Best Of Craigslist

I haven't had any time to post lately. But here is something I read on Craigslist today. It was on the best of Craigslist. There is some funny stuff on there.

-DCR

Just Trying To Read My Book

Alright, well I'm not at work today so therefore I don't have much time to write anything. Weird how that works - I'm not at work and I have less time. It's fine though because this post here from Blackberry Debutantes pretty much sums up what I was going to post anyway.

I was on my way home two days ago and I get the Metro Driver mentioned in the Blackberry Debutantes post. This wasn't the first time I had him as a driver. It was the 3rd. Now, the first time was OK, kinda interesting. The second time it was like OK, OK, we get the point. Now please shut up and let me read my book. And this last time - Oh man, I like to just enjoy my metro ride home and read my book. But I can't with this guy yapping the whole time. I feel bad for the people who have a long ride. Mine is only about 12 minutes so its not too bad.

I'm just glad I don't get him everyday. I used to get the same driver every day when I rode the yellow line, but now that i ride the blue line to work its a different person all the time. Even though I catch train at the same time every morning, and pretty much the same train on the way home too.

Alright, that’s enough for today. I’m going to write something where I don’t complain the whole time on Monday…

-DCR

Next Stop… Ballston

So I’m in a meeting today and we start discussing a workshop that is going to be held at some office right off the Ballston metro stop. OK, that’s fine. Then this guy I work with takes over and hands out the directions to the office building and begins to explain where it is. I read over the directions he handed out and immediately get annoyed at him for giving out stupid ass directions. This is what his directions said:

“Metrorail – Orange Line

Travel to Ballston-MU on the Orange Line (towards Vienna-Fairfax not New Carrollton)

If you travel on a different Metro Line, go to Metro Center, (bottom level) and get on the Orange Line to Vienna.”

There was more after this – the direction to the office blah blah blah – but those don’t matter. What pissed me off is the parts above.

Let me break it down line by line:

“Metrorail – Orange Line”

OK this line isn’t too bad, but we’re not idiots. We CAN read, and we know what color orange is. You didn’t need to color code the word. Thanks.

“Travel to Ballston-MU on the Orange Line (towards Vienna-Fairfax not New Carrollton)”

Travel to Ballston is fine. Orange Line is fine (except for the damn color coding again). Towards Vienna… uh… what if I’m coming from West Falls Church? Dunn Loring? Do I still go towards Vienna?

I realize that most everyone coming to this workshop lives in or around DC and knows their way around the Metro system. They’re not the people I’m worried about. It’s the few people that are coming from different parts of the country for this. And it wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that he really stressed the “not New Carrollton” (bold and italics).

OK, so I travel in the morning of the workshop. Land in Dulles, take the Washington Flyer to West Falls Church, and head towards Vienna. Um. End of the line, no Ballston along the way. Yeah, good directions. Idiot.

“If you travel on a different Metro Line, go to Metro Center, (bottom level) and get on the Orange Line to Vienna.”

I live in Crystal City and therefore will be riding the Blue Line and transferring at Rosslyn. But if I were to follow his directions I would have to ride all the way back to Metro Center and then out on the Orange Line.

What if I was coming in on the Yellow Line? Green Line? What the hell, neither of these go to Metro Center. Now I’m lost. If you’re going to give directions, either give simple ones:

“Take the Orange Line to Ballston. Walk to building blah blah blah.”

Or give detailed ones, from each line, at different points on the line. Don’t do this half very specific “(towards Vienna-Fairfax not New Carrollton)” shit and half leaving out ways to get there from 2 lines. Especially when the information you give is wrong. Holy shit you’re stupid.

-DCR

Coke Zero - So Good

About 2 months ago or so I saw this new Coke in the store. Coke Zero. Had never seen this before so naturally my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check it out. Turns out it’s basically Diet Coke that tastes good. Now don’t get me wrong, Diet Coke is perfectly drinkable but it just doesn’t have as much flavor as regular Coke. This new Coke Zero stuff is 0 calories and tastes like regular Coke. I can’t complain about that.

