Assaulted by Spam

Well folks, I've always hated those stupid things where you read warped letters and have to verify that you are human by telling the web page what letters you see, but it seems that I have no choice. Some asshat keeps posting dozens of spam links in comments to my posts and so it seems that the only way to limit this is to require posters to jump through hoops.
I just wanted to let y'all know WHY I was going to enable the feature and let you know that I regret having to do it. I hope that you will still take the time to make comments, because that really is what makes this all worth the while to me . . .

Gotta go!

After paying one backyard mechanic, and then later on, also paying a rip off artist who owns a classic car repair shop, I've finally had to break down and take my Mustang to a professional transmission shop. One day I tried to back it out of the garage and it just refused to go anywhere. 
When I checked up on it a day or so later, the owner took me to where my transmission was up on a stand and most of its guts laid out on a bench.
"This," he said, slapping down a large square gasket "is clearly a factory original gasket. "
He plopped down one or two other gaskets of various shapes and sizes after it.
"These are ALL 45 year old, factory original gaskets! Do you see this plastic ring?” He asked, holding up a small plastic ring so that I could see it.
"Yes?" I replied.
He flexed his fingers and the ring crumbled into hundreds of pieces.
"Wrong! It's not supposed to be hard and brittle. It's SUPPOSED to be a soft and pliable o-ring and is what is supposed to be keeping the majority of your fluid inside the transmission. As far as I can tell, the guys that you had work on your transmission only replaced the torque converter, the front and rear seals, and painted the thing for you."
"Oh my God . . . " was about all I could say. All of the money I had paid out, all of the stress and agony, and neither one of those assholes that I had paid and trusted had done much of ANYTHING! Heck, my wife and I had replaced the front and rear seals ourselves, so they hadn’t even done that!

The good news is that my pretty Mustang now has a transmission that really HAS been rebuilt and she and I are loving it! In fact, now that it is running so well, I decided to spend some time and effort on the interior! I've gotta admit that my heart was in my throat as I started yanking the console and seats out of my car - I've never messed with a cars interior before! Still, in a few hours I had the old and nasty carpet out, and then had to take a break and wait for the antihistamines to kick in! You would be shocked at how much super fine and nasty dust falls under a cars carpet in 45 years and I had kicked it all up and into the air in the process of pulling the old one out.

As these things always do, my replacing the carpet turned into a few other tasks as well, as I discovered that much of my old center console was not in as good a shape as I might have hoped. I ended up having to do a lot of epoxy work on it, and then when that was done, decided that some of the decorative polished aluminum was just too damned scratched, dented, and ugly to stay. A quick trip to Lowes got me some aluminum sheet metal, but there was nothing quick about the work required to cut, file, and polish it! THAT took a good solid eight hours of work, but it was all worth it!
And I present the brand new interior of my lovely classic:

Would you believe that I'm suffering from two problems? An almost complete lack of desire to travel the country pretty and a fairly serious lack of confidence for doing it.  I suppose that to be honest, it's really one problem with two obvious manifestations. As is often the case these days, I haven't had even a chance to be pretty in more than a month. All of my service calls have been reasonably local and so involved only lots of hours on the highway. Well, today I had to go direct form San Jose Ca to Detroit and I really had to work pretty hard to get up the nerve to fly pretty. I was all ready and had all of my shit together when I did something stupid. I was yanking the old airline tags off of my baggage and it didn't want to come free. I pulled a bit harder, and to my satisfaction, the damn tag did at last come free, but of all of the idiotic things, I more or less punched myself in the face when it finally gave.
Back to the mirror to repair the makeup I had just screwed up . . .

After going through the TSA check point, I was sitting down and putting my shoes back on when a male TSA inspector walked by and casually commented that he liked my shoes. Pretty sure that he was teasing but I'm not positive. If he DID like them, I'm thinking that he was the only person that did today. I encountered something new to me today - what my wife calls the "stink eye". This is when a woman looks at your outfit and makes it clear that she doesn't approve. I kid you not, I saw at least three women look at my shoes and more or less give me "that" look. You know, that look that says "wow does that look wrong/bad".
Oh well, it is what it is, and I liked them, so they can just bite me.

I didn’t make the cut for the free upgrade to first class this time, and so I was stuck just behind the first class section in coach. About an hour and a half into the three hour and twenty minute flight, I reached the point where I had to get eject some of the coffee that I had drank that morning. As they were giving their whole safety presentation, they did specifically ask that you use the restroom in your cabin/class, but I looked to the back of the plane in despair – there was a line of about four people already waiting for it. I looked at the bathroom in first class, only a dozen feet away from me, and it was empty and unused. While I’ve never done it myself, I’ve seen dozens of people from coach step up and use the first class bathroom, and no one has ever said a word to them. I was pretty darn desperate and so decided that I would do this, but the flight attendant apparently didn’t agree with my actions. I got about half way there when the male flight attendant stepped in front me.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“No thank you, I just need to use the bathroom.” I replied, trying to smile even though I was pretty much doing the potty dance at this point.

