August 7, 2000

Spid and commuting

earlier in our story...

The commute from Redwood City to San Francisco and back is a pain in the butt. It used to be that when I visited Tara -- who lives in Redwood City -- I would subsequently have to drive or train myself back to the City in order to get back home so I could go to bed so I could wake up in the morning so I could go to work.

Not last night.

On Sunday afternoon I went down to visit Tara. She picked me up at Sequoia station, (that's Redwood City for you not-in-the-know types), and we drove down to a massive Macys so we could look at china patterns.

There are many things on which I would consider myself knowledgeable, if not necessarily expert. Piano. I know education. I know Java. I know books, and I know that Andrew Lloyd Webber is the Antichrist. I do not know china, I do not know crystal, and I do not know silverware.

A long time ago, back in my college days, a really good friend who was also getting married hauled me out to the mall to help her register. "Because you're a girl," she explained patiently, when I protested. "You should know these things."

Know these things or not, very early on, we established that our tastes were nothing alike, and that if I loathed something, she was quite likely to love it. By the end of the day, she would come running whenever I made an "Ew" sound, because she would then be guaranteed to find something she liked.

"I'm never coming over for dinner if you're going to eat off of those," I complained, bitterly.

"I never cook," she told me, "so it doesn't matter."

Fortunately, Tara and I have relatively similar taste, which is a good thing because I really like her cooking and would hate having to miss out on one of her spectacular meals. We went through china. I had opinions. We went through silverware. I had opinions. Then we went through crystal, where she pinged things with her ring and I made baffled comments in the background.

I learned a neat thing, which is that those Palm Pilots I always see around can actually be used for more than just playing solitaire. I now have craving in my soul.

Anyway, last night I crashed at Tara's place, where I ate a lot, laughed a lot, drank a glass of red wine, mocked the parakeet, and bought a plant. Not from Tara, who was kind enough to lend me two Cuisinart cookingware things to temporarily alleviate some of the damage I did to our own supply with my pasta-cooking errors in judgement. We went down to Albertsons on her corner and there I bought a little tropical plant in a little plastic tub, which I promptly named Spid.

In fact, I named my new work computer Spod, so this works out quite well. The little magnet eggs that Tara gave me for Christmas are affectionately named Squid and Squod, so there's a certain pattern being set here that I'm unwilling to diverge from.

So now Spid is sitting on my counter, basking in the extremely weak sunlight that he -- Spid is male, I say -- can leech from the window on the other side. One of my group came by this morning to say hello and chortled over him.

"He's so cute!"

...which he is. Of course, all single men are, by definition. This is what comes of birthing so many women and gay men. My coworker is jealous of my plant. I shall get her one like him tomorrow.

According to the web, he's a Dieffenbachia. Coincidentally enough, he's deaf.

I expect my mountie to arrive soon in the mail.

Strange things were afoot in San Francisco last week. For one reason or another, I failed to document them as they occurred. I've time now to correct that omission, and a manual for my ergonomically enhanced Microsoft keyboard allows me to type in the fashion that is best suited for my physical build.

It seems that the shuttle bus service provided by my company for its long-suffering workers based in San Francisco isn't a heavily utilized thing. There are reasons for that. One: there's only one chance to catch it, and if you miss it, boom, you're stuck trekking back across the city to get to the CalTrain station before it gets too late. Two: it's freaking early.

I leave the house at approximately 6:45 a.m., and while I've been accused of many things before, being a morning person has never been one of those. The few minutes between the moment my alarm clock hauls me out of bed and the moment I hit the shower or face the outdoors are filled with a cold, malevolent hatred towards all things Man and most particularly all things Job.

It doesn't last, of course. Through most of the MUNI ride to the shuttle stop, (the Church Street Safeway), I nurture a deep, sullen annoyance no doubt experienced by many an early-roused bear. Bears are allowed to express their emotions by killing and mauling white-kneed hikers. Me, I have to suffer mute anguish until I actually crawl into the shuttle, at which point I curl up in my seat and pretend to be dead for an hour.

On the third day of taking the shuttle, it finally registered on me that all three people around me were reading Dorothy Dunnett books. In all my life, I've only ever known four people to read and enjoy the Dunnett books; now there is an entire creche of outsiders devouring them every day, an entire underworld of intelligent minds I was utterly unaware of.

Intelligent minds being frightening to me, I cowered in my seat and remained mute for the rest of the week.

On Sunday, as I dashed to CalTrain to visit Tara, I peered out the window of the bus and discovered a giant blue M&M belly-butting a large grey cat.

He was a very enthusiastic M&M. Passersby and small dogs were quite entertained and alarmed, respectively; he grabbed a startled tourist's hands and danced in little circles with her before smothering her in the throes of some sucrosian passion.

It was the opening of a new store, naturally. However, I saw no reason for them to hire M&Ms and drooling cats to announce the fact.

As of today, I now have email. The proper email, that is; not the email they gave me on Friday, which wasn't configured properly and ended up eating everything and anything that was sent to the address.

The work email will not be for popular distribution. Alas. As I'm already discovering, I am about to become a hub for a great many people needing a great deal of information. Irrelevent information -- spam, notes, the like -- will only confuse the issue. That doesn't mean I love you any less. Just that I'm learning to appreciate the value of separating work from life.

Or living.

Not that I have much of the latter two, anyway.

However, that's diverting from the point. As I mentioned before, I now (finally!) have my own computer; a very nice man from ICS, the Internal Computer Systems department, came by on Friday night and dinked around with my cubicle while I was off busily mocking something. When I returned, I found a docking station, a fat little Dell laptop, and a 20+ inch screen staring me in the face.

"Oh my God," I said. "I got a laptop."

My manager, who has been muttering insistently about the fact that I should be getting a Sun station, regarded my screen with blank disapproval before disappearing again.

I got Windows NT.

"Why do I have a laptop?"

"Maybe because you'll be traveling? Internationally?" suggested the Guy Next Door. "I mean, as International Project Coordinator---"

"Oh."

We stared at the computer thoughtfully for a long time before I said, wistfully, "I wanted a Linux box."

...which was just perversity on my part, if nothing less than the truth. I wandered over to the admin's desk and made plaintive little noises along those lines, only to stop halfway through the explanation to realize: "They'll take away my computer to change it to a Linux box, won't they?"

"Yup."

The matter stopped there. Having had to wait three days to get online, five days for a computer, and then another three days to get my email properly configured, I was in no mood to risk another month and a half without access just so I could get a Linux box.

"We'll get you another computer, later," the Guy Next Door said, comfortingly.

I sniffled.