Okay, so here's one gross thing but not THE gross thing about my walk. I submit the above picture of a very dead little mouse which may be gross but listen to this: I set off on my morning walk with Jules and as I didn't need to go to work or any where particular, we took a rather longer walk than usual. Now I've railing about the slobs and assholes who dump their old building materials and ugly chairs along the dirt road where I walk, but today's offering took the cake. I spied a white thing in the road, and as I approached closer, I pulled Jules in tighter to me as it appeared that the white thing was a rather large pair of men's Fruit of the Loom underpants. But not only did some idiot see fit to leave dirty laundry laying around in the road, but they were copiously soiled with evil looking diarrhea. (I guess I have to ask if there's any other kind). All I can think of is "Ebola!" Boy, did that ruin the atmosphere of a lovely pre-storm walk! (You're all just lucky that didn't have my camera.)
That was the gross; here's the waste of time. (Haven't I recently been haranguing that i have many things to accomplish and and I'm very short of time? I sound like a broken record.) I am having my book,
Better Guns and Gardens produced, and for many reasons ( and people can have their opinions...) I am printing the first batch at Staples. I actually went out of my way to the next town over as the do the production of the book binding there, and the poor over worked young man at our local Staples seemed less than informed about how they do them and said they sent them out anyway. The young man at the New Milford Staples had examples, seemed involved and even listened to my tale of woe as to how their competitor (OfficeMax) made a mess out of one of my previous books (printed and collated upside down backwards etc). He assured me that this wouldn't happen; they'd be extra careful. What could possibly go wrong?
I picked up the single test copy that i had ordered and was pleased; it really looked great. I therefore ordered up four more, and left work early to go over to pick them up. The cover looked fine and a part of me thought, Better be safe and check them out." It's a good thing I opened them up and systematically paged through because the insides were a disaster. And as I pointed out to the young woman at the copy center, not only were the files in order (like pages 1, 2, 3 and on) but the pages were numbered in the book. It was like they collated them with their eyes closed. I was so distraught that I spoke with a manager, who was properly horrified and apologized by saying they'd redo them and give me a fifth one free.
I returned, not getting my hopes up as I've learned that once something gets messed up, there's a good chance the correction will be botched, too. The books looked fine and I checked every last one but when i went to pay, they charged me for the fifth "free" one. After much cash register rewriting attempts, a manager was called over and he tried to right it. Eventually, with a line forming behind me and me feeling teh evil eye of every other customer, they rang it up. And it turned out to be thirty dollars LESS than it should have been. I think they were trying to get rid of me! I need to get a few more printed next week. We'll see what happens!
