The Negative Voice
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2001-05-22 - 1:12 a.m.

Policies and Toilets

Another day, another nuisance. Today's nuisance was having to send a bunch of form letters to people saying, "please request a UNIX account." I tried to request accounts for those people directly, but oh no, that couldn't be allowed. The durn form requires a lot of semi-private information that I don't have access to or time to track down.

All of this again reminded me of my theory about policies: They should exist to define a *minimum* service level. If you say "no returns after 30 days", that should not mean that any attempt to return something after 30 days gets rejected without consideration. It should mean that after 30 days, they'll say no unless you give them a good reason.

If the policy is that account requests should be submitted via web form, and someone has a good reason why that form won't work in a particular case, they should damn well come up with a better solution!

Anyway, enough about that. My other fun for the day was fixing my toilet. Now, I don't have any special objection to fixing things. The problem is, I suck at it. I should never be allowed to pick up tools, because I break things. I break things as naturally as other people breathe. I got interested in computers because in software, you can "break" things without causing permanent damage.

Given all that, one might well ask why I tried to fix my own toilet. Answer: the maintenance crew for these apartments sucks to such an amazing extent that I can do a better job. I've had to call them on both my toilets since I moved in, and the toilets have never worked quite right. So, to hell with maintenance, I'm taking over.

The end of the (plumbing) world is probably nigh.

Oh- and the baby's web site is finally on-line at http://www.liralyn.org/. Yay me.

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