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Ugh, Computer Stuff

28 Mar

I have a confession to make… I’m kind of computer stupid.

I mean, I can rock the crap out of some Excel, use Photoshop like a boss and find pretty much anything ever on the internet, but when it comes to the actual inner workings of a computer I’m absolutely clueless.

This usually isn’t that much of an issue, because I have a pretty awesome IT department at my job. They provide me with a work laptop and deal with any problems it might have. In fact, they even helped me out when my home computer had a virus, which was pretty great of them.

You know what wasn’t great? Lugging in an old-school computer hard drive. I swear, that thing must weigh 50 pounds and it’s way too heavy for me to carry from the parking garage, through the two entrance doors, up three flights of stairs and into the IT office. Which is why I totally packed it in a HUGE orange Heys suitcase and rolled that thing through the halls with pride. Yeah, not very convenient at all.

My home computer has been fine though. I use it to blog, internet surf and do some freelance graphic design a few times a year. It is about ten years old though, which makes it a total dinosaur in computer years. I keep putting off the purchase of a new computer time and time again, because really… it’s FINE.

Or, well, it WAS fine. I’ve been working on an easy little freelance job of designing a postcard and OH MY GOSH the computer is driving me crazy. It is so incredibly slow and outdated and I just can’t stand it anymore. Which means I need to go computer shopping – which I HATE. I always feel so stupid when the computer people start asking me about megabytes, hard drives, memory and processors. My eyes glaze over and I start drooling a little out the side of my mouth, only to rejoin the conversation by randomly shouting “There will be banana hammocks EVERYWHERE!”

Oh, do you not know what I’m talking about? Well, let’s take a little minute long break to revisit one of my favorite shows:

Okay, up to speed now? Good.

Well, I thought I was being super smart this time by asking my IT guy at work what I should get. He gave me the exact brand and MB’s I need, so I walked into the store with the goal of checking the laptop out in person. Yes, I said laptop because if something bad happens it will be much easier to bring to work. Well, I walked into Best Buy and their computer dude pretty much pointed me in a total opposite direction and recommended something else.

So now I don’t know what the heck I want!

Part of me thinks I should just ignore the whole computer issue again after I finish with this postcard design. However, I’m scared that if I keep putting it off one day it will die and never be able to be resurrected to spit out my iTunes library, all the graphic design I’ve done in the last decade and a bazillion pictures (I actually did back up 8 years of pictures on my Amazon Cloud, so I should get points for that).

Are any of you guys super smart computer types? If so, can you give me a recommendation for a PC laptop that I can use for graphic design, internet surfing, blogging and song/picture storage? My IT dude suggested a Sony Vaio with 6 – 8 GB of memory…

BIG Mistake

7 Feb

You know how I’m a little bit obsessed with delicious marshmallows?

I mean, I’ve done really well at cutting back a little bit, but gourmet marshmallows are pretty darn hard to resist. I did that product review for Plush Puffs where I was forced (FORCED I tell you!) to taste four different flavors of their amazingly awesome products. I also was given gifts from my friends (and boss), which of course also had to be tasted (aka devoured).

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Christmas gift from my boss. His note said “one is for those tough days and one is to mask your obvious drinking problem.” Best. Boss. Ever!

So yeah, I’m a bit of a marshmallow aficionado.

Well, what I didn’t tell you was that I actually reached out to four different gourmet marshmallow companies asking if I could please, please, pretty please sample their marshmallows so that I can do a review for my blog. I figured, it couldn’t hurt.

I mean, on the blogosphere scale, my blog is considered pretty small potatoes. I don’t have millions of monthly views or thousands of Facebook fans. But the views and fans I have are pretty ridiculously awesome and loyal, so I’d much rather celebrate the quality of you guys over the quantity of others.

Anyways, it was pretty much one of the best days of my year (besides, um, the whole birthing of my son thing…) when the PRESIDENT of Plush Puffs emailed me back (after reading my missing marshmallow story) and said since I was obviously such a fan of gourmet marshmallows that they would love to send me some to taste.

AWESOME, right?!

So everybody wins. I felt like a BIG DOG and got to taste some magnificent marshmallows. They LOVED the review and the silly pictures I posted, and it cost them less than $30 retail (which I’m sure is a lot less not-retail).

