I Got Cued...

Like one of Pavlov's dogs. News anchor this morning was talking about the rising cost of bacon, and she led into the story by doing the whole ”Bacon! BaconbaconbaconBacon!” thing from one of those old dog treat commercials. I instantly started drooling, and decided that I would have bacon egg and cheese sandwiches for dinner.

Eh, so long as my reward is that tasty, I'll respond to the cues. I'm shameless in that regard.

Tips for Ordering Pizza

If you have been told before that you are out of our store's delivery area, don't try to be clever and place your order over the Internet. A decent driver will notice the address, and alert the insider in charge. If you're lucky, we'll allow you to change your order to a “Meet At”. If you decide to be even more cute and not answer your phone when we call, we won't even give you that much. We'll cancel your order, and eat your food.

If you decide to order delivery, BE AT HOME until we get there. We may tell you 45 minutes, but if we get another delivery going out that way, it might not take that long. There are few things more annoying or scary than pulling up to a house that looks abandoned. Especially at night. You pull that crap on me at night, you get two knocks on the door and a courtesy call. Don't pick up the phone? Fine, I'll go back to the store and you can wait another 30 minutes until another driver gets free to bring the food.

If you want to pay with a check, be sure you ask if the store takes checks before the driver gets out to you. My store does not. Another franchise of Multinational Pizza Corp will take them, but only if there is identifying information printed on the check (address, driver's license number, etc.). It will save a lot of time and trouble if you just take the 30 seconds it takes to ask.

If you are paying with a credit or debit card, that's fine. Just have it ready when you are ordering, because we need the card number and expiration date. It's very annoying to have to listen to you dig around for your credit card, and we usually have other stuff that needs to be done.

If you order late at night – after 8:00 or so on weekdays, 9:30 or 10:00 on weekends – be prepared to wait. We run one driver that late at night, and it doesn't take much to send delivery times through the roof. Pay attention to the delivery estimate, and think seriously about making it a pickup order.

If you are ordering over the phone, and you either get put on hold, or the phone rings more than twice, think very very hard about making your order pick up instead of delivery. Sometimes, delivery time for our store is over an hour. The time it would take for the same order carry out? Less than 30 minutes, usually less than 20. The choke point is in getting it out the door, getting it made and cooked is rarely a problem.

No, we don't carry change for a 100. We carry $15. Sometimes $20, depending on the store. No more.

Also, remember to tip! Tips are how we pay bills, gas, and maintenance. We don't make minimum wage, and if the store charges a delivery fee, we usually don't get all (or even most) of it.

Problems

What would life be without them? I bit the bullet and bought a factory computer, only to discover that the video card was not fit for purpose as a gaming card. I redeemed some geek cred by immediately buying a new mid-level card and a new power supply and installing them myself. When I say not fit for purpose, I mean it was overheating in 20 minutes every time I tried to play something more graphically demanding than Solitaire.

There are problems with Multinational Pizza Corporation as well. We had three drivers leave in a week, two fired and one had given his two weeks notice two weeks ago. This puts the store in a bad position – we are down to five drivers, and two of us are working as little as possible because we have other jobs that we need to focus on. It's looking like it will be another 60 hour week for me this week. On top of that problem, I am seriously burned out on working there. It has gotten to the point where I hate going in, and hate being there. It's started affecting my attitude as well, which I do not care for at all. I've seen other drivers going through this, and I am going to do my best to not be as much of a pain as some of the others have been.

To top it all off, my sinuses are waging war against the rest of my body, resulting in my having had a headache for the last week. It's getting better slowly – at first, it was near the level of a migraine in terms of disabling pain, but now it's down to a dull throb. Still a pain though, and I can't wait for it to get gone.

Maybe next post will be better. I can always hope, at any rate...

Loss of Geek Cred

So, I might have to hand in my geek card.

My computer is getting a bit old, and it's time for a upgrade. I can do this now because I've been working two jobs, which has had the other beneficial effect of not giving me enough time to play any games on it, therefore I haven't needed to spend the money on getting a new one. However, things are (hopefully) about to change. I am almost through with training at my new job, and I've already decided to drop Multinational Pizza Corp. like a bad habit the second I am through the training process. They'll get their two weeks, but not one second more, and I'll not be available for most of those two weeks. I might be more loyal to them if they understood the meaning of loyalty, but that's a post for another time.

