The Soccer Star

I haven't had anything of a technical nature to discuss for awhile so I decided to write something else; just to keep the blog going. You know, my two readers might get upset if they thought my blog site was getting stale. It wouldn't be right to let them down. Gotta stay in the game!! So, here goes....

Problem: Did anyone ever ask you to tell them something about yourself that not many people would know? Something that would be really hard for people to guess about you? Well, it's not easy, at least it wasn't for me. Someone wanted this information for a little game they were planning for a Christmas party. Knowing this, I didn't want to tell them any of the more seedy parts of my past, and have it come out at a huge Christmas party. God forbid that! So, I had to think long and hard for material I could use that wouldn't embarrass the hell out of me and everyone else. What could it be ...... hmmmmm ...... let's seeeeeee ........ ?

Solution: I got it!! I told them that I lettered in soccer in high school. Yeah, that's the ticket. Pretty good, eh? If it ever came up in other conversation, no one could dispute it because it's the truth. I even have the old letter around somewhere to show people, if necessary. This was the perfect thing because, number 1) it's true, number 2) not many people know about it and number 3) it even sounds pretty good!

Anyhow, if they only knew the whole story they wouldn't be so impressed. I'm not afraid to say this here because, as I said before, I only have two readers. And I trust that they, of all people, wouldn't rat on me. They never have before. In fact I'm sure they probably dismiss everything I say shortly after I say it, let alone remember to tell my dirty little secrets. So, here's the true story about my stellar soccer career....

It was the Fall of 1960 and I was a Junior in high school. For whatever reason, Newark High School decided to get into soccer as a school sport, a big step for American schools in those days. Most of us had heard of soccer at one time or another. We knew it was played other places, but not here; I had seen one soccer game in my life, to that point, and I remembered that it was a bunch of old men from other countries in some sort of pick-up game or local league that I just happened upon in a nearby town. The whole thing looked sort of sad to me. Now, NHS was offering it as a varsity sport. Well, as you might expect, none of the established jocks in school would have anything to do with soccer. All the other major "American" sports were keeping them busy. So, it looked like no one was going to even go out for the team. I'm not sure how I even heard about it. It was probably one of the long list of things my older brother dragged me into. I was such a follower. All he had to say is something like, "Hey you! Wanna play some soccer? (I was 10 years old before I realized that "Hey You" wasn't really my name, but I still answered to it). "Yeah, I guess I'll play". So, that was it. All we had to do is sign up and we were on the team. I guess they were afraid that if they had actual try outs they would never have gotten 11 players for an official team. As it turned out, there was only one guy on the team who had ever played soccer before. His name was Peter Jost (pronounced Yost), an exchange student from Hungary, the only one who knew before we started that we weren't supposed to touch the ball with our hands.

The coach was the Ag teacher. I remember feeling sorry for that poor guy. He didn't seem to know a lot about soccer either and I wondered how he got roped into this thing. I imagined that he was hanging around the teachers' lounge one day when the principal walked in and announced the soccer program and demanded a volunteer to coach the team. I'm sure there was a lot bobbing and weaving to get out of the line of fire, and our poor Ag teacher, being a rather big guy, couldn't get out of sight fast enough. His fate was sealed. He spent the rest of the season shepherding around the worst set of misfits encountered in his career. There was at least one good outcome from choosing the Ag teacher for the coach. Most of his students were actual farm boys, some of which he conscripted to play on the team. They didn't know anything about the game, either, but what they brought was some serious toughness. This came from years of hay bailing, cow poking and other hard work on the farm. Most of them would just as soon kick your ass as say hello to you in the hallway. Anyhow, they took out most of their aggression on the other teams, which was fine with me.

