Category Archives: everyday kimli

honesty with a pork pie hat

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Oh if only we weren’t so damn honest.

I was paying some bills online when I noticed that we have quite a bit more money that we should – exactly one month of rent more. Our November rent cheque hasn’t been cashed yet. You would think that having almost a thousand extra dollars would be super, but in actuality it’s a total pain in the ass – it’s not our money; it just LOOKS like we can afford extra ale and whores and groceries.

It’s a little strange, because our landlord is usually anally prompt with the cheque cashing. We give him a year’s worth of cheques, and he’s at the bank at 6am on the 1st of each month, rubbing his hands in fingerless gloves together gleefully and collecting sacks of gold coins in bags with a $ on the side, his rumpled top hat dusty and askew. He’s never once been late with the cheque cashing.

I checked this morning, and we still had the money in our account. Ed called him up and asked if he had a November cheque from us – for some reason I think I only gave him up to October, which would explain why he hadn’t collected from us. We didn’t really think this was the case either, though – when our landlord is missing cheques from you, he calls you repeatedly until you hand them over. We hadn’t heard from him at all, so we thought we might be in the clear and my memory is being unusually faulty. It happens. Not often, though.

Surprisingly, the landlord said he cashed all the November cheques ages ago – ours included. The bank tells me a different story, so we asked him to check again because he might be out some money. We’re waiting for a call back, but damnit! If we had just kept our fool mouths shut, we could have totally gotten away with it! He thinks he cashed our cheque already, not realizing that he probably never had one from us at all. I could have bought .. uh .. shoes! And underwear! I need new underwear! Damn our honesty!

I am pretty choked that I spent all of the glorious yesterday with an enormous, unforgiving migraine coupled with various other maladies I won’t get into here – but today, on a holiday Tuesday, I am feeling better but it is yucky outside. I enjoyed the sleeping, though. That part was awesome.

where did my words go

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I’m not *trying* to fail NaBloPoMo ’08, but I’m definitely not as gung ho about it as I was in years past. There are several reasons – I’m really busy, I’m really lazy, and frankly there just isn’t a lot of excitement going on around here. For the last three days, I’ve really had to struggle to post at all – let alone in an attempt to keep going for an entire month. Am I out of things to say? I doubt it. I’m just a little preoccupied with nothing in particular, is all.

That being said, I really don’t want to become one of those “once a month” people. So, I won’t. I won’t even drop down to once a week. I just .. may be a little dull until things pick up around here.

In other news, it would be awesome if Cheddar would please stop throwing up on my coat.

did you know

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I have 10 STDs!

I should call my mom and tell her.

This is definitely not what you would call a “quality post”, but it’s Saturday and I was up until 4:30 this morning catching those STDs – give me a break. Besides, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t strike verbal gold with every update I make. Sometimes there is crap. Hopefully, though, my more meaty and interesting posts make up for my occasional lapse in poetic tallow – and if you’re good, this week I will tell you a secret.

Note to self: think of a secret you haven’t already written about.

I am still learning how to use my new camera. It’s definitely not as easy as my old one, but the variety of depths and lights and other artistic crap are fun to experiment with.

I think I’ll go outside.

bad dog

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Oh, Fido. Why did you have to piddle all over the country?

I was blissfully unaware of this, but apparently Fido has been experiencing “brand ambiguity” ever since being purchased by Rogers a few years ago. To combat this, they’ve undergone yet another image revamp. It’s all the rage these days; just recently Bell Canada went from anthropomorphic beavers to the classier (?) and wholly confusing “-er” campaign. Not helping matters is the Telus entry into the discount mobile provider party – they’re the bastards behind the disturbing 80’s fitness-branded Koodo, a company seemingly targeted towards people who like to get physical and wear legwarmers.

Fido is, of course, my current cell provider, and I’ve been trying to log into their website for the last three days to get my latest bill. I’ve been having trouble doing so, and today I found out why: they launched their new website to go along with their new image, and it is fucking horrible.

It doesn’t take a degree in Marketing to see what they’re going for here – in Canada, the bright yellow screams CHEAP! DISCOUNT! NO FRILLS! YOU CAN AFFORD THIS! It’s the same yellow used by No Name brand products available at bargain basement grocery stores and Best Buy. It’s also hideous. The old Fido brand featured a website with a black background and shades of teal, beige and brown – it was actually pretty classy. Their new website is an eyesore and actually made me wonder if it had been hacked. Smart move, guys.

Before today, if you had asked me if the company’s image played into my willingness to pay for their services, I would have scoffed and said no. My extreme distaste for the new cheap Fido, however, is proving me wrong. Frankly, I’m embarrassed that these guys are my phone provider. Just like I would never be a Koodo customer because of their awful ads and imagery, if this version of Fido had been the norm when I was looking for a new provider in July, I would have passed them by. I suppose this is really snooty of me, but it’s the same everywhere – you go with what you like. I liked Fido’s old image; that of warm colours, cute dogs and hip people who could totally be me. Their new image – one of obnoxious bright yellow, sloppy sketches and scruffy dogs/people – is highly distasteful to me.

I suppose the bottom line is really the cell service, and it remains to be seen whether this new cheaper Fido will cut back on the quality of service I receive from them. If it gets bad, I will bail and go elsewhere.

In the meantime though, if anyone asks, I’m with Sprint.

bus rage

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I’ve whined about this on almost every social media outlet I’ve got; might as well make it a grand slam: I fucking hate taking transit.

The forecast for the next week or so is torrential, never ending rain. I don’t mind riding Oscar to work if the rain is supposed to let up at some point during the day, but as it doesn’t look like we’ll see the sun or even dry pavement again until March, I’ve reluctantly started taking the bus/boat/train to work each day. It only took me an hour to get to the office this morning, and $4 – clearly that is much better than the 15 minutes on Oscar for free. Getting home will be another hour and more money. Hooray!

