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Vrooom-A-Zoom Zoom!

18 Jun

July 18, 2021

Amos: I’m a Zoomer now!
Me: What?
Amos: I’m a Zoomer. I’m zooming!

That’s Amos, who works for me. He’s a crack investigator whom I once avoided for 20 minutes by the cleaver ruse of simply walking two feet behind him and slightly to his left.

Amos has a little trouble with technology.

Amos: This cellular phone isn’t working.
Me: What’s wrong?
Amos: I can’t find the antenna. I think it must have fallen off.

I had to set up a Zoom meeting for Amos so he could get some training from an outside contractor.

Amos: That’s what you call people who do Zoomer meetings, isn’t it? Zoomers?
Me: Yup. You’re a Zoomer.

Amos has gone through 4 cell phones since I have known him, about 3 years. They never seem to work right. They all have the same problem: user error. Amos has no idea how to set up a contact, so every time I call him- and during the week I may call him four or five times a day- I have to tell him who’s calling when he picks up since he doesn’t recognize my number.

Amos also cannot receive email on his phone. There is something wrong with the settings on all his phones, he tells me. He’s gone to his local Staples to fix it and they always tell him they can’t find anything wrong. Amos says it is a scam to get him to buy a new phone, which he usually does.

When I want to send a case to Amos, I have to email it from a coworker’s account since Amos has somehow blocked me on his email, which he has to go to Staples to access and someone there has to “pull the email off the computer” for him.

My boss recently bought a fax machine for Amos. That was nearly three months ago. It is still not working. Amos has called in the phone company, the company that made the fax machine, and tech support from a number he saw on a flyer on a pole, and they all agree that there is nothing wrong. Amos is so far behind that he is flailing about like a trout on the line trying to figure out the fax machine, a piece of technology that is nearly obsolete.

Amos does not have a home phone line and is dependent on his cell phone (a disaster in the event of emergency) so in order to set up the fax he needed a phone line put in, which will cost him $30 a month. He asked my boss to reimburse him for that. My boss, who is notoriously cheap, agreed to pay it based on my advice.

I told him why not? The odds are he’ll never figure out how to use it anyway and he’ll send it back.

Go Speed Amos Go!

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Conveniently Inconvenient

1 May

May 1, 2021

Dear readers, Mr. and Mrs. Blog are once again looking for a place to live. For reasons I prefer to keep to myself, our old place was no longer meeting the needs of a pair of globetrotting iconoclasts such as ourselves (and our cat.)

(On a completely unrelated note, if anyone would be interested in buying a slightly singed and smoke damaged sofa, or some only partially burnt pants, drop me a note. Ha ha, I kid because it’s true.)

Well, as part of my brilliant plan to see every lousy house in Brooklyn, a plan which I pinky-swear is not at all motivated by my lack of money but only motivated by sense of ironic humor, I toured a home which, after some long thought and soul-searching, I declared was a house that people only move out of, not into.

But that’s not to say that it didn’t make me think. Below is a rough sketch of the layout of the last apartment I saw. It isn’t to scale, but it is close, and I did not exaggerate it one bit.

BEHOLD!

You are reading that correctly. The bathroom is in the kitchen, directly between the stove and the dining room table.

Now, if you spend as much time in the bathroom as I do my cat does, you can see the obvious convenience.

On the other hand, without being too graphic, there are some, um, “obvious drawbacks” to having the toilet three feet from your breakfast burrito. And speaking as someone who hosts lavish dinner parties, it can be unseemly when the Archbishop excuses himself from the Vichyssoise and the rest of the party can clearly hear his “business affairs.” Let alone smell them.

This is not the first time I have seen an apartment where the bathroom is uncomfortably close to the kitchen, but this is the first time the bathroom has actually been in the kitchen.

(Meanwhile, I have a singed loveseat to go with the burnt sofa, and there is a charred sport coat with most of the lapels still intact that matches the only partially burnt pants. I’ll toss in some waterlogged sneakers too.)

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