Well, everyone’s been whining that I haven’t written a blog entry in a whole 6 days, so I figured I’d outline the fairly interesting beginning to my day.

I left the house about 8:00, so I was already running pretty late for work. Normally I try to leave about 10 till, which puts me about 15 minutes late. At the first light I reach, I make my turn behind a woman in a little Tercel, with a temporary handicap tag hanging from her mirror. As expected, she was less than aggressive when it came to driving. After doing 5 miles under the speed limit behind her, I was in a dire hurry to get out on some open road so I could hit my typical 60 (I think the highest speed limit along the way is 40, if that…).

For some reason, at the intersection at the 2nd light along my daily trip, they decided to make the road 4 lanes, providing not only a right turn lane in each direction, but also a short right lane on the opposite side of the intersection, which merges left in a few hundred feet. At this intersection, it’s typical for those in a hurry or those trapped behind old ladies with blue hair to pull into the right lane and floor it when the light turns green to beat the person in front of them through the intersection.

In the hurry that I was in this particular morning, I, of course, pull into the right lane and swiftly accelerate as soon as the light changes. The moment we get into the middle of the 4 lane road we’re crossing, I realize the woman in the Tercel is going to try and make it tough on me, because she too has floored her roller skate. I know that as soon as I drop back behind her, she’d slow down to her previous crawl out of spite, so I totally floor it, pulling ahead of her just enough to change lanes before mine ran out.

A few hundred more feet down the road, this angry woman decides I was somehow in the wrong (even though I had done nothing to indicate I was in any way perturbed at her, and I’d even signaled as I changed lanes with her trying to head me off), and flips on her bright lights. Because it was foggy and rainy and everyone already had their lights on, it took me a few moments to realize that she had in fact done what I thought she had.

While up to this point I had been content to ignore her aggressiveness thus far, this kind of unwarranted disrespect could not go on unchecked. Just before our light had changed back down the street, a pickup truck had made the turn into the lane in front of us (yeah, so when she floored it I had to make sure I cleared her bumper without hitting the truck in front of me). Just after she flipped her brights on, the truck ahead of me had to turn. In response to her lights, I waited to the last minute to brake and then slammed them on, causing her to do the same, with even more force. Then, after the truck turned, I simply decided not to speed back up. For over a mile, we traveled (even though I was in an extreme hurry) at a max of 20 mph. By the time we reached the next intersection, she’d gotten extremely perturbed, but decided to flip her brights off when she saw all the cars waiting at the light. After this, I assumed the ‘battle’ was over, and I quickly returned to my normal 60-ish pace.

By the time I got to my next turn, this crazy woman had caught back up to me, and as I pulled into the turn lane to make my turn, she slammed on the horn. While it did occur to me to cut back behind her and flip on my brights as I followed her to wherever she was going, I figured that’s probably how people end up getting shot as a result of road rage. Who knows, that might be how she got the temporary handicapped tag. So I consoled myself by simply giving her the finger, as I realized all this had happened with her daughter in the passenger seat next to her, obviously totally oblivious to the entire incident.

After that, I proceeded on my way to work, thinking evil things about that woman. When I got to work, I relayed the story to everyone there, and they were equally surprised. Anyway, that’s my best road rage story so far, and it didn’t even have anything to do with my rage. In this instance, I was simply the unfortunate victim of the rage, and was rewarded with a new perspective on life…

Well, let’s see. I got up this morning, actually on time (perhaps a little before). Somehow I still only left at about 7:45, which isn’t that much earlier than normal. I got to work about 8:05, which is actually pretty damn good for me. It still amazes me that our boss (the President of the company) always seems to notice when we’re late, even though he’s never really around, but never seems to notice how much the parking lot fills up after 9:00.

Anyway, I checked my mail and did general Monday morning cleanup from over the weekend. With the new filters I setup on my mailbox last week, I only had about 3 pieces of new mail in my Inbox, all but one of which I was able to dump into an appropriate subfolder, which I was able to safely ignore for another few days.

I don’t think I did a single thing work related today at work, except for cleaning out the virus quarantine on our Exchange server (that took all of 2 minutes), and then re-install Adobe Acrobat 5 (yeah, we’re still 2 whole versions behind) on one of the users’ machines. All the rest of my time I spent working on code for the new website I’m writing for my latest “customer”. It would have only taken about half the time it did, if I’d actually sat back and thought and planned out everything I needed it to do. I got 3/4 of the way done, after writing the bulk of the code, and realized there was a certain condition where everything had to loop back and start over, as many times as necessary, so I had to rewrite everything so it could friggin’ loop.

Anyway, that was about it. Matt and I went to Baileys for lunch. We had some great fun playing pool (I actually won a game!!), but the service was unusually horrible. It took 15 minutes to even get a freaking menu, and then another 10 to order, and who knows how long to actually get our food. Needless to say, our waitress was tipped unusually poorly (we’re generally very very good tippers).

I went back to work and worked on my own code until about 4:30 when my boss grabbed me with some new info on our T1 line. We went traipsing around for about 10 minutes, me trying to explain to him why it wasn’t working. I haven’t taken any Cisco classes to be sure, but I do have a basic understanding of routing in general, I think. I even know how to make basic changes on a Cisco router, just enough to be dangerous (ain’t that a scary thought?).

