Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   eating moldy cannabis
Thursday, October 14 2021
A month or so ago when Register.com charged me something over $50 for an unwanted "privacy" feature, I'd declined the payment for that item. And then I'd called them up to make sure I wasn't billed for that service, something the support guy unsuccessfully tried to argue me into getting despite the obvious made-up-ness of my mind. Then, days later, I got an email from Register.com saying "Account Suspended and Service(s) Scheduled for Deletion." I'd immediately called them up, only to learn that my account was fine and in good standing. So you can imagine my dismay to see an email from Register.com this morning with the headline "2nd Notice - Account Suspended and Service(s) Scheduled for Deletion." This time I didn't accept as good enough when the guy on the other end of the line said that my account was in good standing. "I don't want any more emails like that. What do I have to do to make them stop?" I demanded. So I was transferred to some other department, though what department that was was never explicitly stated. This put me on the line with a gentleman with a light Indian accent (the other guy I'd talked to had sounded like a Midwestern American), and what followed was a call lasting over an hour and a half, most of which time was spent with that guy waiting for an escalation to happen with people in his office. I was trying to work during this period, which wasn't easy, since the guy kept interrupting the silence (there was no hold music) every two minutes to read from the same script, that he was on hold waiting for the escalation to get picked up and that he would keep updating me every two minutes to say the same thing until he got through. At some point I told the guy that I would no longer be saying anything in response to these updates.
Eventually I had to meet with my boss Alex upstairs, though I stayed on hold with Register.com during that period, periodically interrupting my conversation with Alex to talk to the guy on the phone. It turned out that the problem with my account could not be fixed unless I updated my payment method, which made no sense since there was nothing I needed to be paying for. But I wanted this problem behind me, so I acquiesced. I did, however, say on numerous occasions that I didn't want to be billed for any services that I hadn't signed up for. When the Register.com guy finally told me the service fee that had been rejected by my credit card company: "privacy," I said, yeah, that was something I had explicitly not wanted to purchase. He then launched into the script about the dangers of not having privacy, but I cut him off, saying I didn't want a lecture from him about what I should or shouldn't buy, that I just didn't want it. This was all fairly amusing for Alex, who asked how long I'd been on the phone about this matter. "Over an hour," I said. When he heard that the dispute was for a $50 charge, he asked, "And how much do we pay you per hour?" "About that much," I said.
At lunch time I drove down to Rhinebeck to eat a falafel at Aba's. Nobody I knew was working there, but the falafel was as good as ever. On the drive back to the office, I stopped at William's Lumber and managed to find the perfect AFCI and GFI circuit breakers to replace the code-failing one's I'd installed at the cabin. They were expensive, though, coming to $275 for just three units. I supposed we all have to pay a little into the kitty for the inevitable lawsuits that come with safety devices.
At the end of the workday I got a few groceries (including vegan frozen pizzas, french bread, and a twelver of Hazy Little Thing) from the Hannaford. Then I returned the wrong-spec circuit breakers at the Home Depot, using the money to buy tools and hardware intended exclusively for the dock project. I also stopped at Miron Liquor to replenish my laboratory liquor supply. At the cash register, I discovered the litre bottle of Montezuma tequila I was buying was leaking from the cap. "Maybe someone took a shot from it," I postulated. "I wouldn't be surprised," one of the employees agreed as her colleague fetched me a non-leaking bottle. After thinking for a moment, I said, "You'd think if they were gonna sneak a shot of something, it would be something more expensive."

These days Thursday nights are ones I spend by myself with just the dogs and cats and my unbridled hedonic needs. Some of my recently-harvested cannabis appeared to have gone moldy (or something), so as an experiment, I just ate some moldy bud. It had the bite of regular cannabis, but either it didn't have much THC or I didn't eat enough of it (probably the latter; I was nervous about what moldy cannabis might do) because it had almost no effect on my brain.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211014

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