It’s funny though, because most Diet Coke drinkers that I have talked to that have tried Coke Zero say that they don’t like it because it’s too sweet. It’s like they drink Diet Coke because of the flavor and not the lack of calories. The lack of calories was always my main reason for drinking Diet Coke over regular Coke. I know, I know, people say it’s just as bad to drink Diet Coke (and now Coke Zero) as it is to drink regular Coke because of all the artificial stuff in it. This doesn’t make too much sense to me and for now I’ll choose to stick with the 0 calorie drinks.

The only problem I have found with the Coke Zero is that now whenever I go somewhere that doesn’t have it, I have to get regular Coke because I am no longer used to drinking the less sweet Diet Coke. If you drink Diet Coke for long enough you eventually become used to the flavor – or should I say lack of flavor. But if you switch off Diet Coke and go back to regular Coke you need to go through the whole process of getting used to Diet Coke again. Well, at least I do. And since I don’t plan on switching back to Diet Coke anytime soon I would rather not drink it anymore. Even if it is only a few times a week. Right now I'll stick to my 2 (OK, 3 if I'm really tired) Coke Zeros a day and enjoy the flavor.

Yeah I just realized this sounds like an ad for Coke. Whoops.

-DCR

Stand To The Right

Another day and another thing to complain about. I don’t think it ever ends… One thing that drives me nuts every. single. day. is the people who ride the damn escalators. I just don’t understand this. Have so many people in DC become this lazy that they can’t walk up the stairs. I mean seriously, it’s not like most of these are very long. So many people ride up the single flights just getting up to the fare gates above track level.

Yeah, yeah, I can kinda understand the people that ride up the long ones like Adams Morgan, or Rosslyn. But the people who ride AND insist on standing next to their friend – oh man, that drives me nuts. Get out of the way. Just because you are lazy doesn’t mean everyone behind you is. Some of us walk up all escalators, even the long ones.

The other day I got off at Adams Morgan, and only 2 escalators were running. The middle one was stopped. My friend and I look up and see that nobody is moving on the right one. Everyone is just standing there riding it. Its not a fuckin ride, it’s a way to get to the top faster. Talk about a serious waste of 5 minutes of time. Standing there and riding to the top when your legs would work perfectly fine to walk you up faster.

Yeah, so my friend and I decided we weren’t going to ride the whole way, and we certainly wouldn’t be able to make our way through all the people. So we walked up the middle one – the one that wasn’t moving. Made it up a hell of a lot faster then if we had ridden it. So what if it makes you a little tired and out of breath. It’s not the end of the world, a little exercise would probably help a lot of you people anyway.

The people that ride the escalators really don’t bother me all that much – as long as they stand to the right. I guess if you want to be lazy that’s your business. What bothers me the most is the damn tourists (and residents, but mostly tourists) that not only ride, but don’t even move when you come up behind them and politely say “excuse me”. They turn around and look at you like you have 3 heads. I can just imagine what they are thinking; “What the hell is this? This person wants to walk up these stairs? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

If you insist on being lazy then fine, whatever. Just GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. It still bothers me that you are riding the escalator, but at least you’re not preventing me from walking up it.

The thing that doesn’t bother me as much as it boggles my mind is all the people who ride DOWN the escalators. Holy hell, it’s going down. It doesn’t require much energy at all. If you are seriously that lazy or out of shape that you can’t ride down the escalator then you probably need to see a doctor, because there must be something else wrong with you. Pretty soon you people are going to be asking for moving walkways between escalators and the trains so that you don’t have to walk at all. You’re probably the same people who ride the bus for 4 blocks. Almost every time it’s faster to walk those short distances than it is to get on a bus and sit in traffic. But whatever, it’s your money and time that you’re wasting. At least you’re not on the sidewalk walking slow in front of me and getting in the way.

Wow that’s a lot of bitching. HA.

