Pain and Suffering from OfficeMax

So, I saw an article in the GT about a swap meet held weekly in Corvallis, no charge for a table, and I called to get a table. That was like on Thursday.

I had no stuff to sell. I have nothing that's worth anything here. I didn't let that stop me from signing up. I can be very short sighted.

Last minute, I round a few things up. The neighbor gave me some books and a few other things headed otherwise for Goodwill. I had a few unwanted things. I made a few cat toys, then decided to crank up my old hard drive, that sometimes works, to yank off the Publisher file that holds the Christmas story chapbook I wrote a few years back. I was going to print it up and see if I could sell a few copies.

My latest hard drive won't handle or convert the file since it does not have Publisher, any version, on it, just Word, that's it. I ended up having to connect up the monitor, then mouse and keyboard, to that old hard drive. Back and forth, back and forth, because I have only one mouse and one keyboard. The exclusion room I built to keep the cats away from my computer is tiny.

My life is an assemblage of broken parts. That includea my body and most of my possessions. I'm always trying to fix something, keep it going a little bit longer.

For instance, I like having my windows down when I drive. I love the feel of the wind. But, due to that broken switch, that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, I had some trouble when I even arrived at OfficeMax. I parked and the switch was in a non working mode. I couldn't roll up the window. I took it apart. AGAIN! Right there, using the screwdrive I keep handy, and manuelly manipulated the lever. It was a go, and I could roll up the window. I left it all apart hanging by the wires to go into the store. I'm fed up with the darn switch.

I print up one copy of the pages plus all the cover pages, because they have color on them, then head to OfficeMax with the nine double sided pages to copy them there. I fumble around and finally ask the copy area clerk's help. She asks how many pages I have, then says she could do the double sided 9 pages cheaper if she did it, instead of if I did so, on the public machine there. She'll even have the machine collate. "Great," I say.

I bring them home and am about to assemble, when I realize something is very very wrong.

There are only 8 double sided pages. There should be nine. They charged me for 20 copies of each page, but did not return my originals. I was mad to discover all these mistakes. But that was only the beginning. She hadn't just not copied one page. One page she had copied, both sides, 20 times, included parts of that page and the missing page. OMG!!!! Took me forever to figure it out because I didn't number the book pages. I will never make that mistake again.

Because of the jumbling of 2 pages by the clerk (or the machine she used), with print on both sides, printing one side of each of the two pages on only one page, it would be two pages, four sides, 20 copies of each, I would need to sort out and redo. Damn you Officemax clerk!

So now it's almost 1:00 a.m. My printer broke repeatedly in trying to make 20 copies of two pages, printing on both sides. In the end, the printer failed and I could only make 8 complete books up. Officemax, you're getting a visit from me tomorrow! Prepare yourselves! And, you better have my originals ready!

My guess is the woman didn't give me back the originals because she realized her mistake in the end, and knew I'd figure it out quicker if I had the originals. But how awful for me. Do I want her fired? Right now, YES!!!!

See, yesterday, I reached into a full sink for a dish and instead, sliced my thumb right on the edge of the nail on a kitchen knife submerged in the water. I bled and bled and now, that cut edge sticks out and catches on everything and it hurts when that happens. It hurts to be typing. And that's not even all. I re-sprained my right index finger. It hurts to move it even slightly. Typing is hurting. I must love pain!

So trying to redo these messed up pages so I'll have something to sell at the swap meet I should have opted out for lack of goods, isn't making me cheerful.

OfficeMax, you better have candy and flowers waiting for me when I arrive tomorrow, to straighten out this big fat old mess. Next time, I will do it myself, have to be on the public machine, because my poor printer is busted!

I have been able to fix it, however, at least three times in the course of this evening and night, in trying to pump out a few of these books despite Officemax.

So there's hope that in a couple days, when my thumb and finger start healing, when I catch on sleep, when I have no more nightmares of Officemax or rather, what I might like to do to Officemax, I bet I can fix it again. Right now, forget about it. I'm going to bed.

Well, not! My stomach started acting up. I also pulled a muscle in my back. See, I set up the tables and canopy inside my garage, which in itself was not bright, since there's barely any room in the one car stall, to arrange everything, and lifting things, like cinder blocks to move out of the way, and catching the canopy cause gosh dang it, it kept falling over this way or that, I puled something down my back, too. So I've got them thumb thing, the finger thing, the back thing and now my stomach too.

My stomach thing is from eating a little too much fiber possibly. I like squash and my garden is still producing copious amounts of that. I like bush beans and I'm still eating those out of my garden. And every day for lunch I pick a bunch of cherry tomatoes off the vine and eat them. Then I"ve been eating blueberries and cantaloupe on top of that. Yup.

I've also had two pair of jeans give up the ghost in the last two weeks with the pair I'm wearing today, needing to head to the trash, because the material on the legs is so thread bare I can stick my finger through them. The first pair split up the back on one side, just worn out. The second pair frayed up the side seam too badly to repair and now this pair.

I really got excited about the swap meet table. I knew they said in the paper there isn't much traffic yet at it. I like interacting with the public. I like selling things, too. But doesn't work if you have nothing to sell. I got no junk really. I thought I could come up with enough, to do it every week, but I can't see how I'll find product to sell, when I have moved enough in my days to not want extra baggage around, in the form of stuff I don't use, in case I have to pack and move again.

A swap meet is just a flea market which is just a gathering of garage sales.

I form no bonds with stuff. I could leave everything here I have and feel no sorrow at all. In fact, the less I have the freer I feel. Except I love the cats of course. Speaking of whom, I bathed more kittens this morning. They don't like the bath so much, but they LOVE the blow dry job afterwards. Peko especially. He's healing up. Machi has one spot but doesn't seem to be spreading.

I'm concerned Miss Daisy might be getting it on her nose. Hard to tell because she gets a redness above her nose if she has congestion at all, with her chronic herpes, from licking drainage. She's really defensive about any sort of medicating at all, as bad as Shady, the drama queen extraordinaire! If I want to put drops in Shady's eyes, because she too has chronic herpes, coming from that awful colony where all the cats had it, she knows somehow, even if I hide the bottle from her sight. She starts in screaming like she's being tortured then, before she can even see the bottle.

Ringworm I swear hits the lighter colored cats easier, the Norwegian descent cats, hahaha. I told Miss Daisy tonight, "You're getting it, aren't ya, and that's because you're Norwegian." She is, you know. I can tell. Peko and Machi are both light colored cats too.