So, early in the season we all figured out that Peter could actually handle the ball with his feet which was quite an asset. I have to give the guy a lot of credit for sticking with the hopeless lot of us. I can still see the frustration on his face as we tried to learn the game. I really don't know why he stayed. I guess it's possible that he was amused by our horrible incompetence and was savoring the experience for when he got back home. At any rate, he was really good and the rest of us were really bad. The name of the game that year became Get-The-Ball-To-Peter. It was the only chance we had of staying in any of the games. I guess I don't have to tell you that we lost every game that season. As good as Peter was, he simply couldn't be a one man team. He tried. And we tried to help him, but alas, it wasn't happening. The best we could do that year was a moral victory. There was an especially annoying opponent playing defense for our arch rival. During the course of the game he pushed one of our Ag boys just a little too far. As I mentioned before, these Ag guys were very close to edge anyhow, and it wasn't wise to cross them. So, our Future Farmer of America knocked the guy down and kicked his teeth out. Not a pretty site but par for the farm. Hey, I know it wasn't like winning, but it was the best we could do.

So, the season ended, Peter was off the hook, the FFA guys got rid of some anger and we actually learned something new. We were Soccer Players. Not elite athletes like the football players, basketball players and wrestlers, but we had participated in a varsity sport. And as varsity sports go, there were letters to go around. I don't know if this is a big deal anymore, but back then it was something to be proud of. The only one who deserved a letter was Peter, but the coach had at least six or eight of them to award to this new varsity team and he was determined to hand them out. All of the Seniors got one by default. I was one of the two or three Juniors to get one; a big thrill for me. I have to say the thrill didn't last too long. None of us noticed at the time we were issued the letters, but the small ball shape on the letter, indicating the sport we were in, didn't look much like a soccer ball. In fact it looked more like a basketball. In fact, I think it was a basketball. The guys on the varsity basket ball team were understandably (and noticeably) upset. We didn't wear the letters around for very long.

You see, the American high school sports world just wasn't ready for soccer in 1960. It appears that the sports gear manufacturers either didn't know what a soccer ball looked like or they didn't care. I can hear them now when the order was placed: "What did that coach call it Iggy? Sucker? No? Then what was it? Socker, you say? Spell it then. S-O-C-C-E-R? You sure? .................. Never heard of it. Whadaya think the ball looks like? They didn't say? Well, let's just use a basketball; the kids won't know the difference". And we didn't.

Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Like I said earlier, this is a little embarrassing but I'm not too concerned since this is going out to only two trusted readers. I know you guys might be tempted to tell this story to others, but I'm hoping you'll just keep it among us. Shhhhhhh ......... and Merry Christmas!!!

Calendar Sharing

Note: Further testing with the solution below has produced mixed results. I no longer trust that the "solution" is really a solution so, test it yourself or just ignore it. I'm out of enrgy on this one.......

Problem: Our organization provides calendar sharing for our users with MS Exchange server and Outlook clients. The calendar sharing has been working okay until a few weeks ago when an Mac user wanted to use Entourage to view and update a shared calendar. She reported that she could see the shared calendar and even add entries, but unfortunately her entries could not be seen by the Outlook user who shared the calendar. You ask, "Why do I care about this?" Well, it's simple; I just love those Mac users to death!! (Actually, we secretly wish all the users would discover Google Calendars so we could get out of the Exchange business all together. But, so far it hasen't happened).

Solution: The Outlook user had given the proper permissions to access the shared calendar (File menu/Folder/Properties for "Calendar"...). As it turns out, giving the Entourage user the proper permissions to view and edit the calendar is not enough. After several days of trying to find out why, I finally discovered that I needed to make the Entourage user a "Delegate". That is:

1. On the Outlook Tools menu, choose Options
2. On the Options window, Select the Delegates tab
3. Hit the Add button and select user names to add to the delegates list
4. Make sure the delegate get "Editor" permission to the calendar

After this, the lucky Entourage user can actually edit the shared calendar and have the changes seen by the Outlook user. If the changes still don't show up right away, the Entourage user can select "Synchronize Now" from the Calendar menu.

