I was actually out the door when I remembered that one thing had happened yesterday that had annoyed me: while I was gone, that hard drive enclosure kit I ordered weeks ago was finally delivered, but I wasn’t home to sign for it, so it had gone to the office, which was closed by the time I got home.
Naturally my impatience kicked in, and, as I was meeting Kathleen for lunch at 11:30, I wanted to have time to put it together and make sure it worked, so I opted to not go for a walk once again.
I headed over to the office, where I learned that that the fact that they’ll most likely be losing their jobs after the conversion to condos goes through, the people working in the office don’t even bother pretending to care.
In the past when I’ve gone over to pick up a package, one of the employees would go to where they keep the packages and get it for me.
When I told her I had a package to pick up, the girl working said, “You can just grab it yourself. They’re all in that closet.”
The problem wasn’t so much that I had to go in and sift through all of the packages in there, though that was a bit of a pain, it was that, in all likelihood the girl had no idea who I was, so I could have very easily walked off with other people’s packages as well.
In any case, once I got my package and got back to the apartment I opened up the kit and got started.
In addition to the 40 GB hard drive from my old computer that I’d bought the kit for, I had a couple of much older hard drives that I wanted to test out with the kit to see if I could recover some of the files.
As I said, they’re much older drives, so it was no surprise that they didn’t work. In fact, when I plugged them into the computer it didn’t even notice that a device had been connected to it.
I didn’t have that problem once I threw the 40 GB drive in, though.
Nope, once I did that, I had an entirely different problem.
Basically, the computer recognized that a device had been connected; it just couldn’t communicate with it.
I messed around with it a little bit, but the same thing happened every time.
Eventually I tried connected the power and the USB/IDE controller to the drive without actually putting it into the enclosure, and suddenly it worked.
While I had it working I decided to move the files that I wanted to preserve onto the internal drive. Everything was going fine until it just spontaneously crapped out in the middle of transferring the files.
Before just giving up completely, I put it all together one last time, making sure that all of the connections were tight and that I’d carefully slid the drive into the enclosure.
That, somehow, seemed to do the trick.
Of course, I ran into one problem in that the hard drive had been set up with three partitions, so my computer was recognizing it as three separate drives.
Eventually I remembered that I had PartitionMagic installed on one of the partitions, so I merged the three back into one, then formatted the drive.
I’m not sure what I’m going to use the drive for. Just extra storage, I guess.
After that was over I picked up Kathleen and we went to this bagel/sandwich place and had lunch.
It’s actually been a while since I’d seen her, as she’d been gone on a business trip, which she followed up with a trip home to visit her mom.
Her mom actually lives in a town called Beaver, which, quite naturally, has led to a lot of off-color comments whenever Kathleen mentions the place.
While she was there this time, she was thoughtful enough to actually pick me up a little (stuffed) beaver from Beaver, which she gave me today.
The place we ate at is known by many people as “Karate Bagels,” thanks to an unfortunate (and since corrected) placement of signage for it and the karate school located right next to the bagel place.
I got a sandwich from there once before, at the risk of my own life. The woman working the counter had been extremely unhappy with me for having the nerve to actually walk in and order something. I thought she was going to come out from beyond the counter and attack me.
I remember that after she’d grudgingly accepted my order I noticed another sandwich on the menu that looked better than what I’d ordered, but even though she hadn’t started making my sandwich yet, I didn’t dare change my order for fear of getting shot.
Today was the first time I risked going back.
The sandwich I’d considered changing my order to that time had been called “The Heart Attack.” Apparently out of some kind of sensitivity to people with cardiovascular problems, they’ve changed the name of the sandwich to “The Heart Artichoke,” which makes no sense whatsoever (they also got rid of Pastrami as one of the ingredients), considering that the sandwich doesn’t involve artichokes in any fashion whatsoever.
Still, it was okay, even if it didn’t cause my heart seize up.
And of course, this time I feel quite so much like my life was in any immediate danger from any of the employees.
Yesterday when I was eating lunch at McDonald’s, I was fortunate enough to hear a pleasant conversation going on between two old men discussing how the victims of the recent hurricanes don’t deserve any help.
I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion, but they seemed to have some sort of elaborate system of justifying their opposition to charitable works of any kind, as, in some fashion, nobody actually needs charity. Even if people do need it, though, they don’t deserve it, as they have deliberately chosen to become charity cases.
From what I could gather, they didn’t necessarily believe that the people of New Orleans “asked for it,” but if people are gullible enough to waste money trying to help them, their reward will be seeing all of the money they give being wasted on booze.
Yes, that’s right; every person displaced by Katrina and Rita will spend any and all money received on booze.
They went on to discuss how every homeless person in the world is simply lazy and has chosen to drop out of society. Every last one.
They could assert this because they heard from someone who knows someone who heard from someone else who had a dream that that the homeless are all homeless by choice.
They continued talking about how helping your fellow man is for suckers, and felt very proud of themselves for not being foolish enough to ever try to help anyone.
…
This is why I hate people. They construct these elaborate justifications, often hinging entirely on something “they heard from a friend of a friend” or from some conservative commentator who tells them what they want to hear, and suddenly it becomes okay to not care about what happens to other people.
It becomes even easier if the people who need help are different in some fashion: different religion, different color, different accent.
If they just didn’t care and owned up to the fact that they don’t care, rather than concocting some half-assed rationalization for not caring, I could almost respect that.
At least it would be honest.
But this crap is just disgusting.
Then again, I suppose that the basis for a lot of this is a feeling of powerlessness, that there’s nothing that can be done, which is difficult to accept, so it’s easier to believe that nothing should be done.
Or maybe that’s just a way of justifying the fact that people are rotten.
I have no doubt that there are people who are homeless by choice. I know for a fact that there are people who scam the welfare system. There probably are victims of Katrina and Rita who will blow their money on booze.
But there are also people who are mentally ill who, don’t have the capacity to make choices, who have been dumped out on the street because there’s no money to provide them the care they need. There are women who have been abandoned by their abusive husbands and can’t feed their children. There are people who lost their goddamn homes.
But people do this all the time (I’m doing it right now, in fact); they see something once or twice and suddenly it becomes a broad trend.
They see someone working the system, so that means that everyone is working the system.
It is, after all, how stereotypes are born.
And yeah, as I said, I do this, too, though I go a little broader and just conclude that human beings of all creeds and colors suck.
After all, I began painting this picture of humanity in broad strokes using these two old farts, who themselves ought to be old enough to know better, as models.
I, however, am willing to at least entertain the notion that there might be a handful of worthwhile people out there.
There was a kind of irony to be found in the fact that, as I watched them struggle to figure out how the McDonald’s “Monopoly” game works, and, in fact, were unable to even find their game pieces, I considered what miserable specimens of humanity these two codgers were, and how they’d just gotten through concluding that no one deserves help, I was charitable enough to explain it to them.
To stick to their principles they should have greeted my assistance with contempt rather than gratitude…
Ah well, that people suck is hardly a new sentiment coming from me.
My post-lunch day was pretty uneventful. Shortly after I got home I decided that I would finally go for a walk, so I accomplished that much, at least.
Yesterday at the Smithsonian I got to see the Hope Diamond. I took a picture of it with my PDA, but as you can see, it didn’t turn out very well:
That’s hardly surprising, though; hope almost never turns out very well for me…
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