Too long since climbing; too long since photogging; too long since blogging. This post to fix them all.
Spent an idyllic weekend climbing at the Monastary with my favorite goofballs, Brett and Lindsay. Hung out on moderates, enjoyed good food, and great company.
Here are Brett’s pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/bwbovee/Monastary_May2008
I tried purchasing a gift for someone from buy.com and having it shipped to his residence.
You know, the feature that Amazon.com has had since, oh, I don’t know, 1997?
I get this email in response from Tasha Eastman:
Hello Alexander,
We are anxious to ship your order # 39677038; however, we need some additional information to complete the order process.
The shipping address information entered on your order is not on file with your credit card company. To release your order, please contact your credit card company to have the address added on file as an alternate ship-to address.
Um, right. I’m not going to call Amex and have them put my brother’s address on my credit card file. That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.
My response:
This is silly.
Amazon.com doesn’t ask me to call my credit card company if I want to purchase a gift for a family member and have it shipped to their residence.
In fact, no other retailer that I can think of has this requirement.
If you are still interested in my current and future business — I spend roughly $1000 / year on electronics purchases and influence the purchasing decisions of friends/family around roughly $7000 / year — then please fulfill the order as originally placed.
On the other hand, if you are really going to attempt to make me jump through this hoop, then please cancel my order.
Thank you.
Their response was to cancel my order.
So if you’re thinking of buying something off the intarwebs, don’t use buy.com. They are a bunch of JV bush-league-amateur-hour mouth-breathers who clearly do not understand customer service. Buy.com sucks.
The inaugural post in my favorite new category is based on last night’s events, where we took a friend to the emergency room for a traumatic eye injury (getting nailed with a soccer ball). Turns out eye injuries are second place only to chest pain, and luckily, we vaulted to the front of the line…
… which meant that we had the privilege of being first to wait 2 hours before the Doc showed up. Yay ERs!
In any case, during the diagnosis, the doc asks the nurse to grab a tool to measure the intra-ocular pressure (IOP) of Jess’ eye, the goal being to detect if there was any rupturing of the eyeball (yikes!). Lower pressure means stuff leaking out means rupture. Ew!
Nurse asks for a description of the instrument, doc replies, “well, it looks like a dildo and you have to put a condom on it”. I guess that’s what passes for hospital humor. In any case, nurse brings back the TONO-PEN® XL (on sale for $2,999.00 at Western Ophthalmics).
Here’s where the story gets good. Doc opens the carrying case, pulls out the TONO-PEN® XL, and then I see the doc sit down and fiddle with the thing for about 10 minutes while staring befuddled at the instruction manual and muttering to self while the TONO-PEN® XL made occasional sad beep sounds.
So the question is, should one be alarmed that the doc was reading the instruction manual—right in front of us—for an expensive tool that was about to be jammed into Jess’ eye? Or should one have been soothed that the doc had the lack of ego that allowed her to do the same?
I could go either way on that one.
The doc never got it working and walked out of the room mumbling about calling the specialist, and I, of course, who have a special kinship with electronics, took a peek at the manual and the TONO-PEN® XL. Turns out the doc was trying to calibrate it. Obviously, I had to try this procedure myself — it was a bit fiddly, but I eventually managed to finish reading section 4.3.1 (OPERATION) of the manual and get it calibrated, and was ready to start section 4.3.2 (PATIENT TESTING) but decided that my lack of medical training and expertise, not to mention common sense meant that I should probably put the medical dildo back into its carrying case, which I did, thankyouverymuch. [btw, why is the usage of the thing a sub-sub section of the manual? shouldn't it be the majority of the manual?]
Bonus humor for readers who actually know Jess — during triage, I was peeking over the nurse’s shoulder as she entered in various stats and vitals. Eventually, there was a menu labeled “Neuro”, and under it were several fields, one of which was titled “Patient Disposition”. When the nurse entered in “Cooperative”, it was all I could do to restrain from an outburst of crazy laughter, as I thought to myself, “gee that’s probably the first time Jess has ever been called ‘cooperative’”.
I’ve probably violated every HIPAA rule and bylaw with this post.
Today, the “is-this-really-necessary” and “w-t-f” combine to bring you this story from the CSM about the Olympic torch to scale Everest.
I really have no comment on this, except to say that the Olympics wanted to jump the shark, but fell in and got torn to bloody bits instead.
Schadenfreude is a sign of moral weakness, and I would never wish ill-thoughts on fellow climbers, but I really hope that torch gets blown off the mountain and falls into a crevasse.