Has got to be "no". Because nobody around my office ever seems to be able to figure out what it means.

Him: Do you have stock photography?

Me: Some. Seven disks of medical stuff.

Him: Anything else?

Me: No.

Him: What about other stuff? Other than medical?

Me: Uh, still no.

Him: Why not?

Me: Other than this is a hospital and all I do is the hospital web site, and have no use for other stuff? Or other than nobody buys me stock art?

Him: Well, I want to add graphics to the web pages I'm designing so that I can give them to you to design.

Me: Please don't.

(Me, thinks: thank god it's my night to work out with Nic Cage. And then go home and drink.)

Knowing my politics (pinko, liberal, yellow-dog democrat) many people have asked me if I've seen Fahrenheit 9-11. I have not. I don't know if I can. While I do have very stable, nay, even low, blood pressure, I'm afraid that seeing the list of Bush's sins laid out like an all-you-can-eat buffet will cause me to stroke out.
See, unlike most of the sheep that make up the American voting public, I never forgot the links in the chain of events that Michael Moore has strung together.

I remembered that Osama Bin Laden was a friend of America, back when it was the "Evil Empire" that was bogged down in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden was a freedom fighter.

I remembered that the Bush family business was oil, as was the Bin Laden family business, and that they did business with each other.

I remembered that Saddam Hussein was America's chosen one back when we were fighting the Iranians, and the Iraqis were our friends. But that was after we left the Shah of Iran twisting in the wind, after years of keeping him propped up.

I remembered that only one person on Capitol Hill had a son or daughter in the military.

I remembered that no one in the Bush administration actually served in Viet Nam. Or even in the military. Bush's own tenure in the National Guard was suspect, bought as it was with his father's connections, and cut short as it was by Dubya going AWOL.

I said from the very first day, that the Bushies knew and allowed the tragedy to happen in order to give them the "moral" imperative to go to war and conquer the oil fields.

Go see Fahrenheit 9-11? Yeah, probably... but bring the defibrillator with me.

I just got a call from the department secretary to rag on me about how the page containing the cafeteria menu isn't updated. Or, at least, it wasn't when she checked it yesterday.

I asked if she'd checked it today before she called me. No, she hadn't. Of course she hadn't, because if she had, she would have seen an updated menu. Which I posted yesterday, but after the only time she looked, apparently.

She also wanted to let me know that some volunteer had looked at the page and it wasn't right. Fine. So you both looked at it yesterday morning, and waited until lunch time today to bitch at me.

The PR department (of course) does this all the time. They call and ask me if I've posted crap, rather than looking at the web site.

Why? Why is it easier to call me than to click once? Do they love to hear the tone in my voice implying that they don't have sufficient brain cells to rub together? Are they laying odds that I'll crack and actually call them an idiot to their face? Or ear, as the case may be.

Or is it that they are just truly and monumentally stupid?

The office I'm in has four walls and a door. These are real walls, not wall-ettes: they go all the way to the ceiling, not nose level. There isn't a window, but hell, I have the real walls and the door.

Today, and for the last month or so, I've been particularly thankful for the door. I've mentioned before that my team shares office space with another team. Their work habits require me to use my door as a sound baffle.

The woman across the hall leaves her door open, and only uses speaker phone. All day. She also listens to particularly bad radio and sings, but that's a walk in the park compared to her speaker phone abuse.

The Toxic Manager manages by standing over his employees, way too close, and watching them work. And sits behind them and tells them what to click on with their mouses. And just hangs around pontificating in an unidentifiable accent that makes everything he says sound like Laurence of Arabia talking to his camel "hut hut hut".

As if I needed any proof to points 1,2 and 3 below, I came home from my little vacation to discover that my e-mail had been rendered null and void by the simple expedient of my brother (who has his undergraduate degree in computer science, by the way) sending me a 3mg file of photos...
My in-box being filled by that largesse, there was no room for any other communication. A fact I discovered upon my return, because, as I told everyone, I would not could not pick up my mail while I was on the other coast.

Thanks a lot. I was only expecting communications from a commission, an update from Blog Moxie on the new, secret redesign, my usual riff raff of friends, meeting agenda and papers for Tuesday's board meeting, and like that.

All bounced. All lost. All requiring re-registration to mail lists, no doubt.

The irony is that the same thing happened to me last year, when my friend known as the King Geek (because that is his actual job in life) sent me a 5mg photo of his son. Like I don't see the kid on a regular basis.

And both he and my brother did this on the first day of my vacation.

