Little Guy With A Bit Mouth - Part 2

I walk back in to see that Dr Pepper brick wall lady is now blocking a new pair of people. The 30 something woman politely asks the angry wall if she can get by. The wall informs the nice lady that she's not moving until they fix the Dr Pepper.

As the confused 30 something woman is deciding whether to execute a beverage-less exit, I step in.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I ask, my voice more puzzled than angry "Do you own this store? Do you own this soda fountain? Did your parents fail to teach you not to bully others when you don't get your way?"

"I see you have a free refill cup there in your hand. Can I then assume that you are trying to destroy customer satisfaction for this establishment because you are angry that they can't provide your free drink fast enough? I bet if you asked any of the people you are blocking they would tell you they have no problem with Racetrac but that they think you are an obnoxious ass who doesn't fit well in society. Finally, darling, I would like to offer this bit of free advice. Fat people like you and me, we shouldn't be drinking that sugared stuff. You really should try the diet kind. Less chance of diabetes, less weight gain and most importantly, there won't be so much of you in the way when others are trying to move around the store. Think about it -- maybe Dr Pepper running out was divine intervention!"

Fire flashes in her eyes. She takes a step in my direction (fortunately opening up a hole giving soda access to two formerly blocked customers).

"You better step back, you son of a bitch, or I will take you down hard" she spits out.

I place both hands in my back pockets and reply.

"Really? We're going to do this 5th grade style? You're the playground bully and you're going to take me down hard? Well (pause for effect) that works for me. Tell you what, take your best shot and I promise I'll keep my hands behind me. I'm betting you move slow enough that this is going to be a non event".

As she reaches in her purse I hear my wife reminding me that I'm probably going to get shot some day and as I'm pondering how I should react if she comes out with a can of pepper spray she produces a cell phone.

"If you don't leave this store right now I'm going to dial 911" she threatens with a menacing grin.

"Do it. Please do it. I'm begging you! I can just hear the radio call now!"

"One Adam 12, One Adam 12, see the woman. Racetrac convenience store corner of Greenville and Bethany. Customer accused of trying to move a pile of crap out of the soda isle. Proceed code 20."

She looks shocked. "You don't believe me? You DON'T BELIEVE ME?"

(now as many of you know, my stories are typically not word-for-word accurate. I always try to capture the gist but also exercise a bit of creative license for entertainment value. I tell you this because I want you to understand that this next part, as unbelievable as it will seem, is absolutely true)

She actually dials the number. I see her fingers press a single digit followed by two presses of another digit and she puts the phone to her ear. I have to admit that I don't know if the phone was on or if she pressed the send button, but the thing she said made me think...well, judge for yourself...

"Hello, Police?" She stares straight into my eyes. "I'm at the Racetrac on Bethany and there is a man here being rude to me"

No kidding. She actually dialed, she actually said "Hello Police" and she actually reported that a man "was being rude" to her.

Sometimes truth is bigger than fiction. You just can't make this stuff up. I was so impressed by the "Hello Police, I'm at the Racetrac and there is a man being rude to me" that I just HAD to write this story.

Well, reader, we peaked. The confrontation pretty much fizzled from there. I suggested a police force that would give me a ticket for "being rude" might put her in the penitentiary for being stupid. I also offered that dialing 911 when there wasn't a true emergency might actually get one of us arrested and that even though I was a very busy guy, it would be worth the wait to see which one of us the police would be interested in.

About that time a store employee (who was hanging out to monitor the confrontation, much like the 5th grade kids gather to watch the bully beat up the nerd) suggested that even without a 911 call the police might be interested in the video from the isle blocking thing and suddenly wall lady remembered an appointment she was late for.

I followed her to her car, begging her to stay and watch me leave in hand-cuffs but alas, she got in her dilapidated PT Cruiser and left (to my best recollection - without a Dr Pepper refill)

Life. A collection of strange and wonderful stories. Sum up all the bad parts and little gems like this make it totally worth it. I'm just saying.

Little Guy With a Big Mouth - Part 1

Remember that Jimmy Buffet song, Margarettaville? It starts out with "It's nobody's fault" and progresses through "It could be my fault" to "It's my own damn fault".

The "Little guy with a big mount" reference takes me back to my school years when I used to get picked on a lot. Now I'm not saying that anyone deserves to get punched but I expect I could have kept the old yapper shut more and been a touch more invisible. Had I done that I probably wouldn't have gotten punched so much.

It happened again yesterday. Well, not the getting punched part but I was definately the little guy with the big mouth.

It's rare now. It's hard for me to be the little guy when I'm just so darn big but this woman, she was EASILY twice my size (sideways anyway). The confrontation was...well, I guess it was "special".

First you need some background. I'm at the Racetrac. Now for those of you who don't know, Racetrac is much like a Mini Mart or a 7-11. It's a convenience store / gas station. They are running a wonderful promotion where you spend $6.99 on a 22 oz insulated mug and they let you refill it for free all summer long (I've refilled mine 93 times so far - I'm shooting for the Guniess book). Anyway, that's all the background you need.

