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technology meltdowns
Thursday, August 26 2021
I took the Subaru this morning because there was a chance that Gretchen would be going briefly to the Adirondacks in the Bolt to make decisions about painting, which our friend Eric (who just worked on the upstairs of the Brewster Street house) would be doing. My first destination was the Red Hook Hannaford, where returned aluminum cans for deposit and bought the usual snacks that I eat on the days I am in the office. There weren't many people in the Hannaford, but nearly all of them were wearing masks. As I was preparing to check out, there was a guy in the self-checkout who would occasionally burst into aggressive coughs. I suppose it shouldn't've been much of a surprise that he wasn't wearing a mask. I kept a distance, waiting for a cashier to show up at the one open human-staffed cash register. And then another unmasked guy showed up at the self-checkout, and he started coughing too. This is why masks are a good proxy for "likely not infected," since they are an indication of the care the person wearing them is exercising.
People are also back to wearing masks at the office complex, something I haven't been doing since it's rare I am ever near anyone on the stairs or in the hallway. Some woman coming down the stairs saw me approaching and she went to put on her mask, but I was about to take a right and go into the office. In that office, my colleague Jason has been wearing a mask when he's sitting at his desk even though I'm the nearest person to him and am more than six feet away. Perhaps he's hoping if he makes a show of being concerned about such things, the powers that are will go back to letting us work from home every day like we did from late March 2020 to mid July 2021.
The Hannaford had only had one container of black bean salad, and I'd wanted to buy two. So I bought the last of the black bean salads and a container of grape leaves. I used to not like grape leaves, but about six months ago I realize I actually do kind of like them. Sometimes I jokingly refer to them as "Greek sushi." When I wanted to eat lunch, I decided to make it be the grape leaves. I needed to select a utensil to eat them with, and I keep a little package of bamboo utensils on my desk. This package includes chopsticks, which seemed perfect for grape leaves, even if it made Socrates quaff another mug of hemlock tea in Hades. They were perfect for the job.
Then Gretchen sent me a message asking if I could meet her at the Sherwin Williams store on Albany Avenue in Kingston to help choose colors for the Adirondack cabin. She said we could go eat lunch, which I'd just finished doing. I don't really care one way or the other what the colors end up being and didn't want to drive 20 minutes from work just to turn around and drive 20 minutes back, but I said sure, I was coming over. On the way there, my boss Alex started having a meltdown because my Taxinator didn't have one of the database instances listed in a dropdown menu, and he even called my cellphone number, something only my brother Don does. So there I was, driving around with a cellphone pressed against my head, having my boss yell at me. When I got to Sherwin Williams, I found Gretchen and Eric in the parking lot looking at some old cans of paint Eric had brought. I told Gretchen that Alex was melting down about tax season and that I couldn't stay for long. To this, Gretchen did that thing were she talks really calmly in a way that suggests psychically-controlled contempt, saying that if I couldn't fully focus on paint color selection, I should just go back to the office. "Fine!" I said, angry at her reaction and not wanting to be there, and I climbed in the car, started it, and began to back out of the parking space. But then I thought better of it and said that if we could do this thing in ten minutes, I'd stay. And so I did my best to reign in my stress and seem deliberative as I considered the colors (which included a pastel yellow, a "baby camel" light-brownish cream, and, of course (it being Gretchen's favorite color) a sage green. But eventually I couldn't conceal my agitation and Gretchen told me to just go, so I climbed in the Subaru and drove back to Red Hook. I went directly to Alex's office, where everything was now fine. I'd told him to enter the login credentials for the missing server into the provided form, and, sure enough, it had worked, and the tax import had been successful. Alex was sheepish and a bit embarrassed by what had just happened, but, as he jokingly told me to tell Gretchen, "Tell her you have a job!"
I managed to salvage the situation with the paint by having a video conference with Gretchen using Facebook Messenger. Colors viewed this way can't be assumed to be particularly accurate, but I'd already seen the paint cards, so we were able to end our decisionmaking with what felt like a consensus.
Our friends Sarah the Vegan and Nancy have raved about a Red Hook pizza place called Lucoli, and when Gretchen looked at the menu the other day, she was impressed with all the vegan and Middle-Easterny dishes. So today near the end of my workday, she placed an order there and I went to pick it up on my drive home. I thought the pickup would go easy, that I'd just say whom it was for, they'd point me to the stack of pizza boxes, and I'd be on my way. But for some reason the web form Gretchen had used didn't record her name, and we ended up having to sleuth out what belonged to her order (which Gretchen had already paid for). We were hampered by the fact that I had no idea what Gretchen had ordered, and even when I called her, she didn't know precisely, other than that it was vegan. The key to determining which order was hers turned out to be the tip, which was $1.
Back at the house, Gretchen and I ate our Lucoli's calzones in front of Jeopardy!. I thought it was pretty good, though very oily, and a single calzone wasn't all that much food. I got a few drops of calzone oil on my green OBERLIN shirt (which is actually Gretchen's) and they proved difficult to scrub away.
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