The rollout of the new mail server didn't go exactly as well as I had hoped, but I learned a bunch of new things about good mail delivery today.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish my users would complain more so I knew what the fuck was happening on their desktops. I just don't grok the interface that most of my users are seeing my e-mail system through. Just that they are silly morons to be using an interface that takes the system message "User unknown: joe@foo.bar" and converts it into "No transport provider was available for delivery to this recipient." Not just for Joe. That would be too informative. No, no transport is available for any recipient of the e-mail. Sometimes hundreds of not-Joes with perfectly valid, deliverable addresses.

It boggles my mind that this is the industry standard.

On a similar note, I've decided that I really need to stop hitting my head on things. The latest round of impacts have been largely inadvertent, a side effect of my half-second attention span. I’m pretty sure I’ve impaled myself on the corner of the kitchen shelves, and knocked a nice lateral axis into the top of my skull on the overhang at the bottom of the basement stairs. I can accept all this because the function of moving my body from place to place is largely governed by the vector between me and shiniest nearby object. Over 23 years I’ve come to accept this gracefully.

What has started to bother me, though, is my inability to remember the approximate time of the injury. They’re no less pronounced than they used to be, yet somehow I’m able to instantly forget these apparently substantial impacts and go on with my life without noting where or when I am.

I’m afraid I may be launching myself into a vicious circle where the pain of the injury and the situation leading up to it are jarred loose from my memory and into oblivion by the impact. Lacking any negative Pavlovian conditioning over time, my body will continue to mercilessly launch my skull towards hard and pointy objects and render my brain into a soft, mushy pudding.

Then reduced to a sorry, drooling vegetable, I may be forced to seek demeaning employment as a Windows Systems Administrator.

December 8, 2002 - December 10, 2002

No Comments | #2020

Unless noted, all content on epistolary.org is © Copyright 1999-2008 to Rob Carlson with all rights reserved. All information is verified when possible, cited as appropriate and applied in the real world at your own risk. Send all feedback to rob@vees.net.