“I’m sorry, but you will have to use the bathroom in the coach section.” He told me.

I was kind of surprised, because like I said, I’ve never seen them actually stop someone before, but I wasn’t angry or anything like that. After all, I knew darn good and well that I was doing something that they had specifically asked us not to do, but still, I was bit irritated as I turned around to look at the bathroom in the back of the plane that now had five people waiting.

“Really?” I asked him, making it fairly clear that I thought he was being a bit of jerk, but he didn’t bother to reply. He just stood there in my way until I turned around and headed for the back of the plane. Near the end of the flight, he approached my seat and knelt down to speak to me.

“Listen, I just wanted to make sure that you knew I would have stopped anyone, and that it had nothing to do with what  you . . . “ he paused, clearly looking for words that would not offend, “ that it was nothing personal against you. If I let you use that bathroom, I would have to let everyone else use it too.”

“It’s no problem – no worries!” I told him. Not much point to getting upset about it when he was just enforcing a rule that I had knowingly ignored. Still, something about the whole situation did manage to just depress the hell outta me. I really don’t think that he would have stopped anyone else. In more than a decade of flying, I’ve seen dozens of folks doing what I had done, and not one single time have I seen someone stopped for it. As stupid and silly as this all sounds, it bummed me out and I’ve been pretty seriously depressed ever since.

Pretty silly huh?

Ride Sally ride. . .

So there I am, minding my own business, when I get a message telling me that my daughter-in-law's father had wrecked and totaled his car. Since then, I've seen the pictures and have to say that he is one VERY lucky man to have walked away from it.  A day or so later I got a call from him asking if I knew anyone that could loan him a car. You see he had been out of work for quite a while, and had only recently got a job, and now was likely to lose it if he couldn't get transportation to and from work. Since I know pretty much no one in the Austin area, I regretfully told him that I didn't think I could be much help to him, and wished him the best of luck. There was an awkward pause in the conversation before he spoke again.

"You know I hesitate to mention this, but what about the mustang?" He asked in a timid voice.

 To be honest, my 67 Mustang had never even crossed my mind. It has spent so many years in my garage, with this and that wrong, that I pretty much forget that I have three cars most of the time. Still, my Mustang is far more than just an old car to me; it is a symbol and an investment. It is a symbol of my childhood and of my youth as my father had owned one, and my own first car had been one. My own wife is not willing to drive the car because she knows what it means to me, and so there was very little to no hesitation before I replied.

"Umm, no." I told him, while thinking to myself "Not only  no but HELL no!"

Still, after the call, it started me thinking. If I COULD  get the Mustang road worthy, maybe we could loan him my wife's car. The problem was that I didn’t have the money to fix the darn thing, which is of course the whole reason the car has sat in my garage for years. It just kept haunting me though, that the man was gonna lose his first job in quite a while for lack of transportation, while I had three cars - I just didn't think that I could handle that.  My wife and I talked about it and agreed that it was worth going into debt for, and so using my credit card, we started a concerted effort to return a car to life that had not been consistently on the road since 1974.

A few weeks ago, I had tried taking the car out for a bit, and one of the rear tires exploded, shredding assorted parts of my rear fender with it , so now I had two very bald tires and no spare. First things first, there was no point to putting tires on it if its suspension and alignment were so bad that it ate up the last two front tires in less than two thousand miles, so we were off to replace some of the suspension and get it aligned. After getting the lower control arms replaced, the first place we took it to refused to align it, telling me that it was too old, and its specs were not in their database.

The second place we took it to was a new garage with a young owner in his thirties, and he had a brand new and state of the art alignment rack, and he assured me that he would have no trouble at all getting the job done. He was wrong . . .

The first call we got from him was to tell me that he couldn't move most of the components that needed to be adjusted. These had not been adjusted in thirty to forty years, and their threads were full of the undercoating material the car had been treated with in years past.  That cost me an extra hundred or so to have him take it off the rack and free these frozen components.

The next call I got from him was to tell me that though there was no clear sign of it to the human eye, my body must be bent, because he could not get the car aligned. One of the adjustments was all of the way to its extreme and yet needed to go farther. Now over $200 down, he hands the car back to me with the steering far worse than it was when I handed it to him.

Just in case it had anything to do with the very old and bald tires, i decided to go get the new tires before taking the car to a body shop to have the "frame" looked at. This turned out to not be as simple as it sounds either, because not only was I not willing to trust the existing tires even long enough to get me to the tire store, but apparently there are very few tires made these days in the appropriate size for my old car. It seems that this tire size is now relegated mostly to trailers, and no longer for cars. It took a couple of hours searching the Internet, but I did ultimately find some Michelins at a nearby discount tires, and so I jacked the car up, took all of the tires off, and threw them in the back of my truck.

