Messages from abroad, not massages from a broad

No.  I’ll start off with that statement.  It wasn’t that bad.  It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as horrible as people were making it out to be.  I guess part of it was my own doing.  I was scaring myself.  I had created this image of a tiny little town with dirt roads, rednecks and tumbleweed.  It was far from that though, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it was a decent town with lots of decent people.  Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of the stereotypical Southern bumpkins here, but almost all of them were very cordial.  What was the composition of the town?  Lexington is quite a big city.  I was driving through and I noticed a giant liquor store called Liquor
Barn.  It was so big, I had to take a picture of it.  Coincidentally, I later found out that the town I was heading to, Somerset, was a dry town.  That means it didn’t sell alcohol there.  Lame.  Hmmm… I think I saw one other Asian (and she might have been some old guy’s caretaker or maybe a girlfriend <shiver>) and about six African Americans out of the hundreds of people that I encountered here.  I guess that didn’t really surprise me.

This whole week has been a mental drain and it’s only been four days.  I’ve been going to bed early and getting about 7 hours of sleep each night and I still feel like I’ve been pulling all-nighters.  You should see me struggling to type this even.  Maybe it’s all the pizza and wings that I ate for dinner tonight.  That kicked my ass too.  I’m just exhausted.  It’s been crazy busy and I feel like I’m all alone at work.  It’s too much to get into right now, but I think I’ve been grumbling a lot more about the job more than I have the past few months.  ARrrgghhhh!  I hate working 11 hour days.  I’ve been reflecting on things a lot lately.  It’s not like the work has diminished or gotten easier.  Processes haven’t improved.  Things have somehow gotten more convoluted and the people supporting me have disappeared.  To make things worse I’ve been thrust into a role where responsibility and load have increased dramatically, but all I’m getting out of it is an influx of gray hairs.  I’m gonna start looking like Allan soon.  :)  Anyway, I’m just griping because I’m tired and exhausted.  I should be happier cause I’m going to be back in Vancouver for a two week stint. 

Ha.  Ok.  Enough of that.  I got way off track.  I was working at a call-centre this week.  It was in the middle of no where.  Literally.  If i wanted to get food, I had to drive 20-30 minutes away to get a bite.  This contributed to my four straight days without lunch and four straight late dinners.  The place was very nondescript.  There was no address on the building and no company name.  Even when I got into the door, there was nothing that showed me that I had arrived at the right place.  I just guessed that it was the building cause there was only one other one to choose from on that road.  The problem with this place was that it was infested with flies.  Fucking flies everywhere.  It was like there was cow dung smeared on the furniture.  They were everywhere.  And crickets.  Lots of fucking crickets.  By the end of today, I thought it was getting really annoying and a little disgusting.  Apparently they fired their cleaning crew last night.  I don’t blame them.  They are useless.

The call centre sure knew how to give their employees some incentive.  They whipped out two HDTV flatscreens and based on some metrics, two of them could take them home.  Pretty cool.  One of the managers there told me that they also had about 20 IPOD Nanos to give away too.  Pretty impressive.  I wonder why my company isn’t able to provide those kind of incentives…  extra work isn’t much of an incentive.  Ha! There I go again.. bitch bitch bitch!

Southern food sucks.  I was expecting some decent food here.  Not the case.  The coolest thing I saw was a Lee’s Chicken restaurant.  I hadn’t seen one of these since
high school.  My first dinner here, I went to Bob Evans.  That place is terrible.  I wanna say disgusting, so I will.  It was disgusting.  I ordered ribs.  I think there was more sauce on the plate than there was pork.  It came with these weird sweet corn griddle cakes.  Picture little pancakes with corn in the batter and garnished with dried green onions.  Don’t I paint a pretty picture?  Another night, the account manager was going to take me out for dinner.  We went to some place for pizza.  That’s when I parked my car and opened the door, only to hit some guy that was backing into the spot next to me.  He was definitely one of those badnews redneck kind of guys: scrawny, a hick-tache with a white wife beater and tattoos all over the place.  All I heard was ‘ya better get that fucking door off my truck’.  I just said sorry and walked away.  I didn’t really wanna stick around and have the guy build up his anger and take it out on me.  Later, I was a little miffed because I had just parked, grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and opened the door.  He must have seen that I had just parked so screw him for not approaching the spot with caution or letting me get out first.  Anyway, the guy ended up going to the same pizza place as us, and the account manager said ‘I don’t like the smoke. Let’s go some where else’.  I wonder if it was the smoke there or the type of people that were at the establishment.  They were all a little rough around the edges and a lot like the guy in the pickup truck.  We ended up eating at a steakhouse in the same complex.  The food kinda sucked there too.  My broccoli couldn’t have been more dry and salty.  The mashed potatoes had a huge ice cream size scoop of fluorescent yellow butter on top of it.  It was almost as big as the scoop of mashed potatoes.  That’s how gross it was.  So, what do I think of the food overall?  Two big thumbs down!!

