Rants

Lost Time

Yesterday at 2:35 PM I scraped my arm.The nurse and I spent 20 minutes treating it. We then spent the next 15 minutes examining the scene of the crime and recreating the event. We then called in the maintenance supervisor to have him look at the offending junction box cover and he then got a maintenance guy to remove the cover, smooth off the sharp edge and then replace it. Another 30 minutes used up. From there we ended up in my boss’s office while he, the nurse, and I filled out the accident report, spending another half hour. Pretty much killing the rest of the work day.

Today the nurse spent almost 2-1/2 hours with me, driving me to two different doctor’s offices, so I could get my tetanus shot. (At the first place we went, the front office person “couldn’t get me in the computer”, so we left after an hour.) Back at the plant we spent the next 45 minutes together to 1) re bandage the cut because the doctor did a lackluster job after he spent all of 10 seconds looking at it, 2) filling out the appropriate paperwork to have me take a drug test and 3) me peeing in a cup and her testing it. Later my boss brought around the accident report for me to sign (anther 2 minutes, but who knows how long it took to complete it.)

Next week the Director of Operations, the Facilities Manager, the HR Manager, my supervisor, his Manager, the supervisor of the department I was passing through and his manager will meet to discuss how to prevent this from happening again. More than likely after all of these folks spend an hour in a room, a maintenance man will be dispatched to reroute the offending junction box and it’s associated conduit, another maintenance man will be dispatched to place yellow tape on the floor to designate an official aisle and the department supervisor will spend a half an hour instructing his people not to place pallets in the new aisle.

This was not considered a lost time accident, because I did not “miss” any work, even though over 8 man hours have been spent on it so far, with lots more to come.

As a bonus, as far as OSHA is concerned it is not a recordable accident because I did not require stitches, x-rays, or antibiotics (tetanus shots don’t count) so our company’s accident free hours numbers don’t get reset.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 319

Ouch

This afternoon while cutting through a department in the back to get up to my office I got an owee. There was a stack of palettes in the “aisle” and I dodged left to go around them. I moved a little too far left and scrapped my arm on the wall. After about 10 step further along I thought to myself that hurt. When I looked down I was bleeding pretty good from a silver dollar sized scrape on my left forearm. I stopped in the next restroom I passed and ran it under a faucet. Ooooh. Wet some paper towels and pressed hard for a while. Still bleeding, I guess I better go see the nurse.

She took a look, hmmm’d, donned the rubber gloves and spent the next 5 minutes spraying on some sort of “Stop Bleeding Powder” and did manage to get it down to just weeping. Covered the crater with a big gob of antibiotic cream and wrapped it in gauze, all held in place by a magenta piece of that crinkly stretch bandage. It took about 40 minutes before the red spot on the gauze stopped expanding.

Because it happened at work there were forms to be filled out and now because I admitted that I hadn’t had a tetanus shot since sometime in the 80’s I get to have her drive me to the “company” doctor tomorrow for said shot.

We went out to Chinese buffet for lunch today.

Meal Cost: $12.31
Tip: $1.69
Spent Today: $14.00
Year to Date: $1746.78
Meals out, 102 of a possible 654.

Finished my tenth Spenser book today, Playmates, and didn’t find any Crime Buster Rules. Although in chapter 13 there is a statement that might have been called one: When in doubt do something, and hope if you keep doing it you’ll come to understand what it is. Later in the book Spenser gets called into the Boston Police station where there are an assortment of agencies represented (a couple being reoccurring characters) and is asked if he knew why he was called in. To which he replies,”I assumed you were holding a crime stoppers seminar and wanted me to lecture.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 317

Over the Limit

Cameron, SC With this past weekend’s excursion we now have 204 Post Offices. Not yet half but getting there. I have them all up in my gallery, but I don’t have any captions for the last dozen or so (yet.) I have also been posting the photos on Flickr! to give them a little more exposure and they have that neat-o map thing. Plus there is a group dedicated to just U.S. Post Offices that I’ve been adding too.

When I uploaded the last of the photos to Flickr! today I went over the limit, seems that all you get is 200 photos with the free membership. When you add a new picture, one falls off the back. The photos are still there on the site, but you can’t see them unless you know the photo’s URL. They also don’t display on my map anymore (I really liked that feature), but remain visible in the U.S. Post Office group.

