This Post Lacks a Title

Posted by E

Thursday, January 3, 2008

You know what really grinds my gears? Sound. I believe that I have mentioned in previous postings that I have a very tenuous relationship with sleep. We do not tend to get along well and as a result I tend to find myself constantly staggering around in a stupor, only semi-consciously aware of the world around me. I long ago accepted my fate and resigned myself to the fact that sleep is a commodity that will always remain elusive and valued to me.

There are multiple layers to the problems I encounter with sleep. First off there is the obvious issue with actually falling asleep in the first place. Many a night I will toss and turn relentlessly, unable to quiet my mind to the point of resting. Assuming I fall asleep to begin with, I next have to contend with my back issues which are prone to waking me up every 20 minutes or so. (REM sleep is very rare for me.) And even then, assuming I DO fall asleep and manage to STAY asleep I still have that one last thing to contend with...sound.

It's hard to believe, I'm sure, but apparently a bad place to live if you don't like extraneous background noise is across the street from a garbage rendering plant and around the corner from the railroad tracks in the industrial section of town. I know I was astonished by this revelation.

Every morning around 4:30 or 5:00, the daily noises kick in. The lovely sounds of machinery, garbage crushing, trucks dispensing their entire payload 100 yards from my door. A cacaphonous din of scraping metal, pounding machinery and rustling garbage is a fine way to begin every morning, usually 3 or so hours before the alarm begins
its toll. When it's MY alarm I hear, that is.

I am fortunate enough to have a roommate that seems to have a superhuman ability to ignore alarm clocks in his sleep. Without even stretching the truth I can name multiple times that I have heard his clock going off for MORE THAN 3 HOURS without him noticing. And without noticing the pounding on his door or my plaintive cries for mercy.

It's no normal alarm clock noise, either, it's a clock radio, which means that I'm treated to either shitty country or shitty "classic rock". I like classic rock, just not at four in the morning. You've never noticed the epic scale and length of "Shout" by Tears For Fears until you've heard it while fighting back the tears of frustration because you JUST WANT TO SLEEP. These are the things I can do without, indeed.

For fear of this missive turning into some sort of scathing, angry piece about how much everyone and everything pisses me off, I'll throw in two little fun tidbits from the last 24 hours.

First off, I'll give you a premise, you tell me if you think that this will end "well" or "poorly" for me. Here's the situation:

Upon nosing through the various sundries in my kitchen last night, I became keenly aware of the presence of Swiss Miss hot chocolate in my cupboard. I am not one normally taken to imbibing in such treats, but last night that interest was piqued. So I placed a kettle to boil on the stove and began the preparations for the chocolate itself. The directions on the packet indicated that one packet = one cup of hot chocolate. However, I was feeling a tad more Epicurean than that and decided to break form by adding TWO packets into a single mug. Scandalous! So, with my now doubly imbued instant chocolate drink packets sitting in the mug in anticipation of consumption, I proceeded to add the scalding water and mix the concoction into a dark brown and rather rich looking beverage.

However, this libation was still much too hot for consumption, so in the interest of letting it cool, I placed it ever so carefully on the wide armrest of the downstairs futon and proceeded to turn on the Wii for a little bit of Metroid action. (For those not in the know, the Nintendo Wii is a game console with a rather revolutionary means of control wherein you are provided with a little remote and "nunchuk" which allow direct control of the on screen action.)

Herein lies your challenge. Was the placement of a scalding hot and dark brown liquid on the armrest of my sofa a reasonable choice of containment prior to the playing of an excitable, motion-based video game?

Although I'm certain you've all guessed that the answer is a resounding "YES! Of COURSE that's a good idea!", you might be shocked to discover that it's not, as evidenced by the scald marks on my right ass cheek and the apparent shat stain that spreads across my futon and downstairs carpet.

As a secondary humorous tale to end things off with, one of my comrades was tasked with the setup of a laptop for a mutual friend here at the office. This friend has been experiencing what you might term "bad computer karma" this week, and has had hardware failures and system crashes left and right. (It happens to us all!) Anyways, he spent the better part of a day trying to get this laptop to function, but to no avail. He could load the Operating System, but then it would fail to install any security updates. In frustration, he brought the machine to me and asked me to take a few to work with it. I managed to get the OS installed and was also able to get the updates to apply. Hey, no big deal. Again, sometimes machines just get persnickety.

This is where the tale gets amusing. After getting the updates applied, I handed the laptop back over. The second that machine entered his office, it got obstinate once again. It REFUSED to talk to our network. It would see the connection but would not accept any packets. We tried three different cables, pulling connections off of working machines. No dice. I tried monkeying around with drivers and various settings, again, it wasn't working. In pure frustration I offered once again to take possession of the machine.

I took it back to my office, plugged it in, and it's working fine. It's right here next to me and it won't be going ANYWHERE NEAR the "other" until it is 100% done.