Category Archives: The Obvious

The things that are so obvious that it is funny.

The Last Post About Dodge Calibers

This morning at about 7:35 I turned in the keys to Enterprise Rent-a-Caliber and am finally rid of the Dodge Caliber.  I don’t want you to think that I hate the car, except that I do.  I have had 4 men (I notice that women dont’ do this) ask me how I like it when the family piles out of the vehicle.  Each one got a standard three word response, “I hate it.”  Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about a car.  Except that a car that big and heavy needs a very serious engine, 6 cylinders at least, or maybe an iVTEC 4 cylinder engine that pushes various Hondas around.  The 4 banger inside the Caliber is most at home at a red light.  It purs and hums there until the light turns green.  If you stomp on the gas the car gets even more fidgety because it doesn’t know how to accelerate.  I was at a left hand turn, the light was green and a car was more than a quarter mile down the road so I thought I had room to turn left.  I hit the gas.  The gas laughed (laughing gas?), the car jittered forward and finally started to move smoothly as I was narrowly into the left hand turn lane before the other vehicle was going through the same intersection.
The upsides of the low visibility windows that the Caliber has are many and varied.  For example, not being able to see means your body will be in a relaxed state when you get into the accident instead of being tensed up.  Another fine quality of low visibility is that bullets flying at you from outside of a car in a high speed chase will have a smaller target if they have to go through the glass.  Of course most bullets would whip through the steel doors make that less of an issue.  The last upside I’m going to mention is that not seeing where your hood is makes it more likely for you to stay back from other vehicles at a red light because you wouldn’t want to bump into them.  15 feet until the next car may or may not be how far back I was from them… I don’t know, it was hard to tell unless I got out of the car to look.

There are some nice features that I have mentioned before like lights in the cup holders at night.  A stereo that sounds so horrible that you actually drive with it off so that your focus is more on the road (that you can’t see so well, anyway) helps.  There is a drink cooler in the dashboard.  Nice.  I can have cold drinks while I drive, but do I want to be driving?  Last, but not least, I love the fact that the ‘large storage space’ in the back is not any larger than my Honda Civic’s was.  Who needs to put things in the back of a vehicle?  Not me for sure.  Our stroller barely fit  in the back with anything else.

If you see a Caliber on the road, steer clear of them, they’re a mobile accident waiting to happen.

Stick Shift Silliness

My mother-in-law has inherited a stick shift Nissan truck from the early 90’s.  It has a mere 80,000 miles, which is just so few.  The truck has been well maintained and the body is in great shape.  Last night she asked me to get some gas for her in it and I got to drive a stick shift for the first time in years.  Such fun!  I stalled the thing out 3 times in the King Sooper parking lot, but hey, its like learning all over again without my grandpa in the car.  Did I ever tell you that story?

You see I asked my grandpa Peterman to teach me how to drive a stick shift.  So he took me to a nice flat, sandy, isolated place (which is hard to find in the hills where he lives, well, level is at least) and helped me learn about shifting the gears, finding the right shifting points in his Chevy Luv, and getting used to a stick.  Then he let me drive home from that point (on a non-public dirt road, I was 15, I think).  Except for one thing: at a point on the road to his house the road is just as wide as the cars (plus a few feet, I’m sure) but drops off into a small stream on both sides.  At that point the road is inclined.  At that point my grandpa had me stop the truck and stop the engine.  And then he asked me to start the truck and continue on my way up to his house.  Yikes!  I panicked and freaked out and probably was 10 times more dangerous.  I let the truck drift backwards and then slammed on the breaks in major fear.  My grandpa chuckled as I switched places with him (having set the parking break, put the truck in reverse and swore to God above that I would never drive a stick again).  He smoothly drove us back up the hill and to his house explaining to me the physics and mechanics of driving.

I’m glad there aren’t steep hills and muddy streams in the King Sooper parking lot.  It makes it a lot easier for me to get going again.  Oh, and just in case you think I don’t deal with stick shifts well I happen to have inherited that Luv later on when I was 16 and driven it for a few short months until I scraped it down the side of my parents Camry 🙂

Undercooked Meat Hex

The last couple times I’ve grilled non-Steak meats on the grill I have undercooked them the first time they were on the grill.  This was driving me crazy!  Then I realized that I have been cooking everything like its steak, and so I’m a complete moron and the problem is not my grill or the meat.  So, next time I grill non-steak meats on the grill I am going to do it right.  people will once again be able to eat when I say the food is done on the grill and not so much gagging, running for the bathroom and losing their appetite when they cut into mostly raw armadillo.

95% Chance of Hosery

Well, today the ‘adjuster’ came out and looked at my car.  I liked him, his name was Andy and he had a goatee.  It was like a taller version of myself with brown curly hair, a slender body and boots on.  Who has a different job.  Who lives in a different part of Colorado with a different family.  Yeah, we had a lot in common.

