Weekend Assignment #291: It Didn't Work!

Catching up with the Weekend Assignment I couldn't remember last week:

Weekend Assignment: #291: Sooner or later, everyone buys, is given or otherwise acquires something that just doesn't work as expected. Tell us about that useless, broken, fraudulent, glitchy, disappointing acquisition.

Extra Credit: Did you eventually end up with something that worked?

I thought of this originally because a week ago Thursday at St. Michael's, I finally installed the new Accounting module of a program called Church Windows, replacing the old Financial module. The Accounting one is much more Windows-ish, with lots of icons to click on, very much like recent versions of QuickBooks. It had taken me months to finally get caught up enough on my work that I was able to do all the preparatory reports and backups, and finally click the menu option to make the transition.

And when it finished converting all the databases and such... I could not open Church Windows on my computer. At all.

Alicia and I struggled with the thing for maybe half an hour, rebooting our respective computers and even running a database repair routine. No change. I came in early the next morning to call Support, but they don't talk to you instantly, and I was due at work for the last day of my other (temp) job at 9 AM. I was told they couldn't possibly call back before I needed to leave, so the Parish secretary, Nancy, got stuck talking to Support for over 15 minutes before she ran out of time and had to get on with other work. It wasn't fixed.

So Monday morning I was back. I placed the Support call and waited two hours for the call back, doing web stuff in the meantime. I was on the phone with them for an hour before the techs figured out what was wrong and fixed it. (It was a firewall issue, as I'd suggested twenty minutes earlier.)

But at least it works now! I've had other things that never did what they were supposed to. A few years ago in a previous Weekend Assignment, I wrote about this thing:

This is the Igia Ultra Advanced Hair Removal System. Yeah, right. You know what it really is? A pair of electric tweezers. Seriously, that's what it is. You plug it in and it supposedly delivers heat or vibration or a low-level electrical current to the hair follicle, so that it comes out easily and doesn't grow back as soon as it would otherwise.


Can you pull hairs out with these tweezers? Absolutely. Does the electrical current do anything whatsoever to help the hair come out or discourage it from growing back? Almost certainly not. I'm not convinced the power does anything except light an LED on the side of the thing. The sad part is that I plugged it in and used it for about six months anyway. Ah, well!

And then there are the light up collars and tags I've bought for the dogs over the past year. Some of them worked for a few weeks and then died, some failed to light up right off the bat, and the most recent purchase was simply too dim to be seen in the dark from more than a foot away. Darn it! I want to be able to find my dogs easily if we're in the dog park after dusk. But so far, PetSmart has yet to stock a reliable product that does that.

What about you? Did you buy some non-compatible bit of software or hardware for your computer? A toy or gadget that broke down in the first 30 seconds? How about that gift that went back to the store the next day due to excessive lame-itude? Start thinking about these minor disasters in your life while we catch up with last week's WA responses.

Last week Weekend Assignment #290: Sick! I asked whether you get colds and flu and such very often, and how you cope with them:


Julie said...

Funny you should select this topic. I'm at home while the guys are out to lunch today. I'm nursing a 7-Up and running a low-grade temperature. It's the crud. Again. I've been fighting it off and on all fall, which is sort of typical for me. Some years are worse than others, and this seems to be a worse year. Why? It's a rainy fall. The mold counts are way out of sight. As a result my sinuses go into overdrive. I think that fighting that makes me a little more susceptible to the garden variety crud.

Florinda said...

It seems to me that I got sick more when I was younger. I remember missing school for a week at a time a few times a year, but rarely for anything extremely serious - just a combination of symptoms that made staying home a lot more comfortable. The worst illness I can recall during high school, which probably was some form of the flu - I remember fainting a couple of times, and serious intestinal distress a few days later - hit during Christmas break.

Mike said...

I don't think I get sick that often, but my frequency has increased since we've had kids. They are little bacteria and virus factories. When I do get sick, though, I get sick. Like, incapacitated sick. I don't know why, but I'm useless. I just want to curl into a ball and die. My head will hurt, my back won't let me stand up straight, basically I look like an 80 year-old man who was born without a spine.

Thanks, folks! I'll catch up with my commenting in a bit!

