She's Home

My precious little laptop is home again, safe and sound, and all repaired. I got the call about her yesterday, but by the time I got the message the place was already closed, so I had to wait all day long before I could go pick her up. As it turns out, the problem was entirely with the plug, which the techie dude cut off and replaced with a brand new fancy plug. He gave me the old one back, and it was broken and frayed all to hell. No wonder she wasn't getting any juice. That plug was some messed up, brother.

After that small scare, I'll definitely be going in and saving everything under the sun to some disk or other. We shan't be taking any chances on losing that stuff. A valuable lesson has been learned.

I'm just glad to have her home.

Now I can get to my next project, which is having a copy of the first two seasons of the book printed up for ... a brand new reader! Woo hoo. This new reader, who will be known as Her Royal Grooviness (soon to have a fancy new link from this blog to hers, along with other stellar blogs authored by Rachel and Cinderella), is someone whose acquaintance (via the internet) I've made fairly recently through Guinevere. So yet again Guin has brought a new reader to the table and added to my small book club. When I'm getting published for reals I should find an agent even HALF as aggressive as Guin and I'll be ok. At any rate, I hope HRG enjoys those chapters which should be on their way Real Soon Now.

In a perfect world they'd already be ready for mailing, but I was suffering from so much seperation anxiety with the laptop gone that the idea of also leaving my chapters at Staples for a day or two was just more than I could bear. That might sound crazy, and it probably is crazy, but I have so little that I can actually get attached to right now, and Book related things are about it. That said, I'm going down to Staples right after work tomorrow and get things done.

*****

Of course all I could do this morning was continuously bump that finger into every damn thing. And it hurt like a sonofabitch. It was swelled up to about 1.7 normal finger size, and I could barely bend it at all, and it was just in the way no matter what I was trying to do. In a job like mine you never realize just how often you utilize all of your fingers until you take one out of play. I had to readjust everything until I got into a decent groove with it.

At one point Jim and Christy tried to instigate me into picking on Cooter for his lackluster performance (the truth is, though, that he was better today than normal, and the two of them have completely lost any objectivity when it comes to him), but I didn't take the bait. Jim insinuated something about getting some work done, meaning Cooter, who was telling me ALL ABOUT his four-wheeler, the lifts on his truck, and other redneck-oriented things I couldn't care less about, but since he was talking and working both I didn't mind. So I brought my bolt-fit gun over to Jim and said (deliberately missing the point he was making), "I am doing the best I can here ... with my nine fingers." At first he was like NO, that isn't what I meant, but when I said the fingers part he had to laugh.

Right before break I decided it was time to change the bandages, which would require a stop at the nurse's station again. I'd bought some band-aids at Wal-Mart last night, but I didn't have any of the kind that went over the fingertip, and plus they have some special stuff there to put on banged up fingers the way mine is banged up. Also, I wanted the nurse to look at the finger again and tell me if what was going on there was in anyway normal or if I should plan a doctor's visit.

When I pulled off those band-aids, first to show Cooter the ghastly wreckage, as well as the others, they were *horrified*. Well, in fairness, when I'd applied those bandages the night before my finger was still in full bleed, so it was a mess under there. Even so, the finger was swollen, the skin was bleached white and dead, and that awful circular cut stood out like a sore ... uh, yeah. "Jesus Christ," Jim said, "I knew you smacked it, but I didn't know you did THAT to it." And then Christy insisted that I had to go see a doctor. And then they started talking about infections and what not. Blah blah blah. I was just enjoying the notoriety of my first truly wretched work related injury there. I'm a little sick that way.

The nurse didn't think it was all so bad, at least not something that would require a visit to a doctor. He was, however, more than a little taken aback by the sight of that finger. When you can even shock a nurse, you've really done something.

By lunch time the finger did feel better, and thankfully wasn't as swollen anymore, so that I could go about my job without feeling the constant ouch of my pulverized digit. It's still sore now, and I'm sure it still looks like hell, but it's liveable.

We made our numbers earlyish and there was the option to go home. Last week, suffering from intense Spring Fever, I took that option four out of the five days. But today I stayed. A number of guns had come back for defective (that is "flat") firing pins that were blowing the primers, and as usual, any repairs that come back that can be construed as the result of their bolt-fitting ... I take personally. I used to do that at LSI, too, and it almost led me to an ulcer, but I have a more balanced outlook on that kind of thing now -- it's my responsibility to fix it, but I'm not going to let it eat my stomach. That's easier to do at Rugers because Mike and Barney are reasonable people and not wretched old hags like Sue.

So I stayed. I was determined to switch out as many of the defective firing pins as possible. Cooter was going to leave, too, but after seeing that I was determined to stay, even if I was staying alone, he decided to stay. I believe that I'm the only person in that cell that a) Cooter will actually listen to, and b) has any influence over the boy. I guess that's kind of cool.

I didn't get them all changed out, but I made some good progress ... even if my ability to distinguish between a "flat" firing pin and a perfectly good one is dubious at best.

And while staying to fix those, there was a sighting of a really cute girl. (see previous post)

Woot.