A Place Where Cell Phones Don't Belong

Among the many perils of cell phones being ubiquitous is the ability for completely clueless people to use them in a place where they have no business. The one place where people use them which makes my skin crawl is in the bathroom/locker room. I don't care who you are talking to, I don't care how important it is, YOU AREN'T THAT IMPORTANT! If you were really that important, you would be talking to the person face to face. You would have been driven to the meeting in your limo, or the person on the other end would have been brought to you. But it's not that important, is it? You could have stood outside the door while you finished your conversation about sales figures, or you could have told your employee that you would have to get back to them in a few minutes.

But you didn't. You instead took your conversation, on speakerphone even, into a locker room filled with sweaty, ugly, naked hairy men & walked around like you were a King. Who cares if the people on the other end of the call hear that old fat guy grunting from the toilet around the corner. You are important!

I've decided that from now on, whenever I encounter this sort of thing, I'm going to simulate the most awful 'bathroom noise' accompanied by a near-screaming grunt. That should be pleasant for Mr. Important.

The great Linux Switch

While I am far from a genius, I consider myself to be an intelligent guy. (Yes, I know that I'm so humble.) Despite this, my attempts to use Linux have made me feel like a complete idiot.
Most of my posts have related in one way or another to my second job as a Constable. I've devoted very few words to the job where I spend the vast majority of my time, as a QA Engineer for a software company. There, I write and run complex tests on a variety of proprietary client-server systems my company produces. I manage our build processes, I write code to do automated tests, and I write a fair number of complex scripts. Most of all, I enjoy finding a bug and tracking it down to a specific peice of code. Its very much like detective work on a different level.
I find these things interesting, challenging, and intellectually stimulating. However, I fear that the average joe could care less about these things & would rather read about adventures (or the lack thereof).
That being said, I do know a fair amount about computers. I build them, I fix them for freinds, I have become the family tech support guy. I can close my eyes and walk my step-mother through a system restore, I can help my wife diagnose problems in my home wireless network, I can help my son build his web pages.
I do have a glaring hole in my computer knowledge, and that lies with Linux.
I am constantly bombarded with advertisements, articles, rants, and raves proclaiming how easy it is to make the switch to Linux from Windows. Most of my Linux experience has been administering servers through a command line interface, so I am an utter novice when it comes to the desktop environments, but I wanted to see how easy it is for myself.
I began this experiment by installing Fedora Core 4 on a spare hard drive for my laptop. After the better part of three days of upgrades, installing packages, and other sundry tasks, I still had a laptop that I could not even play a simple MP3 on. Further research tells me that Red Hat purposely leaves out support for many things I take for granted due to their devotion to open License Agreements. Thats noble, but doesn't do me a damn bit of good. When I ask questions from the "Robust Open Source Community", I'm told that I should quit being lazy and RTFM. I'm glad that they were so helpful. I pulled the tray containing the Fedora hard drive out, slid my Windows hard drive back in, and didn't think much about it for the next six months.
A half year later, I started reading about Ubuntu. It is supposed to be very user freindly, even to the point of being "Linux for Dummies". I ordered a CD and installed it on the formerly Fedora hard drive.
This is getting to be quite a long post, so I'll hit the highlights:
- no sound card support.
- crazy mouse pointers traced to a bug with my particular laptop and a PS/2 mouse.
- unable to update, even after following 3 different sets of instructions.
While the Ubuntu was much easier for many of the tasks I tried, there is no way that I can recommend it to people I know. It still just has too many shortcomings.
Maybe I'll pull the old hard drive back out in six months...

Assertiveness and wearing the wrong shirt...

I don't often get caught off guard while working my second job, but once in a while someone speaks to me so brazenly, intentionally or not, that I am truely taken aback.
Last night was one of those times. After I rang the doorbell at one house where I was trying to deliver a court order, a woman opened the door and said "I'm not interested!" as she picked up a parcel from the porch. I replied "Excuse me?" The woman said "I am not interested in whatever you have!" as she waved at my clipboard. Perplexed, I responded "So you aren't interested in the fact that I am a Constable and I am here with court papers?" She looked up, her jaw dropped just a fraction of a second before her hands covered her mouth, and after regaining her composure she said "Oh my gosh! I am so sorry! I thought you were with the dish network!"
Apparently, some sales reps from Dish Network have been out working that particular neighborhood pretty hard. She said that she had been deluged with salesmen over the last few weeks, with three coming within the last few days. They have for the most part been wearing light colored polo shirts with ID's hanging from their necks. I had just happened to wear a light colored uniform shirt and when she saw that in combination with my badge hanging from my neck, she assumed that I was just another salesman. (To be fair, the sun was right at my back...)
I gave her the papers I had for her, and we chatted for a few minutes. She kept apologizing, and I kept reassuring her that I was not upset. I did however give her a few tips on dealing with solicitors in the future.
From now on I'm sticking with Blue or Black uniform shirts in that area.

"I serve dead people..."

As I was thinking about the topic of this post, I came to the realization that nearly all of my work-related posts are about my part time job as a County Constable. I started to ponder that, and quickly came to the realization that not much noteworthy happens to a QA Engineer, while Constables do tend to end up being involved in the weird on a more frequent basis than you might imagine.

Back to the topic of the post, last night I had yet another opportunity to try to serve someone a legal paper after they have departed this life. It wasn't intentional. It just so happens that when people expire, they often leave loose ends that at some point do need to be tied up. In last night's example, a woman had been killed in a car accident about one month ago. Not knowing this, a company which held a judgment against her obtained a court order for her to appear and answer questions about her income.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. Contrary to popular belief, there is no crack team that jumps to action notifying the world when someone dies. Processes go on as usual until something happens to make various entities aware of a death - be it a family member returning a bill, a phone call from someone, or even a Constable trying to serve a court order. Even more shocking for many is that despite its status as a quasi-governmental agency, a Constable's office does not do extensive background checking on each individual they are tasked to serve. There is simply not enough manpower, and even if there were, it would be impractical to waste it in that manner. It is a far more efficient thing to just deal with anomalies as they come on a case by case basis.

That being said, there is still something sad about remaining family having to tell a Constable standing on their front porch that the person who is subject to the order in their hands has passed away. I can only imagine that they must wonder "Why didn't they already know this?"

After such incidents, the remaining procedure is pretty straightforward. After verifying that the person is indeed dead (You would be surprised at the lies people will perpetuate to avoid going to court...), the plaintiff in the case is notified and most of the time that is where it ends. Unless there was a huge amount of money involved, very few would try to collect from a deceased person's estate. It is instead written off, and the costs passed along to the consumer.

This doesn't happen often. I've worked as a Constable for seven years, and I've only had to deal with this a handful of times. Most of the time, a gentle apology for disturbing the surviving family is all that's needed. However, there have been two times where the survivors have gotten upset, and in both cases I've become quite upset myself. A large HMO that operates most of the hospitals in the area in which I live used to be very active in pursuing payments for their services, even to the point of filing lots of lawsuits over these medical bills. Not once, but TWICE I have been sent out to serve one of these summonses only to find that the defendant died while in the care of the hospital. It seems to me that maybe they should have had a check box somewhere on the billing form that said "PATIENT DECEASED - DO NOT SUE."

Now the really weird stuff involves serving someone in a coma, or otherwise mentally incapacitated. But I'll leave that for another day.