The Kumachan

When you go to another place or country to visit or even live for a while, the people and culture immediately begin to grow on you. Your heart begins to open regardless of the language or cultural barrier. You begin to go out and absorb as much as you can. Even though you may not always understand what people are saying, you tend to feel a comfort in the whole experience. This may go on for the duration of your time in foreign land, but then you’ll eventually have to return home.

When you’re home people get caught up in their day to day activities, but it is when that special song plays or you hear the language or that little hint that helps you remember the time you spent there. You may even begin to miss it and want to go back.

The funny thing is that no matter how passionate or how emotional you are, when you try to tell somebody about how you feel when you miss the experience you had in the strange world. They just don’t understand. Most of the time, you’ll just get a blank stare. Then when you try to explain the things you miss, the person you’re trying to make your point to usually find error or something to poke fun at. It is then you begin to feel alone for nobody else seems to understand your experience and there is nobody else you can talk to who will understand. This is the little piece of loneliness that aches inside me driving me to want to go back.

On March 5th, 2004 I decided I had been waiting around long enough to get a new computer. The predicament I kept running into though was that every time I tried customizing a computer on Dell’s website the price would jump up drastically. So I decided to call their phone support to help me with purchasing a computer.

I spoke with a polite sales representative Morgan Owens who informed me that if I ever needed to contact her again about the order I need to call 1-800-WWW-DELL, then press 1, then her number 70510. She informed that I could also contact her via e-mail at the following address: morgan_owens@dell.com I explained to her what I was trying to do and she informed me that Dell has some great deals going on and she can be the one to really help me out. So we went through the ordering process and I had a great computer picked out for only $2,400. After I hung up the phone with her I started to get ready for work as I was thinking about what I had just purchased. Then I started getting second thoughts about the computer. For some reason I just didn’t feel confident that the computer I had just purchased was the type of computer I was looking for.

So I decided to call back to cancel my order. I tried reaching Morgan, but her phone was busy so I had to wait to get another representative. Once I reached the new sales rep. I told her the situation and how I would like to cancel the order. So she walked me through the process of canceling this order, but she informed me the monitor had already been shipped. I told her that it was only 5 minutes since I had placed the order and she told me that they work real fast. This made me begin to laugh. This nice representative informed me that if I don’t want the monitor to just don’t accept it once it arrive to “return to sender” and once Dell received it back my money will be deposited into my account.

Less than a couple weeks later I had received a notification that I had a package. So I went to FedEx to tell them to return the product to the sender. FedEx assured me it would be sent back to Dell.

This is now April 24th, 2004 and I still do not have the money for this monitor back in my account. From this impression, Dell is telling me they are happy to take your money, but they don’t want to give it back. Yesterday I decided to call Dell back and try to figure out what’s going on. This new representative informed me she would have to submit some paperwork for me to get my money back and they still haven’t received the monitor. I’m getting the feeling that this monitor is sitting in Dell’s warehouse somewhere and they haven’t re-inventoried it or something, either way this is truly becoming unacceptable customer service.

I was flipping through channels the other day and realized MTV really sucks. I thought the point of MTV was to play music. Hence the Music Television name. Anyway, MTV would be better off changing their name to “stupid programming and utterly retarded game shows?”.

I base this opinion from numerous things. For example what the hell does ”Pimp my ride?” have anything to do with music? Although it sometimes is funny, what does Viva la Bam have to do with music? The list can go on and on, but the point being if you’re going to say you are for music you should at least play some.

Don’t worry though, MTV is not the only channel on TV that sucks. VH1 joins the channel ban list. They used to be an acceptable alternative to MTV, but they recently have become boring to. Although some of the programming for VH1 actually has to deal with music or artists for example “I love the 80’s”. Even though it’s not the 80’s anymore this still has some credibility for at least going over artists and songs from the 80’s.

A few channels that actually support their name are the National Geographic channel, History channel, and the Discovery channel. These channels have great programming that uphold their ideals and their name.

