What A Fucking Waste Of Time

…in with the new as we move from 2007 to 2008. As I’ve done in previous years, I like to recap the past year in late December of early January. I used to do this each year in a Christmas letter to my family when I left Pennsylvania. However, some family members are no longer with us and other family members have joined the Information Age, so I do this annual recap online now.

I lead one helluva boring life. It’s the same old shit every day, but I’ll try to whip something together here.

In January 2007, nothing happened. Oh, terrible shit happened in January; Microsoft released Vista and Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House, but nothing interesting happened to me. But in February, The Company bought a domain name registrar. We were officially in the seedy underworld of domain registration, with the likes of GoDaddy and Network Solutions — but on a much smaller scale. Out of 856 domain registrars, we ranked 130-something. It took a lot of my time, and it was a constant battle with domain registrants before we sold the registrar to some other sucker! I learned a lot about SRS and how domain registrars operate. Would I want to do it again? Fuck no! The domain name administration isn’t bad, but the people who register domain names suck ass. I was never so happy and relieved when the web server, mail servers, name servers, and phone numbers were finally transferred to the new owners.

In March, I was back in the ER with pneumonia. Surprise! It’s an annual event anymore, like the return of the Swallows to Capistrano. I had a temperature of 103.1°F (39.5°C) and missed seven days of work while I laid in bed dying. After all the visits I’ve made to the hospital, you’d think they’d have a clue what was wrong with me…

April and May brought the Virginia Tech massacre and the death of Jerry Falwell, but it was boring for me. Not until June did I get pulled over by the Washington State Patrol for not wearing a seatbelt and I blogged about how stupid the seatbelt laws are. Not wearing a seatbelt doesn’t risk anyone on the highway but me. Of course, a seatbelt violation is a primary offense in Washington, where we had to wait until January 1, 2008 before text messaging while driving became a secondary offense. Awesome. Governor Mudcutter must be proud.

In July I turned 41, and August was uneventful. Sometime during the summer, we lost one of our carpoolers. He started working from home because The Company needed techs to answer phones at 5:00am… and there were also benefits to LDriver’s vehicle and my sanity that perpetrated the decision.

Ever lose your wallet? I did in September. It was teh sux! I had to replace debit cards, credit cards, my drivers license, my insurance card, the proximity card to gain access to the building in which I work, and other such things that reside in one’s wallet. It was a major pain in the ass, and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

Also in September, we lost a second carpooler. There was a she-bitched, he-lied, she-said event at The Company that would rival any plot line of Desperate Housewives. When the Astroglide dried, one employee was fired and the other was allowed to work from Oak Harbor (and no longer in the carpool). I was — and am still — highly pissed at the situation. The one thing that all of us carpoolers from Oak Harbor want is to work in our hometown so we don’t have to do the soul-crushing commute twice a day.

Then in October, The Company moved from the Westin Building to the Active Voice Building. This move was directly next door. The telephone companies needed the space in the Westin, so the Westin management offered another space in the building next door for a lot less rent, and they would pay to move us. Packing up my office shit twice in one year is not my idea fun, and the new space is much smaller than the space in the Westin. People that had offices in the Westin were forced into cubicles in the new space. Can you guess who those people were? I’ll bet you can!

I started feeling the onset of pneumonia again in October. This time, I went to a doctor instead of laying down on my death bed then heading to the ER. The doctor listened to my lungs, gave me a hit of his albuterol through a nebulizer, then told me I have asthma. Can you believe that shit? He gave me a prescription for a ProAir inhaler, which worked not so well. I may as well have been huffing fumes from the tailpipe of my truck. When I finished that canister, he put me on Ventolin, which is better. It works, but could be better. I’m also on Qvar. Ventolin is a rescue inhaler, Qvar is a preventative inhaler. Puff puff pass!

I got another new mobile phone in the fall, too. This one is the shizznit! It’s like the continuum transfunctioner, but without the oral pleasure (dammit), and its mystery is only exceeded by its power, baby! It’s got a faster CPU, faster internet connection, more RAM, more ROM, does GPS… and it’s definitely become the most useful phone I’ve ever owned. I’ve even registered wafwot.mobi to create a mobile-friendly site for the phone.

In November, I bought new tires for my truck. The old kicks were getting a bit thin in the tread department, so I figured I’d better bite the bullet before the winter weather rolled in. I went to good ol’ Les Schwab for the tires, and $800 later, my truck was sporting new rubber. A couple days later, it was time for a tune up — the first tune up since I bought the truck. It got new plugs, new wires, a new serpentine belt, new distributor cap, new rotor, and it was tuned and scoped. That took a $450 bite out of my wallet.

Oh, but my truck wasn’t done yet. Less than a month after it was in for it’s $450 manicure, the lower radiator hose blew open like John Ritter‘s aorta. I limped the truck home, not letting it get over “H” on the temperature gauge. Several strenuous and painful hours later, LDriver and I had the new hose installed. The older I get, the more I hate working on cars. I promised I wouldn’t work on the truck, leaving the maintenance up to the professionals. But, it’s too fucking expensive!

The holidays were quiet and uneventful. Tina and I spent Thansgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day together, not going anywhere. We just stayed home and watched football.

And that was my year. Told you it was boring.

A note from wafwot: I wrote this while watching the Seahawks beat the Redskins on January 5, but completely forgot to wikify it and publish it! Holy hell! It wasn’t until I went to spout off about the New England Patsies losing Super Bowl XLII that I discovered the old draft. So, that’s why you may notice it appearing on my blog in February but having a January date. I’d apologize, but you already know I’m a lazy bastard that needs to type/write more often.

Tags: Holidays, Review
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