Oh, and the tires that were on it? Yeah, it turns out that they were fifteen years old and at the time were about the cheapest tires that you could put on a car with a cost of about $25 each. Terribly cheap and very old - no wonder the damn thing had blown and ripped up my back quarter panel! They were so old that the tire shop refused to move one of them to the spare rim. At first I thought that this was a ploy to force me to buy a new tire, but they wound up giving me a used tire for free, so clearly they really were worried about the safety aspects of the old tires.

So, I got the new tires home, installed them onto the car, and headed out for the body shop. I'd made it maybe a mile and a half when I got pulled over for my expired inspection sticker.

Did you ever have the feeling that the universe was trying to stick it to you?

I explained to the officer that the car had been up on jacks in my garage for years while I was trying to fix it up, and that I was just getting it back on the road. I pointed out the brand new tires and laughed while I told him that they had only been on the car for a whopping twenty minutes. He looked at me kind of doubtful like, no doubt having heard every story there was at some time or other.

"Look, I have to be honest - I'm not sure what to do. Just sit tight for a minute all right?" He told me, and then returned to his car. About a minute later another cop car pulls up behind me, and a young officer gets out and comes up to my window.

"What year is she?" He asked me through the window. Soon, he and I were walking around the car while he explained that he had three or four antique cars himself. As I popped the hood so that he could see the engine bay and engine that I had restored, you could hear him almost gasp as he sharply inhaled.

"Oh my God, it looks like new!" He exclaimed.

"Well you can see where I've been spending all of my time and effort until now." I laughed.

"Look, it's obvious that you have been working on it, so I'm going to suggest that he only give you a warning. I wouldn't worry about it at all. Oh, and what you should do is register it as an antique. You only have to register it once every five years and you don't have to get it inspected." He suggested.

"Thanks so much! I think I'll do exactly that!" I thanked him. He shook my hand, told me he loved the car, and then as both officers were walking away I heard him tell the other one "holy shit, you could eat off of that engine!"

Hmmm, maybe the universe ain't so bad after all!

Feeling more than a little bit of depression at the thought of my car possibly having a bent body, I took the car to a local body shop that had worked on some of my other cars in the past. That afternoon I got my first good news - it seems that the kid with the new garage and state of the art alignment rack apparently hadn't known what he was doing with them and there was nothing wrong with my cars body. He had just been adjusting one of the components the wrong way!

So, now we have loaned my wife's car to my daughter in laws father and got him out of a world of hurt, and yours truly is finally driving a 67 Mustang with new lower control arms, a perfect alignment, brand new tires, and a maxed out credit card in the drivers seat! Oh, I also got those antique plates the police officer had suggested. You are only supposed to drive the car to shows and maintenance, but considering that I've only driven the car half a dozen times in the half a decade that we have owned it, I think my conscience can handle the little white lie.

When it came time to head for the airport for my next service call, I had a bit of a giggle as I was reminded that trunk space in these old mustangs was a very limited affair. Still, I made it work, shoving my tool box in the trunk, and my huge suitcase into the back seat and off I went!

Thinking that this might be one of the few times that I would be driving this car while pretty, I went out of my way to choose an outfit that I thought was somewhat reminiscent of the 1960's. I had considered a pencil skirt, a black with white polka dots dress that is kind of retro, and a new pink dress that I had bought a few months ago. In the end, I thought that the pink outfit fit the bill the best!

Oh, and those adorable pink shoes that went so perfectly with my dress? Yeah, they just went to the top of my "fine for an evening out, but I ain't EVER gonna wear them for 14 hours again" list. OUCH!!!

On this flight I was seated toward the back of the plane and just behind the bulkhead that held the seats for the flight attendants, and so I wound up chatting with one of them. I'm not sure I understood all of the details, but did you know that flight attendants are not on the clock while they are on the ground loading and unloading passengers?! I'm not sure how that could be right or legal, but that sucks! As we were chatting, I could see her doing the typical female routine of giving my outfit the once over. When she had worked her way from my shoes all of the way up to my eyes and found me looking back, she gave me a grin.

"Your outfit is perfect! Very few people bother to get dressed up for flying these days." She told me.

"Oh hell, that's half the fun of it!" I laughed. "And thank you for the compliment. The shoes are a bit much for walking through an airport, but they were just too perfect for the dress for me to skip them."

"Uh uh, those shoes are PERFECT for that dress!" She reassured me.

I'd have to admit that they are cute as hell, but SHE wasn't gonna spend 14 hours walking in them!

