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Karen Fayeth

I have the power!!

[evil, maniacal laugh] bwa ha ha ha ha ha hee haw heee….*cough, sputter, cough*….ahem.

I’m back now.

Anyhow, I seem to have learned to use a fabulous power first taught to me in my youth.

The power of guilt.

Oh yes.

First example:

The center dial on my bathtub is broken, meaning that it will only shower, it won’t bath. This is upsetting. I am a fan of the hot bath. Especially in the winter. Particularly when it’s cold and stormy outside as it is today.

This has gone unfixed for quite some time, despite reporting it dutifully to my landlord. He said, “I need to find a new set of knobs…I’ll get to it.”

And he didn’t.

The landlord’s son lives a street over and came by our place about an electrical problem two weeks ago. So I bugged him to bug his dad about the bathtub. The son promised he’d fix it himself.

He didn’t.

A couple weeks passed.

This weekend, the son was mowing our front lawn. I said, “sorry to ask, but I need to remind you about the bathtub.”

This young man was *immediately* doused deeply in sheepish guilt, he apologized a bunch and promised to fix the bathtub, which he did on Sunday morning. And apologized some more.

Aaaah. Guilt is good.

Next example:

After my dental work yesterday, I woke up with a swollen face and a nifty bruise on my cheek. I’m thrilled to have to explain this to my coworkers.

My dentist, being the kind sort that he is, emailed me today to check to see how I was doing after the work. I emailed him back a photo of my bruised face and suggested he won’t be getting any new referrals from my coworkers.

He called me right away and apologized profusely and told me this sometimes happens (nicked a blood vessel when he did the injections) and that he felt terrible this had happened.

A man who inflicts severe pain for a living feels *terrible*.

Heh.

This feels gooood. I’m learning what my mom has known for years…guilt is quite the propellant.

In case you are still in training wheels and need to learn how to properly give the guilt, here’s a wikihow to get you over the hump.

Only downside? This power can be used on me, too.

Damn my Catholic upbringing!

Replacement Parts

Sorrowfully, I had occasion to visit with my dentist of twelve years today. He’s a good guy and when you have that kind of trust with a dental professional, you don’t take it lightly.

The reason for my visit today wasn’t an easy peasy cleaning and check up, no. A couple weeks ago I bit down on something hard and felt pain shoot up the side of my face.

That *can’t* be good.

So I was unsurprised when the good Doctor told me I had three cracks in my tooth. The same tooth that was home to not one but two fillings.

Feeling myself headed for “you need a crown”-ville, my dentist looked at my xrays and said, “good news, we can use the machine.”

The Machine?

What the [insert dental-fear inspired curse word here] is “The Machine?”

I guess if you need something more than a drill and fill, but something less than a crown, they have this cool device that takes a scan of your scraped out tooth, then creates a puzzle piece-like filling that slips right in there.

It’s milled out of a block of dental porcelain right there onsite, same day.

So the dentist drilled out my tooth, and then I read a magazine while the machine churned and groaned and soon enough, they showed me the little piece of tooth looking porcelain. Add a little dental glue and ta daa! New tooth!

As The Machine worked, my dentist talked about science’s ability to make new body parts, like my homemade tooth. He said, “I laugh when people get up in arms over athletes using steroids to increase their body’s capabilities. In ten to twenty years they will be making new joints, ligaments and tendons, you name it. Athletes can be created, and steroids will be looked on as quaint.”

I replied, “That’s weird, man. In a good way, but weird.”

Oh well, in about an hour and a half all in, I was fixed up and sent on my way with a droopy drool-y smile and a bit of ache in my freshly manufactured body part.

Weird.

Image from The Searcher’s Flickr Photostream.

Keep it to yourself, sister

The weather outside yesterday was what they call “low cloud cover”. Low ceiling, gray clouds, occasional sprinkling rain.

This makes most people think, “brr, cold” and toss on all matter of arctic gear.

This is not true for me. Low cloud cover means the heat is held in and the drizzly rain means humidity.

See, I was brought up in New Mexico and my body has been attuned to be a convection cooled device. Or, more accurately, an evaporative cooled device. I sweat. The dry desert air slurps that up, thus cooling my rig and allowing me to continue on.

