The World is a Funny Place

I was happy to discover this morning that Apple has a sense of humor. And not just from epically cheesy jokes that Siri delivers on command. When you're plugged into your car, via Apple CarPlay, the current version has a feature where it tries to guess where you're heading and show the recommended driving route and ETA, even if you haven't plugged a destination into Apple Maps. So in the mornings, it generally assumes that I'm heading to work, and tries to nudge me in the direction it wants me to go.

Now, this morning - a delightfully raining day by the way - my phone decided I should take I-80 west all the way into West Sacramento, and then pickup US-50 heading east back into Sacramento. Well, that seemed rather unnecessary and long. I always take I-80 to I-5 south after dropping Connor off at school. So I decided to go rogue and go my own way.

And then I discovered that the I-5 was a parking lot. Damn me and my cursed arrogance! I should know better than to go against my phone's wishes. But Apple lost no time in updating it's recommended course.

It said I should just go home. 

Well played, Apple, well played.

So our printer at work is a little under the weather right now, producing a faint line along the width of every page it spits out. The mechanical equivalent of a stuffy nose. Something somewhere inside it needs to be cleaned. It needs to blow its nose, as it were. So of course, we file a work order through our IRT department for service. They responded right away with - and I am not making this up - asking us to UNPLUG IT AND PLUG IT BACK IN to see if that fixes the problem.

I'm not sure who is the greater fool, the person who suggested that, or me for actually trying it. I mean, in my defense, I kind of had to. They need to try every solution in order, to eventually eliminate the nonexistent problems and find the actual problem. I wrote and told them that I did it, and, yes, the problem still persists. 

They wrote right back and said they would "escalate this ticket to our Escalation Team". Well. That's great! I'll just sit here in my office and bang my head against the wall for awhile.

In other news, Sac State recently announced that our football team is joining the MAC conference, a move that costs $18 million in registration, fees, and bribes to bring us to a conference whose teams are conveniently located 2000 miles away. And we have to apparently pay $150,000 to fly each of those teams out here for our home games. This makes complete sense. I mean, every department here is suffering from staffing shortages to the point where we can't get anything done because there's no one to do any of the actual work needed to make things happen. And we're not allowed to rehire positions that have been vacated. But hey, we'll have a football team that will be the butt of all jokes when Sac State takes on Ball State for the annual Ball-Sac bowl.

Yeah, I just can't take all of this funny being thrown at me today. Maybe I should just go home. Apple is very wise.