In any event, I am rested, tanned, well fed and even got in a baseball game. Florida Marlins lost to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But it was another ball park in my life list, and a nice, albeit domed one, at that.

"In-duh-vidual's name removed: in order for me to be able to use this (thing that she sent me)in the site, and have it be a part of the site, not a static window opening in a separate program, I need the original art/format.

I cannot use a PDF. I cannot pull the art out of it, I cannot embed it in the HTML. When you have a graphic image that you want to use as an element on a page, I need it in jpg, or gif, or as an original Photoshop file, or Illustrator or Freehand, or even as a bmp or tiff.

Just to reiterate: I cannot use a PDF."
What I Wanted to Say:

You stupid fucking git, how many times must I tell you that a PDF is not an acceptable format for me to use on this site? Obviously, at least once a fucking week, since no matter how many times I tell you that a PDF is not a graphic format (OK, well, it is, but not one that can be used as part of HTML), you insist on sending me PDFs and telling me to add them to the hospital's site.

Just in case you were in a coma for the last couple of years, and haven't actually used the fucking internet for anything other than passing lame ass jokes around, the whole fucking point of this endeavor is to be interactive, not fucking brochure ware. Which means, to sum up: I cannot use a PDF, I cannot use a PDF, I cannot use a fucking PDF.

I need the graphics sent to me in a graphic format: Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, gif, jpg, bmp, or any other kind of image openable by the first three programs listed. I can use animations, Flash or Fireworks. The one thing that is absolutely pointless to send me is a three fucking megabyte PDF file and expect me to do anything with it.

Thanks for letting me vent.

I have this girlfriend, see. And normally, I wouldn't write this kind of dish about a friend, but she isn't normal. She's a luddite of the first water. She has an e-mail address, but no computer: she has someone pick up her mail, print it out, and fax it to her. I don't even want to contemplate how the reverse works. I know it involves a typewriter. A typewriter, which, in all due honesty, is, in fact, electric.
So this girlfriend has issues with men. Specifically, she is a man-hater. Except for their dicks. Those, she assures me, she likes. But I have to wonder, seeing as how she holds men in such low regard, why she just doesn't keep a vibrator around and save herself much aggravation.

Every time we talk about men, and let me assure you, I try not to, she ends up in this rant about "men retreat to caves when they are in relationships, because they can't handle intimacy."

She goes on and on and on and on and on, and did I say she goes on at great length? about how men can't communicate; how men are all dogs; how men can only exist in one of two planes: the vertical in which you can do business or converse, or the horizontal in which you can do the horizontal mambo. The two planes, she believes, are mutually exclusive.

She informed me during our last conversation, that every single man she has ever been involved with, has cheated on her. I should note that by single man we mean every individual, because she is not so refined in her sensibilities as to stick to the unmarried variety.

This led me to consider the possibility that A) she only chooses men who are emotionally unavailable because she herself is emotionally unavailable, or B) she is more of a psycho than she appears to me, and drives the men, screaming, into the arms of other women -- and let me say that she looks like a bona fide psycho to me, so being more of one is a frightening proposition, or C) she only thinks that they cheat on her (and where does the married guy doing his wife fall?) or D) all men are pigdogs and I should think about my own track record.

I did. And nobody (except the Antichrist, and of course he would) cheated on me in my grand single days. Or if they did, I didn't know or didn't care, seeing as how it was a matter of goose and gander.

In any event, she is currently embarking on a new, dysfunctional and long-distance romance with a man she can barely stand being with when they aren't between the sheets. At least, that was the gist that I gleaned from her last hour-long screed about what sacks of shit men are.

She allowed as how, despite his bad politics, his paternalistic pandering and his harping on her to quit (chain)smoking, she had no desire to change him, and that made him a first in her long line of rejects.

That was a telling sentence, huh? All these losers she's been keeping company with, all these dogs who had to go mark other territory, she's been trying to change them all. Into what? Sausages? Lawn jockeys?

The whole point of men, in my opinion, is that they are not women. They are different. They communicate differently, they hold their silverware differently, they channel surf differently. As the French would say "Vive la difference!" Sure, they're dogs. But hell, I love my dog, too.

But I digress. In fact, I've digressed so much I forgot what the point was that I was trying to make.

I guess it was that if you think the opposite sex is from another planet, maybe you should check your own home address first.

It's been one month, to the day, that my father died. For some reason, I'm just not feeling really productive today. So it's a good thing that tonight I get to go to my soul sister's adult Bat Mitzvah. Nobody will notice if I sob uncontrollably.