The cost to upgrade to the Pro level is $24.95 a year. If it was more like ten bucks I’d jump at it, but I’m not so sure I want to spend that much. I’ll probably just quit uploading the Post Office photos there. There is the option of adding another free account, but I’m going to have to end up with 3 of them to do all the 460 South Carolina Post Offices. Of course if some one were to give me a Gift Upgrade…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 316

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeal

The Emperor had it’s 60k mile service last week. Not only did they change the timing belt, but while they were in there they changed out the two accessory belts. We picked it up Thursday evening and all was well until Saturday morning. We had a MMC breakfast date, so we left the house at about 6:15. Less than a half a mile away from home in our quiet neighborhood is a 4-way stop. When pulling away from the stop the Emperor started to squeal like a stuck pig. I felt about 2″ high. I was sure that lights were going on in the houses around me as the people tried to locate the Siamese cat in heat. The sound went away after about 5 seconds and didn’t reoccur. I figured a little condensation from the car coming out into warm moist air from the air conditioned garage, so the belt slipped a little bit.

Nice theory, but how do I explain what caused the same squeal this afternoon after work. It lasted longer than Saturday’s episode, about 10 seconds. I had time to cycle the A/C a couple times and when off the first time the squeal stopped and restarted when the A/C was turned back on. When I turned off the A/C the second time the squeal continued, but stopped shortly there after. Donna said lets take it back to the dealer. I would have, but the place is over 60 miles and an hour away. If they were less than half that I probably would.

So, what causes belt squeal? Too tight? Too loose? Either? Bite the bullet and take it back? Is this fixable by a novice knucklehead? Learn to live with a random dying pig noise?

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 287

Being Prepared

YemasseeLast weekend I mapped out a bunch (20) of Post Offices in the northeast part of the state because that is where we would be. I covered all the POs we hadn’t already gotten from I-77 on the west to I-95 on the east, and between North Carolina on the north to I-20 on the south. The first thing Donna did when we got in the car to leave was open the South Carolina map and say, “If we go this way we can get these Post Offices.” Well, she was pointing to a section of the state that I didn’t have close up maps for the PO locations inside the actual towns. This is the second time something like that has happened, so my new project is to go ahead and make maps up for the remaining 277 Post Offices.

I’ve got 40 done so far…

Tonight I washed off the filth that had settled on the Emperor when he spent the night Wray’s place. Which reminds me, when we got to the shop to pick up the car the Service Hostess told me that the car would be out in just a few minutes as it was in Clean Up. Twenty minutes later they pulled the car up in front and gave me the keys. As we loaded the trunk and climbed inside I noticed that the car was dirtier than when I dropped it off (no doubt because it did spend the night outside.) So what did they clean up?

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 286

Target Shopping

Comstock Covered BridgeWe’ve got an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner that is starting to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t picking up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fangled bag-less picker upper. Target had a couple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law mandated 1:30 PM opening we headed out to Target. Allow me to interject an observation from my cubicle neighbor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a grocery store on Sunday morning and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you cannot enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bissell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and generally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a couple reasons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an outlet, but couldn’t find one. We corralled a sales team member and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team member and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal department team member had something to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the display vacuum over to the TV section and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our current unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card mention. We pointed it out to the cashier team member and she proceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vacuum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team member, whose response was the gift card automatically shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vacuum.” I hit cancel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imagined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trouble was that offer expired 7/7 (yesterday.) Some one had obviously forgotten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fifteen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apologized for the confusion, sold us the vacuum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do without the sale and jeopardize future purchases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Amazon for $95, no tax and free shipping. Hoover U5507-900

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 264

Asheville

Pearson's Falls, Saluda, NCAiken, SC to Asheville, NC. We stopped and mopped up a half dozen PO’s that we didn’t get to when we were in the Greenville area two weekends ago. Boy did we ever take the circular route to them too. We got turned around at the start in the search for the Furman Post Office and I’m not sure we knew where we were most of the time, but we still managed to get all of them.

We chose Asheville as a destination partially because we like the town and we also planned on attending a Tourists baseball game. When we got here we decided we didn’t want to go to the game after all. After the no attendance at Greenville we have come to the conclusion that we don’t know that we like attending minor league games anymore.

We ended up downtown to get dinner. There were two restaurants that we remembered from previous visits that we wanted to eat at. The choice would depend on the availability of parking near them. First up was Tupelo Honey. It is near a small park that seems to have been taken over by Asheville’s homeless population since our last visit. Fortunately there was no parking close to the restaurant, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable leaving the top down there for fear people would rifle through the interior like any other street side trash can. We had better luck at Doc Chey’s, a truck was just leaving from across the street and it freed up two primo parking spots.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 229