Or He Just Went To A Different Home

Here’s a Fun Fact!  You can never lose a homing pigeon  

You know....you're going to lose credibility here.  Up until this point, all of the Fun Facts on the blag are actually 100% true.  This one is...well...questionable.  

It's still entirely true.  If you lose it, then it was just a pigeon.  

And with that comes the close of Jeremy's work week.  Yes, he's chosen to leave you with that horrible, horrible joke.  It's really your own fault for coming here.  

As LIR alluded to, today is my last day of work before Thanksgiving.  Yes, I did a remarkably poor job budgeting my vacation days for the year again, so I'll be off all next week.  Enjoy your Turkey day everyone!

Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office starting tomorrow and returning monday, December 1st with the official start of the Jeremy Is In The Office holiday season.  A whole month to prepare for buying him stuff.  It's exactly the sort of thing you've come to expect.  I suppose there will also be all new Sametime Statuses, too...so there's that.  Happy Thanksgiving!  

CD Is Probably The Same

Why didn’t VCR become its own verb like DVR?  

VCRs really got the short end of the stick on this one.  I almost feel bad for these non-sentient outdated machines.  Almost. 

So everyone knows that DVR is an initialization (which is subtly different from an acronym in that it's generally not pronounced as a single word) meaning "Digital Video Recorder."  It's the thing you use to record TV shows so you can watch them later while skipping the commercials for crap you don't need and cars.  Lots and lots of cars.  Especially now that it's nearing the Christmas season...we're all supposed to buy cars for people.  Yeah, good luck with that, everybody I'm supposed to be buying presents for.  

Before the world had DVRs, we had these thingies called VCRs (Video Cassette Recorder) which played TV shows and movies on things called cassette tapes.  Nobody ever recorded TV on VCRs because nobody could ever figure out how to set them up properly.  It was the dark ages.  On the few occasions that somebody managed to actually record a TV show, they then had to go and "rewind" the cassette tape back to the beginning of the show, based purely on a guess of how much of the tape the show had consumed.  They then spent the next 15-20 minutes futilely looking for the show's start before giving up and going to bed instead of watching TV.  

The very basics of the actions were the same.  Instead of watching TV in real time, you preserve it for watching at a later date so you can work TV around your schedule (instead of the other way around) and skip commercials.  Both types of preservation have the same term for them..."recording."  Hence, both initializations ending in "R."  Makes sense, right?  

Only problem is that nobody ever called this process "recording."  In the olden days, people set to record something on their VCR would say they were going to "tape" a show, meaning that they were going to record it onto a tape.  Nowadays, with tapes being obsolete and basically non-existent, the verb "to tape" doesn't really apply.  Many people still use "tape" to blanketly describe any recording, including that on a DVR.  Most people, however, have adopted the verb "DVR" which isn't a very at all...nor is it a gerund of any sort.  It's just a new meaning of the initialization.  As in, "I'm going to DVR that new reality show, because I'm a total moron."  

Nobody thinks twice about the poor VCR, who got left out in favor of the Tape. 

 

I'm Delightful

The person driving down the road waved back when I was cleaning my front window 


That was very nice.  You made that poor misguided chump's day. 


Recently, in my ever continuing and ever fruitless quest to Clean All The Things, I decided it was high time that I could see through my front window.  Perfect timing, really, now that it's fall, and I'll get to look at nothing but sticks and dirty snow for six months.  So, I grabbed by bottle of window cleaner and my roll of paper towels and I set forth. 

I'm really trying to make this part of the story more interesting than it really is.  I mean...come on...I cleaned the inside of a freakin' window for crying in the sink. 

As you can imagine, cleaning a window involves some back and forthy action with the paper towel over the surface of the window.  To some random stranger who happened to be driving by and bizarrely looking at the houses instead of the road, it might look like a person was standing just inside the window looking out and waving at them. 

Such was the case.

This person who was driving along waved right back at me as I cleaned my window.  I have no earthly clue who that person was or why they decided I was waving at them.  But, on the surface, it really doesn't matter all that much.  My new friend felt that the world was a little nicer of a place for a couple seconds.  All because of me.  You're welcome, random driver guy.  You're welcome. 

The Horror

The Toaster has recruited the spoon dispenser

This is deeply troubling news, everyone.  I don't know if we can stress the importance of this enough.  It's a BIG DEAL THING!   

So, you remember the Famed Toaster of Hades, right?  As if The Toaster hasn't done enough harm already, it has begun recruiting minions, starting with the new spoon dispenser.  

Recently, the Adorably Tiny Cafeteria Thing In My Building replaced their old and outdated cutlery distribution system (dumping a bunch of plastic spoons into a wire basket) with a new high-tech Lever-Based Dispenser system.  You press a lever and a knife, spoon, or fork drops out the bottom.  It's a much better system for some reason or another, because there is no way it's any easier for the ATCTIMB staff.  Regardless of the reasons, it's the new system.

Because it's so new, it's apparently easily corruptible.  Everyone's culinary nemesis, the Famed Toaster of Hades has turned the spoon dispenser over to its dark side.  I mean...I'm guessing that's how it worked.  It's the only thing that makes sense.  Not long ago, I decided on a bowl of soup, which requires a spoon.  Without a second thought, I walk over to the spoon dispenser and push the lever down.  That's when it all went wrong. 

A spoon launched itself from the bottom of the dispenser with more force than I would have thought possible given the mechanisms involved.  More troubling, the spoon was not ejected down into the waiting catch trough of the dispenser, but completely perpendicular to the machine, directly at my chest.  Fortunately, I was wearing a spoon-proof shirt at the time, so the spoon just bounced off of it and down to the floor, leaving a stunned and at least mildly impressed Jeremy in its wake.

How this happened would be entirely beyond comprehension if you weren't familiar with the demonic forces already present in the ATCTIMB.  Having done battle with The Toaster on numerous occasions in the past, I was instantly convinced that this unwarranted spoon attack on my person could only be the work of one foe.  Stay safe out there, everybody.