I Like Being Places, I Just Don't Like Going Places

I'm going on vacation. I need one pretty badly. I'm going to explore LA, which will be fun. I love visiting new places. The problem is that traveling really stresses me out. Right up until the plane is off the ground, I live with a constant fear that some horrible bureaucratic mess is going to keep me from getting to my destination (or home, if it's the homeward leg). One day I will probably write a posting which contains the story that is both a reasonable basis for this fear and also the evidence that I, of all people, should probably worry about that the least.

The last time I remembered seeing my passport was a few weeks ago after a quick shopping trip to Buffalo. I left my passport in the visor of my car after that. L and I had been packing all night and we were both going on the assumption that my passport was in my car. After getting ready for bed, I all of a sudden realize that I had my car interior professionally cleaned a week or two ago and that I didn't get a passport back in my bag of stuff I left in the car. I panicked, threw on some clothes and ran out to the car, which is a block away from my apartment.

It's raining out tonight. As I walked under my umbrella, a group of three strangers walked towards me. 

"Hurry up, man," said the first girl, obviously wanting to get out of the rain as quickly as possible. There was a guy close behind her who was clearly sharing the same sentiment. A few metres behind that came a guy who was limping rather than walking. 

"It's okay," he called to them, "don't wait up for your crippled friend or anything."

I got to my car, checked the visor, and quickly ascertained that the passport was not their, nor was it in the glove compartment or the console. 

I rushed home in a complete frenzy and started tearing up my sock drawer, which is where I usually keep my passport. Isn't that where everyone keeps their important stuff? Anyway, not there. Not in the bag of stuff I took out of my car before sending it to be cleaned. Not in the bag of random crap I keep around. Not in the box by the front door. 

"What if the carwash people stole it?!" I speculated.

"Uh, what use would they have for a stolen passport?" asked L, the voice of reason.

I continued looking under things and behind things and inside things.

And finally, after destroying my bedroom, my car, and some of my living room I discovered that my passport had been, all along, on top of my dresser. 

I hate travelling.

Too Many... or Not Enough?

I think I have a problem.

The other night I felt like I was having an unproductive evening because I'd only managed to clean my fish tank, plant my seeds in preparation for the end of the frost and make home made ice cream between work and bedtime.

I have too many hobbies. My girlfriend L suggested that perhaps I should start a hobby rotation plan. I pointed out that this would result in most hobbies being visited once a year or so. Which is fine for, say, photography*, but not so great for, say, my fish. So, instead, I have decided I'm going to start combining my hobbies. Blogging, as one of my hobbies, will have to start pulling its weight in the syngeretic hobby circle. This means that my blogs will start being about things. That's okay, I'm out of anecdotes anyway.

Incidentally, tonight's blog was going to be about bicycle mechanicking. Wheel building, specifically. Building a wheel is a simple, but sort of intense task. You get a hub, a rim, some spokes and some nipples. Oh, grow up. You then systematically thread the spokes through the hub and into the rim, until you have a self supporting structure. The components come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The most common wheels have either 32 or 36 spokes.

For "Guy Valentine's Day" L gave me a present — a brand new yellow
Velocity aero rim to go with my hot fixie wheel. (What did you think I was talking about, pervert?). So last week I stopped into the bike shop and bought a hub, some spokes and some nipples. Tonight I sat down with all my parts at my truing stand.

After threading 1/4 of the spokes I had, I discovered that I had run out of holes in my 32 hole rim, but had space for another spoke in the hub. Guess it's back to the bike store tomorrow. And this time I will count.

* I apologize to my friends who disagree, but I have to say, my camera will simply not die if I don't use it, whereas my fish, probably will die if I stop feeding and cleaning them.

This Is Not A Rant

So the other day I was sitting at my desk at work and my cell phone rang. It showed up on the call display as a local number which I didn't recognize. After answering, there was a brief pause, followed by a greeting in a very thick accent. It was Fido, wanting to know how my cell phone service is. Fido is my mobile phone service provider. They used to be a cute little upstart with good usage plans and no guerrilla marketing tactics. Then they were bought by Rogers.

After determining that I was largely satisfied with my service, except that it costs too much, the rep went on to tell me he could give me a free phone and a great plan for the next 24 months.

"But I have to sign a contract?" I prompted.
"Oh, no, sir, Fido doesn't have contracts. You would have an agreement."
"Ah," I replied, "and that's different from a contract?"
"Yes."
"Okay, and if I decide I want to cancel my Fido service next month...?"
"Oh, then you have to pay a cancellation fee."
"Well then, I can see how that is different than a contract. How about this? You put in my account notes that if anyone ever offers me a contr- sorry, agreement, ever again, I will cancel my service."
Unperturbed, he pushed on. "But sir, if you sign up for an agreement, I can offer you-"
I cut him off and repeated that if I was ever offered a contract again, I would cancel my service. He told me to have a nice evening, although to be honest, he didn't sound all that sincere. I told him the same. I was definitely not sincere.

This leads me to the lesson. This has come up a few times in the last month. Everyone seems to have a lot of misinformation about how cell phones work. Disclaimer: this rant really only applies to Canada.

