So, yesterday, I got a call from the insurance company that screwed me over. It went something like this:
Them: Can you send us some paperwork?
Me: Uhhh....no?
Them: Oh...why not?
Me: I don't live in Iowa anymore. (Inside my head: And I hate you.)
Them: Oh, just send us one from that state.
Me: O....kay.
Them: KTHXBYE
So I got the e-mail with their fax number today, and this is what I sent back.
--
Dear Kyle,
After careful review of your claim request for a "Salvage title", we have chosen to deny your claim.
Our claim adjusters have carefully reviewed your case. In this instance, although your policy clearly covers "Getting paperwork", our adjusters have decided that your policy doesn't really matter, in the interests of saving me money, time, and a personal vendetta against the evil corporate empire that you as a minion represent. We can only fulfill your request for paperwork if you:
1) Send me a check for $6,000, which was (about) the total about it cost me to fix my car.
2) Apologize for wasting my time with a handwritten letter from your CEO.
Until one of these two conditions are met, we cannot comply with your request.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask anybody besides me. (Your Magic 8 Ball, your pasty, uninteresting co-workers, your misanthropic cur of a boss, etc.)
Have a nice day. (Are you on crack?)
--
We'll see how this goes.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Mark Said I Should Do This
First, I deleted this file from my computer, but not before posting it's contents here. I actually bothered to create this. Sad, really.
Overused trip phrases:
"Somebody loves you." (Whenever somebody's cell phone would ring.)
"That's going in the blog." (Whenever something witty was said, and none of these witty things actually made it into any blog.)
"I suppose." (Whenever)
AND THE NUMBER ONE COMPLETELY OVERUSED PHRASE ON THIS TRIP:
"Somethin' like that."
Anyways, I went to Denver, got the VUE, and drove back. Now it looks like this. That's not me in that picture, by the way. I was too lazy to go take a picture of the car, but rest assured that is what the car looks like now.
Exit, stage left. Finally.
Sparks
Overused trip phrases:
"Somebody loves you." (Whenever somebody's cell phone would ring.)
"That's going in the blog." (Whenever something witty was said, and none of these witty things actually made it into any blog.)
"I suppose." (Whenever)
AND THE NUMBER ONE COMPLETELY OVERUSED PHRASE ON THIS TRIP:
"Somethin' like that."
Anyways, I went to Denver, got the VUE, and drove back. Now it looks like this. That's not me in that picture, by the way. I was too lazy to go take a picture of the car, but rest assured that is what the car looks like now.
Exit, stage left. Finally.
Sparks
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
66 Through Panoramic Vision
If you'd like to see bits of Route 66 in ultra-wide goodness, check out our Panoramas.
Sadly, flickr thinks it fun to limit photos by width, so they're all really tiny, due to being super-wide. Get with the panoramic craze, flickr!
Anyway, larger versions will be available later, once I spend more time on them to get out the remaining artifacts (some of these take my computer several hours to figure out, so don't expect anything too quickly). In the mean time, you can get a teaser of an in-progress St. Louis Arch.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Yeah, We're Still Alive
Also, allow me to take this opportunity for a shameless plug.
I'm an awesome lighting designer and front of house guy. If you're a tour manager, please hire me!
That completed, perhaps an actual update is in order.
We made it home in one piece, which is more than I can say for my car. The VUE was totaled, and is still in Vail, Colorado getting repaired. The people at the insurance company (Progressive) are still being huge jerks - not only did they undervalue the vehicle, but for some stupid reason that is completely beyond me, they keep trying to pay off my loan with the money that I'm going to get back from them - which would completely decimate my finances. Even after I told the agent assigned to me multiple times that paying off my loan all in one go was not what I wanted to do, I heard from my credit union that she tried to go ahead and do that anyways. Grr.
It was with great pleasure that I canceled my policy with them the other day.
Anyways, after spending the night in an absolutely decrepit hotel with no bathroom door in our room, we took a Greyhound bus back to Des Moines, Iowa.
Let me tell you about the kinds of people who ride Greyhound buses.
