You're Doing It Wrong

I am a notary in the state of Oregon. I have been a notary since 1992 and I’m only on page 9 of my Notary Book. That means I don’t notarize very often.

You need a notary in a law office but in the case of our office, very rarely.

At the end of the summer I was looking for something in my desk and I noticed my notary stamp and I thought, “Oh hey, I haven’t notarized anything in forever. I wonder when my commission expires.”

Well, it expired 18 months earlier.

Oops. To save money Oregon no longer tells you when you expire and if you don’t renew before the expiration date, you have to do a 3 hour online training course. It was sort of a pain but I did learn a lot.

They tell you that when your commission expires you’re supposed to destroy your old stamp. Destroy it, what are you supposed to do? Get a sledgehammer?

The online training course, which is conducted by a robot voice, addresses this very question and says, “You do not have to get a sledgehammer to destroy your notary stamp.”

You can just peel of the stamp off and cut it with scissors.

Is backing-in, as in to a parking spot, a thing now? A local thing? Just a coincidence?

I’ve noticed at the park-n-ride we’re now at about half the cars backing in to their spots. I guess I can see how at the end of the day, it would be nice to just pull out to leave. But I don’t find backing out all that onerous.

On Friday I was at the market and about a third of the cars were backed-in including a car backing in as I arrived. The person driving was a 20-ish young woman who was wearing pajama pants.

Really? You’re willing to take the time and trouble to back your car in at a mostly empty parking lot, but not to put on a pair of pants?

I can’t remember if I ever told the story. This is my office but there was remodeling next door and now people use the adjacent office. The walls are made out of whatever it is that transmits sound best. The people next door have a talking job. I have a thinking job and when they are talking I can’t think. I moved my desk into the main room.

That’s not the story. The story is that at the beginning of last month I cleaned out the vendor files in my old desk and I noticed some shredded paper along the top of some of the file folders. Sort of like a mouse would do.

Except why would there be a mouse on the 10th floor of a well-maintained office building?

I assumed the shredding must have happened with opening and closing the drawer and didn’t think about it again.

Last week I was in the office by myself (because all the strange stuff happens when I’m in the office by myself) and I was sitting at my old desk. I looked up and here was Mr. Brown Mouse trotting purposefully right at me.

He saw me, and if mice have facial expressions his was, uh oh, and he turned around and slipped into the utility room. The utility room is where the copier and supplies are.

After about thirty seconds of, huh, that’s different, I went and shut the utility room door and phoned building management and 5 minutes later I had 3 people from the maintenance staff in there seeing if they could catch it.

They didn’t find anything and arranged for pest control to return the next day and they left.

Of course I have all kinds of snacks in my office so I looked through it all – nothing looked like it had been snacked on. There were no signs of mice anywhere.

The next day I remembered I had a bag of chocolates in the drawer above the shredded paper drawer and I checked and sure enough, Mr. Mouse had been having a good time in that bag. I also have an extra pair of socks in my desk because my feet get cold and he’d done a number on those, too.

Traps have been set. Hopefully when I go in on Monday they will have captured him and taken him to live on a farm out by Scappoose.

Toes inspects the pumpkins

Remember the ongoing saga of the work copier? (I can’t even bear to go back and find the URLs to link to).

Once you get the equipment they register you online so you can order supplies and service.

They automatically registered us using colleague’s name. I have no idea why they would do that.

I logged into the system and requested that they change the username to my name.

This morning I got a reply email telling me to log into the system and request that they change the username.

I’m not sure what entity is responsible for how slow my dashboard for this site is right now but someone needs to get off their butt and feed the hamsters to make the wheels turn faster.

It’s taken me at least 10 minutes to get this far and as per my entire life I’m in a big hurry to get somewhere else. So I’m not going to preview this or anything. Typos, missing words, mis-sized photos be damned.

I had an amazing wonderful weekend. Gorgeous weather. Almost all my favorite people in the whole world. Amazing scenery. Terrific food. Great adventures.

I had anticipated being furloughed this week but turns out, we are not. Not complaining! I’m glad to be working. Busy week ahead.

(BTW – the issues with the Good Ship Clusterfukatonia seem to be resolved as of today.)

I’ve had these photos sitting in here in a draft post forever. I was in Reno over a month ago.

I’m disappointed with the iPhone camera. I have a about 500 blurry Timbers photos from this season.

I worked through some of my new Photoshop stuff on these. Where is the miracle filter? I guess I’m not on that lesson yet.

My one story from Reno is when I went through security only one of my shoes came out of the scanner.

I said, “Oh no, I lost a shoe.”

The TSA lady said, “Yep. We’re keeping the other one.”

After a split second I said, “Well, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.”

And the TSA lady cracked up. She said sometimes that joke doesn’t go over big. She gave me my shoe back.

Boy, when summer finished, it didn’t mess around. It was cold and gray and drippy today. I decided to swap over to the flannel sheets and turned my closet over so the sweaters are in the front. It might be too early for that but if I jinxed us in favor of some more warm days, I’m okay with that.

Remember my Internet pants? I returned them all. First, I went to the mall store to ask the best way to handle it and my helper was terrific. She told me it was better to send them back and repurchase online because in the store they would treat it as a return, but then I’d have to pay the prices in the store and lose any discounts from my online order. She also told me that they DID change the cut of the pants and many of their customers were having trouble with the fit.

She recommended that I wear them around the house a bit because they would give and I’d probably find them more comfortable. She was half-right. They did give a bit but I think the style is a bit more snug than I am comfortable with so I returned the whole lot and am going into the cooler season with the same ancient old clothes.

Pendleton has a new updated cut of pants that I haven’t tried yet. Cross your fingers.

Speaking good customer service, I had several amazing customer service experiences with Comcast. Isn’t that an anomaly? Didn’t Comcast get voted the worst company ever by some website?

I had to call for a work related thing and they helped me out. Then I decided to trade my DVR in.

Our cable bill recently went up by $30. I looked in my file and realized I’ve had my DVR for 6 years which I believe means I’ve paid for it 2x. I figured they owed me a new one so I ripped mine out of the wall and went to the new store in Vancouver. It was not terrible.

I still had to wait about 45 minutes but they gave me a new shiny one and a remote that isn’t caked with 6 years worth of ook. I installed it and of course it didn’t work. He told me I might have to call to get it activated so I called and they needed a ton of not-handy information like the serial number which at that point was on the back of the DVR and shoved back in entertainment center. Also there were at least 4 potential serial numbers and all with teeny tiny writing. AARP needs to rally Congress to make a law that nothing can be in teeny tiny writing.

The woman I talked to was overseas and completely charming. When I whooped yay, it’s working, she said she was happy that I was happy.

But then later I had more problems and I had to call again and that person was helpful, too. And she was funny. I’d write out the whole story but, snore!

I keep meaning to write shorter posts more often but can’t seem to manage.