Daily Archives: October 1, 2014
One Down . . .
And Two to Go.
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Today starts our 2nd month on our gate here, or at least our 2nd four week period. Hopefully we’ll have a relief guard for a day sometime this weekend to give us 10 hours off. We always try to get away once a month for a break, but it’s been hard to schedule up here. Down in the Whitsett area, there are a number of people who do nothing but relief guarding, and they stay booked up. So it would be a real opportunity for someone up here.
Our resident dog came by for a visit again today. This is the first time I’ve seen him in a couple of weeks, as he usually comes by when Jan’s outside.
He lives around here somewhere and just comes by to visit every once in a while. He comes right up to us, waits to be petted, then takes a couple of drinks of the water Jan has put out for him in a cup. Then he comes back over for some more petting, just standing there looking at you until you do, and then turns and leaves, stopping only to pee on our Stop sign as he goes.
One thing I didn’t talk about in yesterday’s blog was the people coming through the gate lost. Blog reader George Keefe calls them ‘lost soles’, but in many cases it seems they’re just a victim of bad directions.
One guy about 3am the other morning showed up in his tanker truck looking for the Patterson rig which his written directions said was the first rig on the right. So he came to our rig which was the first one on the right. But the Patterson rig is the first one on the LEFT, which he passed two rigs back.
In other cases, the directions are just bad. I’ve looked at some of these that drivers show me, and to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, they’re so bad, they’re not even wrong. I couldn’t even get here using these directions and I know where I am.
All of these guys have GPS in their trucks, so why aren’t they just given the GPS coordinates? Seems like it would be much better.
And while I’m ranting about gate stuff, a lot of these guys have difficult names, or heavy accents. So you would think that after going through gate after gate every day, and having to spell their names over and over, they would write it on a card one time, and just hand it to you. But Nooooooo!
I signed up for the free 30 day trial of Amazon Unlimited today. I was getting ready to purchase two $4.99 Kindle books and noticed they were available FREE under Amazon Unlimited. And since the new service costs $9.99 a month, it made sense to sign up.
But then in doing so, I discovered there was a 30 day free trial, so even better.
In case you don’t know about Amazon Unlimited, it features over 700,000 books that you can read free, as many as you want, and as many at a time as you want. So you might want to check out the free trial. You’ve got nothing to lose, and you can cancel anytime. You can go here Amazon and then click on Amazon Unlimited on the right hand side of the menu bar.
Verizon is apparently working on our data service around here. It’s been going on and off a lot, especially at night. But when it comes back on, it’s much faster than it was last week.
At first I thought I was having trouble with my Cradlepoint router WiFi, so I tried the Hot Spot on my Galaxy S5 phone with the same results. So hopefully it will settle down soon.
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Thought for the Day:
“A little rebellion now & then is a good thing.” – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, Jan 30, 1787
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