Good relationships all around!

What’s funny is that one of the other gourmet marshmallow companies I contacted emailed me back with quite a different response. Instead of just saying something to the effect of “thanks, but no thanks” or just ignoring me altogether, they informed me that my Klout score wasn’t high enough for them to communicate with me or my readers.

Um, what?

I mean, I totally expected them to ask about page views and Facebook fan counts and all that jazz, but to base their entire decision on my Klout* score?

No engaging me at all. Just a quick (yet a little bit rude) email that I wasn’t important enough for them to bother with.

Oh, okay.

And honestly, it really didn’t even bother me THAT MUCH. I mean, I’m cool. Small (or even medium sized) companies might not have the budget to send samples to every random blogger girl who asks. Even if that blogger girl is the biggest fan of gourmet marshmallows in all the land. I pretty much forgot about it and even forgot which company it was (which I looked up for this post, but won’t be sharing because I’m not mean like that).

Anyways, here is where I’m slowly making my way towards my point. Which {spoiler alert} is, “Always be nice to the little guy.”

I work at a university and I’m planning a marshmallow toasting event for next month. It’s going to be a fun (and admittedly a bit kooky) way for people to network and bond in a professional setting while making and enjoying some s’mores. Fun, right?

Well, I decided that it would be nice to have a little goodie bag item for the attendees of the event. A little somethin’ somethin’ that they could take with them to remember what a nice time they had. And that somethin’ somethin’ is going to be a package of gourmet marshmallows.

So, I ordered 5 cases of marshmallows from Plush Puffs.

That’s right, I ordered FIVE CASES – because they gave me a chance and had incredibly awesome customer service that left me with a smile on my face (and a sugary marshmallow in my mouth).

This moment has been running around in my head since I’ve made the order:

So yeah, always be nice to the little guy. Due to their awesome response to my email and spending (maybe) $30 on a sample pack, Plush Puffs can count me as one of their fans. In addition to that, my readers know how great they are and now a whole bunch of young educated professionals are going to get to sample their product too. If they love it, they’ll tell their friends and so on and so on.

Be nice to the little guy!

That flustered mom that you’re being rude to because her family has the audacity to come to your restaurant for dinner might be the same one who has a blog with 100,000 loyal readers. The tired traveler that you screw over on his hotel room reservation might be the guy who is posting his review on Trip Advisor. The badly dressed prostitute might just have a wealthy suitor who is happy to let her spend a bazillion dollars on his credit card.

You never know, do you?
So take a deep breath and try to be nice.

And send me marshmallows. That’s a good moral of the story too.

*For those of you unfamiliar with Klout, it’s a way of measuring “social influence” by looking at your online posts and interactions and assigning you a corresponding number. By the way, my Klout score is currently a respectable 54 thankyouverymuch.

PS. This is not a sponsored post and I didn’t receive payment in product or money for saying nice things about Plush Puffs. They just rock.

The Hamburglar

12 Sep

I was thinking about my old job today. Not because I missed it and was being nostalgic – because I went to McDonald’s for lunch. Stay with me, it totally makes sense later in the post.

Anyway, at my old job we had one of those communal lunchrooms with a couple refrigerators where you could store your lunch for the day. Originally there was just one fridge, but apparently so many people felt like they needed to bring enough frozen meals to last them through the next 6 months that the company had to buy an additional fridge.

With over 100 employees, you can imagine that the fridges were typically packed full with food. And yes, sometimes food disappeared.

Which is crazy, right? I mean, what adult would go in and take someone else’s food? We’re all stuck at the office for the day and sometimes the only thing keeping us going is that Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich waiting patiently to be devoured at lunchtime. (YouTube won’t let me embed the video here, so if you want to watch an old Friend’s Clip where Ross freaks the crap out over someone eating his lunch, click here).

I would be furious if someone took my food. Of course, I had my own mini fridge in my office (given to me by a pathological liar… but that’s a whole other story), so my food was safe. And no, I didn’t steal other people’s food and store it in my mini fridge, even though that is a totally brilliant idea that I just thought of right now.

Okay, moving on. We had a few really odd duck’s at the office. You know, like that guy Milton from Office Space – a little off and you hear them muttering about burning the place down? Well, this guy was like a weirder version of Milton.

