(no subject)
Nov. 16th, 2006 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI'd like to give m4d pr0pz to my peeps at Nextel, who market the alarmingly clunky i710 flip phone that does not take pictures, offers like four asstastic backgrounds, and has shitty, annoying ringtone options.
The i710 is not an attractive, sleek, or modern cellphone. It isn't feature-rich. Nobody is impressed with my damn phone, no matter how many times I drop it on the floor while trying to flip it open one-handed. Nobody, except for me.
It rained today. It rained a lot. It rained enough that I felt like I was in Bangladesh during monsoon season. The rain was serious and committed to providing a nice rain experience. (It was also kind of warm, about 60 degrees, which is unseasonably warm for mid-November.) Anyway, there was rather a lot of water falling down out of the sky today. It was a really significant rain.
As most people are probably aware, it's also late fall in these parts. By late fall, most of the leaves that spent the spring and summer attached to trees are on the ground. This morning, more than a few of those leaves were huddled around the low spot in the parking lot at the office.
The low spot in the parking lot at the office is not only where fallen leaves hang out. It's also where the storm drain is. The storm drain is at the low spot so that water from excessive rainstorms can use gravity to run into the storm drain instead of needing a windmill hooked to an Archimedes screw or something.
In our parking lot, the storm drain has a grate over it so that Jessica McClure can't fall into it. (And this works. Yes, it does. Jessica McClure hasn't yet fallen into our storm drain.) The storm drain grate also keeps leaves from going down the storm drain by trapping them between the metal crosspieces of the grate and the overwhelming pressure of the water on top of the leaves.
Water on top of the leaves? Yep. In really significant rains, it's possible to get about eight inches of water in the parking lot over the storm drain if the storm drain isn't draining. Eight inches of water is enough to go overtop of my waterproof chocolate-colored work boots. Ask me how I know this!
Anyway, when I parked the truck at work and stepped out into the parking lot (I park the truck higher up the hill than you'd expect because the parking brake doesn't come off anymore and I haven't had a chance to get it to the shop yet) and landed in three inches of water (some eight feet from the low spot), I figured it was either time to get out the gopher wood or time to investigate the storm drain. Since I didn't have any idea which basement might have the gopher wood in it, I opted to investigate the storm drain.
Normally, I keep my cellphone (I bet you thought I'd forgotten that this was supposed to be a post about my cell phone. I didn't forget.) in my front shirt pocket. Normally, this is a good place to keep it because it's handy and stuff. As I discovered today, though, keeping one's cell phone in one's front shirt pocket when one is bending over eight inches of water to investigate a non-draining storm drain is not a particularly good idea. Buoyancy is yet another feature my cell phone lacks. I didn't NOTICE the cell phone had fallen out of my pocket until a good twenty seconds had gone by. I fished the phone out of the water and stuck it back in my pocket. My front shirt pocket. The same, as it happens, front shirt pocket that it had just abandoned for the pleasure of swan-diving into the (now) slurping vortex of storm drainage in the parking lot of my office. I bent over to play in the oddly-warm rainwater again. (If questioned, I will claim that I was fishing out more leaves that had been swirled into imprisonment by the improved flow of water down the storm drain. The eye of the vortex was like five inches across. Seriously, it was nifty. You'd have wanted to play in it, too.) When I did that, the cellphone took another header into the fucking water. (Sometimes Most of the time, I like to think I'm pretty smart. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.) *sigh* I fished the cellphone out of the water for the second time and put it in my pants pocket.
While it was sort of strange all afternoon and didn't settle down until I took the battery pack out, removed the SIM, and let everything dry in disassembled glory, my cellphone still works and has lost none of its asstastic backgrounds, shitty, annoying ringtone options, or address book entries. It doesn't take pictures. It doesn't have very many options. I'd have to pay money to get it to play more than demo Tetris... but the fucking thing is amphibious.
Makers of the Nextel i710: M4d pr0pz, j00 rul3z!
The i710 is not an attractive, sleek, or modern cellphone. It isn't feature-rich. Nobody is impressed with my damn phone, no matter how many times I drop it on the floor while trying to flip it open one-handed. Nobody, except for me.
It rained today. It rained a lot. It rained enough that I felt like I was in Bangladesh during monsoon season. The rain was serious and committed to providing a nice rain experience. (It was also kind of warm, about 60 degrees, which is unseasonably warm for mid-November.) Anyway, there was rather a lot of water falling down out of the sky today. It was a really significant rain.
As most people are probably aware, it's also late fall in these parts. By late fall, most of the leaves that spent the spring and summer attached to trees are on the ground. This morning, more than a few of those leaves were huddled around the low spot in the parking lot at the office.
The low spot in the parking lot at the office is not only where fallen leaves hang out. It's also where the storm drain is. The storm drain is at the low spot so that water from excessive rainstorms can use gravity to run into the storm drain instead of needing a windmill hooked to an Archimedes screw or something.
