The walk

After missing their evening walk yesterday I thought I'd be nice and take the dogs out for a morning walk.  A little over 60 degrees my sweatshirt was barely enough.  Lovely morning.  Listening to a This American Life podcast.  Clear sky with the sun just over the horizon at the end.  One kid running to the school bus stop got the dogs worked up a bit.  Running children = not good.  But they will always jump to my command and I walked them away.  They would not have hurt the kid but the growling would have or should have scared him.

Recovering from the late night at the concert.  Lost a couple of hours sleep from what I'm used to.  Music was pretty good.  The drummer, only original member of the band, is 70.  He brings along a drummer in his 20's to do the heavy lifting.  Moody Blues is so much about percussion that the two of them were needed to make it work.  Which they did.  Paul McCartney had a drummer that was like this guy but maybe even more so.  Really loving the work, the performance, the music most of which was written before they were born.  But the energy and pure enjoyment of they performance moves the music to a higher performing plain.  In both cases I spend more time watching the drummer than anything else.  It was fun to see a group that had been around as long as I've listened to music.  And the regression in my mind reliving my life when I first heard that life sound track.  The gold standard will always be McCartney who had the entire Beatles list of songs from which to choose and who created goose bumps and tears from a hall that probably had 20,000 people in it.  Tough to beat that.  Moody Blues did well, though, and it was fun, and we had a good time with a couple our age who we invited. 

 

My tweets

• Thu, 20:47: No walking today http://j.mp/jafU9R

Walkless evening - interesting people day

No walk this evening either.  Heading out shortly for my Niece's one year sobriety night.  They officially give her the one year chip.  It is a huge deal for her and for me.  I'm as close to her as ever to my two natural children.  She is for all intents and purposes my daughter.  And I am hugely proud of her.  She didn't hit bottom but only because I was down there kicking her back up before she did.
Ah, my people day.
I started out in an argument then firing a customer.  She's been a customer for years.  Not lots of money and frequently a pain in the ass she finally pisses me off to the point that I don't really want her money any more.  Second customer firing in three months.  In both cases it was because they did not want to accept responsibility for their actions or inactions.  The first time was a contract customer who we had asked on nearly every occasion from the first time we saw them 'do we have everything on the backups now?'.  Oh, yeah, you've got everything.  Well during a routine transfer from an old pc to a new one we screwed up the drive.  It happens.  Our fault.  I'm willing to put down about $700 to correct the mistake if she goes half because she absolutely, positively HAD to have files on that drive and they were not backed up.  She signed paperwork saying that it was the customer's responsibility to manage their data, not ours.  We did everything but beg them to put all their files in the backup we had set up for them.  Didn't matter.  It was all my fault.  You're fired.
Then today I was being dumped on for the second straight day because the customer bought a laptop with the wrong operating system.  She had to have Professional (or Business) version to connect to the domain in her office.  A domain she has had for six years.  A domain we have discussed as being a problem for six years.  But she waltzes into the shop earlier this week and asks Dana what kind of laptop she should buy for her business use.  Dana says do you need graphics?  Nope.  Then you should buy a middle of the road Dell.  Not high end but not the cheapest.  That is what she got.  The home version. Not the business version.  After blaming us for that yesterday at length on the phone she launched into it again this morning.  On the second verse with the same refrain I said "then we are obviously not doing a very good job supporting you and you should get someone else." And left.  I would have been willing to manage the tech of her company and avoid all pit falls but she wasn't willing to pay for that.  She wanted full time service for transactional price. You're fired.

All up hill from there.  Took my car to have the inspection updated, hung out with a beautiful dog who belonged to the husband of this wonderful realtor I know.  We had a great talk and good interaction.

Since I'm not a huge people person such transactions are not necessarily normal.  

Burt then had some wonderful interactions with Amy, as usual.

Then went to Sam's to pick up ribs for tomorrow's bar-b-que and had the best time with the girl at the checkout.  She has three dogs too and we could have talked for hours.  Just one of those mind melds.  It was really funny.  Another daughter type.  Or more likely grand daughter.  

So all in all it has been an uphill day.  

Only drag is I can't have a drink until after AA.  Sigh.