Thanks, Apple

Shockingly (oh, how naive!), we've been out of a computer, off and on, for just about two months now. A one-year old Apple iMac whatever (early 2008 20" iMac), purchased September of 2008, crashed suddenly. Good thing we had purchased the extended warranty Apple Care whatever, allowing us to take the machine to the Apple Genius Bar (rather than being shit-out-of-luck, as we would have been had we not purchased the extended warranty Apple Care) and be told the hard drive was dead, likely due to a manufacturing error. They replaced the hard drive (took seven days) and then we got it back and it still didn't work. Back and forth to the Genius Bar we go... now it's the logic board... wait, no it's not... repeat three times. Finally a traveling Genius (Mac Medic) comes to our house... opens the machine, tells us that the in-store Genius ruined a cable (the cable looks like a Listerine breath strip) with a tweezer, and he's going to suggest we be sent a replacement machine.

Apparently the FOURTH REPAIR is the ticket: if your machine needs a fourth repair they will replace your machine.

The new machine was released November 1st, but we didn't get it till November 12th, because of course it came from China and then went to Alaska and finally came to California.

Whew! The moral of the story is... I'm not sure what the moral of the story is! Apple could take a lesson from Zappos!

Office Space

Due to a new crop of employees coming in all at once, our office has lost any etiquette we ever followed. For example, we have three bathrooms - a unisex, single stall bathroom upstairs, and a women's bathroom downstairs with two stalls, and a men's bathroom downstairs with one stall and one urinal. We have only four men in the office and about 15 women, so traditionally, the men have left the single stall upstairs for the women uptairs (and visitors) and have gone downstairs to the men's bathroom. Not so any longer.
Now the upstairs bathroom frequently has pee splattered on the floor and the seat is left up. We have a nice Method air freshener in the upstairs bathroom, which actually smells really good (it's the vanilla-apple scented one, but it smells like pineapple), and someone actually carried it over to the toilet and perched it right on the edge, as if they thought they were going to take a really smelly poop and it would help to move it closer. Finally, I found that someone had pried open the tampon dispenser.

At one point, long ago, we even used to go across the street to a private (public) bathroom that is very nice and clean and seldomly used if we had to do a #2. Just like animals in the wild, we'd rather others not know. Judging by the odor in the bathroom now, someone is "dropping a deuce"-- as my coworker H. puts it-- frequently... the "across the street" convention has died. The whole bathroom situation has me frequently looking longingly out at the trees outside my work when nature calls. I'd love to pee out there on one of them than encounter whatever is happening in our bathrooms.

People are leaving their dirty dishes in the sink instead of rinsing and putting them in the dishwasher, much to the chagrin of the receptionist, whom I supervise. What's more, people are leaving dirty dishes crusting at their desks with food still in/on them, causing a shortage of forks. People are putting empty peanut butter jars back into the cabinets. (See photo.)

The latest is that I have a very loud, shrill new co-worker. She only speaks at one volume, and it's extreme. The entire floor is treated to her conversations, whether she's speaking to you or not, but what's more, she overshares. Yesterday she ran around telling everyone that she and her husband have sold their condominium for the asking price. She was THRILLED, RELIEVED, HAPPY, AMAZED and "IN SHOOOOOCKKKK!!!" In the morning she ran around telling everyone she GOT AN OFFER ON THE CONDO! By afternoon she had SOLD THE CONDO!!! She told her peers, she told her boss, and she bypassed me, perhaps because she can tell I try to avoid contact with her, and charged right into the CEO's office to tell him.

Our office used to be tiny; manageable. When I started, there were a mere 9-10 full time employees and a few contractors that came to the office part time. At 20 we're still considered small for a lot of legal purposes, but things have gotten out of hand, and it's become a huge mess. As the CEO's assistant, and without an office manager, I'm the default office manager, something I am way too uptight to be. I mean, my face gets hot and I get angry when I see a spoon in the fork part of the utensil divider... imagine what the rest of this is doing to me.

Figs are almost ready!

A few of the figs on our fig tree suddenly fattened up, turned a brighter, more yellow shade of green, and got softer to the touch. I sacrificed one to see how they are tasting... the inside was pinkish violet and tasted pretty sweet, but had not gone fully ripe or fully sugared yet. It was definitely almost there. Now I am watching the four or five that are in a similar state to see when they will ripen. The rest of the figs (hundreds) are still fairly small and green. I think these are Kadota figs... but I'm not sure.

Lizards

There are lots of little tiny lizards where I live now. They're so small and fast that you can miss them easily.