Best of 2004

Jan­u­ary

Duel­ing Car Washes

Mon­day the 19th

On the way home from gro­cery shop­ping yes­ter­day after­noon I decided it was time to wash the car. We had just drove home from Hilton Head in the rain that morn­ing and the car looked ugly.

Just a cou­ple of days before I bought the new Miata, our neigh­bors got them­selves a new “car” too (the word car is in quotes because they bought a Dodge Durango.) When we pulled into our dri­ve­way, Omar was in his, wash­ing the Durango. He had his bucket and sprayer and was going to town.

I parked the car in the dri­ve­way and we unloaded the trunk of gro­ceries. I came in and swapped a load of clothes (tak­ing one out of the dryer, putting the one from the washer into the dryer and reload­ing the washer.) I then went back out­side with my bucket and sponges to wash our car. By now Omar has been at it at least 15 min­utes and I didn’t know how far along he was, but as I filled the bucket with water I hollered over say­ing, “I bet I’m fin­ished before you are.”

I washed the Miata from top to bot­tom, stem to stern. I rinsed it off a sec­ond time with a low pres­sure stream to aid in sheet­ing the water. I dried the car. I shook out the mats. I wiped off the inte­rior dust with a damp towel. I washed the win­dows inside and out with Windex. Fin­ished, I pulled the car into the garage. When I walked back out to get the bucket and reel up the hose, Omar was just fin­ish­ing up wash­ing the back of the vehi­cle, all he could do was shake his head and smile.

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Feb­ru­ary

Is That A Snack? Gonna Share?

Thurs­day the 12th

Every morn­ing for nearly all our mar­ried life, my wife packs up my lunch for me. It usu­ally con­sists of a fresh made sand­wich, a soda, some cook­ies in a plas­tic sand­wich bag, a few ounces of car­rots in a sand­wich bag, half an apple cut up in slices in a sand­wich bag, some raisins or maybe grapes in a plas­tic sand­wich bag and a snack pud­ding. I kind of graze all day, grab­bing a plas­tic sand­wich bag of some­thing every cou­ple of hours. I’m a lucky guy.

Donna recently changed purses, replac­ing an old one with some­thing a lit­tle smaller. She used to keep all her make-up stuff in a see-thru case on one side of the old purse for easy access. Donna would take it out and “fix her face” as I drove us to work each day. The see-thru thing was a lit­tle too big for the new purse and not want­ing to lose the abil­ity to see what she had, Donna put the make-up stuff in a plas­tic sand­wich bag. Now, each morn­ing on the com­mute when she pulls out that sand­wich bag, I, hav­ing been con­di­tioned like Pavlov’s dog from years of snack­ing from those same types of bags, don’t think lip­stick, but cook­ies, etc. I don’t have to see it, just hear­ing that faint rustling sound and I won­der if she will share some of that food with me.

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March

Paint­ing The Town Gar­net Red

Mon­day the 29th

I bought a new car in Novem­ber. They sent me a sur­vey to fill out rat­ing my expe­ri­ence with the pur­chase. I thought about throw­ing it out, I now swear that thought is true, but Mazda thinks I filled it out. As a way of thank­ing me they sent me a bot­tle of touch-up paint. That was the end of Jan­u­ary. About a week later I got a sec­ond bot­tle, it was pack­aged dif­fer­ently and included a cou­ple of other items, but the main con­tents was a bot­tle of touch-up paint. This last Sat­ur­day, a famil­iar enve­lope arrived in the mail, that’s right, another bot­tle of touch-up paint. So Sun­day I emailed them:

From: “Brian Bog­a­r­dus”
To:
Sent: Sun­day, March 28, 2004 10:35 AM
Sub­ject: Stop it. You are creep­ing me out.

Dear Mr. Cus­tomer Assistance,

Novem­ber 24, 2003 — Pur­chase a new 2003 Gar­net Red Miata

Jan­u­ary 28, 2004 — Receive a bot­tle touch-up paint as a thank you for fill­ing out a sur­vey I swear I threw in the trash, but must have completed.

Feb­ru­ary 7, 2004 — Receive a sec­ond bot­tle of touch-up paint inside a minia­ture steer­ing wheel replica along with some other things, includ­ing a let­ter that wel­comes me to the “Emo­tion of Motion.”

