27 December 1997: The Answer Man

Saturday, 27 December 1997:

The Answer Man

On waking up this morning, I sat in bed and finished reading MYST: The Book Of Atrus, which turned out to be not bad, although the mechanics of final confrontation (well, final before Riven, anyway) between Atrus and Gehn are rather contrived and hokey. And the whole thing is more of a set-up for Riven than for MYST. (Hardly a word about Atrus and Catherine's sons, for instance.)

I started MYST: The Book Of Ti'ana this evening, and am about 100 pages into it. These things read fast; wide margins, large print, extra line spacing. How many trees died for this printing style?

I was rather hacked off tonight to walk down to the coffee shop and find that it had closed early. Most of the year it closes about midnight. They've had signs up saying they'd close around 10 pm during the students' winter break, and earlier on the actual holidays, but tonight they closed at 8 pm, despite a sign that was on the door last night stating otherwise. Nice of those bastards to let us know ahead of time! Sheesh!

Football Pool Update: I'm 2-for-2; the Vikings squeaked out an improbable 1-point victory over the Giants, and the Broncos crushed the Jaguars. Very few people in the pool picked Minnesota to win, so that's a small edge for me. I think people were split about evenly between Denver and Jacksonville. If tomorrow's games go well, then I'll have bragging rights for at least a little while!

I went shopping today, and decided that if I'm getting cable TV then I might as well break down and get the other major component of 1990s life I'm missing: a microwave oven. I used to have one I was borrowing from some friends; they got married and didn't need two, so they lent one to me, but when the one they were using turned into toast I gave back the one I had. So now I can buy microwave dinners just like the rest of America. (Actually, I'll probably mostly use it to heat hamburger meat and other such things.)

What I was really shopping for was a new telephone answering machine, since mine is just about dead. It's a Panasonic, which should tell you that it was a gift; I never buy Panasonic equipment for myself, as I think their stuff is of very low quality. I didn't find a replacement, however. There are fairly few such machines still being made, as the combined phone-and-answerer are in vogue right now. (Yes! Have a single point of failure for your phone system! Run up bigger repair bills! It's the American way!) And 80% of the answerer-only machines are white (ugh!). And 30% of them are Panasonics. And all the tape machines are single-tape machines, which I understand are inefficient to the caller, and many of the digital machines lose their data if there's a power outage. Yuck.

I think I found a Lucent machine which is digital, doesn't have features I don't need (like multiple mailboxes), and has permanent memory. It's white, but I guess I'll survive. (Strange; all the telephones are jet black, and the answerer are white. So much for color coordination!) Now I just have to find someone who has them in stock! Yes, I didn't actually buy one today. Ah, well.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)