Once I'd landed at the Cincinnati airport, I grabbed the Avis shuttle bus, and was sitting back for the ride when I heard a familiar accent from a very pretty woman up front - an Australian! I almost choked when the driver asked her where she was from, because I recalled the last time I had asked a similar question and apparently deeply offended a British man by asking if he was Australian.

The woman confirmed my suspicion by admitting to the driver that she was indeed Australian, and so I pretty much HAD to strike up a conversation with her.

"I would LOVE to go to Australia sometime. One of my very best friends is from Perth and it looks SO pretty there." I shared with her.

"Really? So you've never been then?"

"No, but I have yet to meet an Australian that I didn't like, so I'm gonna have to go sooner or later!"

She laughed, no doubt thinking that Australia probably has its fair share of unlikable people just like any other place in the world. There were a few more minutes of quiet before I decided to yank her chain a little by telling her the story of the offended Brit.

"So what is it with the British and the Australians anyway? A couple of weeks ago I asked a man if he was Australian and he was DEEPLY offended. 'No, I’m from England!' he told me in a huff. You would think that I had asked him if he was Jack the Ripper or something!"

It took her a moment to stop laughing so that she could reply.

"Well, the British can be a bit . . ." She hesitated before completing the thought ". . . Stuffy"

So for the record, I STILL haven't met an Australian that I didn't like. An irreverent bunch that one . . .

As for the job I was there for, that turned out to be kind of a giggle too. A year or so ago, I had repaired an instrument in Louisiana under warranty because a critical part had apparently been shipped without a tiny screw that was needed to hold it in place. At the time, both the customer and I had searched like hell for the missing screw just to be sure that we were not leaving it floating around in the machine, but we never could find it.

Well, I found it this week.

It turns out that this was the same company, and they had just shipped the instrument from Louisiana to Cincinnati when it stopped working. Our itty bitty missing screw had decided to go walk-about and become a nuisance by getting lodged into a moving part and jamming it

For the flight home, I was gonna wear tights since it was less than 30F outside, but even sitting in my cool hotel room, I was suffering from being too warm. At the last minute I decided that the tights had to go, or I was gonna die of heat stroke in the airports. I was so hot that I decided to store my coat away in my bag, and this caused people no end of amusement and concern. Making my way to and from the Avis bus, I had at least four people tell me that I must be freezing, but under the wig, makeup, and nylons, I was doing just fine!

Checking in at the Delta counter, I was reminded of why I like Delta so much better than the other airlines - they are SO much friendlier!

"Hello miss, how are you today?!" Asked a male customer service representative, sounding for all of the world as if we were the very best of friends. This is what I like about Delta airlines - they are honestly friendly. Some of the other airlines are professional, don't get me wrong, but none of the others have struck me as being so genuinely nice. I just don't know how to describe it better with words, but this Delta rep was just very kind, friendly, and professional, and he impressed the hell outta me.

Not being terribly familiar with this airport, I didn't know how long it would take me to get through security, and so I had made it a point to get there two hours before my flight.  Needless to say, I had some time to kill in the Delta sky club.

"What can I get you young lady?" Asked the male bartender who appeared to me to be in his fifties or so.

"How about a screw driver please?" I asked.

"Are you 21?" He asked with a straight face.

"No, not for some time now! Thanks for asking though - that's the best giggle I've had all week."

"All right, I'll take your word for it then. So do you want a little smile or a big one?" He asked, moving his finger from low on the glass to much higher on the glass, apparently showing me where he planned to stop with the vodka.

"What the heck, let's go for a big smile!" I laughed.

"Boy am I gonna be in trouble if you aren't 21 . . . " he mumbled as he filled the glass much too full of vodka.
You know, a really good bartender is so hard to come by these days!  ;-)

Sleeping with one eye open

So I took my 9 year old daughter to school the other day, and as we drove past a modern Mustang that was parked on the side of the road, I pointed it out to her. I explained to her that that sleek little car was a descendant of our very own classic Mustang.
“I’ll bet ours goes faster!” she said.
“Oh, probably not sweetheart. That little thing probably weighs half of what ours does, and ours was never really one of the Mustangs that was made to go really fast.”
“I don’t care – I like ours better anyway!”
“If you think you like it now, just wait until you are a teenager! You’re gonna hate daddy, because you’re gonna really like it then and you’re gonna want to take it, and I’m not gonna let you.”
“Oh yeah? We’ll see about THAT when you get old and die daddy.” She replied, grinning at me.

I’m sorta thinking I better sleep with one eye open from now on . . .

Slip sliding away . . .

Three weeks. Three LONG weeks. That's how long I've been sitting on my ass at home without a service call to go earn my paycheck with. Y'all are prolly getting tired of hearing me talk about my job security fears, but these days I think you NEED to worry if you go three weeks without contributing to your company's bottom line. I don't care how good you are, or how respected you are, no company in the world will keep an employee that isn't working and either making money for them or at least taking care of its customers. In a good news/bad news kind of thing, I was sick for at least two of those three weeks and so probably would have been unavailable to work in any case.

