2/6/13

My shell has no power.

I'm in training this week trying to wrap my feeble brain around something called PowerShell that should probably be called PowerHell because I am extremely dense and can't program my way out of a wet $x.load.  Right now I'm sitting in a hotel room listening to Trick of the Tail and eating takeout from TGI Friday's and wishing I didn't have to get up early tomorrow for another day of bafflement.  At least I get to fly home at the end of the day.  All in all, I learned quite a bit so far, and even though I will never be a script jockey, there's a slim chance that I might be able to make some sense out of someone else's code if I had to.*

On the plus side, some 65-year-old guy in a pickup truck just tried to pick me up while I was walking over to Friday's. Either that, or it was totally innocent and he really did just want to give me a handful of cash in exchange for a smoke.

My flight out of Albany was delayed over two hours because of the weather, and because the jet we were taking had to come in from our destination, be refueled, then turn around and go back.  You know how when you use a bathroom stall at work and you get all grossed out because when you sit down, the seat is still warm?  It was like that.  I ended up sitting next to a guy with a shaved head and a bad cold who was working on his manifesto or something, because he was writing on some ratty, stapled-together stack of papers the whole way here. Unfortunately I was sitting on his left and he was a left-handed manifesto-er.  That meant he was doing that hook-handed thing that lefties do, so I had a rib full of elbow for 2 hours.  At one point he tried to be polite by sneezing into his sheaf of papers, however he managed to angle them precisely enough so that their curvature created a boomerang of airborne pestilence and I actually felt a fine mist of sneeze juice hit my face.  I finally resorted to adjusting my overhead air control to blow away from me, and turning my body toward the aisle. I also bathed in purell when I landed so hopefully I will avoid contracting whatever variation of Captain Trips he was spreading.

The landing was a little rough, but we managed to avoid sliding off the runway even though I have no idea how. It was snowing like a bitch and we couldn't see anything out the window but a complete white out. When we finally dropped out of the snow squall the ground was RIGHT there.  A second later, we hit the snowy runway and the brakes simultaneously, and came to a shuddering halt somewhere close to where we were supposed to.  So I just want to say: Thank you, 14-year-old pilot, wherever you are.  I wish you good luck with that first shave you have coming up.  

I haven't had great luck with my vehicles so far this week.  The hotel I'm staying at is very upscale and they provide you with transportation to and from the airport, as well as to the office, so you never have to call a taxi.  I'm kidding.  It's a Hampton Inn, and while they do have a shuttle, it's some kind of ancient minivan with no suspension, bald tires and no heat, and even though they say it runs every half hour, most of the time nobody uses it so they don't run it unless you ask them to.

There's a little indian lady who lays out the continental breakfast every morning who also happens to be the shuttle driver. She's about four feet tall, and she's worked here since the place opened back in 1886. One minute she has her little apron on, and she's busily setting up yogurt and bagels and cereal and then she suddenly yanks off the apron like Clark Kent shucking his suit, throws on her puffy down coat and her hajib and heads for the van.  She's barely tall enough to reach the pedals, and I'm pretty sure reaching the top of the steering wheel on that piece of shit mini-bus is completely out of the question for her.  I thought for sure we were going to die.  At one point, I was actually white-knuckling it in the back seat and yelling, "Curb! Watch out for the curb!" as she slid sideways into the embankment and then over-corrected and slalomed into the fast lane.

I was so jacked up by the ride that I tried to jump out at the first stop, which wasn't even our building.  She was motioning with her hand and saying, "No, no, no, you must wait," and I had no idea what she was talking about until my co-worker clued me in to the fact that I was about to jump out at American Greetings Incorporated.  At that point I was contemplating a career change anyway. I could write corny romantic limericks all day long, and you wouldn't even have to threaten to kill my wife.  I mean, if you wanted really good ones it wouldn't hurt, but I bet I could do a fair job with just the threat of someone making me drink coffee that comes in a can.

My second vehicular failure came yesterday after our training session.  Chris, one of the guys in the class, offered to give us a ride back to the hotel. In order to avoid the Bangalore Express, we accepted.  We had to stop at the security desk and turn in our temporary badges, so he said, "I'll meet you out front. I have a silver KIA."  

