Fnord.

Posted in Family, Health, Personal History | 9 Comments

Piet 1986-2007

Yesterday morning T called me and said “I’m stuck on the MoPac offramp at Braker and Piet just died on me!”  She said he wouldn’t stay running once started without a lot of struggle and persuasion.  She thought she’d run the gas tank dry.  I had her call AAA for an emergency gas bailout, but even with a transfusion she still barely got to her apartment complex two miles away before he died again.  She called and this time said, “there’s a little smoke coming from under the hood” (a statement guaranteed to depress the happiest of parties).

Last night I went over and took a look at him, hoping to find something easily remedied like a gunked-up fuel filter.  He started for me, and I couldn’t see or hear much wrong.  I got in and started driving him around the apartment parking lot to see what I could see.  I barely got to the other end of the lot before the “CHECK GAGES” idiot light came on.  All right, check the gauges and—oh, SHIT.  Oil pressure gauge at zero.  I pulled into the nearest parking space, got on the phone and called AAA for a tow.

The tow truck was almost an hour in coming, and when he arrived he drove right past me and on down the street, though I was standing at the curb trying to flag him.  A call to his dispatcher finally got him turned round and back to the right parking lot.  He loaded Piet onto the slide and hauled him down to Ron’s garage for me.

Late this afternoon I talked with Ron and got the bad news.  Rod slap and bearing noise, soon as the engine starts to warm up.  It’s dead, Jim.  We talked about options for a couple of minutes, but even putting in a junkyard engine would cost $3,000 or so, a rebuilt would be better than $4,000, and doing a lower end job in hopes of fixing the mess would be a crapshoot.  There’s no economic point in putting that much money into a truck I was given to begin with, even if I could find that much money—and I can’t.  In the short term we can manage with Quinn alone, except for Thursday when M has dance lessons at Westgate.  The Tulip and I are talking about what I can do for work schedule flex when I have to start taking her every week.

This is a nuisance and a trial, but not at all surprising.  Piet had almost 160,000 miles on his engine, and the 2.8L V-6 engines weren’t ever known for long service lives.  He’s already gone way beyond normal expectations.  I’ll have to see if any of the “donate your car” charities want to take a vehicle with a sound body and a bad engine.

Piet came out the factory door in Shreveport, Louisiana in August 1986; in a few more months he would have been legal to drink.  It’s a shame he’ll never get to.

Posted in Cars | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Getting too big for our britches

When I started working for the Empire, our Auric call center was the only one there was in the world. You had an Auric support contract, you were gonna talk to us at headquarters in Circulith, Texas.  We got away with that for a year or two, until (1) the Auric contract began to gain popularity among businesses that wanted to talk with an American technician in America who might actually know something, and (2) we had an ice storm that shut the whole area down.  The ones who were at home when the storm hit couldn’t get to work, and the ones who were at work couldn’t leave, for two days.  The techs stuck in the building took calls until they couldn’t, napped on the floor a few hours, then got up and took calls again.  Management contrived to bring in sleeping bags and cots, pizza and other portable food, but by all accounts it was bad.

After that scare, management realized we needed another Auric call center so we never got caught out that way again.  Further, our group was rapidly outgrowing our quarters at Circulith, and there was nowhere else on the campus for us to grow into.  As a result, in late 2004 we opened a second Auric call center at Gemini, in some state where they grow lots of potatoes.  Given the lower cost of doing business there, management figured we wouldn’t have to lay out so much per qualified employee.  Over time, the plan went, the Gemini call center would become the bigger of the two while Circulith, with its close access to headquarters functions, would continue as the Old Original No. 1.

The plan turned out to have a few bugs.  Gemini is a town of about 35,000 people in an otherwise sparsely populated area, so its pool of tech-savvy employees is limited.  Circulith, by contrast, has the Austin metro area of a million people from which to draw employees.  (And from even further away; I know techs in Circulith who commute a hundred miles each way to work, every day.)  This means that to keep their chairs filled, Gemini has had to hire people who wouldn’t have gotten a second look here.  Having to hire less-than-optimal employees has led to higher turnover both through resignations and through firing, forcing them to hire yet more less-than-optimal employees.  Two years later, they’re really scraping the barrel for bums to fill chairs, and it’s showing.