I did manage to get a few things accomplished though! I got lots of practice playing Mario Carts on the Wii with my two little ones. Since my nine year old daughter was the one that gave me the sickies, she was also home from school, and so we became Mario Carts addicts.  If you see TxKimberly on Mario Carts online, it's either me or my three year old playing on my account.

The other things I got accomplished was to get my cars worked on. My poor 2002 F150 has over 165,000 miles on her and things are starting to fail. Using my credit card, I had the chattering clutch and related items repaired and so she no longer sounds like a coffee grinder when the clutch is pressed in. They did such an awesome job on my pickup truck that I went ahead and took them my 1967 Mustang to get some of the suspension reworked. I didn't have the money, so it all went on credit cards, but I figured I better take advantage of the free time that I had and get it done now. It turns out that all she supposedly needed was lower control arms and a great deal of patience to free assorted 45 year old alignment components that didn't want to move anymore. So I'm way over my head in debt, but now have a reliable truck again and a classic mustang that will not chew through a set of tires in only 2000 miles.

Tuesday night at 7PM I was sitting at home and feeling the "unemployment is coming" terror build, when I received a call and a text message from a customer in Texas. To be honest, I normally wouldn't have answered my phone at that time of night, but three weeks without work had me almost frantic to find something to do. Well, it turned out that this guy worked for a small company that uses a truck, trailer, generator, and our infrared mass spectrometer to travel to his customers locations and perform emissions testing and verification for them. His generator had developed some sort of a problem, and the end result was that he burned out a power supply in our instrument. The man was almost frantic, because if he couldn't use our equipment the next morning to do testing that he had promised his customer, he was going to lose the job AND the customer.  I sat at the dining room table for a moment, only a couple of hours before I would normally be headed for bed, and decided that I would go ahead and try to take care of him that night if he was willing. It was going to take him about two and a half hours to get to my office where the spare parts were kept, and so I beat him there by quite a bit, found out that we had the component I thought  was most likely to be at fault, and texted him the price for it. I also sent him my hourly rate, and made sure that he knew that he would  have to pay for a minimum of four hours labor regardless of how long the repair actually took. Much to my surprise, he was PISSED at the cost! Here it was almost midnight, I'd driven an hour into the office to meet him, and he was pissed that he was going to have to pay for four hours of labor for a job that was probably only going to take 30 minutes. Here I had thought that I was being the hero and going WAY above and beyond to take care of a small company that honestly couldn't tolerate a day of downtime, and the guy was mad as hell at me. . . Lesson learned - next time I will wait for normal business hours! It turns out that I was correct about the damaged component, and he had nothing else wrong with the instrument, and so it DID only take about 30 minutes. Despite the fact that I knew my manager was going to get pissed about it, I DID cut him some slack on the labor rate and only charged him for two hours instead of the four hour minimum. I can't wait until my manager returns to work so that he can chew my ass out for it.

It's funny how I went for weeks without so much as a phone call to keep me busy, and all of the sudden my phone was ringing off the hook. Turns out that a customer in Detroit needed preventative maintenance on his equipment and so Thursday morning I was headed off to the airport!

I had chosen to wear a full, mid length skirt that is one of my all-time favorites, along with a pair of boots that I had purchased a LONG time ago but only worn once. I knew that both, the skirt and the boots would be hot, but since it was supposed to be around 30 degrees in Detroit, I figured that it would be a good idea. Well, it wasn't a bad plan, but the problem is that Austin Texas is so much warmer than most of the country, and a HELL of a lot warmer than Detroit. The outfit that would be perfectly comfortable once I arrived in Detroit was WAY too franking hot in Austin, and so there I sat in the airport with perspiration dripping down my nose. Ughhhh . . .

Going through the TSA check point in Austin, I was reminded of WHY I hadn't worn this skirt in so long! It is covered in beads and sparkles that just about gives their full body scanner a nervous breakdown each time I go through it. I guess that they have come to anticipate this problem, because as I as exiting the scanner, the inspector stopped me with an upraised hand.

"Please wait here. Let’s see how that skirt did with the scanner." He told me with a grin while looking at the monitor behind me. I turned around to see the monitor myself just in time to see the cartoon style person portrayed there become absolutely covered with little hash marks from the waist down showing the inspector where I needed to be pat down at.  A young female TSA inspector stepped forward, and she and I both laughed, because the monitor literally showed hundreds of little markers covering my skirt. Needless to say, we spent a little quality time together as she thoroughly frisked both of my legs to be certain that I was not trying to smuggle a backpack nuke onto the plane.

On my connecting flight from Philadelphia, I was seated next to a woman about my own age, and we exchanged pleasantries as we were seated in first class. Soon, the flight attendant came by to get our drink requests, and she ordered a Chardonnay. I'm not much of a wine drinker, but I just thought that this sounded kind of classy, and so I asked for the same.