NOTE: On my way home Friday I had a bad feeling about this blog (it was Friday the 13th after all). I did some further testing today (Monday the 16th, not a particularly spooky day). I found 2 things worth mentioning:

1. With "Editor" permissions given by the delegate process above, I couldn't delete my own items from the shared calendar using Entourage. To get around this, I went into Outlook again and elevated the permisions to "Publishing Editor" for the Entourage user. Then I was able to delete anything I wanted to.
2. The "Synchronize Now" doesn't exactly do it now as I would expect. First of all the "Synchronize Now" option is sometimes grayed out until you switch away from the calendar and then switch back. And, when you finally select the option, it takes up to a minute to acually synchronize.

I guess I should be grateful that this thing works at all ......

Still Another Exchange/Outlook SNAFU

Problem: We recently had to "rename" a Windows userid for a user who got married. After going through this I can now understand why one of my colleagues always tries to talk them out of it (not the marriage, changing their userid ... ;o). Changing the userid is bad enough, but when Exchange is also involved, watch out! Above, I used quotes when I said rename. This is because the rename function doesn't work all that well. It looks simple enough, but it doesn't change a whole lot inside of Active Directory. Even if you go through the user's entire set of properties, changing everything you can see, there are some things deep down in the code that this doesn't fix.

Solution: What my wary colleague suggested was to delete the old userid and create a new one with the new name (and he promised me that the old Exchange Mailbox wouldn't go away). When you create the new userid, don't create an Exchange Mailbox. Connect the user's old Mailbox to the new account; do this by going to Exchange Server Manager, and associate the old (disconnected) Mailbox with the new userid. Then right-click the disconnected Mailbox and connect it to the new userid. After all this, the "renamed" user is back in business. HOWEVER, you might not be done yet; I wasn't. If you have Outlook users defined to use Cached Exchange Mode, they might see the old Exchange user in the Global Address List, and not see the new userid. If so, they can refresh their view of the Global Address List either by turning off Cached Exchange Mode, or:

1. Open Outlook
2. Select the Tools menu
3. Choose Send/Receive
4. Choose Download Address Book...

This last procedure comes from my tireless friends on the web who are much better at finding solutions than I am. So, if it doesn't work for you, please call them. I won't be much help ....

CPU Speed set to Compatible

Problem: A user reported that his machine was running very slow after taking a power surge. I observed that the CPU usage was pegged to 100%, but memory usage was down near zero. I also noted that there were no unusual tasks running, so I decided to run hardware diagnostics. The Dell diagnostics quickly produced an Error Code 0700:0120, msg: No cache detected. Cache might be disabled, defective or not present. Immediately after this error, I got a System Error! msg: System_Error illegal attempt to disable Intel CH SMI without restoring original values first...... Time to look at the BIOS settings.

Solution:
I expected to find that some of the devices were not even detected, but all seemed to be there. I compared the BIOS settings on an identical machine and found several settings that were different. I won't give all the details; the one setting that was causing the problem was: the CPU Speed was set to "Compatible" on the bad machine. I reset it to "Normal" and let the machine boot. Back in business.

Disabled Items? Come on, MS

Problem: The other day a user reported that she tried to turn off her Outlook Out of Office notification. Instead of the expected dialog, she got a message saying, "The command is not available. See the program documentation about how to use this extension." Now that's very descriptive.

Solution: I can't take credit for finding the fix. The user was so irritated that she took the time to search the internet herself. It turns out that the outex.dll Addin was disabled for some reason. All she had to do is:

1. Go to the Outlook Help menu
2. Choose About Microsoft Outlook
3. Hit the Disabled Items button
4. Select outex.dll and hit the Enable button

My impression: I'm glad it was that easy to fix once we knew where to look. Thank God for my friends out there who find these things first! I don't know what I would do without other peoples' research. As for MS: Does Outlook have items that get disabled so often that you need to have a formal dialog in the application to handle them? I'm glad you do, but it would help if the error message held some hope of finding the actual solution once in awhile.

Beware of the Weasels!!

Problem: I have an odd network to support. Odd in that the hardware and software are very strange to me. It's extremely difficult for a lot of reasons; I'll just name a few.

