27-IV-2007.
From this time I have none of my emails to folks at home, I guess I was writing from a different account, or did they remain on the nezavisni. I do have, though, the messages from dad, who exactly then chose not to quote mine, so I'll have to reconstruct out the whats and whens in a circumspect manner.
Meanwhile, three days ago, on UA, caught Maša correcting someone's spelling. Now that she has become a sysop, feels like she should do some work. The man wrote, in correct american way, „calander“, and it stays in the list of messages in the upper frame, because it doesn't refresh until I read them all and click to get what's new. When I click on a message in the list, the message itself appears in the lower frame, fresh as can be, and lo and behold, it says „calendar“... Well, someone has to teach them Amers some literacy.
So, Go wants to buy a car. So I should buy it here and drive it to her. Then it turns out that plan B is much easier, by which I'd just fly there and we'd buy it on the spot, so at least she'd see what she's buying. The flight is longish, six hours. Which occurred on 30th of april.
Through Orlando, ahem, the taxi would cost fifty bucks at least, because that Landmarth of hers is up north, and the airport is all the way south, but there's a bus. I pianoed, after a smoke break, how the buses go. There's a long ride, first I need to catch one to the main busodrome, then wait a dozen minutes for the next one, which I should leave at a specific station, when it turns west, as it has a circular route around the wider downtown, and there catch the third, the route of which intersects with it right there. The fare is ridiculous, single digit dollars, and is valid for 90 minutes. I waited at least two cigarettes for the last one, and was just rolling the third one when it came. By that time I was at around 100 minutes, but the driver considered the ticket still valid, nice.
From the last bus stop to their gated community there's a half an hour's walk. But okay, I know the area from the last time, it's about the place where I left the truck then, it's just that now I don't have a bike to ride back. And the weather is not so muggy as it knows to be, it was already late enough in the afternoon. I don't know how I got in, did I manage to get someone official to call them to come out to open the gate for me, or did I smuggle myself with someone, because it's gated and guarded, it takes a bunny's picture (from that joke), i.e. a lean-on card.
So we said our hellos, had a dinner, drank something. I had a shower and hit the hay. The next day was a workday (though mayday would be a holiday to me, and I guess to the Dutches too). On UA
I'm still baffled at religious people not just being elected, but somehow being seen as more fit for election. How can anyone know when will they be loyal to their post, and when to their religion? I wouldn't trust my vote to such a person.
I guess the same could be said about political ideology. When will they screw the voting public to serve their ideology. But maybe we expect this.
At least they advertise that. The ideology is supposed to be in the party program and election platform. That's their shop window.
Along the way, I congratulated „THE labor day, fellow IT workers, the international one.“ and left a link to the Haymarket massacre, lest it be forgotten. Greg complains of „One more thing. Everyday at 10:00 am, Vista defrags my 200 gig hard drive. I have changed the start time to 2:00 am, but it still executes at 10:00. Talk about dragging a machine to it knees.“
For smoke breaks I took for the terrace. It is screened with mosquito netting from top to bottom, this is Florida, there are bugs enough to drive one insane, and they are larger than anywhere else. There's a running joke that the Floridians saddle them and harness them to pull carts. The bicycle is in the big room and not on the terrace, because the homeowners' association considers it too... unseemly, makes the building look as if someone lives in it, which decreases the perceived real estate values. They behave as if they aren't really living there, they're just posing, all affectation, in the shop window for the customers.
For work, I parked the nezavisni on some side desk and worked quite normally. I think I didn't even bother to try to install the escuelle espresso on it, I just hooked into Jan's server and worked there. It's a cute thing, you have a laptop, hence you can worke wherever you find the internet. Here the cable connection was good, and there was also a long UTP cable so I took the machine to the terrace for the duration of the meetings, which were known to last several hours at times. Since I am not doing anything important during such a meeting, it didn't bother me that I was seeing more of my face than of pixels. Whichever idiot invented glossy sreens... they should be matte.
On the evening of the mayday, I tinkered with CAAR a bit, replacing the expression for empty date for SQL version, because there's a real empty date in dbfs, but here it has to be 1-1-1900. And the grouping of values behaves somewhat different from fox 7.0 (which we stuck to, keeping the behavior at 7.0 throughout 8.0 and 9.0, because these versions introduced a few gimmicks which didn't suit us). And on second, around midnight, the project manager asks about the html report, and I answer within a minute...
On the afternoon of 2nd, Go came from work a bit earlier, so we took the bus down that main street in the area and, rode it to the next sidestreet where the used car dealers have lined up. This was a triple fuckup - first, we disembarked one stop too early, so we had to walk many minutes longer under the scorcher and swelter, and then didn't find anything suitable. Some guy sent us to a junkyard, or so we heard. Took us a while until we got there, it's the John Young street. Fucken southerners and their fumbling of consonants. We got exhausted like nobody, and accomplished nothing. Here, to buy a car, you have to have a car first.
