Published Feb 8, 2006
Thank you for providing so much entertainment to me this morning with your loud conversation. As I was working in the courtyard, sitting at a table alone, I seriously considered putting on my headphones and listening to some Charles Mingus. Fortunately, you came along and spared me the mellow boredom.
I’ll admit that, at first, I was very annoyed that you and your friend sat down directly next to me, in the courtyard of Popovich hall, at 9:30am, and began speaking loudly to each other. I realize that you’re undergrads, but you do have to realize that us grad students do actual work there, rather than just hang out and talk about the rack on that delta delta delta. Then you opened your phone and started talking loudly into it, and I got even angrier; I thought about going over to you and telling you to shut up but then you said the magic words: “Did you get my court records? What do you think about my case?”
That got my hopes up. I was expecting to hear something straight out of Cops (my favorite show of all time, btw), but instead the next line was “do you think I can get out of this traffic ticket?” To say the least, that was a letdown. But your subsequent conversation paid off well enough, I think. Like when you discussed your three simultaneous traffic court cases, how you’d gotten 4 tickets in the last 18 months and were worried about your insurance skyrocketing, how you were hoping you could keep one or two of the tickets in the court system through appeals for long enough that they didn’t all hit your driving record in a one-year period so that your insurance didn’t go through the roof, when you tried to get the lawyer to explain how to game the system by timing your appeals to draw the process out as long as possible, and, of course, how you talked about all of this — complete with docket numbers — at the top of your voice and with your counsel on speakerphone.
Although, dude, I don’t think that your idea that “man this can’t keep happening, I have to get a radar detector” is the solution to your problem. I’m just sayin’.
Next time you have a personal conversation you just have to take care of, I’d like to invite you to sit down next to me, because listening to you is so much better than doing my MOR 569 reading.
Thanks again!
Wade
Since I can’t leave comments on your linkblog:
Palo Alto has municipal fiber. It’s expensive, but for the businesses in town, it’s pretty cool. AND, the city council is now taking up a proposal to do fiber-to-the-home.
I love my techno-utopian town.
I guess the point of the overheated press release I linked to is that you already paid for that in givebacks to the telecoms, so, since the city of Palo Alto built their own, probably the citizens of Palo Alto paid for this kind of service twice.
Still, when the cable companies are killing the telecoms with video-on-demand, the telecoms will wish they’d done what they said.
Oh, and, hint taken; I’ll consider linkblog comments for the next redesign.