So if Circulith can’t expand and Gemini can’t get or keep enough good technicians, what next?  Open another call center, is what.  Sometime in early 2007 we’re going to launch a third Auric call center in the Heartland, which will build up from a beginning strength of thirty L1s and their management to . . . well, to whatever.  I don’t know how big it’s supposed to grow.  They’ll have a metro area of more than half a million to pull from and a major university only a few miles away, so finding lots of educated, tech-savvy employees won’t be nearly such a struggle.  I’m betting that in a few years the Heartland will become the biggest call center of us all, with a much smaller Gemini tagging along or even being moved to some other segment, and Circulith keeping its pride of place as the Old Original No. 1.

 

Pee Wee Reese silvered over the muriatic pushpin during a protracted keratin.  Fnord.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 2 Comments

An affliction of trained monkeys

Part of my job as a Resolver is to be available through an internal Web chat for our level-one techs in the Circulith and Gemini call centers.  They can ping us for help with hard problems, if they get a customer who wants a manager to yell at, or if they need special blessing for something that goes outside the rules.  And when new-hire level-one technicians first go onto the floor to take calls, they have to ping us for review and approval on every single “hard” call—cases that end in a dispatch of parts or a service technician.

Right now we have a bunch of new-hires just starting in both call centers, so the Resolvers are handling a LOT of Web chats.  Many of the chats are just rubber-stamping new-hire dispatches, but sometimes we get ones that make you wonder “which rock did we find this one under, and can we please send him back there??”  And these days an awful lot of that kind of chat is coming in from Gemini.

Late Friday afternoon my chat client “wheep”ed at me with an L1 on line from Gemini.  He told me his customer said that “she only has two percent of her memory free” and what should he do about it?  I made the mistake of thinking that he had already identified this as a real RAM issue and needed to help the customer kill background processes that were bogging down system performance.  I told him to look at the processes running in Task Manager to see if perhaps she had useless background guff (e.g., QuickTime auto-update) running that can be killed with impunity, and if he found anything, try turning them off with MSCONFIG to improve performance.  This is stuff that’s basic to Windows XP troubleshooting.  An end user might or might not know about it, but any Auric tech is supposed know how it’s done without having to be led by the hand.

Not this guy.  He didn’t even have enough gumption to know which running processes in TaskMan were legitimate and which might signal trouble, and when I told him to start MSCONFIG and try turning off startup items, his response amounted to “uh . . . what’s that?”  About that time I realized that if he didn’t know that much, he probably hadn’t grilled the customer about what she meant by “two percent free memory” and she might have nothing more than a full hard drive that needed clearing out.

I asked him a couple of questions that determined the customer did have a full hard disk, the customer couldn’t tell the difference between “memory” (RAM) and “drive” (hard disk), and the L1 either couldn’t tell the difference or didn’t know the right questions to ask.  I swore and rearranged my mind for a hard disk cleanout.

I told the L1 to open the Windows Explorer, un-hide the system and hidden folders, delete any leftover files in the user’s temp folders, delete the Internet Explorer cache files and sub-folders, then go to the Control Panel, open Add/Remove Programs, and start looking for unused or unwanted applications to uninstall.  I rattled off a set of commands to tell him how to unhide hidden folders in Windows Explorer.  (This is stuff I’ve been doing ever since Windows 95.)  He answered “What?  You mean Internet Explorer?”  I told him no, NOT Internet Explorer, go into Windows Explorer and do this.  In a minute he typed back “What is it?  I don’t know where that is.”

This time I swore loudly enough for the Tulip, in the cube next to mine, to hear me.   I didn’t have a technician on the other end of this chat, I had a trained monkey, and not a well-trained one at that.  I told him how to get to Windows Explorer (right-click My Computer, then left-click Explore from the context menu).  Even after that, and the explicit directions I gave him for finding temp files he could delete, he couldn’t manage to get anywhere.  (When I was young, the description West Texans used for people like this was “too dumb to pour piss out of a boot with the directions written on the heel.”)

To complicate matters, the customer refused to consider burning any data off to CD or moving files to some other location.  She also wouldn’t uninstall any programs regardless of whether they were wanted.  She even refused to uninstall iTunes, which had sneaked itself in as an unwanted piggyback on QuickTime, and was completely unused.  Instead, she asked couldn’t we send her a bigger hard drive.

