RIP

My cell phone is dead. It ate it in the storm yesterday. I was hoping that once the innards tried out it would be marginally functional again, but no such luck. After a whole day of weirdly shorting yesterday, it's just a lump of plastic today. So I will be without phone for the forseeable future.

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It occurs to me as I look at new phones that the there have been periods in my life where I carried around disposable cameras to try and capture as much as possible. The only thing that kept me from having the camera permanently glued to my face was the cost of film printing (between film and developing, about a buck a print). If I had had a digital camera, or - god forbid - a cameraphone, I would have taken terrabytes of photos. You'd be able to make stop motion films out of them.

(no subject)

I have to send a bunch of files to an offsite archive at work. So I picked up all these boxes and labels and barcodes and forms and things and brought them up to the file cabinet. Then I looked at the box.

I've never seen a cardboard box designed like this one. And it had no diagram on it explaining how to assemble it. No arrows or anything. I was baffled. It did, however, have a number for the company.

So I called it.

A nice woman picked up and I asked her how to assemble her companies boxes. She laughed at me. Apparently, these are patented "easy-to-assemble" boxes. "You just look at them and they assemble themselves," she told me. Then she put me on hold and got someone else to come and help me.

I'm assuming from the amount of time that took that she told everyone else in the office first.

So another woman comes on the line and tries to instruct me. Turns out you just push down on the thing and *poof* box. No wonder the first woman laughed at me.