It all started with an entertaining drive to the office. Being that Labor Day is coming up, the county sheriff has pulled about 70 deputies from their usual jobs and has assigned them to traffic patrol around the area. For the last couple of days, I’ve passed police car after police car, and every single one of them had somebody pulled over. I’ve seen motorcycle cops sitting in medians clocking people as they drive past. I’ve even had cops jump out in the road right as I drove past, only to flag down and pull over the car behind me. It’s like a madhouse.

So I’m all the more amazed that people continue to drive like absolute idiots along the way to work in the morning. Today I’m driving down a line cars in the right-turn lane at an intersection. As I get to the light, it turns red, so I stop to wait until it’s clear. The first thing that happens is that the people in the left-turn lane on the road running perpendicular to me start turning left. Normally this would be a time for me to turn right, but sometimes people make U-turns instead of turning left, so I waited a couple seconds to make absolutely sure the people turning left were not going to do just that. Those couple of cautious seconds earned me a horn blast from the green Volkswagen Golf GL behind me.

Grumbling, I made the turn once I was sure nobody was going to U’ie into me. The VW bitch passed me, and what did I see her doing? STARING INTO THE VISOR MIRROR AS SHE PUT ON LIPSTICK. Jesus fucking Christ, I was enraged to no end. The bitch has the nerve to honk at me, then she’s primping WHILE DRIVING 50 MILES AN HOUR? On a road that runs through a residential section where lots of young children wait perilously close to the roadway for their school buses to arrive? Christ, what an arrogant buttwipe. I watched her continue to “fard” in the car for the next five minutes as we drove down the parkway. At the next red light I wrote down her license number and considered posting it here, but decided against it.

Then I get to work. All seems fine from the get-go. But I find myself picking up the slack left by Mr. Michael Bolton (mentioned here previously) in the wake of his firing. The woman who sits next to me was still having catastrophic e-mail problems, and additionally, our V.P. of business development was experiencing problems creating Acrobat PDF files from a contract he had in Excel. I managed to solve his problem, and develop a workaround for the woman’s e-mail troubles. Spent about an hour doing this. Am now wondering if this keeps up, whether I’ll ever be entitled to a chunk of the rather large network administrator salary.

And finally, our Internet service provider here at the office continues to be a bunch of grade-A fuckwits. For the past week, I’ve been noticing excessive packet loss on the first one or two hops out, ping times ranging from 700-1000 ms, and sporadic connection timeouts no matter what I do. FTP transfers are near impossible, every website I access occasionally slows down due to the packet loss on our network, and even checking my e-mail accounts is an exercise in futility. Just now, I discovered that the routing was fucked up for one of my domains; it kept looping through the same two servers on our ISP’s network over and over. I can’t believe this incompetence.

Yesterday I submitted a detailed e-mail outlining these problems to the network-admin-du-jour, but of course did not receive a response. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever had this particular guy actually answer one of my e-mails. RAGE!

And if that weren’t enough, it looks like the local phone company (Sprint) is about to dig deeper into our pockets. The cartel of three phone companies who provide local phone service in the state of Florida have just gotten together and decided they’re going to raise our local phone bills by a staggering 60%. And yes, a recently-passed law makes this perfectly legal. As it’s possible to get local phone service only from Sprint in this county, we’re pretty much screwed. At this point I’m about ready to just rip out the goddamn land line and use my cell phone, having just re-upped our contract with Verizon.

Which reminds me, Sprint is the biggest fuckup of a phone company that exists, save perhaps Qwest in the Rocky Mountain region of the country. My experience with them begins a few years before I moved to Florida. Their “Sprint PCS” mobile phone service in southeast Michigan was sold at a primo price before enough antennas were even installed in the area, so no one who paid through the nose for their service could actually use the phones. Then, when I get to Florida, I discover Sprint has a monopolistic stranglehold on the entire area, is incompetent beyond belief (it routinely takes weeks to transfer a phone number to another address), and the charges on your bill are unreal. They charge money to have touch-tone service (even though it’s now cheaper for them than supporting dialing pulse!). They charge money for “portability” of your phone number, meaning you have to pay every month in case you might move and want to use the same number at a new address. And every single bill that comes in the mail, the dozen-or-so “taxes”, “surcharges” and “fees” have all sneaked up about 30-90 cents. Sprint is quietly nickel-and-diming the shit out of us, and they expect us to just not care.

As I said before, RAGE.

Well. Now the Oddball Update has its first rant. Enjoy your meal.