Dad reports that the guy (precisely, two brothers) who bought the vineyard, has just „paid off the expense of registration for the trabant, and now just needs to drive it off someday“. It's a sheer miracle how he sold it all, despite of bundling the land with the vehicle.
The next day I wrote this in the blogue, hough I must have written that from memory... Doesn't have a title, but nowadays I'd call it „Bureaucracy out of the blue (hour)“.
We decided to buy ham at K-mart, again. Last time it wasn't bad at all - first, at 1.69$/lb it was quite decently priced, second, it was real peasant's ham (even though it's from Smithfield, which is a huge pig farm industry), decently dry, and most of all, no water added. Just ham.
OK, not perfect - it was a bit sticky, using anything but salt and water to cure a ham is close to sacrilege, but that's just superficial (still don't understand how sugar and ham can go together). The fatty parts have gone rancid on the surface, but that's what you get when you pack a ham into nylon - it should be aired - but then it'd lose weight and would have to be re-priced, which doesn't sit well with retail. So OK, we've cut the rancid parts, cleaned it up and had fun with it for a couple of months.
This evening, it went down to 1.29$/lb, which is simply a must-buy. We may even hang it to dry a bit more.
Coming to the cashier (a teenager), we put the ham on the counter first, then the rest of lettuce, cabbage, tomatos, peanuts (local, in shell, roasted and unsalted - they are the main reason we shop at K-mart). The girl turns the ham, in its cloth bag, several times around and can't find a barcode. My wife remembers that there was a barcode sticker last time, but not this time.
The cashier asks for help, which then walks to the other end of the store - I thought it was to find out the price. The rest of our merchandise (which is somehow called "order", though I didn't order anything, nor do they deliver, you push it in a cart to the register) gets scanned and bagged, and then we wait some more. Within about six minutes she arrives, saying the meat department doesn't have the barcode for it, they'd have to weigh it and... then I have enough, and start raising my voice. "The price is this big, in a 140 font, says 1.29 and you saw it. Can't she just ring it up?". At this time the shift boss is present too and I'm addressing her mostly, and the other lady who went to fetch the price. "Isn't this register also a scale? Can't she just weigh it here and enter the price?".
I'm sort of satisfied with the effect, because even though it's saturday evening, around seven thirty, there are about a dozen people who turn their heads. My wife tells me not to shout and not make a scene, but I don't think I'm shouting (that would probably bring security if I did) and I want to make a scene. The only reason for existence of retail is to sell stuff to buyers, and the only reason for price tags is that the customers know how much is the item they're buying. This is retail, and the price tag was about six inches tall - so what's the big deal? No barcode? Find it later. I don't need to know. Go through your touchscreen menu and find the ham. Use the "untagged merchandise - meat department" or whatever system you have, but don't tell me "...we are unable to sell it".
If you're unable to sell it, why is it taking dozen square feet in your store?
This is not the first time that there's an unsellable item in a store, though. I've had cases with barcode tags being unstuck, or the price tags missing on the shelves. In the former case, sometimes an available clerk goes and brings a properly tagged item, sometimes we do. If there's no price tag on the shelf at all, we simply don't buy, period.
There's probably a law - if merchandise is laid out for sale, and there's an advertised price, it must be sold at that price to anyone willing to pay, or something to that effect. There may even be a case for this, but given my disgust for ambulance chasers and other legal predators, I was satisfied with ruffling feathers a bit - got something for my money.
I wanted to post this to K-mart first, but couldn't easily find a good location on their website. I'll try to email this to them first, before posting.
Epilogue, couple of months later:
I somehow managed to find some email address or a web form where I was able to paste the text above the line. (don't you hate websites which go the extra mile to hide any way of contacting them?). K-mart didn't respond. I waited more than the two days I promised them before posting. Next visit, they had the hams wrapped in clingwrap, with proper barcodes underneath. Three visits later, the clingwrap and barcodes were gone. I figure we're back at square one.
Beats me - why do they exhibit an item which they are unable to sell. And all this mumbo jumbo with vanishing barcodes. Can't they just add them to their list of items to weigh at the cash register, along with apples and potatos? Don't tell me it's the meat department - the register is definitely not cabbage department, yet they know exactly how to ring up cabbage. I don't care. When I go to a restaurant, I do not want to know how are they organized internally, which waiter is in charge of my table, how long is his shift and how do they split the tips with the kitchen - I just want my beer and to be left alone with my present company. My customers don't want to know how I organize my business, so why should buying a good ham be so hard?
In the end, we didn't buy it.
Mentions: 08-IV-2026., blogue, CAAR, fox, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jan Brenkelen, Maša Bezuhovski, nezavisni, trabant, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
28-IV-2024 - 24-IV-2026