Spring Break Begins
It’s Spring Break around these parts and in all of the senses of the word. The local school district is out for the week so we are braced for regular interruptions of our school day as each friend must be told individually (and daily) that yes, it’s true. We are doing school again today.
And as I sit here and survey the new rug in my office, I am reminded that we are also entering into “Spring Break” in the familial sense of the word. Now I am sure that it would be possible for a week to start off in a more frustratingly spectacular way but I certainly don’t want to amuse myself by thinking about what form that frustration might take. [Note to the divine readers to this blog....that was NOT a challenge.]
It started with the weekly visit of the “Assignment Sheet Fairy” to our house. (So-named because it irritates the boys and causes them to roll their eyes WAAAAYYYYY back into their heads and say “MMOOOOMMMM!!) I was a little bit annoyed when right off of the bat the printer jammed and it was necessary to squeeze my hands into the inner reaches of the printer to clear it. Why is it that the printer nearly always jams in the hardest to reach places? Jam cleared, I restarted the printing of the assignment sheets. It jammed again. I cleared the jam, checked the paper tray to make sure that somebody hadn’t put bent paper into it and tried again. It jammed again. This time it was necessary to partially disconnect and disassemble the printer to get at the jam. I also cleaned the easily accessible areas of the printer. I reconnected and re-assembled the printer and tried printing the assignment sheets again. Jammed again. This time I disconnected and disassembled the printer and cleaned some of the less accessible areas as well as cleaned VERY thoroughly the area I had cleaned the LAST time I had the printer open. I also tried to call to mind the prices I had seen on the printers the last time I had been at Sam’s Club. Re-connected. Re-assembled. I tried printing again. It jammed again. This time I disconnected the printer and sat with it on my lap on the floor as I disassembled and cleaned every single solitary reachable place on that stupid hunk-of-junk. When I was finally done. I re-connected and re-assembled the stupid hunk-of-junk and put it back in it’s place. And…wonder of wonders…this time the assignment sheets printed with ease. I turned around and looked at the floor and there, on my area rug, were several rather largish spots of ink. Holding my breath I lifted the area rug to be greeted by the sight of ink spots on my white carpet. You don’t want to know what I called the printer then. I went and got my small portable carpet cleaner. In an unexpected bright spot to this story, the ink came out of the carpet with surprising ease. Of course the ink is SO concentrated that when the carpet cleaner dribbled a few drops of water on the carpet, I had brand new ink spots on my white carpet. I also spent some time musing on just how worn carpet needs to be in a room full of bookcases (that weren’t easy to put together either) before it becomes worn enough that it is worth replacing. (Between incidents like this and the gunshots in the carpet in our bedroom, I sense that the remaining carpet in the downstairs has its days numbered…..but those bookshelves…..) Once the carpet and the carpet shampooer were adequately cleaned, I looked at the inkspots on the area rug and said to myself. “Self. You would be a FOOL to unroll this rug and let that ink make a new stain. The trash men will be here in a bit. They should have this rug to take away with them before I get stupid enough to try and finish cleaning this area rug.” I rolled the ink stains into the middle of the rug. Directed my eldest to take it to the curb and instructed the remaining children to get their shoes on.
Home Depot. So I piled the kids into the car and set off for Home Depot to get a new area rug for the floor in the office. We got to Home Depot, passed the gauntlet of personnel (two separate stations yesterday…inside AND outside the door.) detailed to get us to sign up for a Home Depot credit card with a smile and “Just fine thanks”…after all they don’t really want to know and they don’t mean to be as irritating as they are. We found a new area rug, in stock, that wasn’t too terribly expensive and wasn’t too terribly ugly and took it to the checkout. “Just fine thanks.” Handed over my credit card and paid. Whereupon, the clerk removed one but not both of the anti-shoplifting tags. Of course, I didn’t discover the remaining anti-shoplifting tag until I got home. (Just about the time my middle child shot the cat with a rubber band and then claimed not to have done it…..another story for another day.) So I set the oldest and youngest children to completing their school work and took the rubber band bandit with me in the car for a little personal one-on-one time with mom and went back to Home Depot. I lug the carpet past the outside the door credit card salesman. “NOT at ALL fine thank you very much!!” and withstood a good five minutes of scrutiny of my receipt before the customer service lady decided that it would probably be ok to remove the remaining anti-theft device. Fortunately, she did apologize (not profusely) for the inconvenience or I would have left the rug there, returned the remaining merchandise and got one at Lowe’s.
The rest of the day was spent in my own customer service work. Sonlight has made a transition to subscription forums. Although several thousand people have successfully subscribed, several hundred are having technical troubles as we find and work out system bugs. See…it’s “Spring Break” there too. I won’t even go into the forum participants who are just unhappy because of the swtich and not becasue of any technical trouble either. I have been helping forumadmin weed out and fix the easy to solve problems. Each problem fixed is one more happy user to help tip the balance and soothe the waters of the forums. Hopefully next week will run a little more smoothly both at home and at work. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is in town and we’ll be going for the second time tomorrow night.