I’m a little surprised that the chambermaid keeps leaving me new bars of soap each day even though I’m still using the same bar I started with.  I now have 4 unopened bars of soap on my counter asking me to take them.  The worse part is that the soap sucks so I don’t even really want them.  Why doesn’t she leave me tissue boxes or something I could really use.

Alright.  I’m gonna wrap this up.  I’ve rambled on way too much.  See ya’ll back in Vancouver.  Can you hear my new accent?

Delays, cancellations, delays, re-booking, delays, delays, delays, delays.  This is what actually happened to me.  This stupid flight should have ended hours ago.

Let’s put this into perspective.  Washington, DC to Lexington, KY is about 550 miles apart from one another.  Google Maps, calculates that it would take approximately 8.5 hrs to drive there.  A direct flight would probably be about 2 hours.  My first flight alone was delayed 2.5 hours.  Then my connecting flight was outright canceled.  United.com sent me a voice message to tell me that the delays affected my itinerary and re-scheduled my connecting flight to one the next morning at 730am.  So I waited 2 hours in the customer service line to see if they would hook me up with some accommodations and food.  It turns out, since my flights were delayed/canceled due to mother nature’s wrath, I didn’t qualify for any of those perks.  But the guy was able to get me onto an earlier flight.  Problem solved I thought.  I thought wrong.  It was supposed to leave at 7:44pm.  At the time I was typing this, it was pushed back 4 times, to where it currently states a departure of 10:26.  I’ve been in an airport for 15 hours now. 

I think we’re about to board soon. The lady at the desk is telling us that we have to walk outside, in the pissing rain, to the little plane.  Effing great!  I’m gonna wrap up this little update for now.  I hope they didn’t lose my luggage…… TTYL!

**UPDATE**

Well, I’m not surprised, they did lose my luggage!  Sweet!  I am so lucky.  3 am and I’m finally in Kentucky.  That goodness Mark lives here.  Thanks for letting me stay the night at your place Mark!  I get to drive around in a Chevy Equinox.  It’s a lot better than I thought it would be.  It’s actually a pretty nice drive.  Things are getting better I think.  Then again, could it get any worse?

Oh, I just opened the care pouch that United gave me when I filed my lost luggage papers.  It’s almost all H20 stuff.   Wow.  Good shit.  They win some points back for that. 

I’m headed to Somerset, Kentucky tomorrow morning.  I don’t really want to pass judgment before I’ve landed, but the place sounds like it’s in the middle of nowhere.  I actually land in Lexington, Kentucky, and according to Google Maps, Somerset is a 2 hr drive away.  That frickin blows.  I’m convinced that I’ll be one of a dozen Chinese guys in the whole town.  I get a feeling that it’ll be one of those places where everyone will walk past me on the street and turn around and stare at me.  Maybe a couple of them will curse me out and call me a jap/chink. Ha!  We’ll see.  Let’s put it this way, when I tell everyone where I’m going, they roll their eyes and they tell me ‘Sorry to hear that’.  At least there will probably be some good food there.  I’m expecting that their BBQ will be decent.

Today, I woke up early to get my Maryland driver’s license.  I wanted some official ID that stated my address here, so I figured I’d exchange my BC

driver’s license.  Plus I always hated the BC driver’s license.  To this day, I contend that the background image is the ugliest picture in the world.  It’s not representative of Beautiful BC at all.  Anyway, I was reading up on the exchange requirements on the www and for out-of-country transitions, I was supposed to take a 3-hour drug and alcohol seminar as well as take a knowledge and driver’s skills test.  But my buddy Gurp had his exchanged last weekend and he said it was pretty straight forward and I guess the Maryland Vehicle Association (MVA) was too lazy to enforce the seminar and knowledge test.  Lucky for me.  I’ll give them credit for a slick operation though.  There must have been 200 people in the MVA office, and I was only there for an hour, plus I walked out of there with my new identification.  It was even warm.  I knew they were supposed to take away my BC ID, and they did, but some how, Gurp managed to keep his.  He is one lucky bastard.  He is luckier than me.  I shit you not.  He pays rent and gets his cheques returned to him cause his rental place is full of idiots.  This didn’t happen once.  This happened twice!!  He’s had a slew of other fortunate encounters, but I won’t get into any more of it.