Here are the guidelines if you'd like to participate in the Weekend Assignment:

1. Please post your entry no later than Friday, November 6th at 6 PM. (You can also post your response in the comments thread, but a blog entry is better. )
   
2. Please mention the Weekend Assignment in your blog post, and include a link back to this entry.
3. Please come back here after you've posted, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below.
4. Visiting other participants' entries is strongly encouraged!
5. I'm always looking for topic ideas. Please email me at mavarin2 on gmail.com if there's a Weekend Assignment theme you'd like to see. If I use your idea, you will be credited as that week's "guest professor."

Karen

Weekend Assignment #290: Sick!

I had a great idea for the new Weekend Assignment, which I was writing in my head on the way home yesterday. Only I can't remember what it was now. See, this cold of mine is stirring itself to new heights of head-filling, lung-clogging obstreperousness, and my brain just isn't functioning very well right now. So let's do this instead:

Weekend Assignment: #290: Are you one of those lucky people who hardly ever get sick, or do you tend to catch every cold or flu or virus that comes along? And when you do get some infectious disease, do you stay home, or try to keep going?

Extra Credit: Are you getting a flu shot this year?

It seems to me I probably get a cold or the flu about once a year, if that; but once I get it it hits me fairly hard. This one snuck up on me. I thought I was just having allergies, which had been troubling me for a few weeks. But I hardly ever get a sore throat from allergies, let alone a cough, unless it's asthma-related coughing after exposure to cats. So when I started coughing a week and a half ago, I knew I had a cold. I probably caught it from a friend who has pneumonia. Fun, huh? Now my ears are ringing and my cough is turning into a dry hack, and I know I'm in it for the long haul. Again. For whatever reason, it always takes months for a cough to leave me completely.

But the good news is that it is a cold, not flu. There is no high fever, no body ache, no nausea, just a very light fever and dizziness from the congestion. I only missed just over a day of work; being only a temp in the last days of my assignment, I didn't want to miss any more work than I had to. So I headed back to work on Monday with my Dayquil in (frequently-washed) hand. At lunch I took a chance on putting the medicine in my purse. The child-proof cap promptly came off, and emptied the sticky orange liquid into my purse, which dripped onto the restroom counter and floor. Yuck! After that I switched to a generic of Mucinex DM. Less chance of a mess!

I say it's a low fever, but I don't actually know that, because I haven't managed to find either of our thermometers. I don't want to buy another one just to indulge my curiosity. But I know what a real fever feels like, and this ain't it.

Flu shot? I got one a few times when my mom was alive, and the autumn of 2007 when I worked for Beaudry and they had them for $25. I've sort of fallen out of the habit of getting them in the years when the supply was spotty. It was difficult to keep track of when Walgreen's or Safeway was scheduled to have a clinic.

This year, though, every Walgreen's seems to have flu shots available every day. I'm not sure that matters, though. A lot of people in Tucson have the flu already, and they're saying on the news it's H1N1, the seasonal flu not having arrived yet because of the warm Tucson weather. I don't even know where or when an H1N1 shot may be available. If there's a shortage, I doubt I qualify as a high-risk person who should get one. But I could be wrong. I am over 50, after all.

But I'll look into it. I promise! Back in college the first time around, I had a "killer" flu once. I was in my dorm room, wearing a parka I think, my electric blanket turned up to 9, and shivering. My friend Howard came in and told me his class had been canceled because his T.A. had died of the flu. Not what I wanted to hear at that moment! I also had some unspecified virus once in my Worldwide Travel days that dragged me out for about a month. I'd rather not repeat the experience.

What about you? Do you get sick frequently, hardly ever, or somewhere in between? Tell us about it in your blog, and I'll link to your entry next weekend. Instructions are at the end of this entry.

Last week for Weekend Assignment #289: Quitting Time I asked for tales of times you quit something you cared about. Turnout was light, but Florinda in particular made up for it with multiple stories:

Julie said...

This was several years after the job I didn't quit, but it was hard to let this one go because someone at this non-profit was responsible for getting me that job. (The job was the best I'd ever had until the company was sold and new owners took over.) I felt some loyalty for that. And yet, I felt I was constantly banging my head against the wall. Personalities had taken over to the point where ideas were approved or shot down because of the person presenting it rather than on the merits of the plan. I was reduced to playing that game I hate: office politics.

Florinda said...

Don't call me a quitter; I don't call myself one. Having said that, I've done my share of quitting at one thing or another. There have been times when bailing on something was the right decision - sometimes you just have to cut your losses and move on, but sometimes it's felt good and sometimes it hasn't. There have also been times when I didn't do that soon enough - I hung on longer than I should have, trying to fix something broken, only to give up the effort much further down the line. And regrets? Oh, I've certainly had more than a few...

