Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Another thing I’m not giving up (6 of 31/41 of 274)

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My religious customs and beliefs do not require me to give up meat, even temporarily. I feel that my God is good that way, because I am quite the carnivore. I verified this fact about myself during my first attempt at college, when peer pressure encouraged me to try switching to a vegetarian diet. I stuck it out for about a month, but the call of the hog was too much to bear. I don’t want to live forever if the possibility of bacon is forever off the table.

Still, I often forego meat on Fridays during Lent. I hope my husband and co-workers think I do this out of consideration. I doubt they are fooled, though. They know that deep down, all right, fine, not so deep down at all, I would think that parading a BBQ pork sandwich through a room of denied meat lovers is just the biggest fun ever.

So no, not consideration at all. It is just my love for pepper and egg sandwiches, which are found everywhere in Chicago during Lent. Is it a little weird that we went to Mr. Beef for our pepper and egg sandwiches today though?

Giving him a break (5 of 31/40 of 274)

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Axel now has 5 points towards his AKC championship, and will hopefully pick up a few more this coming weekend in Columbia, MO. After he’s done showing on Sunday, he’ll be heading home with me for a few months.

We’re not giving up on him! Although he didn’t do much at the Deep South shows, he still came back to win points at some smaller shows back here in the Midwest. His breeder, handler and family are all in agreement that he could use a few months to grow up and out, and then go back out again and hopefully capture his needed majors with ease.

I am so looking forward to seeing him! It will be quite a long drive (about 6.5 hours each way) so I’m very glad to have the new minivan for a more comfortable ride and no worries about mechanical breakdowns in the middle of the vast midwestern wasteland.

I don’t believe I’ve shared the photo from his very first point, so here it is:

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Precious Gems Axel vom Viersen getting his first point from judge Mrs. Marcia C. Feld, handled by Julia Foster

Clicking the photo will take you to all of the full-sized photos from his first successful show weekend. Stay tuned! Axel’s show career will continue in the fall, after he’s enjoyed spring and summer fun with family and friends, including an ATTS Temperament Test along with Freya in May.

Giving credit (4 of 31/39 of 274)

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Just a short follow-up to yesterday’s post, because that is all I have the time and energy for tonight, giving credit where credit is due.

I have never had a great opinion of Comcast. I do not know how it is in other cities, but here in Chicago, you do not have a choice if you want to have cable television. You have a choice between cable and satellite, yes, but there is only one cable company serving each area. So providing superior customer service does not need to be a priority for any cable company.

I have a much better opinion of Comcast after adding their high-speed internet during the whole fiasco with Earthlink. I still have issues with their rather-high pricing, but that’s all at this point.

After the freakshow of a phone call I received at work from Earthlink, just before leaving for home, I called Comcast customer service and spoke to an American person residing in my local area to find out what I needed to do to add high-speed internet service to my existing cable television service. Among the options given to me was to purchase a self-install kit at Best Buy. I stopped on the way home to do that. The associate at the store told me to call Comcast to activate it once I got home. She thought it took about 3 days to activate service. Fortunately she was wrong. I called the activation number and spoke to an American technical service person who told me the line would be active in just a few minutes since I already had cable television service. And it was.

Total time from no ‘net to nothing but ‘net: less than an hour, including the stop at Best Buy.

Credit where credit is due. That was a great and painless experience provided by Comcast. Wish everything could go that easy.

Giving up (3 of 31/38 of 274)

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Shortly after our original Rottweiler Heidi came to live with us in 1994, I made a very basic web page for her with a few photos, a couple of cute stories and a list of links about Rottweilers. Sometime over the next year or so, I was searching for more links to add to the page when I stumbled across Mindspring’s website. At that time, Mindspring was a regional ISP based in Atlanta. Their website included a page featuring their “Chief Executive Rottweiler” Henri, a three-legged Rottweiler belonging to an employee.

Of course I thought that was wonderful. I added the link to Heidi’s page, and had Heidi write to Henri, complimenting him on his business acumen and hoping that she, too, could one day achieve success in a technology career. I was shocked to receive a reply a couple of days later from Mindspring CEO Charles Brewer (or an assistant, I’ll never know for sure) with some kind words to Heidi about her page and the good resources she provided with her links. I wrote back on Heidi’s behalf and said that if Mindspring ever expanded to our area, we would use them as our ISP.