Last week, I went to Melissa and Victor’s wedding.  It was a pretty good day and I had a great time.  One of the memorable moments was when Melissa was about to walk down the aisle.  She was standing at the back of the church with her parents, waiting at the door for the music or the right moment.  Everyone was looking at her and there were some late comers.  The door opened behind Melissa and in walked this woman with the shortest little dress.  It was awesome.  My eyes quickly diverted off of Melissa (sorry Mel!) and onto the mystery girl.  I looked around and I wasn’t the only one.  Anyway, she wore that dress all day and to the reception too.  Woohoo!  The rest of the wedding was quite fun.  There was even a garter and bouquet toss.  I don’t even remember when the last time someone did that.  Good times.  I have a couple more weddings to attend this year. 

There’s not much else going on here other than the shit for work.  It’s a bit of a mess, but with time, I’m sure it’ll be fine.  Too bad busy season is kicking into high gear, and that might be the biggest obstacle to overcome.  I’ll wrap up with some completely random things:

• Check envelopes before you throw them out.  I threw away an envelope and I didn’t realize my birth certificate was in it.  It wasn’t until a few hours later when I walked past the garbage can and noticed that the card had slipped into the clear address window.  Fuck, that was stupid AND a mighty close call!
• We were eating lunch at Chipotles when Brant walked in and was in line waiting for food.  We exchanged baseball signals and fooled around with various forms of bullshit sign language from across the room.  I went back to eating and that’s when I noticed that the table next to us was also signing, but for real.  I guess one of them was mute.  I felt like a donkey’s ass.
• Go see Superbad.  It’s hilarious!  Despite it being a Friday night, I went to watch the late show and it was totally worth it! I didn’t even fall asleep.
• I tried to sign up for some kind of health insurance, but maybe I didn’t fill out the form properly, because my application was declined.  No reason was given.  WTF?!?  I’m supposedly less than 3 months away from being allowed to sign up again under the policy with work.  We’ll see how that goes.
• My 2 week vacation in Vancouver at the end of the month has turned into a 50/50 work/vacation trip.  The good thing is that I get to work from Vancouver and save some vacation days, the bad thing is that I am working.  This is probably a good thing since I would have been too stressed out about work if I left it untouched for two weeks.  This means that I might actually come home for Christmas too.  Although I’m entertaining the idea of going to NY.  Although that really depends on the following…
• Should I go to Toronto or NY for Thanksgiving?  It’s a four-day long weekend, so it’s a perfect stretch for a quick trip to one of those places.  Give me some feedback peeps!

Alright, that’s all for now.  Wish me luck in Hicksville!

I crumbled on Monday and ordered an HD-DVD drive for my XBOX 360.  A week earlier, I borrowed a friend’s drive to check it out and see how big a difference it  made compared to DVDs.  There’s nothing like it.  This totally reminded me of the time when DVD players came out.  Probably around 8 years ago when they were $1000, I bought one from Futureshop, with one purpose, to test it out and return it.  My biggest fear was that they wouldn’t let me return it, but that wasn’t gonna stop me.  So that’s exactly what I did.  I bought one for $1000 and rented a couple DVDs.  It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen at the time.  I returned it a week later and from that point on, I pretty much stopped buying VHS.  HD-DVD is just as revolutionary as the DVD.  So on August 1st, bestbuy.com had a price drop AND a sale.  None of the nearby stores had any in stock so I had them send me one from their warehouse.  Four days later, it showed up at the office.  I still love getting packages there.  AJ, one of the Facilities guys, says that it’s my own little mail room because I get a tonne of mail there.  Later that night, I brought it home and hooked it up, and boy was I disappointed.  It was broken!  The stupid tray wouldn’t open unless you titled it forward and then when you closed, it wouldn’t close properly.  If you shook it around you could hear pieces rattling around inside.  What a pisser that was. 

