Casing the joint
February 21: Days like today are why, in our household, the P-word (planning) is a little like the F-word. I got out of bed this fine, sunny morning ready to rumble and do a bunch of programming, but first I had to do a few admin tasks.
I started off applying for a volunteer job, then found a page where I had to ask DH something and he wasn’t around. So I turned on email and found melydia’s reply about something I’d asked, and started ordering some special kinds of cards from VistaPrint.
At this point HughesNet completely and utterly crapped out. It’s not bad enough that, two days ago, they were completely out of action for over eight hours. No. There was more.
Pages were not loading, and when I hit reload, they would serve me their obnoxious interstitial ad for an upgrade I don’t want and which replaced the url I was sending, meaning I would lose the original link and have to go back two pages to re-click it. The upgrade has an opt-out but when you click it you get an error message.
I got so enraged that I think I sprained my finger from stabbing the reload button. I detest this ISP with every fiber of my being.
It took over two hours to get as far as creating the product, then I had to break off as our tanks were full and we went to dump and restore.
This, at least, was accomplished without incident, and we even met a couple of bikers hauling their water container behind a big Harley on a trailer while doing so. Then we took a spot at La Posa North.
I spent more time on the product I was creating, got it ordered, then saw that the site was advertising a cheaper price, so I canceled the order and tried to get the better price. Turned out it was only for people coming in from a different promotion, so I felt a bit annoyed about that, but in the end they do make it insanely easy to reorder the same thing, so I reordered the same thing.
Meanwhile, I had agreed to enter an advertising setup with a company whose contract I had been unhappy with, and they had told me they would let me sign a different agreement. They got back to me, I started signing up, and realized that to sign up I had to agree to that same agreement I’d been objecting to.
So I copied the clause I found unacceptable, told them they were really back to square one, and the ball’s back in their court. :: headdesk ::
Then DH and I were going to head into town, but I was outside just as a guy on a bike was cycling on the path and he hailed me to ask about the bike as he couldn’t see how we were transporting it. He then pretty much bang-bang-bang interrogated me, caught me completely off my guard, which isn’t very guardy to begin with.
I am English by birth, and the English are polite at the molecular level, and very few of us find it easy to just tell someone to mind their own darn business, as that would be rude.
He asked me who I was traveling with, whether we were Christians(?!)-that really creeped me out-and in a few moments had found out I was with a DH and a cat, how we earned our living (here, at least, I did manage to obfuscate, and said we volunteered and camp hosted our way around).
When I extracted myself from the conversation I realized he now knew that, if the bike wasn’t there, we weren’t there, and the bike was about to not be there.
So we discussed it and decided we’d just leave that spot, period, as I was totally creeped out by now, and DH concurred that he was probably casing the joint, assessing whether we had money or not.
We went into town and got food and drinking water, then returned to a different La Posa, then rode into town and got hamburgers, parking next to the same bike we’d encountered at the watering hole earlier.
And so I sit here at 7:30 Arizona wondering where the heck the day went, and feeling as I’ve accomplished almost nothing today other than to order some business cards.
This was cross-posted from Raven's Roads. You can comment here or there, but if you could bring yourself to comment there rather than here, that would be very nice. Here's the link to comment over there