March 27, 2004 — Receive a third bot­tle of touch-up paint with what looks like the exact same let­ter as accom­pa­nied the first bottle.

Thanks for the first bot­tle as I already have had a use for it, but stop already, one more bot­tle and I’ll be able to paint my wife’s Civic Gar­net Red to match the Miata. If you feel a fur­ther need to thank me for buy­ing your prod­uct a $10 gas card or sim­i­lar would be nice to off­set the cost of the required pre­mium fuel.

Sin­cerely,
Brian Bog­a­r­dus

Today I got a reply:

From: “Cus­tomerAs­sis­tance”
To: “Brian Bog­a­r­dus”
Sent: Mon­day, March 29, 2004 04:33 PM
Sub­ject: Re: Stop it. You are creep­ing me out. (KMM203077V95587L0KM)

Dear Brian,

Thank you for con­tact­ing Mazda North Amer­i­can Oper­a­tions. I appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­nity to respond to you.

Thanks for alert­ing us to the addi­tional, unin­ten­tional mail­ings that you received. I have for­warded your com­ments to our Mar­ket­ing con­tacts to ensure that no fur­ther wel­come pack­ages are sent.

Again, thank you for con­tact­ing Mazda. It has been my plea­sure to assist you. Please feel free to reply to this mes­sage with any fur­ther ques­tions or comments.

Please take a moment to give us your opin­ion about our e-mail ser­vice. Click the link below to com­plete a brief, online survey.

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?T8SY3YKAT109GH3CPK39V6

Regards,

William Zdan
Spe­cial­ist, Cus­tomer Assis­tance E-Business

Oh no you don’t, fill­ing out a sur­vey is what got me nto this mess to begin with…

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April

Lemon­ade

Wednes­day the 7th

On the way home this after­noon when we got to the exit of the park­ing lot at work, Donna said, “Go left.” As we nor­mally go right, that phrase meant, let’s take the long way home. This is a great stress reliever for both of us, I like the drive and Donna likes the ride.

I pro­ceeded to wind my way home via some of our usual back roads. It was a warm after­noon, but it felt good to be out dri­ving around. The dog­woods are bloom­ing along with the aza­leas and every­thing that is not flow­er­ing is turn­ing green. Even though there were a few more cars on our route than usual they didn’t dimin­ish our enjoy­ment. About 3 miles from home on a rel­a­tively lightly traf­ficed road we passed a lit­tle girl sell­ing lemon­ade along the side of the road. We looked at her as she looked at us as we went by.

It is spring break for the local schools this week and both Donna and I envi­sioned this lit­tle girl telling her mom she was bored and her mom say­ing, “Why don’t you go sell lemon­ade out in front of the house,” in an effort to keep her enter­tained and get her out of mom’s hair.

We got about 200 yards down the road and Donna said, “Do you have any­thing smaller than that ten?” I pulled out my wal­let and sure enough there was a sin­gle in there too. We turned around in a dri­ve­way a lit­tle fur­ther along and headed back. The lemon­ade was 50 cents a glass, so we bought two. We drank it right there at the side of the road and chat­ted with her a bit. It was from a mix and not too cold, but it did hit spot. When fin­ished we turned around in her dri­ve­way and drove off with a wave and toot of the horn.

I think we kind of made her day, I know she made ours.

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May

3 Laws of Humanity

Wednes­day the 26th

I’ve always been a lover of sci-fi. Grow­ing up I had a few favorite authors and one of them was Isaac Asi­mov. I was eagerly await­ing this summer’s release of a movie based on his robot sto­ries, I Robot. After see­ing the first trailer with it’s The Who sound­track and it’s Apple-likeness (I won­der how much they had to pay Steve Jobs for that?) I was stoked. But the newer ones aimed at draw­ing in the action crowd seem so against type from my mem­o­ries of Asimov’s books/stories that maybe I won’t enjoy the flick at all. That may just be me though, as from all the trail­ers the movie looks awesome.

All this got me think­ing about those 3 Laws of Robot­ics the Asi­mov wrote way back when. Maybe, just maybe, this world would be a lot bet­ter place if we just changed the word robot in them to human being:
1) A human being may not injure a human being or, through inac­tion, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A human being must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would con­flict with the First Law.
3) A human being must pro­tect its own exis­tence as long as such pro­tec­tion does not con­flict with the First or Sec­ond Law.