-DCR

Sour Milk

So the other day I go into the kitchen at work and the fridge in there is making this awful noise, it sounded like there was a sick dog caught in it somewhere growling while throwing up. I thought it was going to die. After a few min this stopped and it appeared to be back to normal.

But then a few days later I notice that my milk is very warm in the morning and my soda is no longer ice cold. I figure someone must have not closed the door all the way, so I look for something blocking it from closing… nothing. It closed fine and closed every time. OK, well there are a lot of people that use the fridge, it must just be that it’s opened too much and it doesn’t get a chance to cool down. I found this to be wrong too when I checked the temperature first thing in the morning – it was still way warm. I’m one of the first people into the office so I know it hadn’t been opened more than 2 or 3 times before I checked it.

So the next day I bring in a thermometer to see for sure if the fridge was actually warm or if I was just imagining things. Sure enough – the temp in the fridge ranged from 45 F to 50 F. WAY too warm to keep anything that you don’t want to spoil. Oh good, now I get to throw my milk out.

OK fine no big deal, I’ll use the fridge in the kitchen down the hall. They won’t mind. So I use that one for a few days, and then this morning I go get my milk out of it and its like that fridge was too warm too. My milk was rotten. I had 3 more days before the sell by date, so I don’t think it was too old. I guess leaving it over the weekend in a fridge that apparently is too warm did it in. I wonder what the hell is going on with the fridges in this place – none of them seem to work. Grrrrr.

I can deal with warmish soda, I just throw it in the freezer – which works great (-10F) I might add – a little while before I want to drink one. But I can’t exactly freeze the milk, and it goes rotten if I leave it in the fridge at 50 F. Kinda annoying.

There isn’t anything that I can do about it either. I talked to a guy that works in my hall, and he said if we were able to get a replacement it would take months to get it anyway. And well, I leave this office in a few weeks so it’s not worth it anyway. Nobody else seems to care that their food goes bad, they just don’t store anything in there, but they haven’t tried to do anything about it. Oh well, hopefully someone important will put something in the fridge and it will go bad, and they’ll get something done about it. I guess until then I’ll just bring milk with me everyday or something… oh well.

-DCR

Pennies Pennies Everywhere...

Alright. Well I guess its time to finally start writing on this thing. I don’t have anything useful to share, but I feel like having a place to just put down random thoughts and to complain about things that I don’t like or that bother me.

Today I open my desk drawer to put some change in that I got at breakfast, and I look at my penny stash. Holy, I have too many pennies. I never spend them. I just put them in the drawer to sit there and collect until I have enough and then I guess I’ll cash them in or something.

To me, pennies are worthless. Who wants to carry around a pocket full of change to equal the same as one piece or light, small paper? I sure as hell don’t. Yeah yeah, I know there are a lot of people that like to get back even change when they buy something, and thus use the pennies for that. But the whole reason that you would want to have the pennies is to use them… so that you don’t end up with pennies in your change.

So why not just eliminate pennies all together and just have the nickel or hell, even the dime or quarter as our smallest detonation of money? Seriously – you can’t buy shit for a penny. They probably cost more to ship then they are worth. If I see one on the ground I don’t even bother to pick it up because it’s just not worth it.

I guess I’m biased because I don’t like change in general. There isn’t much that you can get for less than a dollar so why carry change? So you can use change when you buy something so that you don’t get change back… I see a pattern here. Yeah it would be impossible to get rid of change. Many things would be more expensive. But just getting rid of the penny wouldn’t cause prices to change a lot. Some prices would go up, some would go down. Leaving the average price of things unchanged. Plus the advantages of not having to waste time dealing with pennies would possibly be a benefit to everyone.

Also, it would get rid of all those damn $19.99 things you see on TV. Now, instead, they would be $19.95. See, right there is a $.04 savings! Things are looking better already. They know they can’t make it $20.00. It just doesn’t have the same look/appeal to it.

OK. Well I guess that’s it for now about pennies. I’ll post something useful some other time.

-DCR

First Post

Just some random thoughts and rants about my time here in DC.