We turned in our badges and stood in the foyer where it wasn't so cold and windy, and waited for him to pull around.  When he pulled up,  we ran outside to meet him and because chivalry is not dead and my co-worker is a woman, I figured I'd let her ride shotgun.  I ran up to the driver's side back door, yanked it open,  tossed my backpack on the floor and then realized there wasn't any room for me back there because the entire rear bench was taken up by two car seats filled with two little black kids whose eyes were the size of paper plates because they'd never before in their lives been carjacked by a middle-sized white dude.  I apologized to the very unfriendly gentleman driving this particular silver fucking KIA and did the walk of shame back to the foyer.  He was kind of a dick about it. To be fair, I had just jumped into his car with his two babies, but I maintain that it's partially his fault for making questionable window tinting decisions.

And to illustrate how fried my brain is right now: honest to god,  for a split second, I actually thought, "Chris has two little black kids?"

Yes.  And he leaves them strapped into their car seats in the parking lot all day while he's working because it's cheaper than paying for day care.  I'm an idiot.


*and by "had-to" I mean if someone had kidnapped my wife and was threatening to kill her if I didn't tell them how to add 14 users to Active Directory using a jagged  array. 


21 comments:

  1. Holy crap. I am laughing so hard. That is freaking hysterical.

    Please tell me your coworker saw all this happen and thinks its as hysterical as I do...

    And HEY...I just had a thought... you're a published author! That dude should feel honored that he almost got car-jacked by THE Johnny Virgil!

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    1. Self-published. I think that's sort of like being an "Exotic Dancer" instead of a stripper.

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  2. Ha ha, I love the logic. Chris must have had two black kids, not "wrong car"!

    I remember being a kid at the mall, and holding my mom's hand. And the hand felt weird, and I looked up, and my Mom had become some strange, smiling, slightly embarrassed lady. Then I saw my actual Mom 5 yards away!

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  3. OMG hilarious.

    In Cleveland? Lived there for a while... Winter sucked for sure. Now I'm back in NC where we haven't even seen any snow yet this year. Just some freezing rain one day that shut everything down in a 5 county radius. We southerners don't deal with winter weather all that well.

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  4. thanks for the giggle! cheers

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  5. Dying here, as usual. Had to call my IT buddy and run that PowerShell bit by him, also as usual. He sends his sympathy, said they have to use it quite a bit here, and then treated me to an explanation of the difference between CLI and GUI interfaces. Wow, I probably know as much as you do now! :D

    I bought a goldy-silvery Toyota Sienna minivan at a time when half of the United States apparently also wanted a goldy-silvery Toyota Sienna. At LEAST four times in the ten years I've owned this vehicle I have attempted to open either the driver's side door or the hatch of my van, only to realize that a) my key wasn't working and/or b) I was trying to carjack someone's kids or dog. Good times. I made a mental note that the next car be a color that wasn't as popular.

    [You know what happened next: my mother gave us a car, a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee. Guess what color JGC *everyone* decided to buy in 2003? Yep, tried to get into another one of those in the year we've had it.]

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    1. I remember when I was a kid, my mother did that to an old chevy impala and the key actually WORKED. She was able to unlock the door, but then couldn't turn the key.

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  6. The real shame in all of this is that you had to eat TGI Fridays.

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    1. It's totally like taco bell. The same five ingredients arranged in different orders.

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  7. I miss Windows sometimes. No, I'm kidding, though scripting is still mostly a mystery to me, while all of my co-workers tend to write scripts if they have to copy two files in a row. I used to hate that our company wouldn't pay for training. Now I feel better.

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    1. This training is from MS and not some training company, so it was actually pretty good.

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  8. Why couldn't you have taken the cash and then said that you didn't smoke?

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    1. I was actually too shocked to say anything but, "No, I don't smoke anything."

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  9. I can always come here on my days where I'm feeling a little low and get a bust out laugh for my little teeny bit of effort. click click. Your imagery is so superior that I can clearly see every single experience as if watching it on the screen. Thank you for saving my mood and upping my serotonin level every single time I come here.

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    1. Thank you for stopping by and reading my ramblings. Smoke?

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  10. Good to see you are still the same JV; blogger extraordinaire, and making me LMAO. It seems like we're there with ya, and living it first hand. I can't wait to read the posts I've missed over the last year or two! Thanks for the giggles tonight!

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  11. Captain Trips!!! Now I want to re-read The Stand. I am hoping that you have passed harmlessly out of the incubation period for whatever pestilence your seatmate was spreading.

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  12. Captain Trips! Now I want to re-read The Stand. I hope that you have since harmlessly passed out of the incubation period for whatever pestilence your seatmate was spreading.

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    1. Unscathed! I guess my immune system is better than I thought.

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  13. OMG...crying with laughter at work...as if my co-workers didn't already think I was a nut! Thanks for the hilarity!

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