In 1997, they did come to Chicago, and I kept Heidi’s promise. Mindspring had excellent customer service and technical support. There were some growing pains, but things were always taken care of in a friendly and professional manner. We upgraded to DSL in 2000. When Earthlink bought out Mindspring, things were still fine for quite a while.

Somewhere along the line, Charles Brewer left to pursue other projects. Garry Betty passed away from cancer. Things started changing for the worse around that time. Support and customer service were outsourced. The service itself had pretty good uptime, but whenever I did have to contact support for any reason, it was simply hell to deal with the lower level outsourced technicians and their canned scripts and fake American names.

The last outage was the last straw. It lasted a little longer than usual, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem clearly lay outside my network, but the lower level tech put me through the entire script regardless. I could have dealt with that if he had actually escalated the call to the phone company to check the physical lines as he said he was going to do.

When I called back the next morning to check on the status, per tech’s instructions, the new tech said that he would put a trouble ticket in to the phone company. Ummm. It was done last night? No, apparently not.

This was still not the breaking point, as the phone company did more than their part and actually showed up shortly after I’d left for work and took care of their part of things.

The breaking point was the tech who called for me at work. He got off to a great start by asking one of my male co-workers if he was me. This particular co-worker does not sound like Barry White, but neither does he sound like a girl. Then, wonder tech continues by asking me to check on my service. I point out that he has called me at work, and the troubled DSL is at home. He repeats his request verbatim. I point out his error again, a little louder. He repeats his request again. I resort to profanity, ask for a supervisor, and am denied. I tell the tech I will check on the DSL when I get home and hang up.

Fortunately all was well. But that was the last straw, and after a dozen years, I have finally given up. The Mindspring I subscribed to is long gone. Heidi’s gone, Henri’s gone, and customer service is gone and way more dead than either of those beautiful dogs. And now I am gone. I made the call to cancel my account earlier tonight. The… again, outsourced… customer service rep noted that I had been a customer since 1997. Yeah. Had been. Not happy. Leaving.

I truly mourn the loss of the days that a company could still have a cutesy page with a “Chief Executive Rottweiler” and a CEO that took the time to see that a silly letter from a dog was answered. And a person could call for customer support and be able to talk to a person in their own country who could communicate effectively in their language.

Giving a sign (2 of 31/37 of 274)

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I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, but I do believe in an afterlife of some kind. Whether it takes place as reincarnation or moving to another level of existence, I do believe we go on from here. I’ve always hoped for some communication from my dear departed family members (human or otherwise), but I don’t believe they’ve ever contacted me. Other than one very real-seeming dream in which dearly missed Oscar appeared to let me know he was fine on the other side, wherever that is, I’ve never seen a sign from beyond.

This year I took some photos at and around the gravesite of my maternal grandmother and some other family members who died long before I was born. I’ve seen some ghost photos that were obvious fakes, and others that really made me wonder, so I thought I’d see what might show up in any photos that I took. Nothing unusual showed up, either upon viewing the photos right after taking them, or upon viewing them at full size on the computer later that evening.

But something rather strange did happen at the next gravesite I visited.

After spotting my uncle’s gravestone from the roadway, I happened to glance down as I walked towards it. The gravestone I saw was a smaller one with a photo: a high school graduation photo of someone I’d been friends with so very long ago. This was not someone I’d ever dated, or been extremely close to, but we had been pretty good friends all through my high school years. I knew he had passed away very young. I had already moved to Chicago and lost touch with a lot of people, including him, a couple of years before that.

Someone I hadn’t thought of in many years. Until earlier that week, when I saw an advertisement for the 70s Nightclub Reunion, which took place just this past weekend. I had a lot of friends who played in bands during the 70s, and his would have been one from that time. I knew quite a few of the members in the bands that were playing at this event, and I was just thinking about other friends from that time. Including him. And then to stumble upon his gravesite, with a forever young photo.

I am not sure if that was a sign from beyond. My friend has been gone for almost 30 years, and my uncle for about 6 years. It is very strange that I never happened upon my friend’s gravestone until that day. I visit my uncle’s gravesite every year. What are the odds that I would have always gone up the other path?