In which Elen gains repetitive facepalm strain injury and makes a hole in her desk

[elen_nare]

Wednesday

The morning was good. Got my sister up in time to catch the school bus, got a couple of fillings authorized (is that good or bad?), had a nice walk to the city centre. First bit of fail: The DVD I wanted still hasn’t arrived. But hey, the walking is good for me. Went to the bus stop and only had to wait for five minutes, which was total win. I can’t remember the last time I waited so little!

Got home, got the laptop out, and saw the DAYDcast announcement. So I turned the main computer on and started downloading Skype. (The laptop works a lot faster, but I’ve been forbidden to download stuff onto it in case it gets a virus). Download completed, I try to plug the microphone in and this is where the fail starts.

Recipe for microphone fail:

Step 1) plug the mic into the port at the front. No reaction. Think “hey, the speakers aren’t plugged in here. Let’s see where those plug in.”
Step 2) Follow speaker cable to another set of ports at the back – one occupied by the speakers, and two free. One of those is pink, same as the mic cable, so plug the mic in there.
Step 3) Very faint reaction. Check volume, and shove it up to maximum. Still very faint. Think “maybe that’s not the right port”.
Step 4) Try every other port in sight, including the ones for headphones. No reaction.
Step 5) Return to pink port. No reaction. Check mic is on (it was). Still no reaction.
Step 6) Go to control panel. Find the “test hardware” option in the sound part.
Step 7) Attempt testing. No reaction whatsoever from mic.
Step 8) Disgust. Return to laptop to see what can be googled about mics.

Sprinkle liberally with facepalm, headdesk, or preferred gesture of utter exasperation throughout.

Did I mention, this is the same mic I used for the audiobook recordings? I just tested it on the laptop, and IT WORKS!!! AARGH!!!

Step 8, however, didn’t get very far, because five seconds after I sat down, the light above me started fading. I wasn’t sure if it was the electricity or the bulb that was the problem, so I got up to turn out the light, because I was scared it might be the bulb and that it might explode. (No, elen was not being totally stupid. This happened to her once). My dad got home just then, tried the lights in the bathroom, and realised the electricity was the problem, because they were really faint. And in about ten minutes, while we turned off appliances, all the lights in the house had faded to practically nothing, and I’d lost internet. It still hasn’t come back, I’m typing this in Word with the laptop running on battery power. While listening to music on my cellphone, because being alone in the house with no sound but shutters creaking in the wind freaks me out. And really, really hoping the battery on both lasts. ( I found the AA battery powered radio after, and was very very happy).

For additional fail points, no electricity means the guy who was coming to do work on the bars will have to come again tomorrow, and that means I’ll have to stay here instead of going to my grandma’s like I wanted to.

And, it will doubtless mean no physiotherapy today. My lazy side is admittedly squeezing about that, but the rest of me is not happy about it.

I guess the electricity problems are due to the huge storm last night (it blew over a tree in my back garden! Granted it was a small, dead palm tree, and when I looked at the wood at the base, it was pretty soft, but still! It’s a tree and it blew over!). But it’s odd the electricity was perfectly fine this morning, and didn’t fail until noon. And anyway, this happens EVERY SINGLE YEAR with the first storm. Don’t they ever learn??? Yes, there are huge, very windy storms in spring and summer! Yes, cables will probably fall down and so on, especially since they do that even without storms! Yes, it might be a good idea to prepare for it!

And while you’re at it, you could repair all the cracks and holes in the roads before the storms start and the heavy rains make the roads collapse.

Wait, all that sounds too much like organization and planning ahead. Whatever am I thinking?

-----

Thursday

Electricity was still oscillating, going from near normal to very low and back again. The guy who was coming to install a motor for the bar gate turned up without phoning first, and gave it a shot. He managed to get it installed, but before he could configure the motor, we lost power again, so he’ll have to come back yet another day.

To make matters worse, we had no idea when the power would return properly, because the company is on strike. They earn well. Very well. But the syndicate, like several others, has become a mafia that the government can’t control.

Luck, however, was finally on our side, in the guise of a news interview. The local news heard about the situation, and interviewed a shop on our block, that sell meat, milk by-products, fruit and veg, etc. Of course, without electricity, they were going to lose all the stuff they had in store, and for a small district shop, that would be a big blow. Negative publicity of this sort does not make the electricity company happy, naturally. Especially when it’s broadcast that the answer these people got when they phoned to complian was “wait sitting down”, which means it’s going to take a long time. They also interviewed a representative of the company, who said they would be putting special taskforces out tomorrow. He also said that “this happens every year with the first storms, especially because a lot of the cables are too old”. And it doesn’t occur to them it might be an idea to PREPARE FOR SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR??? And that OLD CABLES SHOULD BE CHANGED????

Typical utter incompetence and “never mind fixing it properly, just patch it up” ideology.

But, the power is now back!!! It’s still all kinds of fail that if it hadn’t been on the news nothing would probably have happened, but at least we have electricity.

Makes you wonder, though... how is it possible that in a situation like this, people are just left without electricity, and it takes appearing on the news for things to get sorted out?

Comments

[elen_nare]

This one is total fail. About the only qualification you need to get in is to be the son or other close relative of an employee. I'm not exaggerating, the jobs are effectively hereditary.

I hope I can get in on one, they seem really fun.

I think I've just found my new vocation :) The news did an assessment of salaries recently. Municipal workers and bus drivers were right at the top (and it's impossible to get official information for those; they'd put together lots of different sources), and at the bottom, teachers and specialist doctors working in public schools and hospitals. A bus driver earned about three times as much as a doctor. And guess who goes on strike all the time? the bus drivers.

[zeviz.livejournal.com]

Municipal workers and bus drivers were right at the top (and it's impossible to get official information for those; they'd put together lots of different sources)
There are sunshine laws in US to prevent this kind of thing. Not sure if it's US in general or just California, but any money paid to any state employee is a matter of public record. So newspapers can easily make searchable datablases like this on their webpages. There was one for UC system (California's top public university system), and that one was a lot more reasonable. Aside from top management, people getting the most money were famous professors, and the overall level of salaries was pretty reasonable. Actually, it looks like they now have all state employees in their database: http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/ (If you are curious.)

and at the bottom, teachers and specialist doctors working in public schools and hospitals.
The teachers aren't payed much anywhere in the world, but I am a little surprised about doctors. (In post-Soviet Russia, doctors are also payed so little that they have to make up for it by "charging" patients directly, but that's more a factor of messed up economic situation and corruption so widespread that it's considered a normal business practice.)

[elen_nare]

There may be such laws here, I don't know and haven't been able to find any. But if there are, clearly no one bothers about them. Thanks for the link, it's interesting.

Basically, doctors don't have a strong syndicate. Neither the municipality nor the province have done well financially for years (the national government not settling its debts with the province doesn't help. In the news today it looks like it's finally getting sorted out... but I don't trust our president to see it through). Both spend A LOT of their budget on salaries. So of course, any strong syndicate will get the biggest benefits.

Also, doctors can't go on complete strike, or there's outrage. They're on semi-strike at the moment, so they might finally get a raise, but we'll see how that works out.

And corruption? Argentina is 109th on the transparency index, and has been going down the last few years. It's a historical practice started in colonial days, continued by the "caudillos" (authoritarian political and military leaders of different provinces in the 1800s), carried on by the presidents, maximised in the military dictatorships...

Sorry, I can rant quite a bit about things like this. I'll shut up now.