donner v donder and the approaching holiday

As it may come of no surprise to you, I was listening to my grammar podcasts instead of socializing this weekend. Actually Friday night was wicked cool, and I was at the office’s scaled-down holiday party. It still turned out to be a lot of fun, and I got totally drunk because I drank a bottle of wine. They love sushi here, but I don’t so much. I did try it, but not having any food in my stomach could have contributed to my state of sobriety. The party continued to an uppity bar that had the best drink ever. It was vodka, apple juice (the dark gold, sugary kind), and some kind of herb. I was too drunk to remember, but I think it was sage. The resulting drink was an amazing elixir that tantalized me into oblivion. I will have that again soon. Then a few of us headed over to my favorite pizza place and closed the joint down…I’m sure the waiter loved that. It was the best night ever, and my feet hurt sooo bad I was hobbling. I shouldn’t have worn my pointy bedazzled wizard shoes, but oh well.

This week marks the final countdown (sound the marching band trumpet) to my Christmas Vacation. It’s such an event, I’ve decided it’s worthy of being a proper noun. It will be one hell of a week at work because lots of people will be taking of the next two weeks, so marketing has to get everything done NOW. CRAZY BUSY! Hopefully I’ll be able to stay focused because I really need to, and I’ll need the busy distraction. I’m soooo excited to see everyone and hopefully see snow and to have a familiar setting for the holidays. It will feel just right I think. I don’t even know how I’ll get through this week with all the preparations of laundry, packing, and getting stuff to take home. Let’s not forget that we have to deal with the animals, and that will be a plan itself. I think I may publish my tentative activities calendar for the week on facebook so everyone can see when I’m free. It will be, more than ever, and appointment-based Christmas.

Now, since we’re on the subject of Christmas and grammar podcats, it has always been my thing to participate in the Donner v Donder controversy. Of course I’m talking about the reindeer, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re unimportant. Every time I here “Donner” instead of “Donder,” which is 98% of the time, I immediately correct it. People always fight back and say it is in fact “Donner.” Well, I decided to dig into it a little more, and it turns out both are correct. “Donner” is the latest evolution because it was softened over times by some author. “Donder” actually is a middle version, and not the original name as I once thought. It turns out in fact that this little deer’s name was actually “Dunder,” as is Dunder Mifflin (paper) or Trouser Dunder (terd). Surprised? That’s not all! “Blitzen” is not so innocent either. Right along with Dunder, her name is actually “Blixem.” There names were changed over time to soften and facilitate rhyme scheme. I guess they mean thunder and lightning, respectively, in German. So, from now on, you’ll hear me say: “Now Dasher, now Dancer, now Prancer, now Vixen, on Comet, on Cupid, on Dunder, and Blixem.” For bike cops who wear shorts outside new mini malls…now haberdash, haberdash, haberdash all.

the return of the dentata

Can I tell you how much I hate the medical sitchie in California? First of all, I can’t deal with sub-par healthcare or insurance. Unfortunately it is my opinion I have both at the time–although some of my elections may have played into that, and hopefully things will improve next year with a different plan–and California has the most banker-like doctors I have ever encountered. Forget the fact that California is on the leading edge of healthcare, Cleveland was up there, too. The only difference was that I could find a doctor in Cleveland that took my insurance–or insurance at all–and who was open. Here, doctors work three, maybe four days a week and almost never past five. Who are they catering to because it’s not me? How ridiculous is it that you have to take off work EVERY time you need medical care? Oh, and it’s not fantastic care either, for the most part. Most of these docs share a tiny building with millions of other people and have, yes, an answering machine. I always get a busy signal. Dear 1985, thanks for voicemail…can you send a Pony Express message to California doctors? Is the overhead too much? Is it a struggle to provide a homey environment in a decent space along with extreme patient-centric care? Well, maybe it is, but if you worked five days like most people, I have a hunch it just might all work out fine. Cut out the “Business hours: 9-3 every other Thursday” and kick in some night and weekend hours. After all, it is about the patients, isn’t it? Or is it about having money? Shame on those doctors, and shame on this lazy Californian “banker” medical care. I’m not sure the financial industry is the best model for anything really.