These people are all nut jobs. Every single one of 'em. There was the ex-con sitting across from me who complained loudly about how the bus driver was being a "bitch". There was the tall, bearded, black hippie who graphically described how to please women, and then proceeded to stand in the back of the bus (Right next to me, of course.) and give the entire section his rendition of what a Godly union between a man and a wife was - and he spoke far, far into the night. About halfway into the trip, he realized that he had lost his radio that he had bought earlier that day, and asked the entire bus to look for it. "But if any ya'll take it, just know that Jesus is watching you, and ye will be judged on that day! Ya'll know we need to be kind to our brothers, ya'll hear?". There was the guy traveling with his two young daughters who pulled out a laptop and proceeded to watch violent action movies. And let us not forget the charming fellow who assaulted the first bus driver because we were half and hour late getting to our destination. (In one small act of justice, the universe saw fit that this recalcitrant young hoodlum be hauled away by two massive security guards for his misdeeds. I hope they beat him severely for attacking that old guy.) Not that he didn't have reason to complain, mind you. The first bus driver, while a kindly older gentleman, didn't have any business driving a bus. He wasn't comfortable driving a manual transmission, and due to the fact that he had broken the emergency hatch in the top of the bus earlier, we had to deal with pouring rain throughout half of the passenger compartment for three-quarters of the trip. (Another passenger and myself eventually just took matters into our own hands, and used my pocketknives to cut ropes off of the luggage holding racks to tie the door down.)
And then there was the seats. We might as well have been sitting on milk crates. In fact, they might have been an improvement Though once your butt goes numb, it becomes easier to bear.
Anyways, needless to say, we're glad to be home. And if I hear one more person tell me "You'll look back on this in a few years and laugh!" they will have earned themselves a swift kick administered somewhere soft.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
I'm an awesome lighting designer and front of house guy. If you're a tour manager, please hire me!
That completed, perhaps an actual update is in order.
We made it home in one piece, which is more than I can say for my car. The VUE was totaled, and is still in Vail, Colorado getting repaired. The people at the insurance company (Progressive) are still being huge jerks - not only did they undervalue the vehicle, but for some stupid reason that is completely beyond me, they keep trying to pay off my loan with the money that I'm going to get back from them - which would completely decimate my finances. Even after I told the agent assigned to me multiple times that paying off my loan all in one go was not what I wanted to do, I heard from my credit union that she tried to go ahead and do that anyways. Grr.
It was with great pleasure that I canceled my policy with them the other day.
Anyways, after spending the night in an absolutely decrepit hotel with no bathroom door in our room, we took a Greyhound bus back to Des Moines, Iowa.
Let me tell you about the kinds of people who ride Greyhound buses.
These people are all nut jobs. Every single one of 'em. There was the ex-con sitting across from me who complained loudly about how the bus driver was being a "bitch". There was the tall, bearded, black hippie who graphically described how to please women, and then proceeded to stand in the back of the bus (Right next to me, of course.) and give the entire section his rendition of what a Godly union between a man and a wife was - and he spoke far, far into the night. About halfway into the trip, he realized that he had lost his radio that he had bought earlier that day, and asked the entire bus to look for it. "But if any ya'll take it, just know that Jesus is watching you, and ye will be judged on that day! Ya'll know we need to be kind to our brothers, ya'll hear?". There was the guy traveling with his two young daughters who pulled out a laptop and proceeded to watch violent action movies. And let us not forget the charming fellow who assaulted the first bus driver because we were half and hour late getting to our destination. (In one small act of justice, the universe saw fit that this recalcitrant young hoodlum be hauled away by two massive security guards for his misdeeds. I hope they beat him severely for attacking that old guy.) Not that he didn't have reason to complain, mind you. The first bus driver, while a kindly older gentleman, didn't have any business driving a bus. He wasn't comfortable driving a manual transmission, and due to the fact that he had broken the emergency hatch in the top of the bus earlier, we had to deal with pouring rain throughout half of the passenger compartment for three-quarters of the trip. (Another passenger and myself eventually just took matters into our own hands, and used my pocketknives to cut ropes off of the luggage holding racks to tie the door down.)
And then there was the seats. We might as well have been sitting on milk crates. In fact, they might have been an improvement Though once your butt goes numb, it becomes easier to bear.
Anyways, needless to say, we're glad to be home. And if I hear one more person tell me "You'll look back on this in a few years and laugh!" they will have earned themselves a swift kick administered somewhere soft.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
VERY VERY VERY UNHAPPY
So, we (Meaning "I") hit a deer.
What kind of animal sees a bunch of fast-moving objects and thinks "Hey, I should run towards that!"? What a blatheringly stupid animal they must be.
Anyways, the dang thing pretty much totaled the front end of my car - crushed the radiator and smashed everything else all to heck. MJ's dad let us use his AAA to get towed, and I'll have to talk to the insurance agent tomorrow to see about repairs and getting back to Des Moines.
And we're stuck in a stupid tourist mountain town. Our hotel room was $124, and it's the only hotel that was open in town when we got here. And that's cheap around here.