1. The servers are very new to me. Most people don't even know there are servers for this technology, so I'm not alone on this one! "New" can sometimes be very confusing and intimidating.
2. In spite of their spiffy commercials and superior attitude, this technology is not the know-all, end-all computer technology. Their machines actually DO hang from-time-to-time.
3. Routine upgrades are not all that "routine". In fact, I haven't experienced one yet that wasn't problematic in some way.
4. People talk about it being intuitive technology??? What a bunch of CRAP!

Now for the real problem: The guy that turned this network over to me did so without giving me any formal documentation. He told me not to worry; I could always call on him for backup if I had a problem. Since then, I've had LOTs of problems. The only way I've gotten any help from the asshole is to track him down in his office. He has never answered a phone call since the turnover.

In the past few days I upgraded the servers to the latest maintenance level. This should have been an easy task, but again there was a problem. I searched for the solution until my wit's end but just couldn't see what was wrong, so I decided to call for backup. Again, no answer. I was off site, so I called another colleague to track down my backup guy. She called me in a few minutes with unbelievable news. The weasel had QUIT! That's right, he just quit without the common courtesy to tell me he couldn't back me up any longer. Had I known, I could have spent some time bringing someone else up to speed.

In my professional career, I have never paid much attention to what supervisors and managers have thought of my work. They usually tell me it's good, but it just doesn't matter to me. I've done very well with promotions and pay all my life, in spite of this. What I really rely on for job satisfaction is the respect of my peers. In business this means more to me than anything, including promotions and pay! I always assumed that all techies felt this way. Well, my X-backup proves my assumption wrong. That weasel will never have my respect.

Solution:

1. Don't do another upgrade without having a backup team mate fully trained. There's nothing like the help of a competent colleague when you're in trouble; even if you just have another set of eyes to look at the problem.
2. Make sure my backup knows about the upgrade before I do it. If I had tried to contact the weasel before the last upgrade and found that he had moved away, I never would have done the upgrade. I thought I was doing him a favor by not bothering him. So much for that.
3. Develop good documentation and keep it up to date.

Chinese Laundry Conspiracy

Problem: I'm far away from home and I have a semi-formal event to attend. I was smart enough to pack one pair of dress pants, one pair of black socks, one belt, one pair of non-sneakers, one tie and one dress shirt. Man I'm really on top of things this time! I even remembered the tooth brush and razor. Nothing can stop me now. So I get all this stuff out and start to get dressed. Everything survived the trip and looks great. Well, almost everything. The shirt looks like hell. It's got more wrinkles than a 200-year-old Floridian sun worshipper. So I borrow an iron and try to make it look presentable. Well, this turns out to be impossible. No amount of heat and steam and pressing and cussing does any good. So I borrow some of that nice spray startch. Huh, that's a wonderful idea. Now the iron sticks to the shirt; GREAT!! Now I'm really screwed. Anyhow, while all this is going on I'm thinking: the pants made the trip okay; I don't have to iron them; the socks are fine; nobody even sees them. What's with the shirt? They can make wrinkle free shirts can't they? If they can make wrinkle free shirts, why the hell would they ever make another wrinkly one? It doesn't make any sense. Then it hits me. Somebody wants the shirts to be wrinkled. I'm sure of it. But who? Who could possibly benefit from all the wrinkly shirts? Well, the answer wasn't far away. In fact, I had it right in my hands. I looked at the tag in the shirt and saw those familiar words we all see so much these days: Made in China. THAT's IT!!!! The damn Chinese are doing this! I should have known it was them. They make everything these days; they're taking over the world. And, it's not bad enough that they're making everything. They're also supporting their relatives here who operate all the laundries, by forcing us to send them all of our damned wrinkly shirts!! Wake up America!! Put a stop to the conspriacy!!

Solution: Don't send out your shirts to be ironed. Throw away your irons and ironing boards. Don't ever iron anything, ever again. When you walk into church or a nice restaurant or the theater with all your disgusting wrinkles, ignore the nasty stares and comments. The fashion statement will eventually catch on; Don't worry, America will get used to the new look, and we'll defeat the conspiracy. It really is a conspiracy, you know...........

