Talk About Tennis 2.0

H/T Rebekah Jones, MS, GISP
@GeoRebekah

Yes. Everybody is going to be saying "happy New Year!!"... with a little aprehension.
It looks better, but we really do not know.

What are the chances that I find the exact jeans I am looking for, they have one pair left, and out of all the size combinations you can have, the one left is my size?

I think I'll go buy a lottery ticket.

shtexas wrote: ↑Sat Dec 19, 2020 9:00 pm What are the chances that I find the exact jeans I am looking for, they have one pair left, and out of all the size combinations you can have, the one left is my size?

I think I'll go buy a lottery ticket.

Too late! You just pretty much used all your quota of luck for 2020, and a little bit of 2021
That is indeed lucky...

Refrigerator Update : Order for Refrigerator I Never Wanted CANCELLED! Old One Up and Running!

So, basically, I practiced shameless reverse age discrimination searching for an appliance repairman. First guy that came was very young and he said, a new one was needed and this one would be faulty until a new one came but maybe not that long, hence me finding out there is an appliance shortage and ordering a refrigerator that isn't bad, but is hardly what I would've liked as a first choice. Second repair guy, he was older, I think in his late 40s, but he barely did any better and gave me a "it might last for 2 or 3 months before it dies." Better, but I just kept thinking it wasn't that serious and could this be fixed. In my experience, the older the appliance guy the better, they done seen some things and old solution to broken things was never just to buy something new, so they taught them differently. So, for the third time with a new company, I said to the booker, "who is your most experienced guy? I'm talking 30 years into doing this. Can I get an appointment with him?" "Uh, yeah, but not right away, you'll need to wait at least a week for that kind of scheduling." Sold! So, they sent out someone (young) to assess the refrigerator a few days later, he said I needed to unplug and defrost the fridge for 24 hours before the guy came. A pain, but okay.

Guy shows up, he's looking a little, well, not old. But then he started talking about something totally old school and I thought it might be okay and he just looked great for his age. And that ended up being the case. He moves the fridge, looks at things for like a minute and is like, "I'll have this fixed for you in 15 minutes!" YAY!!! Seriously fixed the damn thing in 10 minutes, said no big deal, just routine for a fridge. I said, thank you, I just need to get through March before the new one gets here. He told me I can get a new one if I wanted, but this one was "set to go at least another 10 years!" He said it so casually, like, oh yeah, this one is good, I wouldn't get rid of it. It might go 20 more years, but 10 is a given. the gap in knowledge is just massive. AND, he also said, I don't know why the guy who came out the other day to do the assessment didn't fix it then, this didn't need to be defrosted to fix this. He was like, "these young guys, you try to teach them, but they don't pick it up all that quickly."

So, a pain in the ass for most of December dealing with a not fully functioning fridge, appointments and finding a new fridge, but a great result and luckily, it was up and running a week before Christmas so I didn't have to do this with prep and Christmas leftover in the faulty fridge, which would've been something approaching a nightmare.

Hooray for us old geezers!!!

If you're familiar with AITA on Reddit this headline will make you smile.

AITA: A confused older man called asking me to ‘find more votes’ for him but I refused

Opinion by
Alexandra Petri
Columnist
Jan. 4, 2021 at 5:12 p.m. EST

Hey! A lot of people seem mad at me, but I don’t think I’m actually the a------ here! So I (65, M) got a telephone call from an older acquaintance in a position of power (74, M). I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume that maybe he used to be a lovely man, because a lot of people seem very dedicated to him, but all I can say is that he has definitely reached the stage of life where talking to him on the phone is a duty rather than a pleasure. And this isn’t the first time he tried to call. He tried 18 times!

Basically, the call went immediately off the rails; indeed, it would be kind of inaccurate to say that it was at any point on the rails? I pick up the phone, we announce that everyone’s on the call, including his friend Mark (who frankly seems like he’s enabling a lot of dubious things right now) and a person he seemed to view as a lawyer (doesn’t necessarily mean anything!), and then he immediately starts shouting that I need to “find” him “votes.”

I should mention that I am the secretary of state of Georgia, and, as such, basically the absolute minimum of my job is to make sure we don’t just randomly pick the winner of elections and give all our electoral votes to them because they call and yell at me, so that was how I was coming in.

Anyway, the call mostly went like this:

Him: [Conspiracy theory I did not perfectly understand, additional different conspiracy theory, just repeating an election worker’s name a bunch of times as though the name itself was proof of wrongdoing, description of an edited video he saw on Fox News maybe? Incoherent shouting about how he has 500,000 votes we should just take as assumed — he does NOT, we checked — but we only need to give him enough votes to win the election, and we need to find them for him.]

Me: ??

Mark: So, we can agree to work together on this, right?

Me: We can agree to work together in the sense that we are happy to get on the phone later and explain that we think everything you’ve just said is incorrect!