So I go into Racetrac to fill my cup. I round the corner to get to the soda fountain with my spiffy "fill it as much as you want" cup. I'm a happy guy about to get yet another free soda.

To my immediate right there is a woman with a child filling up a drink. Directly in front of me there is this battleship of a woman standing with her hands on her hips. One elbo is in the corn chips, the other is about 7 inches past the line completed by the woman/child combo filling the drinks.

I notice the arm with the elbow in the corn chips has a "free refill" cup in it (everyone is doing it).

In my judgement a quick arm retraction followed by a half step to the right and I can scoot right by and get to the diet coke so with a big smile I say those magic words "Excuse me please!"

Wall woman pushes her arms out another inch or two, furrows her brow and states "I'm standing here waiting becasue they are out of Dr. Pepper".

"So you are..." I respond, not yet aware that the stand isn't a waiting stance but an agressive attempt to block me from the isle "...so can I get by?".

"I'm not moving until they change the thing and I can get some Dr Pepper" she states boldly.

"Let me get this straight. You are not going to let me get to the soda machine unless or until you get them to change the Dr Pepper surup?" I ask (still polite but now with puzzled face instead of a smile).

"I'm not moving" she states and glares at me.

In an obvious gesture I roll my eyes, back track around the corn chip rack, down the cookie isle, past the donut dispenser and the front counter, around the corner to the other side of the soda machine where although I can't reach the caffine free diet coke, I can get to the other kind.

I fill my cup, pop the lid on and start through the hole to the right of the Dr Pepper protest lady (the hole vacated now that the woman with the little kid have vacated) and as I do the human road block does a studder step to try and block my way.

Decision point. I could accelerate one step, get by and be on my way or I could stop and do the little guy with a big mouth thing.

Surprise! I do the accelerated step narrowly miss the approaching elbow but making it by. I go out to my truck, put the new refill in my cup holder and then I stop and reflect a moment.

The big mouth guy took over. I closed the door on my SUV and headed back in.

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to our exciting story (and post a comment if you are amused so far).

Death & Reserection

Death

Either you are terrified by it or you are not paying attention. I know this is about you because you are reading this. It's about your computer. Imagine you are creating a document and FLASH! The computer screen goes dark.

You reboot. It runs about 90 seconds and blanks out again. You never get to the point where you need to log on. It always blanks out and you can't get in anymore.

That's what happened to me Thursday at 4:50 p.m. As most of you would, my mind goes straight to "what did I lose". It had been just over a week since my last major backup. I had some minor backup files on a memory stick and a portable hard drive but my mind was stuck on what I might have lost.

Later that night I discovered I could interrupt the boot process, get to a command prompt, and copy a file or two before the machine augered in. After many re-boots I managed to snag all the files that were not current in my backup.

I was lucky (mostly because I had backups because of past times when I lost it all) but my computer was still just as dead.

Resurrection

The next day I started the task of getting to root cause. The technical details should be boring for you so we will jump right to the bottom line. It was the video card that died. Here's why...

There is this fan on the video card that keeps it cool. The fan stopped turning. The board would get hot and shut down. When it shut down the screen would blank out.

In finding it I had to blow on the card the whole time the computer was coming up. Doing that I accomplished two things. First, I got the computer to stay up long enough to backup the rest of my files. Second I got such a head rush that I nearly fell down.

I looked things up and found that I had 24 days left on my warranty. After 2 and a half hours on the phone with a guy from India who didn't want to start with a solution and was confused by big words like "data buss" and "cooling fan" I finally got HP to ship a new card. They would ship the card next day but unfortunately I had to wait 2 weeks for a tech to come put it in.

Why, you might ask, would I need a tech to put it in when I removed it (and the memory and many other components) during my troubleshooting efforts? I would ask that too but they wanted to charge me for the card if I installed it myself. If their guy puts it in they paid for everything (so they get to pay their guy for a house call).

So will I accept two weeks without a computer while I waited for the guy? Perhaps a mere mortal would but for me, it wasn't the right option.

I figured out that all I needed to do was blow on the card for 2 weeks the way I blew on it during my full backup. So that's what I'm doing...

The case is on the desktop with the case open (heat rises) so I can blow on the video card.

...and this is how I blow in it (I didn't like the head rush that almost made me fall down).

Actually - The problem was he didn't talk enough

I have to do a bit of a self reprimand here. I've done a post of facebook every now and then but I've been terrible at writing posts for a while.

Now I've got some excuses and some aren't really all that bad but I'll not bore you with them. Well, I'll tell you about one of them. About a year ago I purchased a new "home" computer (my old that I got in 2001 one had died). About that time HP asked me to move out of the office and work from home. As it worked out my new "home" computer became a work computer.

Well the other day my home computer died and I had to set up another configruation for a work comptuer. As it happened I've been looking at tablet PCs and I found just the right one so I purchased it and now I'm setting it up a a "Totally Personal Computer". No work stuff.

I'm also setting it up outside the office so it can't get sucked into the work ifrastructure.

Hopefully it will support my new goal to write a minimum of 3-5 posts per week.

I expect you can't expect many readers if you don't write...