XP Logon Limits

Problem: Your kids get up in the middle of the night and use the computer, and you need a way to stop them, short of handcuffing them.

Solution: Go to the XP command line and enter the following:

net user littlejohnny /TIMES:m,6am-11pm;t,6am-11pm;w,6am-11pm;th,6am-11pm;f,6am-11pm;sa,6am-11pm;su,6am-11pm

Here's a breakdown of the command:

• net user is the command
• littlejohnny is your kid's userid
• /TIMES: is the option to set the logon times
• m is Monday (the rest of the days are abbreviated t, w, th, f, sa, su. They can also be spelled out)
• the times can also be specified other ways, but the syntax is very particular. This way works

You can look at the results of the command by issuing: net user littlejohnny

So anyhow, these are the times that littlejohnny is allowed to logon. Of course the times can be different on every day if you want.

Here are 2 things to note:

• These times only control the LOGON. If littlejohnny is already logged on when the restricted time goes by, the machine will not kick him off. You have to do that. Then he won't be able to logon again until the unrestricted time.
• Make sure all the other userids on your machine are password protected. Littlejohnny might be little, but he's not stupid.

Down With Global Distribution Lists!

Problem: Outlook/Exchange global distribution lists don't allow you to include members who are not Exchange users. This is very cumbersome in mixed workgroups where not all of the people are using the same email system. Hey, come on, the poor non-Exchange users deserve email, too, don't they?? Well, maybe not, but you might want to send them mail, anyhow.

Solution: Outlook/Exchange personal address books and Public Folders both allow you to add non-Exchange e-mail addresses to a distribution list. So, to solve the above issue, you can create a "Contacts Item" in the Public Folders, which are available to all your Outlook/Exchange users, and add any (non-Exchange) outsiders to a distribution list there.

Note: If you do this, anyone using this distribution list must also set the new "Contacts Item" to show as an e-mail address book, like this:

1. Right-click the new "Contacts Item" under the Public Folders.
2. Select Properties.
3. Select the Outlook Address Book tab.
4. Check the box labeled: Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book.
5. Hit Ok to save the change.

My First Survey

Problem: I really hate surveys. So, this "first" one might also be my last one. The problem is that they ask a lot of questions I don't care about, and there's always too many of them. The invitation always says something like, "Please take a few minutes to answer the following questions." Three hours later I'm asking myself, how in the hell did I get sucked into this? Or they say, "I'm trying to save the world from the scourge of acne." Well, I haven't had acne in 2 years (or so). Why would I care about that? You rarely run into a really good survey. For example, one time on Saturday Night Live, Father Guido Sarducci was doing a street survey and he was asking just one question, "If fish had ears, do you think they would be better listeners?" Now that's my kind of survey! Only, I don't recall if he ever got a good answer.
Anyhow, I guess sometimes surveys are necessary. So, if you have to do one for some reason then the question is how to do it with the least amount of grief on your part.....

Solution: Survey Monkey. Need I say more? What a great product! It practically does the whole survey for you.
I needed to learn something about the product so I could help someone at work use it. I decided to practice by doing my own survey. I found that you do need to sign up for the service, which I normally hate to do. But, I was willing to sign up because, with Survey Monkey, small surveys are free; there's no obligation. So, I signed up, logged on and followed the dialog; and in literally a few minutes I had a survey ready to be sent to my lucky respondents. If you're interested seeing how the process works, just go to SurveyMonkey.com and see for yourself.

