Entropy Again

Snow day. Day 2, Part 2. Low of 6 deg. F, wind chill -3 deg. F. Last week (part I), I could barely stay on the roads going 15 MPH. Spun out, doing a 180 in front of some guy that was shovelling his driveway right about the time that I'm contractually obligated to have the route completed. He looked at me like I was a terrorist. Had to go back out into the intersection, make a U-turn in the intersection, make another pass at his cul-de-sac, then deliver his paper at his feet.

Somebody else thought I was a terrorist. I don't know if it was his car that barked at me as I walked past it, but his comments of "I hope that was a newspaper you just threw... BOOM!!!" were ever so slightly rattling.

Whenever there's a snow day, the truck - the one that brings the papers from Denver to the warehouse - is an hour late. That's an hour later than they are usually late, which makes them two hours late on snow days.

"How are the roads out there?"
"Are you an olympic figure skater? 'Cause if you're not, you ain't gonna have a very good time getting to work"
You'd think that the Denver Post could check their own weather forcast, and step up production and delivery of the paper when there's bad weather. But it's not like an organization that big to have any sense of the big picture.

"How come you're so late?"
"Dude, on days like this, hurrying just makes it worse."
I wonder if that's why the truck driver was drunk when he finally showed up at the warehouse. On a snow day.

President Cheney shot some lawyer. Or maybe it was Dan Quayle. Either way, good for him. Oh, and all the newspapers all felt jilted that he didn't report the crime to them for 18 whole seconds. "It was as if the country was decapitated for those 18 seconds."

I managed to get 245 MB worth of spam from the past three years to my postmaster account at emporium-sw.com cleaned up. That's 31 spam messages a day for 3 years. Some 33,169 messages. Uh-huh, yep, and that's right. I got Outlook set up with that account, and set up a rule to delete everything that comes into it. And everything that comes into the server for some made-up account that doesn't exist gets dumped into a blackhole.

Now that I'm not hitting my disk space quota on the server, I can put some ebay listings up there. I even got the new auction software installed. 'Cause the old software quit working, 'cause they quit maintaining it, 'cause ebay changed their rules so those people couldn't write their software like that anymore. So they're basically out of business, until they can re-write their software all over again.

And the truck's been overheating. Well, not since it's been so freakin' freezin' cold. But before that, it was boiling over. I don't know what's going on, everything is new again except the engine block itself. Since I replaced the power steering for a cool $800 just a week ago, I'm a little embarrassed to take it in right away and say "You know that new radiator you put in last summer? Well it's plugged up already."

But still, the overall cost of repairs is still less than the combined cost of payments and insurance on a new vehicle. So I'm happy that every repair is one more major component that I shouldn't have to worry about for a while. Stoicism is the only thing that keeps me sane anymore.

Wait, there's still more driving me to the edge of going postal. Some guy was taking his dog out for a pee, and the dog turned vicious and was ready to rip me a new one. Probably 'cause I was wearing the burglar hat that day, 'cause it was so cold. Oh, and some lady whispered under her breath "I don't like you" at me in my burglar hat that day. So that's when I got the pepper spray. You know, just in case.

Well, it seems the idea of wanting to protect myself has been drawing in all the more wierdos. Even the ring of bag-thiefs at the distribution center is having a hard time, since they stopped getting the designated national's bags for us. Now I have to put all the papers in those cheapey rice bags that fall apart as soon as you think about them. I went to throw a USA Today over the top (of the truck), and the paper flew out the bottom of the bag onto the street. In the snow. Furtunately, its too cold to get a wet paper complaint. Stoicism again.

The USA Today was extraordinarily fat today, so that's probably why it flew out of the bottom of the bag. It's probably full of coverage of Cheney's shooting rampage.

Although I did get a wet paper complaint on a perfectly dry, but windy day. The explanation for that was the phone menu on the complaint hotline. Remember the Springfield Emergency Hotline when Bart tried to report Flanders as a murderer? "If you are being murdered, press one..." [Bart presses random key] "You have selected 'Regicide.' To report the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one..."

I should just refuse to deliver any more national newspapers until they get more bags for us. 'Course, I'd lose my job right away. My boss takes every opportunity possible to threaten me with my livelihood. The memo congratulating us on winning the lowest complaint-rate contest also ended with a threat to our livelihoods if we didn't improve the complaint-rates.

I was also threatened with my livelihood when I bit some girl's head off for parking too close to my truck, then complaining that I was in her way.

According to the liberals, if I use enough of words like 'terrorist', 'target', 'suspect', 'bombed' and 'killed' in some out-of context way, the NSA will pick up these blog entries off of the internet, report my suspect activities to my employer, give me a 35% pay cut for some made-up reason, cancel my (non-existent) health insurance, put me in the FBI database, have me shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, where I'll be beaten with rubber hoses, hosed and raped with a Koran, have rubber bands tied around my gonads, then be beheaded by some Special Forces commando dressed up as one of those wonderful Islamofascist thugs, er, I mean terrorists, er, I mean "insurgent", er, I mean "freedom fighter."

And one of these guys wants me to listen to talk radio while I work. Dude, they know that the only people that listen to talk radio are pathetic liberal losers that can't formulate their own opinions and need opinions spoon-fed to them by some anti-American Democrat's tool. I don't need to listen to something that's just going to piss me off while I'm trying to work.