L’histoire Dentata: Since a highly recommended dentist whose hours are (surprise!) less than full-time was not “accepting new patients,” I had to find my own. Well, the ones she recommended weren’t covered by my busted insurance. I did, however, manage to find the worst place ever. They had a cancellation and got me in today so as to fit me in before the end of the year, but it went south soooo fast. An unsupervised trainee/assistant/rebast took more than 20 X-rays of my face because she didn’t know how to do it (and she wasn’t shy about sharing that either). Well, whatever, I’m all for the learning process, and they were digital X-rays. Then, she was the one who continued on with my care–again unsupervised and clearly doing a horrible job. She fucking got toothpaste all over me too.  There was a lot of touching things and then my mouth, and I hated that. And THEN the dentist came in. He had visible dirt on his hands and a freaking crack nail on his pinky! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I got out of there as soon as I could. Luckily he said my mouth looked fine, but was he really paying much attention? UGH! I was disgusted, and that place should be investigated.

One year from now I had better have good doctors for everything or I’m abandoning my California plan. My need for medical care is way higher than most and I can’t handle these terror scenes for much longer. I’ll give it a year though.

communicating after a crisis

I subscribe to IMS business lead services at work. With the holiday and the weekend, it had been a few days since I received a daily e-mail from them. Add on to that a couple more days, and I was a bit concerned. Apparently they had a huge server meltdown, which is why they weren’t sending any leads out. I wrote to find out what had happened–perhaps there was a glitch and my name was removed from the list? No, it was just the server. I received a response in a somewhat timely fashion alerting me to the situation, which I was fine with. Granted they should have sent out an e-mail when the problem started, but who knows if they had the capability. It’s what happened later that makes me pause.

As I was going through business leads, the last page was a letter from the president. It reads as follows:

On behalf of IMS, I wanted to let all of you know that for the first time in all of the years that we have been emailing projects, at about 7:30 pm on Monday, December 1, 2008 we had a massive gremlin attack and our server blew up in self defense. We immediately called for CPR but it was too late and the server died. It took our IT team almost 24 hours to replace the server and load the information back in – thank goodness for backup. We were able to send out projects from December 1, 2008 and you should have received those today. We were unable to retrieve information for December 2 so there were no projects for that date. We are up and running and are back to publishing on a daily basis. Our apologies and thanks for your patience while we recovered.

Rinda Robbins

President, IMS

Although I feel the message from the president was appropriate, I can’t say the content is. The message seems to blend casual conversation with jargon that even I can’t definitively understand. Is the CPR thing an attempt at humor? I’m not sure that’s the way to go with this audience, which is mostly business professionals and most of them are higher up the chain than I. It also seems to focus on the company more than the customer. I’m not sure that’s the angle I’d take either.

My Analysis: Message should have come out earlier and/or message should have been more carefully crafted for the audience. The danger of doing something just to get it done is, as I have learned oh so many times, the risk of doing more harm than good.

Thoughts?

twitter

Superstar Photo Shoot

You know how you kind of want to share something, but it doesn’t really warrant a blog entry? Or you could update your Facebook status, or set an away message via AIM, but it seems a little long in length or ephemeral. That’s when you start using Twitter. I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for a little bit now, and I’m going to make a concerted effort to “tweet” more frequently. I cannot update this page via Twitter, but I can send a tweet with a link about a new blog post. The great thing is that it will automatically update my Facebook status as well. It’s pretty comprehensive. I’ve got all possible networking utilities tied together in as many ways as possible to make communicating with me easy, fun, and pretty unavoidable. My account name is davidryancarr or david.ryan.carr@gmail.com(I’m not sure how you search for me), and I hope you start using it. Of course I’ll still be updating here, but with the holidays and all it will be good to have a tweeteration supplement.