Is the Russian government at it again, or what? GIVE ME MY ELJAY BACK. Anyway, here is an entry about various things, which I will post as soon as lj is working properly again.
First, a work story. This guy comes in and put this big ol’ blanket down on the counter. And I say to him, “I’m sorry, we can’t dry clean blankets right now; we have a machine down, so we don’t have space for them.” And he gives me this look like I’m the world’s biggest idiot and replies, “It’s not a blanket, it’s a comforter, and you’ve done it before.” There was so much fail packed into this reply that it has taken a close second place to “You didn’t tell me it would ruin the entire dress!” for my favorite customer dumbassedness so far. SO LET’S GET NITPICKY.
I love it when customers use the “you’ve done it before” argument, since 99% of the time it makes absolutely no difference. In most situations it’s “someone broke the rules for me on a previous occasion,” and I’ve always failed to see how that’s supposed to convince me to risk my job by breaking the rules now. Sometimes it means “that didn’t used to be your policy” or “what I’m asking for used to be possible.” In either case, the customer just needs to be educated on the policy or circumstance change — but it still doesn’t make what they want feasible, so the phrase is still ineffectual. In this case, I had already explained the change in circumstance; I think “we can’t do this right now” pretty neatly negates “you’ve done it before…” but the latter is such a staple of customer asshattery that he felt the need to say it anyway.
Customers arguing with a statement of physical impossibility is another thing I love. This isn’t even about policy; “we have a machine down” does not translate to “we don’t feel like doing this.” I can see where someone might ask whether we don’t have space simply because our remaining machine isn’t big enough for a blanket — sorry, comforter — or because we have so many clothes to clean (you know, clothes, those things our business exists to clean) that there isn’t room left for something bigger, then, on learning that the latter is the case, argue that he and his comforter are important enough to supersede the needs of those getting their clothes cleaned — but this guy was not making any such argument. He was, rather, implying that the fact that we have a machine down and don’t have space for a comforter was irrelevant in the face of the fact that we’d cleaned his comforter before.
Lastly, a comforter is a blanket. If you are absolutely dead-set on distinguishing between a “blanket” and a “comforter,” a comforter is a bigger, thicker blanket, which makes “we don’t have space for them” even more applicable. I’m really extremely impressed by this guy’s ability to make a such a moronic statement. And now I have documented it so I can look back on it forever!!!!
Next, two dreams I wanted to document as well. First, I was an agent with two partners. One was half Trowa and half Spock, and the other was half Quatre and half Clarice Starling (because Spock/Clarice was a pairing everyone needed, right? It makes total sense). We were after Moriarty. He kidnapped TrowaSpock and tortured him, and when he returned him to us he also gave us this letter. It was, mockingly, set up like a thank-you note, as after a party or something. In it, he went into bizarre levels of detail about what he’d done to TrowaSpock — “Thank you so much for allowing me to torture your friend; I very much enjoyed cracking his patella in two places, causing swelling in his knee…” etc.
Next we were investigating something in a store or something, and I guess TrowaSpock had recovered because he was there too and seemed to be OK. Anyway, at this store I ran into this pretty blonde guy (actually he looked a bit like Quatre) with whom I was flirting for some reason. And he asked me to go out with him to get coffee and pastries — only he was bizarrely specific about the place we would go to and the type of coffee and pastries we would get. So I knew this was Moriarty. Being a dumbass, instead of playing along with him and quietly alerting my partners, I ran right off to tell them that Moriarty was here. Of course Moriarty fled, but we chased him, and I got the feeling we would have caught him if I hadn’t woken up.
Only I didn’t really wake up. I woke up from the dream inside another dream, and in that other dream I was marveling at the awesomeness of the first dream and how cool was the method by which I’d detected Moriarty. So I went to tell my brother all about it. In real life, when I was eventually really awake, I had to tell him all about both of them because it was so funny.
In another dream I had recently, I was with my family at some kind of professional convention (a dental convention, perhaps, but the dream was not clear on this). In the evening, there was a play for the entertainment of everyone attending the con, and I was going to watch it. It was a Star Wars play. But as I was watching it, I was no longer myself at a convention with my family; instead, I was Rarity, and I was at the play with Rainbow Dash. There were no slashy undertones, unfortunately.
We were seated on a two-pony seat, and the play was taking place across an abyss from us. Then Celestia wanted to talk to Rainbow Dash and summoned her. Dashie flew off across the abyss to where Celestia had some kind of office inside the cliff through a couple of square windows. For some reason, once she was finished talking to Celestia, I had to go pick her up by levitating the two-pony seat over there (despite the fact that Dashie still had wings).
I put my forequarters through one of the windows to see if Dashie was ready to leave, but as I did so, the seat floated away to where all the seats were kept, leaving me hanging half-in-half-out of Celestia’s window with my hindquarters hanging over the abyss. This wasn’t frightening, but it was inconvenient and uncomfortable, so I asked the princess if I could come all the way in. She replied that since she was done with Dashie, she would just cause a seat to come back from the place where the seats were kept. The one she brought, however, was a one-pony seat, and I had to explain this and ask her to send that one back and bring a two-pony seat so Dashie and I could both leave. That was the end of that dream. I felt it definitely needed to be documented because it was my first MLPFiM dream. And because I had hooves, which was kinda badass.
So remember how last year Lester and I made all the cookies in the world? Well, on Thursday, we did it again ^__^ This time Zombie Girl joined us. We listened to the Worst CD Evar again, and it was still hilarious, and had a lot of ponytalk as well. I think last year we made a triple batch, because this year’s double batch seemed smaller than last year’s. I will have pictures eventually.
Yesterday at work I thought of two story ideas, and I have summarized them today. I’m feeling like that Christmas story I thought of last year just before Christmas and didn’t have time to finish isn’t going to get finished for this Christmas either. That’s the usual fate of my holiday stories. We’ll see, though; I’ve been pretty well in Full Absorption Mode lately, so once I get out of that things may change.
Ah, it seems like lj is back up. Time to post this.