At the meeting the other day where the Senior VP told us our jobs were on the roof? He also came up to me to do some serious managerial touchy feely with this particular wage slave. He said, "I understand you had some kind of death in your family?"
Some kind. Yeah, specifically, MY FATHER. Fucking idiot. So I mouthed a few appropriate mumbles. He signed off with "Good luck with that grief thing."

That grief thing. He must have gone to the George Herbert Walker School of eloquence. You remember, it was his fumbling of the vision thing that got Clinton such a leg up in the American psyche.

If I could make this shit up, it would be so much funnier than it is, being reality and all.

Remember the old joke about the person who goes on vacation, and their friend calls and says the cat is dead. Person says, you don't tell someone something like that with no preamble. First you say the cat got on the roof, then it fell and was taken to the vet, and everything was done, but... Friend says, OK. Calls the vacationer the next day and says, uh, your grandmother got on the roof...
Well, our Senior VP had a meeting today where he told us our jobs are on the roof. Hospital is running about a zilliontytrillion dollars in the red and we aren't even through the fiscal year. Sacrifices will have to be made. Yadda yadda yadda. No overtime. (Not that anyone I know actually is hourly.) Cuts are coming. Yadda yadda. Go see the dog and pony show that the CEO will be giving on Monday. Everything will be explained.

Maybe it was all those years of working in a darkroom, but I can see the writing on the very murky wall ahead.

On a related note, one of our managers managed to say "OK" 28 times in his five minute presentation. The next most annoying verbal tic was the manager who said "Basically" 13 times in about as many minutes.

Yes. I was keeping score. Making little tic marks on my legal pad.

What, you think this shit only goes on in Dilbert?

In the immortal words of Firesign Theater: How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at alllllllll?

I took my car in to the shop to have them check out the randomly soft brakes. My regular mechanic wasn't there, and so nothing could be done. Came to work, got my computer booted up and then all hell didn't actually break loose so much as it just started oozing out around my grasp on life.
The RLA's lung cancer (he was sure) turned out to be a strained muscle. But then, he once thought his newly-developed lats were tumors. He'd never seen lumps there before.

(Update) The RLA insists that he never said it was lung cancer. He says he merely said that he felt a "dead spot" in or on his lung, which he says (now) was maybe something swollen and pressing on the lung. He says that maybe he thought it was his heart. Pleuresy, or something. Maybe. But that he really, really didn't think it was serious. Which is why he really DIDN'T say something to the effect that he'd clean the kitty litter after his doctor's appointment, if they let him come home and didn't check him into a hospital for x-rays and tests.

The phone rang again. It was my mother's neighbor. She's sure that mummy's caregiver is abusing her. I called mummy's case manager to discuss the matter, and my brother called in, very upset, having just had the same conversation with the neighbor.

The Senior VP of Human Resources has noted that there is old and crappy information on the hospital's web site, and has made it their mission to force PR to supply new. Which they are now doing. Stacks and piles of it. And I'm trying to keep both the existing site up to date and do the conversion to the new site, at a rate of 100 pages a day.

But tonight is Miss Aretha. And tomorrow morning, I get to meet my new trainer at the gym. He looks like Nic Cage in "Con Air". Tats. Ripped to the nines. Hubba, hubba. If that can't motivate me, then I'm dead and shouldn't be taking up space in the weight room, anyway.

More news as it happens. Maybe.

Who's there? Mr. Kettle, as in Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. We're here to talk about the color black.

So the National Guardsman who served in Iraq, saw war first hand and decided that he couldn't actually support the war effort and had, in fact, to consider himself a conscientious objector, and refused to go back to Iraq after his (first) tour has been found guilty of desertion and must go to jail.

But, the National Guardsman who went into the Guard to avoid actually serving in a hot war (Viet Nam), and who decided that he'd done enough time and went AWOL six months before his tour of duty was over was appointed President of the United States.

Anyone? Anyone? Right. I know. The difference is that the Guardsman sitting in jail is Hispanic with no powerful father in politics.

Fucking chicken hawk hypocrites.
The Battle of the Bands last night was just wonderful. I'd be happy to tell you who won, but we left before the end. (I had a hot gym date today, and I didn't want to be so hungover that I fell off the step. Nor did I want to be so toxed out that the yogini was offended.)