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June

Excit­ing Day At Work Today

Mon­day the 21st

I got my new elec­tric pen­cil sharp­ener. This puppy’s got a cord, no more wimpy, bat­tery oper­ated, hold it just so, slow poke. This thing wil make dust of a full size pen­cil in just under 2 min­utes. I know, I timed it.

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July

Of All The Gin Joints…

Sat­ur­day the 3rd

…in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

The Master’s Miata Club was “host­ing” a cruise in at the Sno Cap Drive-In in North Augusta tonight. We had about 8 of our cars and a smat­ter­ing of other cars in atten­dance. About halfway through the evening, in pulled a blue Miata that wasn’t a club mem­ber. Hey, wait a minute, that car looks famil­iar. Sure enough, it was Donna and my old car. I went over and said hello to the new owner Shan­non Vick and her son. She and he were in North Augusta and he sug­gested going to the Sno Cap for some­thing to eat. They had no clue that we would be there. Boy that sure is a pretty car.

You must remem­ber this;
A car is still a car,
A sigh is just a sigh ?
The fun­da­men­tal things apply
As time goes by

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August

You Peo­ple Are Pathetic

Sun­day the 29th

While watch­ing Fox News this morn­ing I could see some peo­ple on the side­walk out the win­dow behind the anchors. The usual sus­pects were there, includ­ing a cou­ple of folks that deserved to be culled from the gene pool.

Per­son #1 is hold­ing up a piece of card­board of about 12″ x 24″ and he is hold­ing it up so his mes­sage will be broad­cast all over Amer­ica and pos­si­bly the world. Only trou­ble is that he prob­a­bly wrote the mes­sage in 1? high let­ters with a ball-point pen. You couldn’t tell if there was any­thing on the card­board all. I didn’t get your mes­sage dummy and no one else did either.

Per­son #2 has a cell phone in her one hand and is wav­ing madly with the other. She has obvi­ously called some­one she knows, to tell them she is on TV, because when the cam­era moves or zooms the per­son on the other end directs her which way to move so she can still be seen wav­ing madly. It takes them a cou­ple of times to get it right, because we she should move to the left, she goes right first. They finally get very adept at this so she can be seen wav­ing madly con­stantly in the back­ground when­ever the one anchor is talk­ing. She even man­ages to duck appro­pri­ately to get under­neath the LIVE ban­ner that appears peri­od­i­cally in the upper right hand cor­ner of the screen. I hope she was on her way to a Cud­dle Party because she needs some atten­tion.

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Sep­tem­ber

How Cheap Can You Be?

Wednes­day the 8th

As a favor for a friend I sell his Brake Lite Blinker to out of the coun­try buy­ers. He doesn’t want to make a trip to the Post Office and fill out the cus­toms forms, etc.

Tonight he for­warded me a request from some one in Canada. He had a few ques­tions about size and power, etc. His last ques­tion was would I list the value of the item as $10 so he wouldn’t have to pay as much cus­toms duty on them. Come on, the things are $15 to begin with. How much can he be sav­ing on duty? I wrote him back:

I’m sure there is a very minis­cule chance of any­thing bad hap­pen­ing to me if I did that, but for all I know you actu­ally work for the U.S. Cus­toms and are trolling the inter­net look­ing for vio­la­tors of fed­eral law, so, no I won’t do that. They are val­ued at $15 US each. Sorry.

We’ll see if he still wants them after that…

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Octo­ber

Didn’t You Check That?

Fri­day the 1st

The Emperor is in the shop for a Tech­ni­cal Ser­vice Bul­liten relat­ing to the clutch, so I was given a Mazda Trib­ute as a loaner the other day. When I was dri­ving with it back to my house, about 5 miles from home the low fuel light came on. The light was on, but it still read about an 1/8 of a tank. Not know­ing which one of these indi­ca­tors were more cor­rect, I decided to put $5 worth of gas in it. The 3 gal­lons approx­i­mate, sent the nee­dle to just below a 1/4 tank and ought to be enough to get to work and then to Rader the next day. Not only is this Cute Ute low on gas, but it is filthy too, I think the last per­son to bor­row it was test­ing it’s off road capa­bil­i­ties. Not only do they not check to see if there is gas in it, they don’t even take enough pride to wash it off or vac­uum it out before they loan it out to some­one else.