Then he started to go on and on about how it was unlikely that anyone could ever move back to Georgia and legitimately vote here again after previously leaving the state? Which, I understand there are things in our electoral process that are pretty wacky, but the concept that somebody might want to move back to a state seems like a very weird one to latch onto as definitely untrue. But he kept going on about it. Literally, he was like: “How many people do that? They moved out, and then they said, ‘Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.’ You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal … you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy.”

Verbatim quote!! Which, in addition to being very strange, seemed kind of insulting to the lovely state of Georgia! Of course people who leave it for other places could want to move back!

My friend and I tried to say it wasn’t crazy, but he was not really in a listening place.

The call goes on for like an hour, somehow, most of it him yelling at me, and he and Mark kept trying to pressure me to look into this less “litigiously,” which I think meant that he wanted me to just announce I found a bunch of votes for him maybe in a drawer or a ravine somewhere? Really unclear where I was supposed to be getting these votes!

But he was like, I heard people saying there are a lot of fake votes and dead people voting. Okay, you heard that, that’s great, but did you hear it from somewhere true, or did you just read it on the Internet, where people make things up? And then he got offended that I thought he was reading made-up things on the Internet. Like, what am I supposed to do with this?

Anyway, I don’t think I was in the wrong here. I let him talk and talk and talk and tell me about these conspiracy theories he’d heard. I just didn’t agree to find him any votes, since I don’t think he understands how elections work.

I should mention he is the president of the United States. AITA?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ind-votes/

Ok. Side story.
In 2020, my motto was "I want the tiger to eat me". Why? Because there is a very old Spanish song that is called "What you want is for the tiger to eat me", and it became a cliché for when people give you no choices and still ask you to do something. For example, if somebody asks you for a cold coke, and all the ones you have are warm, but you have plenty of ice, so you tell him you will put some ice in the lukewarm coke to make it cold, and then he says he does not like ice, you reply "so you want the tiger to eat me".
That is the gist.
So in 2020, I decided to tell people that my goal was for the tiger to eat me, because it would make so many people happy. So, so many. Because again and again, I run into these sort of situations. In my job, where they want everybody to be impossibly safe but they have to drive at night through a hailstorm because the data need to get there. Or somebody asks me for a rum and coke, but there is no coke, so I say rum and pepsi, no, they don't like pepsi, so I say I will put more rum than usual so they will taste more rum (the whole point of drinking) and less pepsi but they say no, because they don't like them too strong, so then I say ... I want the tiger to eat me. Just to make them happy.
The point being:
You (or whomever wrote that) just made my goal for 2021 clear. Because my second name starts with an A, my last name starts with an A, and now all I need is for people to slam an IT in between. Because that is exactly one place where I find myself a lot of times. Wondering: I am the one NOT in the right?
But AITA is way shorter.
I can shut this forum down NOW! Mission Accomplished!
(All yours, people. And if you don't like it, well, may the tiger eat me).

Still missing Christmas presents. One was sent long enough ago to file a report with USPS. Filed it. Got a response. USPS proudly marked my issue resolved.

Small problem. Still don't have my package. There has not been a single update on the package since December 12th.

The damage the USPS is doing to their package business is incalculable. When is the next time people are going to legitimately rely on a package arriving in the stated time? And their Christmas business next year is toast, everyone I know is still waiting on something and everyone has the same "never again" energy on using them anytime in the foreseeable future.

JazzNU wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 8:11 pm USPS proudly marked my issue resolved.

Your luck has been worse than ours, but it was amazing how long things took. One card we sent to a house one hour away from us took two weeks to arrive. Normally that would take 1 day, or 2 days at most.

Meanwhile, in Canada... my cousin sent me a micro cassette player/recorder in a yellow bubble-wrap envelope (so sized between a letter and a package) via regular Canada Post mail. He lives a good 45 minute drive from me.
He mailed it on a Monday. I received it on Tuesday - the very next day. And this was about 10 days before Xmas.
Given that it was Xmas time, which is the busiest time of the year for Canada Post, plus the whole COVID-19 situation, we were both amazed.

(He sent me the micro-cassette player/recorder because I have some old micro-cassettes, and I can't find a device to play them on - they are all digital now. He said he had one that he wasn't using, so he was nice enough to send it to me.)

My mom lives approximately 600 miles away.

She mailed on 12/8 - arrived 12/26.
She mailed on 12/12 - arrived 1/5 (along with three Christmas cards).

We also have dog food on "recurring delivery" - the last two times when we check on it (mind you it's delayed) - the message we get is "it's in your mailbox."

I assure you the 28lb bag of dog food cannot fit in our mailbox, nor has it arrived.

No packages lost, just two accidentally delivered to neighbors in the last 2 months and lots of delays, but they lost a letter from the IRS that I thought had a passport in it, so that was fun (luckily, the one with the passport did make it a couple weeks later).

My entire immediate family managed to catch covid this week. So I've been stuck fretting in a different state. I imagine my grandfather (they were together to celebrate his 96th birthday) isn't going to make it.

Hope you are wrong about that last part.
Wish you well. So little one can do.