So the next plan was to exchange it at a store or return it through mail and wait for them to send me another one.  To avoid the wait time and the possibility of them sending me another damaged drive, I decided to hunt one down at a local store.  Like before, there weren’t any available in the closest 6-7 stores.  I did find a couple stores in Virginia that had stock and neither were near a Metro train station.  I didn’t have anything else better to do so I dragged Anand out on Saturday to Potomac Yards Center (PYC) to exchange my drive.  I did some research on how to get there and it seemed rather straight forward.  Ride the train to Pentagon City and catch the 9A bus to PYC.  Well, this all looked and sounded fine in my head, but I am a public transit moron because it was all wrong.  First of all, Pentagon City station is not the same as Pentagon station.  So not only did we get off at the wrong station, we compounded the problem by standing at a bus stop, that wasn’t really a bus stop.  It looked like a bus stop and there were plenty of people waiting for buses, but not transit buses, shuttle buses.  After 35 minutes in the sun, we figured out that we were in the wrong place.   I am an idiot.  We got back on the train and got off the right train station and found the proper bus station.  We were looking for the 9A and it was supposed to show up every 30 min on the hour.  However, the station had an LED sign scrolling an RSS feed of the upcoming buses.  It said that there weren’t any 9A buses for 50 min.  Wow, this was really turning into a gong show.  I was a little bit in disbelief because it didn’t seem right, even for a weekend.   We saw about a dozen buses come up the hill and every time one approached us, we would say ‘Please let this be the 9A. PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!’  A 9A showed up 15 minutes later, but the douche bag was going on break or switching to another route.  I was ready to give up and snag a cab, but we were in such a remote location, there weren’t any cabs near by either.  Well, after an additional 10 minutes, one showed up.  Woohoo!!  To make things a little better, the bus ride was free.  It turns out that in Virginia, when the weather gets to hot, they try to encourage people to leave their cars at home and take a bus, so they offer free bus rides.  Pretty cool.  So after 2 hours from the time I left home, I finally walked into Best Buy at PYC. 

The roller coaster ride continued.  They said I couldn’t exchange purchases made from their website.  I could only return it.  WTF?!?  So it wasn’t that big a deal because they would sell me another one for the same price that I purchased it online.  I would just return the broken one and my funds would show up on my credit card later this week.  The problem now, was that their computer system to the bestbuy.com site was down and they couldn’t process the return.  Fuck!!!  How much shit can go wrong in one afternoon?  To ease the pain, it was tax free weekend, so when I re-bought the drive, I saved $8+.  It worked out in the end because Anand and I killed some time by eating and visiting Target.  I bought a door mirror for $6.  I don’t know how I was able to survive without a mirror for 7 months.  Anyway, by the time we were done, Best Buy had their system back up and I was able to process a refund.  So the ordeal was over and six hours later, I was home watching movies in HD.  Oh yeah, plus I kept the UPC from the broken drive.  They have a promo running now in the US; if you buy an HD-DVD drive you can mail away for 5 free movies out of a selection of 15.  I intend on sending it out
for an additional 5 free HD movies.  So that’s 10 free movies coming my way.  Anyway, I suggest that everyone get one or even a PS3 for Blue-Ray.  It’s awesome!

On Friday night, we went out to watch The Simpsons Movie.  I must be getting old because I have a hell of a time watching movies on work days.  I think getting up early really takes a lot out of me.  I can feel perfectly fine throughout the day, but as soon as those lights turn out, my eyelids feel like dead weights.  I only missed about 1/3 of the movie I think.  The chick next to me and in front of me were laughing hysterically throughout the movie.  I wanted to lean over and tell her that ‘it wasn’t that funny’.  By coincidence, the Simpsons Movie screener was made available for download.  I burned it onto disc and tried to watch it again this morning, and I got 30 minutes into it when I fell asleep AGAIN!  I guess it’s not that entertaining after all.  I suppose I’m not that old either.  Now that I think about it, I managed to sit through all of Harry Potter and that was on a Monday, not to mention a way longer movie too.

To wrap things up, I managed to eat Chinese food for dinner this week.  We went to some place in Chinatown called Full Kee.  It wasn’t too bad and I’m looking forward to trying some other dishes there in the future.  Alex Ku wanted to order weird shit that not everyone would enjoy.  I saved Anand and Nakisa from eating sea cucumber, frogs, and some other weird shit that he wanted.  Anyway, til next time.  I’m out!