"I'm gonna try and fool you into thinking that I'm classy or something." I told her with a grin as I accepted my glass.

We had been sitting there for a few minute when it became really obvious that the man behind us was seriously flirting with the pretty woman that was sitting next to him.

"No way! Your eyes are dark brown!" He insisted.

"We'll, it depends on what I'm wearing! Sometimes they are gray, but usually they are kind of green." She replied to him.

"Excuse me!" The man loudly called to a bewildered and random passenger that was walking past on their way to their own seat. "What color are her eyes?!"

This kind of thing went on for a good five minutes before my seat mate and I glanced at each other. I couldn't help busting out laughing when she rolled her eyes at me.

"This is going to be a LONG flight, isn't it?" She asked with a laugh.

"I think it might be! Just be thankful that YOU aren't sitting next to him!"

Of all the things, it's the little moments like this that I appreciate the most. For just a brief moment, the woman sitting next to me had invited me to join the women's only club, giggling at the silly man who as trying much too hard to impress the woman next to him. Of course HE probably was far more “successful” with women than I ever was, so really, who is the fool in this story?

I don't normally do this, but on this trip I decided to contact my other customers in the area and ask them if they were interested in a service call as long as I was in the area. Since the customer that had brought me to Detroit had already paid for the bulk of my travel, this meant that I could offer others a major discount on my travel fees. Much to my surprise, ALL of the customers that I made this offer to replied that they wanted a service call, and so I went from having only a simple four hour repair at one customer to do, to suddenly having four that all wanted to see me. Needless to say, I ended up having to stay the weekend so that I could take care of all of them. I guess it really is feast or famine, because while I was juggling all of this, I was contacted by a customer in Denver who had damaged his machine, and he wanted to see me just as soon as I could get to him. So now I was staying the weekend in Detroit, and then flying directly from there to Denver! Hey, if I have to have a problem, I'll take having too much work over too little any day!

You know I keep telling TG's that they have nothing to worry about if they are thinking about traveling pretty in the USA, but my flight out of Detroit has convinced me that I can even take that a step farther. It seems to me that I am most often treated BETTER when I travel pretty than when I travel drab. I don't know that I can express the way that people were just plain friendly and nice to me going through Detroit, but I'll try.

First off, when I entered the Avis bus, I was warmly greeted by a familiar face and voice - Harmon. To be blunt, most of the folks driving these courtesy busses are not terribly friendly. They are polite, don't get me wrong, but they are clearly there to do their job, get their paycheck, and go home. Harmon is an exception. He clearly takes pride in the job that he has chosen to do, and is one of the most professional folks I've ever seen. He is always helpful, takes great care to welcome you to his bus, and seems genuinely pleased when he thanks you for using his company. Trust me, you would have to see this guy in action to understand why I am so impressed with him.

I asked him for change for a five dollar bill so that I could give him a tip, and he gently refused, telling me that I was a longtime customer, he was happy to see me again, and he was more than happy to help me with my bags. I love the hell outta that guy!

When I was checking in at the US Airways counter, the woman I was dealing with there struck up quite a long conversation when I asked her about the pending merger with American Airlines. We had been chatting for a good five minutes when another customer service rep who was walking behind her stopped to wave at me.

"Hey, good to see you again!" He told me enthusiastically. He had checked me in on multiple trips through here in the past, and apparently has a great memory.

As I was going through the TSA inspection point, an adorable female TSA agent asked me to please step to the side so that she could replace the almost empty cart that holds the little bins that you send your things through the X-ray machine in, and I quickly obliged her. Once she had the new cart in place, she stayed there and struck up a conversation with me. What really kind of got my attention was the way that she stared into my eyes, and if I didn't know any better, I'd swear that she was flirting with me!

"So, how are YOU today?!" She asked, never once loosing eye contact.

"I just couldn't be Gooder, thanks! How are YOU doing?!" I replied with a laugh.

"Eh, you know, it's another day!"

"Another day in paradise?"

"Sure," she laughed, "living the dream."

We stood there for a moment smiling at each other but silent, and still never once having lost eye contact with me, she wished me a great day and a good flight.  Hmmm. . . Still not sure what to make of that one, but I'd swear that it seemed like there was more to that conversation than met the eye.

Oh, and just for fun, I decided to take up skiing when I entered the airplane. A the door to the airplane, the floor is a hard plastic material, and when slippery heels meet with wet plastic, it can make for a bit of excitement. I found this out when I suddenly found myself sliding a good solid foot or two toward the startled flight attendant who was standing there. You should have seen the panicked look on his face when he saw a six foot tall (in heels) cross dresser sliding across the floor toward him. Priceless . . .

Doing it in the dark . . .