Now, for my survey results:

1. If you've never done a survey before, what's the first thing you want to know? Is it how do we stop the next terrorist attack? Or, ...... Who will be the next American Idol? Or, ..... Will Hillary run? No. You want to know if people like you. To get the best results, you design your first question to dupe your respondents into answering the way you want. You do this by making 4 of the 5 possible answers favorable to you. (It also helps to send the questionaire to only family and close friends). Because of this, 90% of the respondents "like" me. The 1 that doesn't must have just slipped up with the mouse.
2. Then, you want to get to the real meaty questions. Like, "Is Keith Primeau faking his injury?" The answers to this one shocked and horrified me. Most of the respondents don't even know who he is!! Come on people, get into Hockey! (I guess McNabb or T.O. would make better survey material, even in the off season). Anyhow, the 2 people who know of Keith Primeau said he isn't faking.
3. Nobody wanted to buy the Taj Mahal. I guess this is no surprise since 2 of my respondents said they already own it. Come on now; there's only 1 Taj Mahal! So, .......which one of you really own it? Most of the respondents didn't want any of the things I suggested.
4. The favorite food, by far, is steak. Beer and pizza came in 2nd with equal percentages, and M&M's were a close 3rd. Since Pizza and M&M's both showed some good numbers, I'm surprised that only 1 respondent chose M&M pizza.
5. Question 5, "Are the questions on this survey fair?", was a trick question. All but 1 of my respondents thought the only answer was "Yes", so that's what they chose. I thought my questions were clearly not fair. One sly respondent simply skipped the answer rather than replying "Yes" (Bravo!).
6. Question 6 showed that only a few of people were even confused by question 5. The other 70% were almost evenly divided between not confused and don't care if it was confusing. Wow!
7. All respondents either refused to tell their age or just plain lied about it. Interesting .. :o)
8. Most of the respondents gave exact outside temperature readings, which really impressed me. I never know what the outside temperature is when I myself am inside. And then, some poor people sadly didn't understand the question; one person said, "cloudy."
9. The highest percentage of the respondents once owned "A little red wagon". Strangely enough, no one admitted to ever owning just a monkey or just a skunk. However, someone had multiple things from the list......(See below).
10. When I asked what people would do to me for making them take this survey, I got a wide variety of answers, mostly innocuous little threats. The only scary one is, "I'm going to send him my skunk with a pocket protector in a little red wagon." (See what I mean?). The only other response that's a little bit threatening is, "(I will) Try to forget he is my brother." I guess my sister thought I wouldn't be able to figure out who wrote that one (HAH!).

Anyhow, thanks for the help with my survey!!

HPBPRO.exe

Problem: A user reported serious response time problems on her machine while trying to open attachments in Outlook and while accessing various internet links within Internet Explorer. It's still not clear what was really causing the problem, but Filemon showed very heavy file activity from HPBPRO.exe. It's apparently part of the HP Toolbox product, which is non-essential to the operation of the HP printers. Lots of hits on the internet indicated that the program was causing performance problems. And, there was a lot of discussion about how to remove HPBPRO, but it was not clear which was the best way (It's not an item in Add/Remove Programs). Simply renaming the file in the Windows\System32 directory didn't completely stop related file activity. There was still an SVCHOST task trying to execute it.

Solution: I navigated to C:\Program Files\Hewlett Packard\Tools and found an Uninstall program. After I ran this, all file activity related to HPBPRO.exe stopped. All is well so far. If we have any fallout from this, I'll update the post....

Mac Server Share Points

Problem: The user reported that no one could logon to the Macintosh network from any of the workstations. After I verified that I also could not logon, I logged onto the X Server as Administrator and found that the "Users" share point was listed, however it only contained a few userids (including mine). Looking further I found that there was now a "Users1" directory which contained all the real user profiles. Apparently, the RAID device which contains all the user profiles and data for the network had dropped connectivity for some amount of time, releasing the "Users" share point (The RAID device was later found to be hung and in need of a firmware upgrade) . When a few users attempted to logon, a new "Users" share point was mounted and captured those few userids, but the system would not allow them to logon. In the mean time the RAID device reconnected and created the "Users1" share point, since "Users" was already mounted.

Solution: To work around this situtation and allow people to logon, we renamed the "Users" directory to "XUsers" and then renamed the "Users1" directory to "Users". This allowed the users to find the correct path to their user profiles. The final fix was to upgrade the firmware and restart the RAID device.