As an aside, it is awkward to have a strange man come running up to your cubicle and start groping around under your seat. I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it – charm school didn’t teach me what to do when strangers want under your ass – so I sat there and watched and felt a little dirty afterwards.

Okay, back to the bus. I hate you, bus. Today was a mere hint at what’s to come, as I left the house late and didn’t get into the office until 9:30. I don’t feel bad about it, since I was here until 8pm last night saving the world again – but when I have to start being here on time, I’ll be taking the bus/boat/train with steaming hordes of grumpy people. I do not look forward to that. Perhaps I will invest in a machete. Err, that was in bad taste – sorry. I really do hate transit, though.

I think I aced yesterday’s executive tour of the warehouse. It was a crazy busy day though, featuring my very first 12 hour day at the Lab. Poor Ed had to cab from the airport to my office, then wait around for me to be finished writing emergency reports which are much more complicated than regular, non-emergency reports. I’m hoping today won’t be quite as bad – I can only handle so much fussy nitpicking in a week – and tomorrow I get to spend the entire day in Richmond for awesome fun sneezy times. Yay!

At least I don’t have to take the bus there.

delicious fail

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I went into the kitchen at the Lab to get a fork so I could eat my delicious and healthy salad for lunch. Unfortunately, the kitchen table is literally COVERED in chocolate and cake and goodies – it’s someone’s birthday and they appear to have purchased an entire candy store for the office to eat. I don’t want to seem like I’m not a team player, so in addition to my delicious and healthy salad, I will have to eat the birthday girl’s weight in chocolate. After all, I don’t want to be rude.

girl time

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Ed is off learning about the exciting world of insurance, so I have the apartment to myself with absolutely no plans. It is awesome. I am going to henna my head, give myself a facial, listen to some truly terrible early 90’s Canadian pop, drink Diet Coke for breakfast, and go marry more people in Fable II. Bliss! I do feel a little bit guilty though, because Ed has an awful cold yet has to go to this stupid course for 7 hours – then leaves for a business trip to exotic Calgary on Monday at 5:30am. He can rest up tomorrow, but I know if I were in his situation I would be one big ball of whine.

Okay, time to make myself beautiful.

Also, welcome to NaBloPoMo ’08, where I write a post every day for the month of November because I just love the smell of eggs and coffee overkill.

failed pirate

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I am the world’s worst pirate.

Not only did I epically fail at downloading movies from the internet (purely for demo purposes only of course) to show at our office Scary Movie Lunch Hour, I turned down a bunch of gold doubloons.

I was tasked with finding a copy of Halloween (the original) to show at lunch today, but I’ve been impossibly busy all week. Without any legal options at hand (I remembered last night around 11pm), I turned to the internet where I’m usually able to find, download, and burn anything my heart might desire. I don’t know if the internet ran out of copies of Halloween, but I couldn’t find a damn thing. Oh, sure, I could find more Halloween porn than you could shake a stick at, but this is a work function – not a usual Thursday night at my place.

Not wanting to admit defeat (and have to work during lunch instead of watching movies), I opted to go to Walmart on my way to work this morning. How bad could it be? Surely the rest of North Vancouver wouldn’t be attempting to buy last minute candy and costume pieces at 9 in the morning! That would be foolish!

And yet, that’s exactly what happened. I’m a little smarter than the average bear though, so I planned my attack in advance. I knew I needed to get a) candy, b) Diet Coke, and c) horror movies, so I picked the first two items up on my way to the electronics department where I would be able to pay for everything at once. See, I am smart. With an A and everything.

I didn’t have any luck finding a copy of Halloween – for all I know, Walmart doesn’t even stock the DVD because Jamie Lee Curtis once looked at a gay or something – but I did pick up 28 Days Later and The Ring for $8 each. Confident that the two movies would adequately kill time at work, I made my way to the cash register.

.. which was staffed by the STUPIDEST WOMAN ALIVE.

I made the mistake of challenging the display on the register, because although the sticker on 28 Days Later said $7.97, it rang up as $9.83. Not a huge deal, but those are my pennies and I had better things to do with them than give them away to Walmart. I made her change the price – to which she glared and sighed and took 5 minutes to figure out how to void – and she continued ringing my items in (incorrectly, as she double-charged me for my bag of peanut butter cups).

Then I ruined her day.

I paid with via debit, and took advantage of the Cash Back feature to get $40. You’d think I had just skull-fucked her dog, or something – she was plainly HORRIFIED that I would ask for such a thing. She had no money in her till! How was she supposed to give me $40? I offered no solution, because it frankly wasn’t my problem – just give me my damn cash and sort your enormous troubles out later. After many heaving, martyred sighs, she pulled a $20 and three $5s out of her drawer. Clearly, that does not equal $40 – so she put the $20 back, and pulled out a roll of loonies.

Then she tried to hand me the $25 roll of loonies and three $5s.

I laughed at her.

She kept insisting that I take the large, non-foldable roll of change but I refused. As simple math was clearly beyond her skills, I finally told her to give me the $20, the three $5s, and 5 of the loonies – she could ask her manager to restock her till later. You could practically hear the wheels turning in her head as she realized this would work, and I made it out of Walmart with my scary movies, foldable money, and a shiny new headache.

I’m sort of regretting turning down the doubloons, though.

For a Halloween workday, I am getting a lot of very strange looks at my horns. However, you just plain can’t go wrong with green glittery eyeliner. People at work have asked what I’m supposed to be:

I’m a stressed out tech writer who’s going to fork the next person who springs a bunch of surprise process changes on me >:E

I knew this pitchfork would come in handy.