Firstly, the "system access fee" is a scam. There was, in fact, a class action suit in Saskatchewan about how cell phone providers have been collecting this fee for themselves even though it stopped being a government levy many years ago. I was told once by a Bell rep that they split the cost of the plans into usage cost and system access fee because people wanted to know how the plan was divvied up, but I seem to recall that the plan that cost $30 before the split, cost $30 + $6.95 after. You also probably pay a monthly 911 system access fee. Even though you can dial 911 from any payphone for free.

Another serious point of misinformation seems to be about the difference between plans and contracts; or agreements; or shackles; whatever you want to call them. The important thing is that your plan and your contract are completely disjoint. And for those of you who thing this is completely obvious, I talked to two reasonable and intelligent people with two different misconceptions about this just this month.

A contract is just a statement that if you cancel your phone before N months (where N is usually 36) you will pay the phone company some large chunk of money. This renders you basically helpless in the event that the phone company wants to, say, charge you a new random fee for no reason. Keep in mind that it is usually stated explicitly in the contract that they can change your plan without notice whenever they want. So you may think you've signed up for unlimited something something for 3 years, but really, all you've signed up for is 3 years of getting hosed.

Your monthly plan is the usage you pay for. You can get a plan without having a contract. I have been without a cell phone contract for about 3 years now. And since there is now a law stating that if I change cell phone carriers, I get to keep my cell phone number, I have no reason to stay with my provider if I don't feel like it. They want to increase my fees? Too bad. I'll go somewhere else and it won't cost me $200 to cancel, even if I leave tomorrow. And I don't even have to change my number. I recently used that fact to knock literally $20 a month of my cell phone bill.

Sure, they'll offer you lots of little goodies to sweeten the pot: $100 off your cell phone cost; a $2 a month discount for the first 3 months. But you can get that same plan without a contract if you forego the $6 in savings and buy your own cell phone. At the time I bought my phone, Fido was selling the LG Chocolate for $200, if you signed up for a 3 year agreement. I got mine for $200 on craigslist, almost brand new. No agreement. Plus mine is unlocked, which means I can take it to any GSM carrier. Which, of course, limits me to Rogers of Fido.

The main reason that I recommend all this is that they are trying to get new carriers in the game. My fear, of course, is that because everyone is tied up in contracts already, any new carrier will find it impossible to sign up new customers. This will stifle competition, which will encourage the players we have now to continue to screw us. However, if, in a year or two, we get a new carrier with more reasonable rates and enough of us are free to leave our current providers, we may start seeing our rates come down. And that, in my opinion, would be a welcome change.

So the next time your cell phone company offers you some random thing if you agree to extend your contract, tell them to get stuffed. Buy your own cell phone and rest assured that whatever plan you sign up for will stay the same, even without a contract. Because if they start changing your plan around, you can just leave.

Please, feel free to post a comment with your provider and how much you actually pay per month, ie. your plan plus extras plus system access fee plus 911 fee plus whatever other ridiculous fees plus taxes. Post anonymously if you're embarassed about it. I'm curious, in any case.

You Pays Your Money...

I visited the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls over the holiday. I played roulette. I love roulette. It's all shiny and spinny. It's one of the few games that can keep hold of my attention for at least as long as my money lasts.

I always love hearing people talk about odds and things when I go to a casino. I actually overheard someone say, "ooh, bet on black, it hasn't come up in a while." If you don't understand why this statement is completely false, I would strongly suggest taking a class in basic probability or reading a book called Chances Are... Adventures In Probability. Even if you already know why this statement is wrong, I would still suggest that book. It's quite entertaining.

Mom loves to inform me that roulette has terrible odds. If I really want to do well at the casino, I should play blackjack, she says. What my mother fails to realize is that I don't go to the casino to do well. In fact, before I've gone to the casino, I assume the money I'm taking is not coming home. Instead, I look at it as payment for entertainment; kind of like going to the movies.

One way I make sure I get my money's worth is by playing games that entertain me with shiny balls and spinning wheels. The other way I keep myself entertained is to ruin gambling for the serious players.

I hit on 14 at blackjack, for example. I once had a dealer ask me if I was sure I wanted to do that. People get so angry when you don't play properly. I have even been accused of taking someone's card. As though they knew what that card was before it came out of the shoe.

Another way I piss off the seasoned gamblers is to act really nonshallant when I win or lose. I won $125 on slots and the machine was whooping and hollering because that was the big prize on that machine. The guy beside me had a serious five o'clock shadow and looked as though his leg muscles had atrophied from sitting at the same slot machine for about a century too long. I looked around with a stupid, Mr Bean-like grin on my face while the machine did it's thing. The pro next to me reached over and hit the button to make my machine shut up.

