So what did you guys do for turkey day?
I worked. Ahh, the life of a laborer 🙂 I was at work from 9PM Wednesday night through about 7 AM Thursday morning, handling UNIX support issues for workers in India. It was an unusually busy night! I’ve noticed this tendency for people I support there — and here in the US, we’re not guiltless — to submit support issues, claim they are “critical”, and then when it isn’t handled within, say, thirty minutes, use my support team as the scapegoat for their multi-week project not getting handled on time.
It’s terribly frustrating to *know* this is done routinely, handle the support calls, close the ticket, and have the user repeatedly re-open the ticket claiming to not understand the solution I provided. Until one day I saw the pattern behnind the madness, and then it makes perfect sense: the goal of the ticket isn’t to get the problem resolved, it’s to get a plausible excuse for their otherwise inexcusable delay. Or, at least, so I tell myself.
Strangely, the few times I’ve wanted to test my theory, the turnover is so high in our remote office that the worker who attempted to use us as a scapegoat is no longer there a few weeks later. Justice, I suppose.
Anyway, after working, I went home and slept for about 3 hours before leaving for our family get-together at my brother Jay‘s house. Lots of turkey, lots of pie, lots of fun and a sad goodbye. All the good stuff. It was really nice to have a family get-together where all we were doing was just hanging out, all day long. Usually, we get together for dinner at around 4:30, and by 7:30 we’re packing up to leave. This time, we had enough time to play Dance Dance Revolution for a while, watch three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (now I’m on Season 4, episode 3… yeah, I’m slow, but woot!), play board games (I didn’t get into those today), geek-out by whipping out matching laptops on the couch, and stuff ourselves silly to boot.
It was a good Thanksgiving. Now where’s my diet book?
Great Turkey Day
We had a great turkey day. We spent the day with some friends up in Aberdeen, MD. Will & Christie have been friends of ours since 97 when we met on Christmas Eve when i was stationed in Panama. William is unfortunately on his 3rd deployment to Iraq. We spent the day with Christie and their 2 kids. It was a great day. We got there in the morning and spent the day watching the kids play, watching the parade and just overall having a good time.
It was one of the most relaxing weekends i have had in a VERY long time. This was a very nice change.
Good old Aberdeen
Funny you should mention Aberdeen. I graduated from Aberdeen HS, same one as Cal Ripken Jr. Small world, huh? Because my dad was in the army and stationed there, we lived on the proving ground. When I would write to Matt I would write APG instead of writing it out. Matt thought it was a dislexic GAP. Crazy boy!
Anyway, back to the original topic of Turkey day, we had a great time at my sister in law’s house. But since she made a huge turkey, I didn’t have the leftovers at my house. So Saturday I cooked a 12 lb. smoked turkey. It was gone by Sunday night. So much for not having to cook for a week, huh? Luckily I have two other turkeys in the freezer. I’ll probably cook one sooner than later just for the leftovers. Then again, it takes a week just to defrost the bird. Now that’s advanced meal planning!–
Christy
APG
Not understanding exactly what APG was (not being familiar with the acronym atll), I believe what I wrote was:
Or something along those lines. I’m certain the actual letter is somewhere in one of those boxes around the house. Man, we wrote a lot.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Let Me Hear It
Since you graduated from AHS, you have to have the obligatory Cal Ripken story. Everyone for 15 miles around Aberdeen has one. I work with his catcher from high school (Cal pitched in high school). My brothers played against him in little league. I worked with a guy who had Billy Ripken as a substitute teacher. Fred Ripken coached 10 year old girls softball against my brother-on-law.
Me personally….never met a Ripken. Saw Fred from afar at a softball game. Been to Ripken stadium for an Ironbirds game, club level, which is real nice…the Sunday buffet is AWESOME.
So what’s your Ripken tale? 😉
btw, I bank at APGFCU. I work with ARL, AMSAA, AEC and CHPPM on APG. The military loves their acronyms!
My $.02 Weed