The maintenance minder light in his car had been on for some time, so I thought while he was out of town I would take his car in to the shop for its maintenance. One less thing he’d have to deal with when he got back. So I called the shop and set up an appointment to bring in his car.

About an hour later, Alpha Geek forwarded me the e-mail they sent him confirming his appointment.

Damn. I’d forgot they did that.

I e-mailed back, “Well, so much for surprising you.”

He replied, “I just got the surprise a little early.”

Ashampoo got an error, and suggested I should try installing a later version of itself. Okay.

The install program asked if I wanted to install the Ashampoo toolbar in my browser. I unchecked that.

Five minutes later, I go to my browser and there’s the Ashampoo toolbar.

And it seems to have reset my default search engine from Google to Bing.

Can’t wait to find out what else it did without my permission. I’ve uninstalled every trace of Ashampoo I could possibly find on my computer. Perhaps someone can recommend a CD burning program that isn’t owned by Microsoft.

“It’s in the file cabinet.”

“You should make one, too. We should also discuss our preferences for funerals and so on.”

“No we shouldn’t. I’m going to live forever. And so are you, cause you have to.”

“…but it’s going to be difficult to discuss until you get over this denial of yours.”

I was wrong.

From: FBI
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2012 7:03:55 -0700
Subject: !
From qwerqw@cox.net Tue Apr 24 10:04:04 2012
Reply-To: scam_t@aim.com

Have you Lost any money to scammers,Reply back now for your money!

From: “Mrs.Stella Harrion”
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:09:55 -0400
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Hello

I am a dying woman who had decided to donate hat I have to you.
I am 59 years old and was diagnosed for cancer about 2years ago

Your Respond will be appreciated.

Mrs.Stella Harrison.

That’s the most half-hearted attempt at a 419 scam I’ve ever seen.

“Quite a long time ago, someone was very verbose. Fortunately for you, you don’t understand a word of it.”

Today my supervisor called me in to her office and asked if I’d done any of the taxes for Client X. Nope, not I—I’d been doing the expenses and reports, but none of their taxes.

She handed me copies of the sales reports they’d sent us for the last few months, and asked me to work up the sales taxes on them and see what I got.

Our normal procedure for doing sales taxes is to set up a spreadsheet for them. The initial set-up is a bit of work, making sure you’re including all the appropriate tax calculations and detailing which part of the tax form they go into. After that it’s pretty easy, just plug in the new numbers each month and the spreadsheet does the math for you. But as with any computation, computer or otherwise, you have to make sure you’re putting in the correct numbers if you want the correct answer.

Clearly my supervisor had doubts that the new girl was coming up with the correct answer for this particular case, so I didn’t use her spreadsheet. Instead I set up a new one from scratch, doing a little research online to make sure I was taxing what should be taxed and not taxing what shouldn’t. The client had circled one of the numbers on his reports, but it wasn’t the number I wanted. He had circled his gross profits, not his sales, and some of his sales weren’t taxable and weren’t to be included. He also had a “total sales” number off to the side that didn’t appear to be related to anything else on his report; after some poring over it, I gave up trying to figure out how he’d come up with that number and just went with his base sales figures. I picked out the numbers I needed and set up my little spreadsheets, then brought them back to my supervisor.

“This is what I get,” I showed her. “I used these sales numbers here; I don’t know where he got those totals on the side—”

“So it wasn’t just me!” she interjected. “I couldn’t figure out where those numbers came from either.”

We determined that my numbers for sales taxes were considerably lower than the other girl’s, because she was using the “gross profits” number that the client had circled, and that number included sales that he didn’t need to pay taxes on. “That’s why I wanted you to double-check it,” said my supervisor, “because you’re good about going online and researching things you’re not sure about.” We showed it to the other girl so she could correct her spreadsheet, and all was well. (Fortunately Client X pays quarterly so we hadn’t yet actually sent in that overly high tax payment.)

Turns out having your supervisor use you as a check to see if other people are doing it right makes you feel pretty smart. *brainflex*

Apparently some entrepreneurial souls have been going around town on recycling day, gathering up materials from the bins people set out at the curb. They take the recyclables to the local recycle center and sell them for cash.

Personally, I have no problem with this. Here are some people who have found a way to make some cash with other people’s leftovers. I think this is a laudable enterprise.

The company who has contracted to collect our recycling feels differently. They paid for all these recycling bins, and their argument is that only they should be allowed to use them.

Now I’m wondering—if I set my recycling out in something other than the official recycling bin, is it illegal for other people to take things out of it? Because personally I’m willing to just set my recycling out for whoever comes by first.