"You have to wait for the girl to come around and pay you out, now," he said, with more than a hint of sour grapes in his voice.
"Okay. Thanks," I said, unwilling to let my winnings be sullied by this sour-puss. He looked at the machine again.
"Oh. No you don't, you didn't bet the maximum. You only won $125, you coulda had $250" he said with disdain.
"Oh well," I replied back with a big friendly smile. He made a noise of disgust and went back to pushing Bet Max with a grim determination that would make Sysiphus jealous. I wasn't about to be annoyed at what could have happened when I had just won $125. Given that I'd already written off the money I put into the machine, it was a pleasant surprise.

I am fond of saying that I never gamble what I can't afford to lose.

When I was 18 I started an RRSP. This is what banks like to call an "investment." They like to show you all these pretty graphs which say that if you put in $1000 when you're 20 you'll be a millionaire by the time you're 65. They try very hard to make the word "investment" sound like the word "savings" but really, it is a synonym for "gamble." My RRSP is comprised of what appear to be reasonably conservative mutual funds from Royal Bank. Up until recently it'd been doing pretty well.

Upon checking my online banking page today, however I discovered that perhaps I should have gone out and spent a few hundred dollars on a really good mayonnaise jar and burried my money in the backyard because there'd be more of it left in that case.

No Postage Necessary If Mailed Within The House

It's that time of year again, for feasting and visiting and so forth. At one party, I commented that the sound of screaming children always puts me in mind of Christmas.
"Or water parks," someone else noted.
"Yeah, but those remind me of Christmas, too. My family was cruel and cheap."

My family's normal Christmas ritual is to go to my grandparents', about a 2 hour drive away, and have dinner with my mom's brothers and sisters and their families. For various reasons, my mom is hosting this year, which means there will be 8 people staying over tonight. To accomodate all these relatives, my parents have borrowed an RV. A 34' long, powder blue RV. As I arrived and saw it from a block away, I couldn't help but be put in mind of Randy Quade in his short robe and flapped hat waving his beer and yelling, "shitter was full!"

We've had the local radio station on for the last day. They promised 36 hours of Chritsmas music with no commercials. This promise quickly began to ring hollow as we realised that, although they will be playing Christmas music for 36 hours, they can't have more than about 4 hours of Christmas music on file.

My favourite moment of this year was when my step-dad gave my mom her card. It was one of those standard mushy Hallmark "to my loving wife" bla bla bla cards. That's why it was kind of funny when he pointed out that the envelope, which came with the card, included a marking in the corner indicating "Additional Postage Required."

Merry Christmas, everyone!

No Equivalent

So lately I've been looking for a new job. There are lots of great things about the place I work right now, but there are some pretty glaring omissions from the list of Things I Need At My Job. I think for a lot of people, "it's the thought that counts" are just words. But for me, I really mean it. I would much rather a gift worth $5, or even nothing, if a lot of thought or hard work went into it. Similarly, I would much rather a small raise, unbidden, then getting a big raise after asking for it. This appears to be not understood at my current place of employment.

My friend T is also moving to a different job. For different reasons, really. In any case, neither of us has ever been employed at any one place for a long time. This greatly concerns my mother, who grew up in the Job For Life era. I have tried to explain to her that anything longer than about a year or two is not actually considered job-hopping anymore, at least in my experience.

T was talking about her longest ever job, about 2 and a half years. "It's funny," she said, "the way relationships differ from jobs: you are always serially employed."

"That," I responded, "is because there is no employment equivalent to masturbation."

Brains!

Sunday was the Toronto Zombie Walk. I'm not sure exactly when the tradition started or where or even really why, but it was quite a sight to behold. My friend B and I have been trying to get out to take some photos for a while now so I figured what better chance than a giant public spectacle. He drove downtown Sunday afternoon and we set out for Trinity-Bellwoods park. We were a little worried because B had gotten into town a bit late. About a block from the park we were excited for our first zombie sighting! Then they turned around. It turns out regular Toronto street punks have a striking resemblance to zombies.

The organizers gathered everyone in the pit at the park. It was awesome. Some people were just lightly made up but some were dressed to the nines. Some of them were creepy and some of them were hilarious. There were theme zombies, too: Where's Waldo, Elvis, the Hippie Zombie or Hipbie as I like to say. People had zombie rights signs. There was enough fake blood to choke a horse. And plastic brains. And fake body parts. There was one guy with an axe in his chest who simply shuffled along slowly, stopping every few steps to chew thoughtfully on the fleshy end of a full sized human arm, severed above the elbow.

Some people even brought their children. At one point a guy lurched around the corner with a knife sticking out of his chest. Attached to the knife was a hand. Attached the hand was a child. The kid spent the whole day following his dad around attached by the knife in his chest. "How's that working out for you?" I asked. Not well, considering his dad continued to lurch, undaunted by the kitchen utensil interrupting his internal organs. I wonder how many sessions with a therapist the Zombie Walk will occupy when that kid is older.

In the end, I managed to shoot over 400 pictures. B shot a similarly obscene number. All-in-all it was very successful. I had a lot of fun. Everyone who came out was very friendly and a good sport. At one point, we were talking to some random strangers and B said he was enjoying it so much they should do two zombie walks a year. Maybe one in the spring. You know, around Easter.

"That wouldn't work," I asserted. "Everyone knows there's only one Easter zombie: Jesus."