In search of a portable blender, Josh calls information for REI contact info:

-What city?

-San Francisco.

-Listing?

-REI

-What’s that?

-R-E-I.

-Can you spell that?

-ARR-EEEE-EYE

-Oh! What does that stand for?

-Really egalatarian cicles. (hangs up)

A young girl dies of a kiss.

This page lists dozens of ways to bypass voice response systems, and it reminded me of a trick my friend Jeff shared with me a while ago. It doesn’t work for every system, but when it does, it’s glorious. It goes like this:

Robot: Please press one to access your account, press two to

Me: Fuck.

Robot: I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Can you repeat what you just said?

Me: Fuck.

Robot: I think you said you want to talk to an agent. Is this correct?

Me: Yes.

Agent: Hello! May I have your account number please?

Of course, I’m extra polite once the operator gets on the line, as he or she presumably knows that I got aggressive at the phone. Yet another example of how nastiness is rewarded. Unfortunately, until someone designs a system that reacts similarly when I say Please and Thank You, I’m sticking with the program.

The best parts of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood:

Good egg, he says. Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He’s easy to please, but difficult to protect.

West is not the tool-using type, though: the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nail-pounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life?

throwing your leftovers out the window, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the half-eaten filo pastries and the champagne truffles, things you’d used up just by looking at them.

The best part of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon:

time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don’t have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuit again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don’t have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep.

time is a mystery, and not even a thing, and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is, exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can’t see the desert because it is not a thing.

And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don’t get lost in time.