Thanks, you two!

Here are the guidelines if you'd like to participate in the Weekend Assignment:

1. Please post your entry no later than Friday, October 30th* at 6 PM. (You can also post your response in the comments thread, but a blog entry is better. )
   
2. Please mention the Weekend Assignment in your blog post, and include a link back to this entry.
3. Please come back here after you've posted, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below.
4. Visiting other participants' entries is strongly encouraged!
5. I'm always looking for topic ideas. Please email me at mavarin2 on gmail.com if there's a Weekend Assignment theme you'd like to see. If I use your idea, you will be credited as that week's "guest professor."

I'll try to get my next entry up tomorrow. *Cough cough!*

*I see I posted this as the deadline last week. Oops! I was a week ahead of myself!

Karen

The Monsoon Returns (Cough-Cough)

The subdivided sky: Saturday 8/23/08, approx. 4 PM

The time has come to admit that I'm a little concerned about this cough.

Back in late June, I had a cold. As usually happens with me, especially in recent years, the cough has hung on long after the cold itself was gone - not constantly and horribly, but a nagging cough set off by little things like lying down, or trying to take a deep breath. As I say, this has happened before, a number of times. I've even been to my doctor on past occasions of it. As I recall, she listened to my chest, heard very little, wrote down the word "bronchitis" and gave me a prescription for an albuterol inhaler. Which didn't help.

Two things are different this time:

1. The cough is getting worse. I drive John crazy, coughing in the car, coughing into my pillow, coughing pretty much anywhere. I'm not going to try your patience with gross details, but I feel an asthmatic tightness in my chest pretty much all the time now. A good cough helps a little, briefly, but it's clearly not going away on its own. I'm coughing more and more, not less and less.

2. I have no health insurance. I'm a temp. If I temp for long enough on a continual basis, I'll have health insurance through the temp agency. I should check the envelopes they keep sending me, to see whether I've reached that point - but I doubt it.

I have a history of asthma, going all the way back to infancy; but normally as an adult it's only hit me when I was around certain allergens (e.g. cats), attempting aerobic exercise, or exerting myself in the summer heat (100+ degrees). But now I'm having problems just sitting in an air conditioned room, typing. I've been taking the common expectorant Guaifenesin, which is found in basically all cough medicine. So far it doesn't seem to help me clear things out much. John thinks I should be taking fish oil capsules at mealtimes, and maybe he's right.

Our old friend, the ribbon of clouds on the Catalinas

I think the return of the monsoon, much as I love it, is exacerbating things slightly. Even John can smell the mold as we approach the river on the way to work. But I do love this time of year. That photo at the top of this entry comes from late Saturday afternoon, as I drove back from photographing Glenn Stone and the wine bottle. The sky was dark with rain or impending rain to the northeast and southeast. But dead east, there was a patch of brightness and fluffy white clouds. As I arrived at El Taco Tote on Wilmot, it started to rain.

Odd thing about El Taco Tote, a regional chain of Mexican restaurants: that location closed months ago. It was replaced by a restaurant with a rather strange menu, Hawaiian plate meals I think they were called. This was basically Polynesian barbecue plus macaroni salad. Apparently this polyglot cuisine is common in Hawaii, but I'd never heard of it. It was okay, but I could have told them it wouldn't go over well in Tucson. And now El Taco Tote is back, in the same location they left early this year. So why did they shut down, and what brought them back? Not that I'm complaining! They're rather good.


One last shot before I go back to bed. John spotted this on Speedway Blvd tonight, and turned around so I could take a picture to go with the ones from the weekend. What can I say? The man loves me.

Karen

A Vital Question

What I want to know is this: is there such a thing as a cough medicine that would actually enable me to stop coughing between now and 6 AM? 'Cause I sure haven't found one.

And oh, second question, where the heck did John put the very expensive cough medicine that I bought tonight anyway?

Oh, never mind. It was still in the black canvas shopping bag.

I can't decide which I hate more, the completely unstoppable sniffle of a serious allergy attack or the beginning of a cold (or some combination thereof), or a completely unstoppable cough when I'm trying to sleep, combined with that nice hit of asthma that makes walking around in hundred degree weather just a little painful.

Still, there's no point in ranting on and on about it, not when I can go take the cough medicine and at least try to sleep! Wish me luck!

Karen