We called him The Hamburglar and this is how he got his name:

One day at lunchtime, one of the high ups at the company came into the lunch room to get her delicious leftovers out of the fridge for lunch. It was a big, juicy hamburger and she pulled the Styrofoam container out with the anticipation of heating that bad boy up and destroying it. Yum, yum, yum!

However, when she opened the box she saw that someone had gotten there first – the edges of her burger had been nibbled all the way around.

WHO DOES THAT?! Who opens up someone else’s lunch, takes bites out of it and then returns it?

Did you know you could buy a Hamburglar costume off Amazon? Creepy. (Source: Amazon.com)

The Hamburglar, that’s who!

We ALL knew who it was, but we didn’t have any proof.

So one of our brilliant IT guys decided to install a little camera* in the lunchroom to see if they could catch the Hamburglar in action.

It didn’t take long to hit pay dirt. The office provided a monthly cake to celebrate staff’s birthdays. It was cut up into individual pieces and set out for everyone to pick up and enjoy at their desks. Well, the very next cake day after the camera went up, we all noticed that a few pieces of cake looked a little… weird.

Sure enough, IT caught it on camera and it was AWESOME!

Picture #1: Milton is standing in the kitchen. Alone. Gazing at a slice of cake.

Picture #2: Milton has picked up a plate of cake – one hand is holding the plate and the other has been shoved into the cake with icing and cake smooshing out from between his fingers.

Picture #3: The gooey hand is in Milton’s mouth and he tastes the sugary goodness.

Picture #4: Milton has set the defiled cake back on the table

Picture #5: Just an empty kitchen with a piece of nasty cake. Yup, Milton high-tailed it out of there and left his sampled cake behind.

The Hamburglar struck again! Amazing, right? And yes, for those people totally grossed out, we ran in and threw out the cake pieces that had been molested so that nobody would accidentally eat them.

Eventually the Hamburglar was let go from the company. I’m not sure if his weird food stealing was named as a reason, but we all were relieved when he was gone. Every so often, I wonder where he is. Is he stealing food away from unsuspecting coworkers at a different company?

I asked my Facebook friends whether they have anyone who steals food at their companies and apparently it’s more common than I thought:

“A guy at my work would eat other people’s food so someone baked ExLax brownies with a sign that said ‘Don’t Eat’. Well he ate them and ended up going to the hospital because he didn’t know what was wrong with him!” – C

“I can’t prove it, but I am pretty sure people regularly steal milk out of the 1/2 gallon I keep for my oatmeal and coffee in our office fridge. So to retaliate, I regularly drink directly from the carton, so that anyone who DOES steal some gets the backwash/spit/germ experience they deserve. =)” – L

How about you, anyone stealing food at your work?

 

*You know what’s funny; the non-brilliant IT guy would totally read that sentence and think that I was complimenting him. Well, I’m not. We ALL knew who the brilliant IT guy was and it wasn’t the one who thought he was so freaking awesome. It was the other one – the quiet one who was secretly hilarious. So there. Wow, I’m really going off subject today! My point of this was to explain that the camera wasn’t a video but took pictures every few seconds.

Pet Peeve Alert: You Stink

16 Jul

Prepare yourself now, because I’m about to go off on a tangent.

One of the things that I absolutely CANNOT STAND is when people pretty much bathe in their perfume or cologne before leaving the house.

If you are standing 20 feet away from me and I can LITERALLY TASTE your cologne in the back of my throat, you have applied too much scent!

If you walk down a hallway and I walk down that same hallway five minutes later and I can still smell your stanky ass old man cologne (and yes, this is an actual example of a Mr. Potato Head-type man I used to work with), you are wearing too much!

I’m an equal opportunity complainer too, it’s not just men who are stinking me out – there are also ladies out there who are surrounded by a Pig Pen type cloud of floral aroma. And maybe the perfume would have smelled good if you just dab dab dabbed it on…but if you are smell blind and layered the lotion, powder, perfume and matching room spray you crossed over that line and you just stink!

So there is your public service announcement for the day. If you’re unsure of whether you have too much cologne or perfume on your body, ask someone.

Or just look around for the person like me who is trying to strategically cover her nose and back away without vomiting.

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