I lost patience with the customer and the L1 both, and fired back, “No we cannot!  We are not responsible for being her housekeeper.  She has only one weapon against a full hard drive, and that is delete, delete, delete.  If she wants a bigger drive she can buy one from Spare Parts and install it.  And then she’ll have the happiness of reinstalling the OS and every last one of her applications from scratch and porting all her data across.  We can walk her through reinstalling the OS and drivers, but after that she is completely on her own.  Anything further is outside your scope.”

After a minute, the L1 typed back “She’s going to think about it.  That’s all I need.  Thank you.”  Obviously my refusal had been as welcome as a dog turd at a dinner party, but I can’t say I much cared by then.  Once the L1 disconnected, I sent a “coaching opportunity” note to his team lead that he needed to get a much firmer grounding in Windows, and described all the things he hadn’t known how to do.  The team lead may well ignore my note—they often do—but my recommendation’s on the record.

 

The flowerpot of the Chrysler Building has polished some menhaden.  Fnord.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | 9 Comments

The Tale of the Laplandish Deposit Slip

I just removed a bewruful quiche (wilted spinach, onion and sausage) from the oven and am now letting it cool while waiting for L and M to come back from the mall, where they’re picking out a birthday present for one of M’s classmates who has a party tomorrow.

I know today deserves a post to itself, what with the preposterousness in the afternoon, but it isn’t getting one tonight.  I’ve been sleeping very badly lately.  Between prostate trouble and sinus trouble, I’m up about every ninety minutes at night, wake up tired, stagger through work somehow, and come home exhausted every day.  There’s no spare energy left at the moment.

Maybe tomorrow I can gather the strength to write something.

 

Political sloganeering is only a liverwurst screwdriver.  Fnord.

Posted in Minutiae | 2 Comments

Waiting for the ball to drop

Last night, as L and I sat up watching PHC on Great Performances (not the best nor most organized episode I ever saw, either; it seemed obvious to me that the producers threw Emmylou Harris on as a “special guest” with every musical act whether she was prepared or not—and mostly it was “not”), I was struck by the resonance.  Keillor told about sitting up as a kid with his mother, listening to the radio, drinking ginger ale and playing Flinch and Authors, trying to stay awake until the ball dropped in Times Square.  And there L and I were, sitting up watching the show and trying to stay awake until the clock struck twelve.  As we’re often up that late anyway, it wasn’t nearly so hard for us to do as for them.  In the middle of the previous show (Audra MacDonald singing at Lincoln Center with some of the New York Philharmonic to back her), L got a phone call from a long-ago boyfriend, and they talked for a good two hours; she missed the last 45 minutes of Lincoln Center and the first hour of PHC, so M and I watched Lincoln Center.  The program was all movie musical selections, from the war horses (“Singing in the Rain,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) to the utterly obscure—has anyone ever seen The West Point Story with James Cagney and Doris Day, much less heard any of its songs?

Lincoln Center ended at nine, M’s usual bedtime, so she went in and crashed out on our bed while L continued to chat with her boyfriend and I worked on a needlework project I pulled out for the occasion.  (Got a fair amount done on it, too.)  I also simmered a pot of black-eyed peas, to make hoppin’ John later today.  If I say so myself, this batch turned out far better than usual because I had the ham bone available from our Christmas ham to put in the pot, instead of having to make do with fatback.  I gotta see if I can find a reliable source for meaty ham bones, for when I want to make a mess of peas.

Today L’s taking down the Christmas tree so it can go back into storage, and as my box-end wrench set has re-appeared from wherever it’s been hiding these last several months, I’m nerving myself to pull out the toilet in our bath, so we can have the linoleum up and see how bad the underfloor damage is where it’s been leaking at the wax ring seemingly forever.  This also involves rearranging the third bath (AKA the “eBay room,” because that’s where I store Waring Stuph inventory) so we at least can get to its toilet.  The tub in there is piled full of stuff and hence unusable, but with that toilet clear, the tub in our bath still working and M’s bath completely functional, we’ll have an aggregate of two full bathrooms available while I work.

 

Counted fnord stitch increases the pocketed agave.

Posted in House, Minutiae | Comments Off on Waiting for the ball to drop

Bleah.