I guess that I was tired on my flight out of Austin, because I fell sound asleep on the airplane. Now with most folks, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but you have to understand that I snore. When I say “I snore”, I mean “I SNORE!”  Let me tell you a little story that puts my snoring into perspective:

I was once in a hotel and sound asleep when the phone on the table rang at about midnight. Not thrilled at being pulled from my sleep, I reached out, picked up the phone and mumbled “Hello?” into it.

There was no one there . . .

Figuring it was just a wrong number and the person on the other end was probably too embarrassed or rude to say something, I went right back to sleep. About twenty minutes later, the phone range again and so I answered it.

“Hello?”

There was no one there . . . I went right back to sleep . . .

About thirty minutes later, around 130A, the damn thing rang again. This time I was angry, so I just reached out and unplugged the phone from the wall, and then went back to sleep. About thirty minutes after that, I awoke with my heart pounding in my chest, because someone is banging on my wall so hard that the cheap hotel paintings hanging there are jumping on their hooks. 

“. . . . YOUR FREAKING SNORING!.

I didn’t catch the first part of his statement, but I figure that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. . .

So with that little story to give it perspective, I'll say it again - I feel asleep on the flight and my own loud snoring woke me up. I sheepishly looked at the poor woman next to me.
"I'm so sorry, but I didn't get much sleep last night and so I was pretty exhausted." I told her, blushing horribly while thinking about how very masculine I know my snoring must have sounded.
"It's no problem." She replied with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and with a tone of voice that made it clear that she wasn't in the least little bit sincere. Just then the male flight attendant walked up to me.
"Did you enjoy your nap?" He asked with a grin.
"I'm SO sorry!" I told him while covering my face with my hands.
"Oh it's not a problem at all. So who is Larry?" He asked 
"Larry?!" I asked him, more than a little bit confused.
"We'll you were yelling his name out in your sleep." He told me with a concerned look on his face. I must have had a shocked look on my face, because he busted up laughing after a few moments.
"I'm just teasing," he told me with a laugh.
When the plane landed an hour so later and I was walking by him on the way off of the airplane, I gave him a wink.
"I'll tell Larry that you said hello!" I quipped at him.
"You do that!" He replied with a laugh.

Things got a little bit interesting when it came time to board my connection. As you enter the gate area, you hand your ticket to a customer service representative who then scans it, tells you to have a great flight, and then off you go. Not THIS time though! I handed her my ticket, she scanned it, and her computer made three loud beeps. At the same time, her monitor went completely red with one message in the center: "DO NOT BOARD PASSENGER"
"What the heck?" She said with a shocked look on her face. "I've never seen this before!"

THAT didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. She frantically pushed keys in her keyboard for two or three minutes while irritated people started to pile up behind me.
"According to this, there is already someone seated in your chair, but your ticket appears to be correct and valid. This might take me a moment or two, so would you mind stepping aside?" She asked with a flustered look on her face.
"Sure" I replied, with more than a bit of a flustered look myself.

The woman behind me was a flawless young lady in her early thirties with long dark hair and a petite figure that probably allowed her to wear those size six things that have been, and always will be, well out of my reach.  That didn't help her here though.
"BEEP BEEP BEEP" went the oh-so-helpful computer when HER ticket was scanned.
"What in the world?" The exasperated gate agent exclaimed to no one in particular.  Since we had just gone from just one customer with a problem, to multiple customers, it suddenly became a priority to figure out what was wrong. While she madly typed away at her terminal, I turned to the beautiful young lady that was apparently in the same boat that I was in.
"I'm sure that YOU are not so very pleased about it, but I'm SO happy to see that it is not just me that has a problem!" I told her.
"It's always something isn't it?" She said with s shrug.

"We'll ladies, I'm sorry, but it insists that there are already people seated in the seats that you are assigned to. Since the rest of first class is full, the best that I can do for you is to give you your own row in coach?" She stated it as a question. I didn't see much question to it though as I had to get to Detroit even if it meant taking a bus.
"No worries, as long as I get there! Oh, and you don't need to give me my own row either, I'm not that antisocial." I told her with a grin. The pretty woman stuck in the same boat with me nodded her agreement to my own statement, and shortly we were entering the aircraft and on our way to our newly assigned seats. As we entered the first class section, I was fully prepared to glare at whoever was in MY seat, but there was no one there, nor in the seat behind it.
behind it. Before I could say anything, the pretty size six spoke up.
"Hey! There IS no one in our seats!" She loudly proclaimed. This got the interest of the flight attendant, and so the young lady shared the story of our plight with her.  While they were taking, I started putting my things away and prepared to take my original seat. You know, the one in first class! Now that the flight attendant had heard the whole "we were told there was someone already seated in our seats story" the flight attendant still looked at me and shook her head.
"I'm sorry, but you will have to take the seats that they told you to use at the gate."
"We'll all righty then!" I said with a disgusted tone of voice, and then I grabbed my stuff and moved back three or four rows, past first class and into cattle territory. No sooner had we got our things stowed away, when the gate agent boarded the airplane and approached us.
"Look, I'm so sorry. I still have no idea what happened, but clearly there is no one already seated in your chairs, so please feel free to move back up to first class." Size six and I just looked at each other, laughed, and started pulling our things back out of the overhead again. Of course by now, general boarding had started and so the two of us had to fight the flow of traffic to make our way back up to the front of the plane while everyone else was trying to get to the back of it.

