Hmmm….something’s not right here

I got the mail this afternoon and when I looked in, I saw what looked to my bank statement.  Odd thing was…there was no envelope, it was literally just the pages of my bank statement.  and in the corner there was the postage mark.  So….yeah….somebody mailed my bank statement with no envelope so any number of people at the post office were able to see what checks I wrote and to whom.  So now I get to go into the bank monday morning and close out the account just to be safe.  the lady at the 1-800 number was pretty stunned and at first said “Well, it must’ve been somebody from the post office who opened it”  to which I replied “Yeah, I would’ve thought that too except it’s got postage on the first page of it. 

UPDATE: I went to the bank this morning, got the same kind of response that I got from the 1-800 number.  They were ready to let me walk out the door with just putting a flag on the account to check for signatures and id (which I didn’t ask but the thought crossed my mind…shouldn’t you be doing that already?)  They asked if there was anything else I’d like to do like close the account and reopen a new one, to which I replied yes.  They set me up with a new account, waived all the setup fees.  I also turned off paper statements to avoid this happening in the future.  They’ll be rushing me my new checks and debit card and hopefully I will have dodged this little identity scare bullet with only a little inconvenience.  

Pop Quiz, Hotshot!

Who’s drunk in this picture?

Random Thought of the Day

Even if you do everything you think you’re supposed to do, chances are pretty high you’re not necessarily going to get picked.  And that’s how life goes.  You can let that fact knock you on your ass and get swallowed up by the disappointment.  Or you can stand up, dust yourself off, take a deep breath, and take another step forward.  And then take another one after that.  and another one, and another one and another one…

You can’t expect what should happen or what could happen, but you have to accept what does happen. 

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Found this interesting article today..

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This passage really struck home for me..

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

I haven’t been able to sit down and a read a book for years now.  Like the author of that article said, I lose my focus after a few pages. 

I was thinking about kids these days and how when my nephew ends up in college in 4 years how drastically different of an informational landscape it’ll be.  The internet was still in its widespread infancy back in ‘94 when I started college.  I remember being a Prodigy user back in the day.  I had an email address through an honors english class I was in.  I could get on the web in the computer science lab.  But the majority of any research I had to do was done by trudging to the library, searching titles for something that might be somewhat relevant to my topic, trudging *editor’s note* did alot of trudging in college, must’ve been all the books I had to carry through the bookshelves, craning my neck to read the spines of the books to find the one I needed, taking the book back to a nook and skimming through it, trying to decide if it was relevant enough to my topic or not, putting it back, wash, rinse, repeat…

Now in the age of google and wikipedia and mobile devices with internet access, information is so readily available for us at our fingertips.  But is that a good thing?  I think it was a good character-building experience to have to go through the actual research process.  It was kind of like a right of passage to get through higher education and achieve a degree.  You want a degree?  Prove it.  Do the literal legwork necessary to complete the task put before you. 

Random thought of the day..

When I get depressed, I feel like nobody cares whether I’m happy or not, and I wish that someone would try to cheer me up.  But when I’m depressed, people don’t generally want to be around me.  So in order for people to be around me, I need to try to make myself happy again.  By doing so, people are more likely to be around me.  So, basically in order to get what I want, I need to get it for myself. 

 

Make sense?  dunno, that’s why it’s a random thought. 

I suck (revisited)

Way back in the olden days (summer of Aught 07 specifically) I put out a request for blog topics.  I’m revisiting the comments I got from that request now.

Today’s request comes to us all the way from sunny Mentor, OH.  Jenny asks “is it ok to joke at a funeral? (an essay on when it’s ok to bring out the funny)”

This is unfortunately a timely topic.  Monday I attended the funeral for my best friend Scott’s father.  With respect to that event, there was levity before the service itself and following it at the memorial meal.  Personally I think humor is one of the more powerful coping mechanisms we have available to us.  A properly timed and worded joke can short-circuit grief before it can get to that soul-crushing stage.

Looking back to when my dad passed (btw, Happy early Father’s Day, Dad!) I remember how on edge and exhausted and emotionally spent I felt the day of his (unbeknownst to us at the time) final surgery.  When the moment came that the end had come, I was overcome with an explosion of negative emotions that had been building that day.  Terror, rage, etc.  I remember running out of the ward and just starting to punch the wall out of disbelief.  Friends and family tried to console me, but for that minute or so, I was just shut off and running on pure emotion. 

(inner editor’s voice) *cough* where are you going with this?

Anyway, the emotional wave finally crested and I was able to get myself back under control.  The whole family went back out to the waiting room to wait for the next step.  We started talking about dad.  It’s strange, how many details of that night I can remember, but then some I can’t.  Someone made a joke about something dad used to do.  it might've been me.  regardless, laughing at that point felt so cleansing.  I helped ground me and realize that the clock on the wall continued to tick. 

I think it’s something similar with respect to a funeral as well.  There is a time and place to be one with your grief and let your emotions flow (ok, perhaps not to the wall-punching level, I admit) and to pay your respects.  But I think at a certain point in time, grief needs to be reigned in, and humor does a really good job of doing that.  It tries to remind us that no matter how terrible of a sorrow we’ve been through, that none of it should discount or lessen the good things that have come before it.  I think if we spend too much time grieving that we can sort of “disrespect” those who have passed. 

Humor at that point in time needs to be handled by a semi-professional though.  You have to wait for the right moment.  You don’t want to take attention away from the ceremony.  But there comes a time when things have settled enough.  There’s a kind of still in the air.  Some of the “fringe” relatives and loved ones may have already left, and the “core” loved ones remain.  If you time it right, and do it with enough care and love behind it, it can really turn into a joyous situation.  I know following my dad’s funeral, my cousins and I got pretty laugh-winded, sharing classic Dad stories.  And even joking about things not even related to Dad.  Same thing occurred at Scott’s father’s memorial dinner.  Like I said above, ….

Wow, great spot to get pulled away by work…Umm…yeah…anyway, no matter how bad we feel at the time of the funeral or memorial or the passing, I see humor as life’s way of reminding us that time keeps on moving along, and we’d best make the best of it while we can. 

What to say…

Jennifer says I need to blog more. So…yeah…guess I need to come up with more stuff to blog about.

I’m trying out Windows Live Writer.  It’s supposed to make blogging easier.  We’ll see.  It’s got lots of tools which I’ll probably never use.

 

For now here’s a map of where I work.  hooray!!!