Andy told me that due to the fact that the outside and inside of the quarter panel and trunk had been damaged that most likely the auto-body people would tell him that it would cost a quadrillion-bazillion-trillion-finity dollars to fix the car and that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. Heck, I only paid tens of thousands for the car in the first place, with repair bills that high its a bit steep to put it in ‘ship shape’ condition.  Not that I want to go sailing in a Honda Civic.
So, in short there’s a 95% chance that I’m going to be making a deal with the devil car dealer soon so that I can drive a new pimped ride.

Geico = Guy-co?

Saturday I called Geico to follow up on my claim and was given a toll-free 800 number for future contact with my claim.  Just now I called that number.  That number had a recording telling me that the adult line had been moved to a 900 number.

Woops!  I don’t want to pay $9.95 for insurance information!

Craw”Fish.” Fish! ->Fish

When we were kids we lived in Carson City for part of our kidhood. And right about 30-45 minutes away was Lake Tahoe. I say 30-45 minutes away because it depends on which car my parents owned at the time. They had a white Volvo stationwagon that was so slow that it could possibly have been 90 minutes to Tahoe. They also had at one point in time a Suburban that was really fast, and really lifted, which made it really unsafe to drive to and from Lake Tahoe on US Highway 50. I take that back, it was safe if you went 20 miles an hour.

As kids we would go out in between the large rocks and boulders near parts of the shore and try to catch ‘Crawdads’ or Crayfish. Those critters were fun to catch because we would entice them out with bacon on a string, or bacon on a coat hook, and sometimes bacon on a large sheet of plywood. Pretty much anything with bacon got their attention. We loved to catch them and put them in a cooler so that we could show off our catch to our parents, other onlookers and gross out our sister and her friends. Now I think Becky would just cook them.

Well, I think that the nickname ‘crawfish’ should have caught our attention. Because fish, when they get dead and old, start to stink. And they don’t stink a little, they stink like you were buried up to your eyeballs in dead flesh. I mean that in the nicest way possible Crayfish activists. My brother and I somehow talked our parents (or parent if only one parent happened to take us up to Tahoe, I can’t recall which) into letting us take a few home as ‘pets.’ But crayfish don’t actually eat bacon alone, and they need their water changed and circulating. They also don’t live in a cooler as a native habitat. Coolers don’t provide those very important things that crayfish need to stay alive. And so it began. The stench slowly built up in the garage (mom wisely would not let us keep them in the house). And the crayfish moved slower and slower. And the use of ‘and’ to start off a sentence began to be beaten into our heads at school. And we did it anyway.

The crayfish died. But the smell lingered on, we didn’t want to throw them out because we didn’t want to get close enough to the cooler to get rid of the crayfish and then take on the responsibility of cleaning out the cooler. My parents finally made us do it. It was sad, gross and a valuable lesson: don’t bring home pets you’re perfectly glad to go visit in their native habitat. Which is why I don’t own dogs. I’m more than glad to go visit them in parks when other people are walking them in their native habitat.

Customer Service Terms Lead to Turn-Offs

On the phone with a human being in India recently he related that he ‘owned’ my problem.  It was his problem to resolve and he would do it.  The problem, of course is that if he didn’t fix the problem then claiming that he owned the problem would just drive me to loathing hearing someone tell me that they were going to fix my problem by owning it.  One of the problems with script based help systems, just like a touch-tone system, is that the language becomes boring, it become irritating to customers, and it can cause the customer to perceive a poor support experience.  That is why live human being with a direction, but not a script, will be more useful.  That of course is problematic because that requires training to actually know the product.  It also requires people with personality and character.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourselves, but I’m writing it here just in case some CEO/Exec type person stumbles across it and decides he’s going to do something about it 🙂

My Force Field Blocked Your Mega-Lazer

I was just thinking about my childhood.  For some people that would be a bad thing, but I think mine was pretty cool.  I remember distinctly digging in my friend’s mom’s garden with him so that our G.I. Joe’s could have bases & forts.  We never actually got around to playing with the G.I. Joe’s because we were too busy digging in the dirt.  However, when we did actually play we always had extremely intense weapons.  If your team was going to win you needed to have lazer equipped fighter jets that can blow the enemy into vapor.

And if you’re the enemy you need to have plasma-mega-ultra force fields (or force shields) that will block anything coming in.  Otherwise, you could be toasted by the ultra-uber-mega lazer smashing ray of doom.

And we can’t have that!

Scooper Foo Foo

This evening we were driving around Aurora whilst we discovered what joy waisting petrol would bring.  As we passed a King Sooper’s grocery store my mother-in-law blurted out something that just cracked us up.  “Look, another scooper foo foo.”  She has for some reason really blown the snot out of the King Sooper name since she’s moved here.  It has been Kind’s Castle and many other variations on the wrong name.

However, another thing we saw today was a “Super Foo-Foo” driver in a Sport Useless Vehicle get out of her vehicle (after I had to slam on the breaks) to recover a plastic swimming pool that had fallen off the top of her car.  Instead of re-attaching the plastic kiddy pool she placed it on top of her vehicle and slowly turned around the corner that she was at to get off of the main road.  They kicker?  She had never attached the plastic pool to her vehicle in the first place: there were no ropes or bungie chords – just gravity.