jeffpollard.net

My Lack of Patience

I've noticed myself with an ever-growing lack of patience lately. And I really don't like it. I've always considered myself a pretty patient person. Even sitting still in rush hour traffic hasn't ever really bothered me too much.

And maybe it's not a lack of patience but rather a lack of tolerance. Mostly I notice lately that my threshold for problems at work is not what it used to be. Little things that used to not bother me at work now aggravate me to the point of..well, blogging about it. I blogged a few weeks ago about my frustration with ITS management for hiring under-skilled staff. I promised myself a long time ago that I wasn't going to use this site as a medium to vent about work. mostly, because sometimes people from work visit this site. But here I am, not more than a couple weeks later, venting about work again.

Most of my job requires me to help people solve their computer problems. What I find most frustrating a lot of the time is that the people I'm helping don't seem to want to try to help themselves. What I mean is that - many times - if our employees would take a moment and try a couple different things, they could probably solve their own problems.

Case in point: I went upstairs to help a customer who couldn't get connected to the server. Before I did anything, I asked the customer if she had tried rebooting. She said she had. To be curious, I brought up the Terminal and issued the 'w" command, which shows when the last time the computer had been rebooted. It said something like 16 days (go OS X!). Miffed that I had been blatantly lied to, I rebooted the computer. When it came back up, it connected to the server without problem.

The second thing that's been bugging me at work is the amount of calls I receive regarding home computers. Don't get me wrong, I don't usually have any qualm with answering people's home computer questions. But lately it bugs me more and more. I suppose I've made myself so available that people tend to depend on me to be their personal computer consultant. Unfortunately, I know think twice about even picking up my desk phone when I see someone outside of ITS calling me.

Maybe the answer to all of this is simply that I'm in a bad mood lately. All the time. Or maybe I'm just becoming an angry old man. I certainly hope not. Or maybe I just need a vacation.

Either way, I hope I snap out of it soon. I don't like myself with this demeanor.

Plum'r To the Rescue

I discovered an interesting home remedy this weekend. Do you get a build-up of dirty-looking stuff on the floor of your bathtub? Maybe our situation is weird, but we get pink water stains and dirt build-up on the floor of our tub that we can never get clean, no matter how hard we scrub.

A few months ago, I used some Liquid Plum'R to clear up our clogged drain and noticed that where the Plum'R had been sitting in the floor of the tub was CLEAN! And not just sorta clean..but bleach-white clean!

So yesterday, I grabbed our bottle of Extra-super-heavy-duty-strength Liquid Plum'R and went to work on our. I closed the drain and poured a decent amount all over the floor of the tub and let it sit for about a half hour. I came back and vigorously scrubbed at the dirty spots until, they came clean. When I was finished, our tub looked brand new!

That's about all of the exciting news I have for now. Oh, and the wedding invitations went out today. YAY!

Carlisle All-Truck 04

We made the trip up to Carlisle, PA on Saturday for the 2004 All-Truck Nationals. It was a beautiful day -not very hot at all- and perfect for a truck show. It was a good show. I noticed more 4x4 stuff this year than I had before, which was cool. My two favorite rides were this '37 Ford truck and this '95 Chevy Suburban. Check out the show photo gallery for all of my photos.

East Coast Nats

Finally got to go to my first show this summer - the first since I've been using my new camera. Here are the photos and movies from the event. Enjoy!

Next weekend: Carlisle All-Truck Nationals in Carlisle, PA.