You know what bothers me even more than knowing just enough to be dangerous with Cisco stuff? The fact that I just said “ain’t”. I don’t think I’ve ever EVER said that before. Yikes… These southerners are getting to me!

I’ve also been reading the rest of the blog I mentioned a post (or maybe two?) ago, 99 Zeroes [Bloglines.com], about life working for Google. The thing that really hit me was the open bar at their Marketing conference. I’m thinking our Marketing department might actually get something constructive done if they were constantly drunk. Not to mention I might not dread going to work every day, which is odd, because last night I actually found myself feeling ready to go to work. Could it be I’m slowly adjusting to my life as a corporate clone? Ah well, that’s a blog entry for another day…

I got home and my mom gave me a cool pen she got from one of our clients (suppliers?) at work. I wonder when I’ll get a present from our contact at Medco. I’ve certainly dealt with them enough lately. Anyway, I think that’s about enough for tonight. It’s time to log in and look at something school-related so I don’t get any more behind. Ugh…

Well, let’s see… I finally got in touch via email with the professor I’ve been trying to reach for a week this morning. At first, she didn’t want to let me back into her class and said she didn’t think I could catch up after missing the first 2 weeks. After a little begging, she went to the department head (who happens to be the guy I spoke with personally to get into a class without taking a prerequisite… we got along great, I’m not surprised he let me back in!). So now I’m back in the classes, and even after missing 2 weeks worth of crap, I only have 3 assignments to make up (and they’re the first ones of the course, easy as cake…).

Oh yeah, and it’s supposed to snow tonight and all tomorrow. The weather channel only says a 90% chance of precipitation, so I’m not sure how convinced I should really be… You’d think if it were really going to happen, they’d actually bump it up to 100% and get it over with. Or maybe that’d open them up for a lawsuit if someone called in sick to work and then nothing actually happened… Well, at least if it does (assuming we have power and internet), I’ll be able to catch up on all my school work. And if not… Well, I’ll just get 2 more weeks behind.

We went to lunch at Hooters yesterday. The waitress was an incredibly sucky waitress. It took 45 minutes for us to get our food, 15 of which was spent sitting there watching it sit up front because our waitress was off flirting with an Elijah Wood lookalike a few tables down. Is it just me, or do his eyes freak anyone else out? I swear, they’re like… so bright or something. I don’t know, anyway. After we finished, she made up her tip about 3x over. I didn’t finish all of my burger (so I have a stomach the size of a 2 year old… so what? Better than having the blatter of one like most women!), as usual, and she started in on me about when I was going to become a man and finish my plate.

Later she came over and tried to get us to get dessert. She started listing all the stuff they had, hoping we’d jump on one (although I think we only wanted to jump on HER! It’s Hooters, what do you expect?). One of the guys I work with has been on a diet and hadn’t had any beer in like 2 weeks, and he added on ‘Newcastle’ when she finished. She looked around the table, then at me, and said ‘You’re not old enough to drink.’ The other guy with us cut in ‘Yeah, tell that to the people at Stax’. The waitress didn’t get it, but the other guy and I just cracked up. (If you don’t get it either, then wait for my next post and I’ll explain that night…). So finally we quited down and she asked me how old I really was. I told her 19 and she didn’t believe me. I offered to show her my driver’s license and she finally gave in, saying I looked MUCH younger than that. I’m not really sure how to take that. Maybe when I’m 40 and only look like i’m 20 I’ll appreciate it when I can still get into movies by buying a kids ticket, but right now I just wish I looked a little older (like, say… 21?)…

Aside from that, the week was pretty dull. I talked to a client in New Jersey at work just before lunch today. He was amazed we’re supposed to get snow. Whenever he thinks of South Carolina, he thinks of golf and green fairways. He also said it was 6 degrees when he left his house for work that morning, which trumped the 18 degrees when I left for work (late, as usual).

On Slashdot today, there was an interesting article about a blog entry made by a new Google (former Microsoft) employee that criticized some of the aspects of his new employer. The entry was apparently snatched down as soon as people at Google realized it, and only put back up a week later when the author had time to revise it and go a little easier on the company. He says he wasn’t pressured and that Google was suprisingly cool about it all, but we all know how likely that is. I know my company wouldn’t particularly like me spreading rumors about things and bashing them, even though they’re nowhere near the public eye. Then again, I guess it’s true what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If no one knows about you in the first place, any publicity is good publicity. Well, if nothing else, this guy’s blog entry has convinced me to write one criticizing our marketing department, which you’ll probably see here soon (because I’ve sure got plenty to criticize them about).

BTW, now that I look, I can’t find this article on Slashdot anywhere (could it have been removed?). However, I was thoughtful enough to email myself a link to the Bloglines copy [bloglines.com], and the original (albeit ugly) version can be found here [blogspot.com].

Anyway, that was pretty much my day. Aside from a little nose picking, lots of coffee (and the cute coffee chick that always goes with it), and talking about poor parenting these days with the guys at work, that’s about it.