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September 21, 2004

Kansas City... GO CHIEFS!

School starts tomorrow. Yet another fun quarter of random classes and probably tons of other stuff I just won't have time to get all done. This past weekend was a nice change to things though. I helped J.J. move to Kansas City where he got a job with Cerner.
Overall it wasn't much different than Columbus except the people go 20 miles over the limit rather than 10. Also I think the highways were an afterthought, since most of the entrance and exit ramps gave you a very sharp ~20mph turn right by the highway and then about 200 feet to accelerate to 60 or so to enter the highway without cutting someone off. Crazy stuff.
We also rented a U-Haul while we were there, and that was quite an experience in itself. When we got to the rental place this middle aged woman asked us if anyone was local, and of course since we just got there they day before that wasn't going to happen. Then she was asking for 2 forms of ID and the name of someone local that she could also get in contact with. Now let's say you just moved into a town. Are you really going to know that many people and have their information on you, let alone have a local phone number to get in touch with you or anything like that? Probably not. Luckily J.J. had his recruiter's business card with him with all the info she needed to "verify" we weren't terrorists or something.
Then she showed us this sheet that described all the different types of damage that could be done to the vehicle and the cost of repairing each one. Well this wouldn't be really important except for the fact that when we got our vehicle and looked around it apparently all the different types of damage had already been done to it! Everything from a big dent in the hood to long scrapes along the side. At least the tires weren't flat and it turned on.
The frame was an old Ford F350 diesel truck. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think the transmission on this thing was on its last leg. To get it to shift from 1st to 2nd you had to rev the engine up nice and high, let off the gas, listen for it to shift to 2nd, then apply the gas again. Otherwise it would just rev up and stay in 1st gear. Then I think it never got past 2nd or 3rd gear on the highway since the engine was really revved up just to go 55 or 60. It did have a tachometer, but of course it didn't work so I don't really know how high I was revving the engine. So I just went by the engine temp gauge which I hoped work since nothing much else did in this truck. Other things wrong included: missing half of seat belt for the middle seat passenger, radio display broke, left speaker broke, half the hinges missing screws on back door, mirrors that wouldn't adjust (bolts too tight), really soft brakes, and no log of vehicle maintenance where it was supposed to be.
I had the fun job of driving this thing around and probably cutting off a ton of people (add the shifting problem with the horribly designed highways), but at least we didn't put any more dents in the darn thing (even if we did they'd probably be undetectable).
Then we attempted to order pizza one evening. First place gave us a wait time of 2 hours for delivery. 2 hours?!?!?! Apparently they are slow to make pizza around this town. Then we called another which gave us a 1 1/2 hour wait, so we decided to order and pick it up. Not quite as bad, maybe 40 minutes.
So J.J. and his mom went out to pick it up, since according to the map it looked like it was just around the corner. An hour goes by... 1 1/2 hours... OK what's going on? Finally they show back up a frozen pizza from the grocery store rather than hot Papa John's. Apparently this town has multiple streets with very similar names, and they don't always connect. The rule is, if you add N or NE or NW or whatever to the street name it becomes a completely new street in a different part of down. So our pizza place just around the corner was actually all the way downtown. So much for that!
When the cable guy showed up to install things at one point he asked if J.J. and his mom were Chinese (which they are). Then he went on to mention that two people from China are contstantly trying to hack into his computer as if J.J. were actually the one to be doing so. Then later he was making some sort of attempt to it on J.J.'s mom. He was a little unusual. I told J.J. the code word was "Go Chiefs" since that was plastered all over the place, particularly at the grocery store where milk was $3.05 per gallon.
But there are some good things that go along with the unusual ones. There was a pool and hot tub basically just behind J.J.'s place, which came in real handy one night. Their downtown seems rather nice and the historic market area was kind of neat to see. There are farms just outside of town, much like Columbus, and most people seemed friendly besides their uber-agressive driving. Overall it was a nice place, and I think I could handle living there if I ever had to.
At the airport on the way back home of course I got randomly selected to be poked and prodded with the handheld metal detector (even though I purposely had nearly no metal on me, not even a key ring). This guy even scanned all the way around my feet. He didn't say anything but I was wondering if it would detect the metal pins in my left foot. I'm not sure how someone would really store something large enough to do much damage between their sock and foot anyways. Then he went all through my backpack which basically had my clothes and a few accessories for my computer and cellphone. But he never asked me to open my briefcase which actually had my laptop and other electronics in it. Oh well whatever. So I survived that one and enjoyed the two plane trips back, both around an hour long.
Now I'm back here in the office waiting for Winnie to get back. Apparently I can't pick up my football tickets because I have a balance on my account, and I have a balance on my account because my fee authorization hasn't gone through to pay for all that junk. So now that I'm back up to the present time I'll go check on that and write more later. Ok peaceout.

Posted by Plocmstart at September 21, 2004 1:21 PM

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