Never let it be said that we don’t go through life without questioning the obvious or at least what should be extremely obvious.  You walk into your dark bedroom to grab the keys to your car and you can’t seem to find them.  It’s your bedroom.  You know every single inch of the place.  Even when something is out of place you should be able to find it.  Why not turn the light on?  Well now… that’s simply too obvious.

Last week I found myself cleaning my kitchen in preparation to entertain guests for dinner.  The laundry room is unfortunately part of the kitchen in that the fridge is right next to the laundry dryer and the microwave is right next to the washing machine.  Thus, when I say I am cleaning the kitchen and as part of such cleaning the kitchen floor, I am ipso facto cleaning the laundry room floor.

Generally this is not much of an issue, except we recently purchased a large discount-chain bottle of laundry detergent.  This is one of those that has the button to let you pour the detergent so that you don’t have to wrestle a twenty pound bottle all of the time.  The problem this time around is that there seems to be a tiny annoying leak such that the front of the dryer (upon which the bottle rests) and the floor beneath the dryer have a bit of soap collecting.  To compound the problem, the soap has been drying a little bit over time, not so much that it is actually dry, but enough that you can’t simply wipe it away.

Here is where the paradox lies… laundry detergent is meant to clean things, yet in its current semi-dry state there is no good way to clean up the soap.

Option 1:  Since the soap is only semi-dry, and we know that soap moves a lot better when it’s wet, grab a damp cloth or paper towel and wipe while rehydrating the soap.  The problem here is the water and scrubbing action now cause the soap to spread around and to start foaming up.  This solution seems to be going no where good.

Option 2:  Since the soap is semi-dry and this acting like stuborn putty, maybe we can scrape at it.  Sure - scrape away and wind up with big clumps of disgusting soap.  I mean really!  How can soap be disgusting? Let’s forget about the Fight Club references. It’s meant to clean things so it must be clean.

So I ask you, how do you best clean up soap?

Apparently Love’s checks their customer responses.  More than that, it seems that they actually take action on them.  Now they didn’t tell me they did anything, but while explaining my customer response form fiasco to a friend, I found out that they updated the .pdf version of their in-store flier.

Fantastic!  Thanks!

Now let me show you what I wanted to show you.  It’s a relatively moot point now, but I thought it was interesting none the less.  Here’s the section of the advert that I was focusing on that has a different bluetooth headset being advertised than being modeled:

To make sure we can do a decent comparison, I’ve flipped the advertised model around and placed it closer to the model:

It’s a little grainy, but you can definitely tell that the model is wearing more of a boom version and that the colors are in slightly different places. 

So that’s all I was trying to say when I landed in mediocrity mayhem.  Good for Love’s in their speed to recover.  Bad on them for never sending me an email that things were fixed.  And still… check your artwork - please!

Some of you may not understand.  I love my job.  Every day brings with it new challenges and a constant drive to change for the better.  To keep up with the environment, you start to acquire new skills either by focusing on the need to develop them or by inheriting the skill through some form of mental osmosis.  This latter form of metamorphosis has started to lead me down the path of noticing things.  Maybe the following awareness test will help to explain a little.

If you didn’t see it, thank the loving scotoma wherein you simply don’t see that which you’re not looking for. This ability to “notice” things even applies to that which isn’t there but ought to be as in my cell phone adventure where a seemingly simple solution to something just wasn’t there.

It’s getting worse for me. Today I saw a simple advertisement in a gas station regarding a bluetooth headset. There was a picture of the headset next to a picture of a model wearing the headset. Actually, she wasn’t wearing it at all. She was wearing a completely different model. Out of all the things to notice, that’s what I picked up on.

(more…)

To jump to the end of this story, my phone is fixed and I didn’t have to reload anything.  I just wanted to be sure that all suspense is completely removed from your mind so that we can all think clearly about this.

About a week ago, my phone fell to the ground a couple of times because the belt clip on my case was so worn and old that there was about an inch of play.  It’s fallen off before (once resulting in a 45 minute retracing of steps in the snow) and there hadn’t been any problems.  This time, apparently the phone and case landed clip-side down and that inch of play in the product generated the perfect landing point for the screen to shatter.  Luckily, the screen protector kept everything together and the only real usability lost was the touch sensitivity on the screen.

Today, I decided to take the phone to the repair center.  I put my name on the list and was approached by a representative within about five minutes.  The gentleman then asked me if I had backed up my phone.  Well… no!  I don’t currently use this phone as my main means of organization as my company has given my a Blackberry to stay connected.  I don’t generally have a need these days to connect my phone to a computer.  He went back to speak with the techs and then came back and said “we need you to go backup your phone”.

(more…)

As mentioned previously, I’ve recently delved into the world of Twitter.  In the short amount of time that I have been experimenting with it, I’ve experienced some nuances in communication that I never that I would encounter.

On one occasion, I came across this tweet from Robert Scobel informing everyone that he was transmitting a video feed from his cell phone camera live to qik so that anyone could listen in to the party.  Not only was I watching a live feed of people sitting around a bar table in San Antonio, but I was able to interact with them via chat and get near immediate responses via the feed.  I must be getting old because this was a bit shocking to me and it all started with a twitter tweet.

Alternatively, I have found myself responding to someone’s tweet on twitter while communicating with them via an instant messaging platform.  All the while, this person was simply sitting at the other end of the office building at which I work.  In the end, and after finally realizing what I was doing, I got up and walked over and started to talk.  Yup - verbal communication face to face.  Amazing.

I’m kind of curious what else I am going to run into.

It’s been quite a long time since I have written a blog post.  The activity got a little overwhelming in that I was paying more attention to spam in the comments than content on the page.  Recently, I dove into the world of Twitter. I had no idea what I was doing, but now my addiction is becoming a little more evident. The ability to provide a smaller update in life without committing to an entire blog post is exactly what I need to maintain traction here.  I have included a small feed on the homepage of my site so that even more random people can stumble across my day. All in all, I have things to say. I have thoughts that need a place to go. We’ll chalk it up to randomness once in a while, but darn it, it might be fun!