About 8:15 AM this morn­ing Kelly, my ser­vice “advi­sor”, called to say the Miata was ready. Seems as if the tech­ni­cian fin­ished up just before going home yes­ter­day. I told her I’d be over as soon as I got off work and men­tioned she should get five bucks from petty cash to reim­burse me for the petrol. I made it over to Rader a lit­tle after 5 to get my car. Kelly went off to get some­one to bring it around. While we waited I popped upstairs to run the Master’s Miata Club newslet­ters through the postage meter. When I came back down the car was there, but she didn’t have nei­ther the $5 nor the paper­work. She couldn’t find the paper­work because the tech who did my work was not in today (no won­der he fin­ished up yes­ter­day, he knew he wasn’t com­ing in.) She also said she would have to talk to the ser­vice man­ager on Mon­day about get­ting the money to me. We ran through this rou­tine when I wanted to get reim­bursed for the tow charges on the 95 when the tim­ing belt broke. I won­der if it will take nearly two weeks again?

When it was time to go, I got in the Miata, dropped the top and crept out of the deal­er­ship lot, the clutch felt real smooth. Hung a right onto busy Wash­ing­ton Road and sped off the 1/2 mile before turn­ing off. A short stretch and then right on River­watch Park­way to head home. As I got up to speed and shifted into 5th I looked down to check my speed and dis­cov­ered I was going ZERO MPH! The speedome­ter cable is hooked to the trans­mis­sion, I bet my just fin­ish­ing up in time to go home tech­ni­cian had for­got­ten to hook up the cable cor­rectly (or not at all.) Hang a right and then another and pull back into the ser­vice area. It is 5:35, they go home at 6, so I fig­ure we can get this done and I’ll be on my way. Wrong. The advi­sors stay until 6, the techs go home at 5:30, so there is no one there to fix my speedome­ter. Luck­ily, they work on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, so it should be solved tomor­row. I put the top back up on the Miata and Kelly gives me the keys to the Dark Teal Metal­lic Trib­ute, again.

I get 5 miles from home and the low fuel light comes on, again…

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Novem­ber

Apolo­gies

Tues­day the 2nd

I feel that I have to post some­thing here tonight besides the joke from ear­lier. Although I found it extremely funny when I got it via email this morn­ing, I don’t want all 4 of my read­ers to think that I didn’t take today’s elec­tion seri­ously. In yesterday’s post I rec­om­mended you vote an obscure 3rd party can­di­date, well that was sort of tongue-in-cheek and advice I didn’t fol­low. Although, I did vote for the can­di­date that every poll in the coun­try is call­ing an obscure 2nd party can­di­date in South Carolina.

I just couldn’t endorse a man who got us into this Iraqi mess just because the whole mid­dle east war thing worked so well for dad. Instead I picked a guy who sup­pos­edly roots for my favorite base­ball team, but can’t name any­one on it (and when he tried he com­bined the first name and last name of two play­ers) and when he threw out a cer­e­mo­nial first pitch at a Yan­kee Red Sox game last July, used the pitch­ing motion of a lit­tle girl and couldn’t even make it to the plate with­out bounc­ing it while throw­ing from in *front* of the mound.

I leave you with a quote George Will used to lead off his col­umn in this week’s edi­tion of Newsweek:

PRESIDENT, n. The lead­ing fig­ure in a small group of men of whom, and of whom only, it is pos­i­tively known that immense num­bers of their coun­try­men did not want any of them for Pres­i­dent. — Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dic­tio­nary” (1911

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Decem­ber

Dream On

Wednes­day the 1st

Just saw a com­mer­cial for the new Buick LaCrosse with the back­ground song of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” Good song, IMHO much bet­ter than their more cur­rent work, I can only hope that the same is true for Buick. Some how though I can’t imag­ine that that car will be the car of anyone’s dream.

This is not the first time Buick’s adver­tis­ing has dipped into the clas­sic rock bag of tricks to try and sell cars. I don’t know how many more Ren­dezvous they sold because of the pair­ing of that SUV with Edgar Winter’s “Franken­stein”, but I thought the song was dead (no pun intended) on right for the vehi­cle. It looked like it was made var­i­ous parts of other cars and pieced together to form a whole vehi­cle, but it wasn’t cohe­sive.

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