But the bands we saw were awesome. Most particularly, I was impressed with The Kick. They did. They do. They have this little skinny bass player with the most amazing mop of hair who can windmill like Pete Townsend. They had more energy, more stage presence, more ... I was pogoing like a mad woman. They're from Orlando, but don't hold that against them.

Then there was Wha The...? out of Atlanta. They were so good that after their set someone in the audience (not me, really, not me) yelled "This battle is OVER!!!" And it would have been, had not The Kick followed.

Last night was the first time since the whole drama of my father's decline began (two years ago?) that I felt so alive and so happy. I've said it before, and I'll repeat myself now, that the Church of Rock and Roll is the true spiritual savior of my generation.

Please don't write to me and tell me that I'm going to roast in hell, and that my previous statement is sacrilegious and that there are a million other things wrong with that sentence and sentiment. I know. I'm being a touch facetious.

But, really, when I'm in the presence of live music, when the beat is so loud that it takes over for your heartbeat, when the energy is palpable, the smell of teen spirit, as it were, is thick.... well. Children, I have seen the lord in the face of rock and roll. You find it your way, I'll find it mine.

Let me hear you say "AMEN!"

Every now and then, the level of technology at this institution confounds the average user. It is of a level totally incomprehensible to the average moron on the street. Today, that would be the elevator at the train station.
Yes. The fucking elevator was beyond the ability of one of my co-passengers to deal with. This isn't a big elevator, or one that goes in unexpected directions, or even between more than two floors. It goes from the platform (2) to the street (1) and back. Period.

And yet, there we were, on two, when the doors closed. And there we remained, because the one person within reach of the control panel just stared at it in amazement and slack-jawed, mouth-breathing stupidity.

"Press the button, please" I requested from the back of the elevator, wedged against the wall by the vet in the wheelchair.

"Que? Aqui?" the bottle blonde with too much jewelry, too much makeup (for a 20-year-old, much less the 60+ this old crone had to be), knee-highs and black FMPs under a beige Pucci-print maxi skirt responded. And then pressed, wait for it, 2. Yes. The same floor we were on. With the doors closed. And not moving.

And it's not like these are even clean elevators. Due to their proximity to the Metro, the VA, and the county hospital, these elevators do double duty as moving urinals, and gawd knows what else.

So with a quick, but never the less pungent epithet of my own, I stretched across the chair-bound vet (who was looking daggers at me anyway, and for what I haven't a clue) and punched the ground floor button.

Once inside my office building, I was treated to a ride with a random loony, who cursed at the guy who got on at the ground floor to ride up only one stop to the second, and opined that the semi-tall female lawyer should take up basketball and make a lot of money, like, and I quote :"Kobe Bryant."

Great choice of role models, dude.

I am now ensconced in my office, door closed, headphones on and a 4-pack of CDs for today's enjoyment consisting of: The Rough Guide to Bhangra, The Rough Guide to Bollywood, The Rough Guide to the Music of India and The Rough Guide to the Asian Underground.

And tonight? Tonight is the Battle of the Garage Bands. Now, if I can only make it through the day.

The front page of today's Herald features two photos, in color, above the fold. They are two frames from the video of the murder of Nick Berg. The first shows him sitting on the floor, surrounded by masked men. The second shows one of the men holding Berg's head to one side as he applies the edge of his knife to Berg's throat.

Thank you. I think we all needed to see that. Mr. Berg's family surely needed to see that. Like hell.
The US government prevents us from seeing photos of our military coffins, citing security (hah!) and sensitivity to the families. But a civilian (Whom authorities now say was advised to leave Iraq, and if that isn't a case of the buck stops with the victim, I don't know what is.) being murdered as payback for a photo of a prisoner wearing a dog collar (Oh, yeah. That's a fucking eye for an eye, I'll tell you. I can surely see the corollary there, boy howdy.) well, that's just perfect fodder for the insatiable American viewing public.

Fuck me. I don't think so. And if I were the least bit paranoid, I would say that Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg had one thing in common other than having their cold-blooded murders paraded through the American press: they were both Jews.

If I were the least bit paranoid, I would say that one thing is what makes it acceptable to show their deaths.

But I'm not that paranoid. I think that the reason these brutal slayings are shown ad nauseum is because we need images like that to keep the determination to stay in Iraq alive in the hearts of the American people. This is just propaganda for the Bush mill. Bush and his lousy, filthy cadre of chickenhawks. Not a one of the high-ranking men in his administration served in the Viet Nam war. Not a one of them has a son or daughter in the military, at risk for the kind of death they allow to be broadcast nightly. They condone the demonization of the enemy, and then react with faux horror when the citizen soldiers of our own republic are found to have committed "atrocities" against the enemy.

