I realized today, as I was getting ready to go out into the world and pick up a few things, that I only had one black pocket T-shirt in my wardrobe, and a ratty, worn-thin T-shirt at that.
After the initial realization came the question: how could this happen to me?
For a good portion of my life black pocket T-shirts accounted for anywhere from 60 to 90% of the shirts I owned.
And yet, here I found myself with only one in my possession.
I decided that something had to be done about that, so along with the other things I went to Wal-Mart for, I opted to grab a pack of black pocket T-shirts.
The pocket aspect isn’t really that important now that I no longer smoke, but it does seem like as much a part of who I am (or at least who I used to be) as the blackness.
There were only two shirts in the pack, so I may need to get some more at another point, as there are altogether too many other colors that have infiltrated my closet and my dresser drawers.
I mean, I don’t even own a pair of black jeans! What the hell has happened to me?
In any case, my original intention in heading to Wal-Mart was to see if they still sold the external hard drive kit I’d seen there before.
Basically the kit is an enclosure that lets you turn an internal hard drive into an external one.
When I bought my 250 GB external drive a while back, I essentially just bought a kit and an internal hard drive, then paid the company I’d bought them from to put them together. Sure, I could have saved five bucks and did it myself, but what for?
In any case, now that I have a new Munin (the name of my secondary computer), one of the few things I wanted to salvage from the old Munin was the hard drive.
I could just install the hard drive inside of Hugin (main system) or the new Munin, and that had actually been my plan, but the thing is, I just don’t feel like mucking around with the innards of either computer.
Besides, while I’ve replaced a hard drive in the past, I’ve never added one. The process doesn’t seem too terribly complicated, but like I said, I just don’t feel like doing it.
So I decided that I’d pick up one of the kits and turn it into an external drive.
However, Wal-Mart didn’t have any of the kits, so it looks like I’ll have to order one.
While I was there, though, I did find a cheap UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply; basically a back-up batter that gives you enough power to gracefully shut down your computer or other electronic equipment in the event of a power outage), which I decided to buy for use with Munin. It doesn’t include any kind of software to manage shut-down in the event of a power outage like the UPS that Hugin is connected to, but I figure that something is better than nothing.
While I was in line to pay for my purchases I saw, as I have many times, the cheap little knife set they have on display with all of the other “impulse purchase” junk.
I actually kind of need to replace the set of knives I have, but beyond that, I often find that I don’t have a clean knife when I need one, so while these cheap knives wouldn’t be suitable replacements, they might serve as decent supplements until I finally do buy a new set.
Sure, they’re ridiculously cheap and are probably incredibly low quality, but so what? I mean, they cost less than two dollars, so while I’m obviously not going to expect them to be high-quality, I couldn’t see any way that they could be so bad that I’d find myself fretting over the two dollars that I “wasted.”
So I figured I’d grab them. I haven’t actually used them for anything yet, but they seem a little sturdier than I’d expected, so I’m sure they’ll work out just fine.
After finishing up at Wal-Mart I stopped to do some grocery shopping.
In the meat section I noticed a woman wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of a different grocery store (Wegman’s) checking out the stock and writing things down on a clipboard.
She was kind of cute, so, knowing what she was doing, I said, “Checking to see how their prices compare to yours?” She smiled sort of nervously and nodded.
I then said, “I used to have to do that when I worked for a grocery store.”
That wasn’t entirely true; it was a duty of the particular job I held, but I usually had a partner who actually performed that function.
Either way, she didn’t seem impressed by the fact that we had this in common, and went back to checking the prices.
As I said, she seemed kind of nervous when I spoke to her. If it was because she felt self-conscious about being caught “spying” on the competition, she probably would do better to not show up at Shopper’s Food Warehouse wearing a Wegman’s shirt.
I don’t think that’s why she was nervous, though. After all, most grocery stores engage in this practice and are very upfront with each other about the whole thing.
I don’t even think that she was put off by my creepiness.
She was Hispanic, so I suspect that she probably didn’t speak much English.
Unlike a lot of people who have the “If you can’t speak the language, leave the country” mentality, I don’t really fault immigrants working in the service industry for not speaking English fluently. After all, English can be pretty tricky. I should know; I spent four years studying the way the language works.
Honestly, from my perspective, most native speakers mangle the hell out of it. I mean, I’ve encountered Southerners who might as well be speaking another language entirely, and don’t even get me started about the way people back home talk.