I get to have this WHOLE week off (due to many holiday hours that needed burning rather than handing them back to the Empire next Sunday), and what do I wake up to find?

Achy joints.  Malaise.  Plugged ears.  Sore throat.  Queasiness.  100.2° fever.

In a word, a gods-be-damned cold.

I’m taking some Motrin and going back to bed.  The only thing I can think to say in favor of this timing is that I won’t have to use up a fistful of next year’s sick leave hours first thing next week.

 

A summer fnord is a Different Animal.

Posted in Health | 2 Comments

Quiet house

And you cannot believe how Good a Thing that can be, after two days of enduring my brother.  C has a number of conditions, but the one I find hardest to cope with is that he’s unmedicated (by his choice) ADHD, and that means if his eyes are open, he’s talking nineteen to the dozen.  He never shuts up.  He’s also so fidgety that peas on a hot shovel are nothing to it.  Being in the same house with him, never mind the same room, exhausts me.

He and Mother were here from Saturday evening until mid-morning today.  Fortunately, I had a reason to be Somewhere Else (the Land of Færie) all day Sunday, but L had to endure him without much rest.  I’m thankful he thought up a project to keep himself busy:  rewiring several of the wall outlets in the house to change them from two-prong to three-prong sockets, and arranging them to be properly grounded.  It was something he could do easily, we could use to have done, and didn’t have money to hire anyone to do.  Having that for a project kept him from being completely insufferable, but it was a near thing at times.

C insisted he had to drive back to the Metroplex Christmas morning so he could be ready to go back to work on Tuesday, and he simply could not rest with the idea that we’d open presents at eight (the soonest we were likely to get T awake and over here, given she had to close the store last night) and have breakfast afterward.  No, he was going to have to leave right away; otherwise he wouldn’t get home in time to do laundry and things.  I decided mostly to ignore this hoopdedo.  I picked up Terri, and we got to the house just as Mother and C pulled up.  A few minutes later T came in, and M started handing round the presents (in L’s family, by tradition the youngest member of the family able to read is the one who hands round presents).  That took about twenty minutes, then I had T start the pancakes, which she does better than I do, while I started the bacon and sausage and got the eggs ready.  T finished the pancakes and handed over the range to me, then made some toast while I scrambled the eggs and experimented with the microwave, which is capricious about bacon.  For a wonder, I found a combination that works (fresh pack of bacon—not an older one that’s begun to dry out—thirty seconds per rasher at 50% power, then turn the tray one-eighty and give it another thirty at 50%) and none of it scorched.  We all sat down to eat at nine; L had to insist that C, who has stomach problems and had had his morning yogurt earlier, come sit at table with the rest of us “to be sociable, if nothing else.” Ever since JP died C has had a bee in his bonnet about “continuing family traditions” and “getting to see one another,” but he won’t stay still long enough for it to happen.  This figures.

Breakfast was over before ten, and C got to leave when he’d intended to before he started creating such a commotion about not enough time.  Terri wasn’t feeling quite well left a short time later, and L and M lay down for late-morning naps.  The only noises in the house right now are the wind outside blowing the wind chimes around on the front porch—the rain we had for the last three days stopped this morning, the sky faired off, and a twenty-five-mile north wind is trying to blow away all the city’s hats, leaves, and chimneys.

 

Will the fnord be unbroken?

Posted in Family, Personal History | 2 Comments

See you in the funny papers

You remember how I asked, three weeks ago, whether anyone got the reference in the December 3rd Mutts?  Apparently no one tumbled to it, which must mean my Small but Faithful Readership has no comics historians.

The strip has finally made it to his Web site (the archives are always two weeks behind), so I’ll post the question again, but this time I’ll also point you to the answer.  I truly admire someone who’s so aware of where his art came from, and willing to engage in hommage à ses ancêtres.

So let’s try it again, with a new example:  What’s the reference in the first panel of the December 10th strip?

 

I Go Fnord.

Posted in Minutiae | 6 Comments

Safely delivered

Hero Woman has been safely delivered, pre-medicated, woozy and giggling, into the Hands of the Dentist.  I expect I’ll learn later how it went on from Shiny Woman, as she’s the only one who’s likely to have first-hand information on the question.

Posted in Minutiae, Relationships | 2 Comments