A person cannot commit an atrocity against an enemy who looks like them, or has the same values as them. You need to create a demon in order to be able to maintain the fight. Our government is creating a demon in fact by its actions in Iraq, and a demon in the popular imagination by what they chose to allow to be shown to the American people.

And I for one, have had enough.

Yeah. I got a question for ya. I got it right here.

If the filter on our server can detect and delete viruses, then why the fuck can't it just delete the whole damn thing? Why the fuck do I have to spend my day deleting 200 freaking messages with the subject line of "Important" "Re: Your document" "Hello" "Pictures of You?"
Hello. It was a virus. I don't need to see the spam bot that sent it. And our own fucking servers are infected, or being highjacked, because the new spam is a photo of "lonely girl" who wants to be my friend. And no matter who she is, no matter what first name is used, the mailing address is a hospital server.

Proof Reading: something to be done before a document is approved. Is that so hard? Could that little rule of thumb be taught to the freaking head secretaries at this institution? Huh? Could it? Ya think? Because I have to say that I am really fucking over the whole, "Put this document on line as a PDF (which I am too fucking stupid to be able to create myself, as a head secretary, so you need to do it for me) ASAP and less than 24 hours later, I get the new document with the typos corrected repeat the PDF and ASAP process." I'm just saying.

Here's another tip: if you don't want to spend half an hour sobbing uncontrollably into your napkin, don't watch "Big Fish" if you have either lost a father, or are in the process of losing one. Other than that, the movie is a delight and a wonder.

Ewan McGregor. He can do anything, can't he? I love the smile he used in "Big Fish." It wasn't just a smile, it was, um... Well, every time he flashed it, in my minds eye I could see the big animated star-burst shiny twinkle off his teeth. It was a work of art. It was "ACTING" in all caps. It was brilliant and completely articulated the character.

Well, it's been fun, kiddies, but believe it or not, I actually have some content to post on the hospital's site. I'm sure it's inane, and out of date, and thoroughly pointless, but it is content, so there you are. I'm going to do some "real" work.

That was the subject line of the following e-mail. This has to be one of the saddest things I've ever seen come across the virtual transom. This person is trying to apply for a job at the hospital. She wants to be a clerical worker. Here is her e-mail, in its entirety. Only the names and addresses have been removed to protect the guilty.
"I TRAY TO APPLY BY THE APPLICATION BUT SOMETHING HAPPEN WITH THE COMPUTER

I APPLY NOW I F YOUR LET ME APPLY HERE


I APPLY FOR CLERICAL POSITION HERE MY RESUME


Education: English Center August, 1996

Miami Senior HJ August, 1993



Certificates: Business Computer

Application 1

December, 1993

D-Base

April, 1996

Lotus-Beginning Intermediate

April, 1996

Medical office Technology

August, 1996

Windows 95

August, 1996

Business Communication

August, 1996

Ms-Dos

August, 1996



Languages: English and Spanish



References: The English Center

Principal Diaz Fugue.



Work Experience: I have Experience in Teacher Assistant.

When I was in HJ School 1993



Let me work with your for vonlunteer for

One week if any to."

This is just so sad. And she sent it twice, with the same mistakes both times. I forwarded it to the HR department, because who am I to say she isn't qualified to work here? Just because she can't spell or use spell check? Hell, I have vice presidents who can't turn on their own computers, so why should a secretary have to be able to write in English? It's not like it's our primary language in this city, after all.

Another conversation on the train this week was with a woman serving jury duty at the Federal Courthouse. The room was filled to capacity, standing room only, she said. And then they made an announcement that if you didn't think you could speak/understand English well enough to follow along, you could be excused. (No matter that there are translators in the courts.) Two thirds of the room left. And I know she wasn't exaggerating, because the same thing happened to me last year. The room holds several hundred people.

Don't be fooled by the mass exodus, however. Most of the folks who left probably do speak/read/understand English. They just don't want to serve on a jury. Why? Who knows. I sure as hell don't.

The Anti-Christ (my ex-husband) is a criminal defense attorney. The ideal juror is one who doesn't read a newspaper, or listen to the news on the radio, or watch the news on TV. The ideal juror has a flexible view of right and wrong, and an IQ somewhere around dishwater. The idea that those kinds of people could be my peers (jury of one's peers?) makes my blood run cold. Just another reason to keep the proverbial nose clean, then.