When the Avis bus pulled up to the airport and the driver came back, I had to grin as I realized that he was the same guy that had given me shit a year or two ago when he had realized what I was. Back then, he had done a double take when he tried it lift my bags onto the bus, because they were good deal heavier than he had expected.
"Wow, you must be really strong!" He had said with a grin back then.
The grin that he gave me THIS time made it clear that HE had also recalled ME.
"Hey! I know you!" He said with a laugh.
"Oh I dunno, I've only been coming here off and on for the better part of a decade." I laughed with him as I collapsed the handles on my suitcase and toolbox.
"Well you go ahead and leave that stuff and get on the bus." He told me. I already had my hand wrapped around the handle of my suitcase and so figured I'd at least put it up on the bus, but as soon as I started to lift it, he put his hand on it and stopped me.
"Ma'am," and he emphasized the word, "please get on the bus. I'll take care of that for you." I looked up and found him staring hard into my eyes. In my last encounters with him, I had thought that he was more or less polite, but the kind of person who liked to kind of cut up with people. I hadn't been sure if he was being honestly friendly or not at the time. This time he seemed pretty sincere and seemed to honestly want to help, and so I sat the bag down and entered the bus while giving him my thanks.

By the time that I got settled into my rental car, it was too dark to see without a light, and so I started looking for an interior light switch in my little SUV so that I could find my GPS and set it up. Apparently I goofed though, because suddenly there was a polite little gong sound, followed by a recorded voice saying something about connecting to OnStar.  I was unsure if that entailed an additional fee or not, and so I frantically looked for an "off" or "end call" option, but all I saw were icons that meant nothing to me. Not knowing what else to do, I hit the same button again and was gratified to hear something along the lines of "call ended".

It lied . . .

About thirty seconds later I hear what is clearly a living human beings voice.
"This is OnStar. What is the nature of the emergency?!" Asked a polite female voice in a most professional tone. I sat there a second, startled that the call apparently hadn't been ended after all, and I guess I waited too long to reply, because she asked again.
"What is the nature of the emergency please?"

I thought about it for a moment before I replied.
"We'll, the nature of the emergency is that there is an idiot running loose in a rental car who apparently can't figure out how to end an OnStar call once it was accidentally started." I told her with a flabbergasted and sarcastic voice. It took her a moment or two to stop laughing.
"That's okay, the system is designed to keep the call active until we can verify if there is an emergency, and if we need to send the police out or not."
"We'll I hope like hell THAT'S not gonna be required!" I laughed. "No one is hurt here. All we have is an ignorant redneck in a rental car that is apparently smarter than I am."
Once again, it took her a moment or two to stop laughing so that she could wish me a good night.

I won't bore you with the details of my work there, suffice it to say that it was a long service call, the weather was miserable, and I was more than a little bit happy when the day to go home rolled around at last. Imagine my joy when I awoke at 6AM on a pitch black morning, to a hotel that was utterly silent, dark, and cold. It seems that sometime during the night, a transformer somewhere had blown, and the hotel had no electricity! At this point, most people would have probably decided that with no lights or power, today would be a great day to just throw on a pair of jeans for my flight, but I was feeling stubborn. In no time at all, I had my laptop setup on the bathroom counter and proceeded to use the light of its screen to apply my makeup. For those things that demanded more light, I downloaded a flashlight app for my iPhone, and we were off to the races. Just for the record, this was a lot harder than it sounds, and I expected to get to the airport to find that my makeup looked like hell. Much to my surprise though, when I got to the airport, I thought that it looked pretty darn good!

So sitting in the Charlotte airport waiting for my connecting flight home to Austin, I had four hours to kill. I was sitting down eating lunch when a young lady that I recognized from my own flight sat at the table next to me and struck up a conversation.  We got to talking about families and the like, and I mentioned having three children.
"You must have a good husband that takes care of them while you are gone huh?" She asked me at least three times. I kept considering telling her that she and I both knew damned good and well I don't have a "husband" but instead I kept grinning and telling her "yeah, something like that."

Did I mention that I think my makeup turned out pretty good considering that I did it by the silvery light of a laptop monitor?!  Hell, I'm thinking maybe I ought to put on my makeup in the dark more often . . .