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captainsblogThat quote was from fairly early in my practicing days, when The Lawyers and The Wives got taken out to dinner at a fancy-ass steak place which my then-boss, oddly enough, also co-owned. Whatever they brought me, it looked good enough to eat, and it was, despite my having ordered something completely different; but when the officious waiter came back to fawn over us, he asked how it was, and I told him. The line got laughs and became something of a household legend long after the ends of my life with that firm, and that of the Down Under Restaurant on Gregory Street.
It came back to me this morning as I opened the mailer containing my new power supply. The last of my red-hot (sometimes literally) extra laptop adapters died on my trip last week, and the storefront geek I took it to while in Olean confirmed what I already knew: Best Buy and That Lot would only sell me overpriced universals with a ton of tips, and my best bet would be to special-order off eBay or Amazon. I did so; the hardest part of it was ensuring the right match, since these sites try to make their parts out to be more adaptable than they really are. Finally, though, I found an exact replacement for my original, which never leaves the house, and it got here, mere priority mail, several days ahead of schedule.
After opening it, though? Not an exact replacement, but one with several extra tips and a "Mickey Mouse" connection and three-prong plug on the wall end of things, rather than the two-point connectors that came with mine. It actually is a better fit for my stay-at-home model, so I've moved my original-original out to the living room so I can spend more evening time with the grrls out there. From there, it'll be easy to take it along with me when I travel.
I'd already paid, so there was no invoicing to be concerned with, but the big padded envelope had more in store. First, the explanation:
Then, the obligatory prayer for pimping and plugging:
(What do YOU think of these, btw? I tend to resist such things because I think they skew the sample; car dealers send them all the time after service appointments to basically beg you not to rat them out on a survey, even if they screwed you blind in the service process itself.)
Last, but not least, there was a box. About the size of a D-cell battery. What could be in there? Three letters: NFI.
It had a page of directions, but those were written in typical Tech Manual Mangle-ese, with tiny diagrams and, still, no real indication of WTF this thing was.
Eleanor and Emily, of course, instantly identified it as a TARDIS (okay, Em thought it was more a TARDIS/Dalek love child). Em gently opened it, and it was, indeed, bigger inside than it looks. Turns out it's an external speaker for a speakerless mp3 player, or can be used to boost the speaker on something like my phone if we want to take the JazzFM app out to the picnic table. Which made much more sense once you didpush pull it open and saw the added appendage tucked inside:
We all like it, but I told them that if we suddenly start getting calls from Richard Nixon, I'm throwing it out.
----
Waiting for Eleanor's truck to be finished. Cost more than I'd have liked, but far less than in the dream I had about the repair where it was gonna be over $2,000 including replacements of all the windows on the truck. I'm not sure if this came before or after my dream of being hit by a tornado while driving somewhere on the East Side, which I totally expected after getting sucked into watching this horrific video of a guy getting hunted down and half-killed by one in western Massachusetts the other day. (I'm not kidding about the horrific. NSFW, or sleeping, or much of anything.) We pick it up in a little while, and then the weekend's not far behind:)
It came back to me this morning as I opened the mailer containing my new power supply. The last of my red-hot (sometimes literally) extra laptop adapters died on my trip last week, and the storefront geek I took it to while in Olean confirmed what I already knew: Best Buy and That Lot would only sell me overpriced universals with a ton of tips, and my best bet would be to special-order off eBay or Amazon. I did so; the hardest part of it was ensuring the right match, since these sites try to make their parts out to be more adaptable than they really are. Finally, though, I found an exact replacement for my original, which never leaves the house, and it got here, mere priority mail, several days ahead of schedule.
After opening it, though? Not an exact replacement, but one with several extra tips and a "Mickey Mouse" connection and three-prong plug on the wall end of things, rather than the two-point connectors that came with mine. It actually is a better fit for my stay-at-home model, so I've moved my original-original out to the living room so I can spend more evening time with the grrls out there. From there, it'll be easy to take it along with me when I travel.
I'd already paid, so there was no invoicing to be concerned with, but the big padded envelope had more in store. First, the explanation:
Then, the obligatory prayer for pimping and plugging:
(What do YOU think of these, btw? I tend to resist such things because I think they skew the sample; car dealers send them all the time after service appointments to basically beg you not to rat them out on a survey, even if they screwed you blind in the service process itself.)
Last, but not least, there was a box. About the size of a D-cell battery. What could be in there? Three letters: NFI.
It had a page of directions, but those were written in typical Tech Manual Mangle-ese, with tiny diagrams and, still, no real indication of WTF this thing was.
Eleanor and Emily, of course, instantly identified it as a TARDIS (okay, Em thought it was more a TARDIS/Dalek love child). Em gently opened it, and it was, indeed, bigger inside than it looks. Turns out it's an external speaker for a speakerless mp3 player, or can be used to boost the speaker on something like my phone if we want to take the JazzFM app out to the picnic table. Which made much more sense once you did
We all like it, but I told them that if we suddenly start getting calls from Richard Nixon, I'm throwing it out.
----
Waiting for Eleanor's truck to be finished. Cost more than I'd have liked, but far less than in the dream I had about the repair where it was gonna be over $2,000 including replacements of all the windows on the truck. I'm not sure if this came before or after my dream of being hit by a tornado while driving somewhere on the East Side, which I totally expected after getting sucked into watching this horrific video of a guy getting hunted down and half-killed by one in western Massachusetts the other day. (I'm not kidding about the horrific. NSFW, or sleeping, or much of anything.) We pick it up in a little while, and then the weekend's not far behind:)
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-03 06:15 pm (UTC)I'd've been very confused by the extra doohickey, too.
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Date: 2011-06-03 06:53 pm (UTC)