Printers That "Don't Print"

Problem: The user reported that her printer wasn't printing. The first thing I usually try is to print a test page; if it doesn't print I can usually see the print in the queue and then determine what the problem is. In this case, the print flashed through the queue and disappeared into limbo. Gone without a trace. I remembered that I had seen this problem before and spent many hours trying to resolve it by reloading drivers until I was completely frustrated. As a desperate last resort, I did the following.......

Solution: This is difficult so you might have to write it down:

1. Unplug the power cord
2. Wait about 30 seconds
3. Plug in the cord

Fooling Exchange

Problem: A user reported that each time she got a meeting invitation, Exchange was also sending the invitation to another account in the office next door (her boss). I checked all the usual settings in her Outlook configuration and could find no reason for the invitation being forwarded. All attempts to figure out what was causing this failed.

Solution: This is not a solution, but a workaround. I exported her mail to a .pst file and saved her Outlook data strored in her user profile (both the Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook and the Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook paths). I also saved her Desktop, Favorites and My Documents directories from her user profile. I then had the administrator delete her Exchange mailbox and her Windows userid. After he redefined her userid and mailbox and reset the permissions on her server directory, I had her logon to recreate her local user profile. I launched Outlook to re-establish her Outlook connection to the Exchange server and restored all her saved Outlook settings. At the end of all this she was able to get a meeting invitation without forwarding the phantom invitation to her boss.

I have no idea why this worked, but it's okay so far. I have my fingers crossed (as I often do in this business)

The New Postal Worker

Problem: If you’ve been reading my blogs, you might have noticed that I’ve been having trouble getting along with people, lately. It’s true; I admit it. And it is a problem; people are normally better to deal with than machines. I’ve always complained that my life is ruled by machines. This is what I was thinking as drove to the Post Office Saturday morning. I went very early so I wouldn’t have to deal with any people, but then I remembered my many bouts with the Post Office vending machines, which if they weren’t completely empty, were at least out of the stamps I needed.

Anyhow, my mom, bless her heart, had handed me a small package to mail. She had said 2 stamps should be enough. As I briefly hefted the package I told myself that there’s no way the USPS is going to take this anywhere for $.74. (Mom still remembers penny post cards). So, I was on my way to the Post Office scales and vending machines to overpay for another package, as always.

Solution: I walked into the Post Office and right before me stood the New Postal Worker. My first thought was, Oh, damn, here we go again. But much to my surprise and delight, here’s how the dialog went:

New Postal Worker: How may I help you? Information? Stamps? Sending a package?
me: Sending a package.
NPW: What’s the Zip Code of the address on the package?
me: 07101
NPW: Place the package on the scale to your left.
me: I did.
NPW: Your package weighs 1 lb, 4.30 oz. It will cost you $1.35 to send it to Newark, NJ by Tuesday. If this is not okay, there are other choices with different prices and delivery dates. Do you want the $1.35 option?
me: Yes.
NPW: Would you like to purchase postage for the $1.35 option?
me: No.
NPW: If your package has some postage but not enough would you like to purchase the balance?
me: Yes.
NPW: How much postage do you already have?
me: $.74.
NPW: (The display showed a 3” x5” label with postage printed on it and asked), Will this label fit on your package without covering the address and return information?
me: No.
NPW: Okay, I’ll give you a normal size stamp, okay?
me: Yes.
NPW: How would like to pay for this, Debit or Credit?
me: Credit.
NPW: Please swipe your card in the reader to your right.
me: I did. A few seconds later a self adhesive stamp for $.61 appeared from a dispenser in front of me.

As I stood dumbfounded…….

NPW: Is there anything else I can do for you today?
me: (hmmmm) ……. How much do you charge to change a light bulb?
NPW: Sorry, sir. I’m here 24 hours a day. I really don’t have time to change a light bulb.
me: Figures.

So, whatever; I don’t expect things to get any better with people, but the prospects for machines are looking up.