I’m attuned to this and it suits me just fine.

When it’s warmish and humid, I cannot effectively evaporative cool my hard working human mo-chine.

You can ask anyone who knows me, my internal temp tends to run a little hot anyway. The frosty pawed feline doesn’t favor me as a sleeping device because she thinks I’m nice, ok?

So what all this means is, even on a cloudy drizzly day like today, I don’t want anything to do with a jacket.

This tends to make the biddies and would-be work moms crazy.

“Aren’t you cold!?!” they shriek.

“Where is your jacket?!?!” they demand in harpy voices.

Look, I have a mother. She’s a fine, upstanding lady. She taught me to be self-sufficient. If you are cold, put on a jacket. If you aren’t cold, don’t. If you are cold and don’t put on a jacket, it’s your own damn fault.

Mom and I have been in agreement on this for years.

Yesterday, I was wearing a sweater dress with a long sleeved sweater over, tights and knee-high black boots. That is practically Nanook of the North for me, and yet, one of my menopausal coworkers eyed me up and down and screeched “Aren’t you cold!?!” because I was sans jacket.

It was close to sixty frapping degrees outside, but it was drizzly, so that must mean everyone should wear an overcoat.

An overcoat? Hell. No. I was hot in what I was wearing!

But if I had said to her, “Hey, you look a little hot, why don’t you take some clothes off” I would have been reported to HR.

It’s a bizarre up world out there, and I’m but a passenger on this carnival ride.

Image via FreeFoto.com

What is wrong with these people?

You can employ them at a Fortune 500 company, but you can’t make them think.

Found this today in the copy room where I work.

See, what’s happened here is that someone needed to get at some paper, and were foiled by those sturdy yellow bands around the box. I get that. They suck.

And yes, there isn’t a pair of scissors to be found in the area, which has often perplexed me.

Right above those reams of paper, there is a staple puller, which is my usual tool of choice to hack and nip at the confounded yellow band until it comes loose.

But that right there is just the work of savages. I mean it’s like an animal got at it and tore away, struggling for their very life for….a packet of copy paper.

Last time I saw something that brutal was a picnic lunch left in a car in Yellowstone.

I’m all the more ticked because I’m collecting those paper boxes. There is a MASSIVE home clean out and storage project underway, and a sturdy box with a lid is useful. This one is now rendered useless to me. And it is, after all, all about me.

Although, if I step back and take a different perspective, that was sort of an ingenious “I shan’t let you beat me, confounded yellow band” tactic. Sort of raccoonish, really. Tear a hole, reach in and get the goods, slip away unnoticed.

Ok, I’ve gone from thinking this person a buffoon to thinking them a quiet genius.

I can talk myself into or out of just about anything.

Na Na Na Na, Hey, Hey, Hey…

Goodbye.

Ok, not goodbye, but welcome to bankruptcy.

From CNN:

Muzak files for bankruptcy

This story is a couple weeks old, so I don’t know how I missed it.

Ah Muzak. That bastion of elevators and department stores everywhere. Making the artistically fascinating into dreck.

Sure, bastardizing Beatles and Creedence Clearwater tunes is bad, but the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” done up Muzac style, I was not only appalled, I was angry.

I fear they will crawl out of debt restructuring like the oily swamp monster that they are, reaching out a webbed hand to assimilate Flo Rida and Beyonce and Lady Ga Ga and all the other Top 40 pop crap, coming soon to a Seven Eleven near you.

Once upon a time, in my former job, I had the opportunity to interact with the beast that is Muzac. They were entrenched as the on-hold music for our busy call center. The telecom team found a supplier they liked better and asked me to pull the ripcord on the termination clause in the contract.

Is it wrong that I giggled the whole time the pages fed through the fax auto-feeder? I stood there giggling like Beavis and Butt Head for the whole time the machine made high pitch squeals, and gladly took the confirmation page from the paper tray, confirmed all pages were sent, and filed that bad boy with satisfaction.

One of those “I love my job” kinda days.

If that kind of glee is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

Ah well, even oily swamp monsters have to make a living.