And beyond that, the fact of the matter is that, language barriers aside, at least they have enough ambition to try to earn a living, which is more than can be said for a lot of natives. Sure, maybe you speak “the language,” or at least a variation of it, Bubba, but I don’t see you getting off your ass and cleaning floors for a living. Hell, all summer long in most stores I’ve seen nary a high school student manning a cash register.
That being said, language issues can get irritating, such as in the case of the lady who often cuts my hair and only seems to be able to say “How you want?” (though she’s unable to actually understand my response) and “Fourteen dollar.”
As far as I’m concerned, if janitors and grocery store clerks don’t speak the clearest English, it’s really not that big of a deal, but there are some jobs that do require a little more fluency.
Honestly, though, a lot of the problems that people have with understanding non-native speakers stem from laziness on the part of the listener. Basically, as soon as they hear even the slightest trace of an accent some people turn off their brains. “Oh, he’s got an accent so I must not be able to understand him.” They stop even hearing what’s being said because they assume that they won’t be able to understand it.
It’s kind of like how computer illiterates can stare at a dialog box that says, “To continue, click OK” as if it’s written in some kind of indecipherable hieroglyphics. They know that they do, in fact, want to continue, but they can’t figure out whether or not they should click “OK.” Why? Because it’s a computer, and it’s their belief that computers can’t possibly be understood by anyone but computer nerds. Therefore, even the clearest instructions will seem arcane. This is why they spend so much time staring at the keyboard in a fruitless search for the “Any” key.
Just because someone has an accent that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s so thick as to be impossible to understand.
When I was a senior in college I took a class called “The English Language.” This was a deep dive into the origins, history, and etymology of the language. The professor teaching it was very much the product of a colonial education, which is to say that he spent a good portion of his formative years studying the languages that served as the basis for English, followed by post-secondary study of the language that ended in a terminal degree.
There wasn’t anything that this man didn’t know about the English language.
However, he was from India, and despite the fact that he had lived in the US for more than thirty years, he still had an accent.
That his words were carefully and skillfully chosen, and that he had a mastery of the language that would put most anyone to shame, proved irrelevant to a good portion of the students in the class who “couldn’t understand a word.”
In any case, if I were a bolder person I would go up to some of the people working in the grocery stores and ask them how they live. After all, while grocery stores around here no doubt pay well above the minimum wage, there’s no way in hell that they pay well enough for employees to be able to afford to actually live around here.
Do they commute in from cheaper communities? Do they work second and third jobs? Do they share living costs with other a dozen roommates?
Just knowing how difficult it can be for me to make ends meet at times, I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who don’t have decent-paying jobs.
Of course, even if I were bold enough to ask them, the odds are they wouldn’t understand the question or I wouldn’t understand the answer…
On the topic of cute Hispanic girls in grocery stores, though, I stopped at a store to pick up some milk on my way home from work last night, and the girl working the register was kind of cute. While she was busy bagging my milk and ringing me up, I took the time to kind of check her out…only to have her catch me looking. She smiled, but made sure that her wedding ring was prominently displayed when she handed me my change.
I hate it when I get caught looking. Fortunately it doesn’t happen too often.
This morning I was trying very hard not to look when I stopped at the gas station to get water on my walk, as there was a girl there wearing some low-riding sweat pants and a bikini top.
I had my sunglasses on, so I wasn’t concerned about getting caught looking. The real problem was that my experience has been that girls who dress like that are way too young for me to be looking at.
This one did buy a pack of cigarettes, so that would suggest that she was at least eighteen. However, she seemed rather nervous about it, and was very relieved when the guy working the register didn’t card her.
There was another attractive young woman there, though this one clearly was a woman. For all of my attempts to not look at the girl in the bikini top, I failed to more closely scrutinize her, as she was dressed rather more conservatively in a sort of “business casual” outfit.
Anyway, that mostly covers how my day has gone so far and the major thoughts that have bounced around in my head.
Tomorrow and Wednesday I have yet another training class at HQ. This time it’s CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which, out of all of the classes I’ve taken, is the one to which I’m most looking forward.
With that class out of the way, I don’t know when I’ll be taking another, as I’ve had quite a glut of training recently.
In any case, it’s nearly time for the crazy, hot Italian chick’s show, so that will do it for this entry.
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