In our parking lot, the storm drain has a grate over it so that Jessica McClure can't fall into it. (And this works. Yes, it does. Jessica McClure hasn't yet fallen into our storm drain.) The storm drain grate also keeps leaves from going down the storm drain by trapping them between the metal crosspieces of the grate and the overwhelming pressure of the water on top of the leaves.
Water on top of the leaves? Yep. In really significant rains, it's possible to get about eight inches of water in the parking lot over the storm drain if the storm drain isn't draining. Eight inches of water is enough to go overtop of my waterproof chocolate-colored work boots. Ask me how I know this!
Anyway, when I parked the truck at work and stepped out into the parking lot (I park the truck higher up the hill than you'd expect because the parking brake doesn't come off anymore and I haven't had a chance to get it to the shop yet) and landed in three inches of water (some eight feet from the low spot), I figured it was either time to get out the gopher wood or time to investigate the storm drain. Since I didn't have any idea which basement might have the gopher wood in it, I opted to investigate the storm drain.
Normally, I keep my cellphone (I bet you thought I'd forgotten that this was supposed to be a post about my cell phone. I didn't forget.) in my front shirt pocket. Normally, this is a good place to keep it because it's handy and stuff. As I discovered today, though, keeping one's cell phone in one's front shirt pocket when one is bending over eight inches of water to investigate a non-draining storm drain is not a particularly good idea. Buoyancy is yet another feature my cell phone lacks. I didn't NOTICE the cell phone had fallen out of my pocket until a good twenty seconds had gone by. I fished the phone out of the water and stuck it back in my pocket. My front shirt pocket. The same, as it happens, front shirt pocket that it had just abandoned for the pleasure of swan-diving into the (now) slurping vortex of storm drainage in the parking lot of my office. I bent over to play in the oddly-warm rainwater again. (If questioned, I will claim that I was fishing out more leaves that had been swirled into imprisonment by the improved flow of water down the storm drain. The eye of the vortex was like five inches across. Seriously, it was nifty. You'd have wanted to play in it, too.) When I did that, the cellphone took another header into the fucking water. (
While it was sort of strange all afternoon and didn't settle down until I took the battery pack out, removed the SIM, and let everything dry in disassembled glory, my cellphone still works and has lost none of its asstastic backgrounds, shitty, annoying ringtone options, or address book entries. It doesn't take pictures. It doesn't have very many options. I'd have to pay money to get it to play more than demo Tetris... but the fucking thing is amphibious.
Makers of the Nextel i710: M4d pr0pz, j00 rul3z!
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 02:28 am (UTC)I guess not having all the bells & whistles can be a good thing.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 03:58 pm (UTC)Didn't you ever go to church camp and sing that stuff around the campfire?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 05:43 pm (UTC)Though it pains me to admit this in public, an embarrassingly large part of my Bible Knowledge (tm) does NOT come from actual Bible study. Neither does my Bible Knowledge come from confirmation class (which I attended at Mt. Zion Evangelical Lutheran outside of Breezewood) because that mostly indoctrinated me with the specifics of being a good Lutheran rather than hooking me up with more general Christian thoughts.
I got a huge chunk of Bible Knowledge (and you can, too!) from the Statler Brothers. Back in the day, they did songs for the Old and New Testaments, kind of catchy songs. They were songs you could, y'know, sing along to, assuming your idea of fun included singing along to Bible stories in the first place.
Our family drove to Mazatlan in December of 1979. I was nine years old. The Old & New Testaments as sung by the Statler Brothers were in the selection of 8-tracks that we had along for the trip. (Other music from this era includes The Clancy Brothers singing assorted irish folk stuff. I have a huge soft spot for both Statlers and Clancys as a result of the trip to Mazatlan.)
In this particular case, the lyric is as follows:
Song: Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord
"The lord said 'Noah, get some sturdy gopher wood.'"
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 05:59 pm (UTC)As for the Statler Bros... see above, "not raised country". Even our farming relatives were kind of on the Rust Belt side of the rock/country divide. Closest we got to country was the odd Alabama eight-track floating around the floor of my uncle's Trans Am.
Confirmation class at my mother's suburban Methodist church consisted of a lot of running about visiting other denominations, making sure you were a Methodist, and not a Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Jew. I'm sure we would have dropped in on the snake-handlers if there were any examples in the tricounty area that the youth minister had been aware of.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 07:46 pm (UTC)There are religious among us. I have a Quaker, some Grace Brethern (no snake handling, sorry. Just apple butter.), a nice selection of Roman Catholics, some Lutheran, some Episcopelian, some generic and fairly free-form Christian. There are also deists who do not hold with organized religion. We don't poll for these things but there are at least two other atheists besides me. (They know the secret handshake, is how I can tell.)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-19 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-20 08:53 pm (UTC)Dude, plz give buff b/c OT ganked us.
(I will translate that OT is "Old Testament." I looked up the rest in a gamer-slang lexicon.)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 03:57 pm (UTC)Just sayin'.