At least the room is nice.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
What kind of animal sees a bunch of fast-moving objects and thinks "Hey, I should run towards that!"? What a blatheringly stupid animal they must be.
Anyways, the dang thing pretty much totaled the front end of my car - crushed the radiator and smashed everything else all to heck. MJ's dad let us use his AAA to get towed, and I'll have to talk to the insurance agent tomorrow to see about repairs and getting back to Des Moines.
And we're stuck in a stupid tourist mountain town. Our hotel room was $124, and it's the only hotel that was open in town when we got here. And that's cheap around here.
At least the room is nice.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
Road Trip IV: The Voyage Home
Where, hopefully, we will not be picking up any whales.
Road trips can be a lot of fun, though as Pixel's dad mentioned in the previous entry, spending so much time with one person and you start to see all their little quirks, oddities, absurdities, and basically all the stuff that just plain ticks you off.
First, I would like to state for the record that what normal humans refer to as a "comfortable listening level", Pixel finds "deafeningly loud". Seriously. He listens to the TV on "soft mute", and claims that it's too loud. He would be annoyed by an ant walking across the carpet from 40 feet away.
In addition, he hates bass. And not just bone-rattling concert-level bass. He claims that any sound below about 400hz is "painful". So, listening to Dave Matthews at a comfortable listening level to me (A level where you can use a normal speaking volume and be heard just fine.) makes him complain constantly.
That said, we're both looking forward to going home. I have a great deal of work to do when I get back - preparing to move to Nashville, packing all my stuff, etc. We're both seeing why the interstate system was built to replace roads like Route 66 - as charming as Radiator Springs might be, after you've gone through ten towns that looked exactly like the last ten towns, you start to wonder why you need to slow down at all. The interstates solve this nicely.
Anyways, we're headed home. Godspeed to us both.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
Road trips can be a lot of fun, though as Pixel's dad mentioned in the previous entry, spending so much time with one person and you start to see all their little quirks, oddities, absurdities, and basically all the stuff that just plain ticks you off.
First, I would like to state for the record that what normal humans refer to as a "comfortable listening level", Pixel finds "deafeningly loud". Seriously. He listens to the TV on "soft mute", and claims that it's too loud. He would be annoyed by an ant walking across the carpet from 40 feet away.
In addition, he hates bass. And not just bone-rattling concert-level bass. He claims that any sound below about 400hz is "painful". So, listening to Dave Matthews at a comfortable listening level to me (A level where you can use a normal speaking volume and be heard just fine.) makes him complain constantly.
That said, we're both looking forward to going home. I have a great deal of work to do when I get back - preparing to move to Nashville, packing all my stuff, etc. We're both seeing why the interstate system was built to replace roads like Route 66 - as charming as Radiator Springs might be, after you've gone through ten towns that looked exactly like the last ten towns, you start to wonder why you need to slow down at all. The interstates solve this nicely.
Anyways, we're headed home. Godspeed to us both.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Route 66 in Retrospect
Road trips, like any long stretch of time with someone, strain relationships, test friendships, and generally reveal all manner of things about a person you are sure to find annoying. I knew going into this trip Sparky wasn't the sort of person I really wanted to be around for long stretches of time, but fortunately our combined enthusiasm for the trip made it fairly easy to get along. Now that we're sick of being on the road, we're starting to get on each other's nerves. A little. I prefer no music or quiet music to Sparky's uncomfortably loud music, he has a list of grievances against me.
But the trip itself was fun. Our enthusiasm waned around the time we started hitting desert, so we missed anything along Route 66 which might have been interesting in Arizona and California, but perhaps another time with another friend--Sparky is not terribly fond of the mountains, and it'll likely be a while before we really want to spend all that much time together again. Certainly there are plenty of things not on Route 66 we won't be seeing which I eventually would like to see: the various Canyons, snow-capped Rocky Mountains, Catalina, and so forth, but you gotta save something for the next trip.
With that said, traveling along a road such as Route 66 you begin to understand just why the modern interstate system was created. Those old roads were so much driving, you get sick of it after a while. And then, when you finally hit LA, you get stuck in traffic. Good times, if you like watching Sparky doing a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde impersonation.
The trip is over, we're winding down, and heading home; if we've gained anything, it's a newfound appreciation for our own state. Corn, soybeans, and absurdly polluted water that it is.
The thing I miss most about home, and the thing I most look forward to once I get back, is cooking my own food. I was quite sick of cooking when I left, but now I think it might just be the most wonderful thing in the world. Blueberry muffins, spaghetti, pancakes that don't suck--mmmmmm.
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