The computer I am writing this on was blazing fast and top of the line – six years ago. Now, it's looking rather dated and obsolete. I've been keeping it working through sheer stubbornness and swapping of parts as needed, but parts are beginning to fail at a rate that is rather alarming. Part of it is no doubt due to age, but part of it can also be linked to the fact that it took a lightning strike some years ago, and has not been quite the same since.

So why do I think I might have to turn in my geek card? I built this computer, bought the parts and assembled it myself. It was a fun project, and I have had fun with keeping it going over the years. But I don't have the time I used to, and I don't really have the money to make another top of the line beast of a computer. The sad fact is, although I can easily build a testosterone-fueled were-computer for half the price of one from a manufacturer, I can't match the combination of price and performance of a mid-range computer from a decent company.

So there it is, friends. I might have to bite the bullet and buy a pre-made computer. Please don't think less of me - I'll attempt to restore my lost credibility in another fashion. In the meantime, the money I will save on this computer will no doubt go towards my guns and ammo fund, since there are times when the only real relaxation is Ballistic Relaxation.

Update

Updating has been sparse recently, but there is a reason, I promise.

I've been in training for a second job - and this job is something I would actually be happy to do for the rest of my life. I'm not going to go into more detail at this time, since I wish to maintain whatever shreds of privacy I can.

But yeah, if I have not been delivering pizzas to the ungrateful, I've been training at my other job. Think the total hours I worked this week is somewhere north of 60, closing in on 70.

Hopefully training works out, and I can quit the pizza gig. Updates would be a bit better at that point, I am sure.

Relaxation

I was feeling worn down and stressed from work, so I made arrangements to visit a nice little outdoor range with my father Thursday. He was needing a range trip as well, since he is in the process of rehabbing a broken wrist sustained while attempting to arrest a “young lady who did not feel like she needed to go to jail.”

We went early Thursday morning, arriving only a few minutes after the range opened. The range time was good – I got to fire my new toy, a Springfield Armory Mil-Spec, and he spent some time with both his department-issued Glock and a Ruger .357. The Glock visibly hurt him to fire, but the Ruger was fine, since he was firing light .38 loads through it.

I outshot him, as usual...comes from usually putting more rounds downrange in a month than he does in a year.

More relaxing was in order for me – in terms of stress, these past few weeks have been nasty, what with people quitting, and others not wanting to work, so I went to the Grand Reopening of a gun store. It was a Grand Reopening because they had just finished the process of moving into a new building that is substantially larger than the building they were in.

I didn't see much I fell in love with, but I did see some things. It's gotten to where I don't really get excited over EBRs and the like now – they all kinda look the same to me. I do lust after older firearms though, ones with history to them, and this store had a few that met that description. Saw a Webley .455, some Enfields, and a couple of Mosin-Nagants. I quickly learned to stay away from those, lest my bank account take a hit it didn't really need to take.

All in all, it was a good day off, which I needed. Especially since May 28th was graduation day for the local high schools, and it was a madhouse that night...not sure I would have made it with my sanity intact had I not had Thursday.

No Deference to Congress

Huh.

Elena Kagan believes that the Supreme Court is not "deferential enough" to Congress.

Hold on one moment while I attempt to keep my blood pressure from going up like Pompeii.

Ok, here we go:

In case no one ever informed you, you pimple on the ass of a halfway decent paralegal, IT IS NOT THE SUPREME COURT'S JOB TO BE DEFERENTIAL TO ANYTHING EXCEPT THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. IF ANYTHING, CONGRESS IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEFERENTIAL TO THE SUPREME COURT AND ABIDE BY ITS INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION.

If you ever want to be more than a worthless, scum sucking, slimy residue of a two week old afterbirth, you will READ THE CONSTITUTION, AS WELL AS THE OTHER WRITINGS OF OUR FOUNDERS and realize that the original intent of the Founders was to DENY the federal government any powers that were not explicitly granted via the Constitution.

That statement alone proves that you are completely unfit for practice as a judge at any level, much less at the level of the Supreme Court. Half the problems facing this country today come from the outdated and archaic concept of the Presumption of Constitutionality. This concept might have been worth something back when our political leadership was actually worth the price of a used Yugo, but has no place in society today, where some of our so-called "leaders" don't even know what is in the document they swore to uphold!

Cthulhu weeps. At least she'll be safe from the brain-eating zombies - she obviously doesn't have any nutritional value for them.