The point I’m trying to get at is if you’re going to call yourself something you should at least stick to it and not be a rating whore. It’s because of too many rating whores out there that make TV crappy for you and me.

I used to chat on #worldchat on efnet, but it seems the politics of who controls a room really made this room go downhill. I would basically use IRC as a reference tool and I met some real cool people on there who taught me lots of things. It’s always hard to see a change for the worse, but it’s harder when you lose contact with the people who taught you so much. I once heard a saying that later was added to words of a Megadeth song. The quote was, “Moving on is a simple thing, but what it leaves behind is hard?”. I guess that is the case here. This quote seems to apply to a lot of things in life. Sometimes it makes you take a step back and think if the decisions you make are the right ones. Anyway if anybody in which I used to chat with gets this message, don’t be shy shoot a message sometime.

Today I had something rather interesting happen to me, but don?t think it will ever happen again. Today my boss, another coworker, and I were having a discussion about smoking in public places. This conversation started because the boss recently had gotten back from a trip and he told us he had gone into a bar where there was smoking and he couldn?t stand it. Then he went on to say that smoking should be banned from every bar and restaurant establishment.

Once he said this statement I had a point I wanted to make to him about how I think that if it is well within the law I think it should be up to the establishment owner to decide if they want a smoking or no smoking establishment. Mr. Boss man blatantly interrupted me to say, ?What you?re saying is if an establishment owner owns the place he should then be allowed to have cockfights in his establishment.?ì I attempted to correct him, but he wasn?t listening he continued to interrupt me with off the way statements in which I did not say. Once he tried making a point I intentionally cut him off to see how he can handle his own medicine.

This conversation continued on for a few minutes with neither person getting their point across due to getting continuously cut off, however boss man cut me off with absurd statements. When I cut him off it?s because I tried making a valid point. I then began to realize he was not interested in the point I was trying to make, but instead more interested in getting the last word. So I began to point out his absurdness by saying that?s just asinine.

At this point is when the conversation became real interesting. Mr. Boss man now was perturbed, he now began to yell and point out the fact that I wasn?t with the company long enough, I had crossed the professional boundary, and do I know him well enough to say what he is saying is asinine. He then persisted to tell me that we should go outside to fight. About this time is when I started to laugh and I maintained a smile on my face. With every second I was still laughing he began to get more disgruntled. He for the second time challenged me to go outside. I just continued to laugh and ignored his (at this point) stupidity. He was pissed as he went out the door to go home for the day.’, ‘Now here is my stance on what happened:
The conversation was going on and everybody is entitled to the right to their own opinion. Both of us were trying to make our points. It was once he started to cut me off with his absurd statements is when the conversation started to go down hill. Then once I pointed out his stupidity this made him angry. As soon as he started to raise his voice he lost all control of the conversation. He lost control of the conversation because of the fact that if you can?t control your voice you cannot control a conversation. That is why I remained in my seat and kept my cool, while he began to yell about me not being with the company long enough nor knowing him well enough to say his statements were asinine. Once he challenged me to go outside. This is when I began to laugh because I new that if I did not begin to laugh I would have stood up and kicked the living shit out of him and I would not have been wrong for doing so. I would not have been wrong for doing so because once he challenged me to a fistfight; he was no longer a boss at that point.

Lessons learned from this encounter:
Not all good employees make good managers. From what I hear he was an excellent worker, but once he has become a manager he gets frustrated and emotional.

Not all managers make good leaders. Just because you may be able to manage some people or resources, this does not mean you are a good leader.

My level of respect has just gone down for this man because this is not the actions of a good supervisor nor is it of a good leader.

Reasons why my respect has gone down for him:
This was not the first time I saw him raise his voice and yell at an employee.
This may not have intended to be a personal conversation being held in the workplace, but it was. Once he brought work into it by trying to be a supervisor and challenging me to a fight. He crossed the personal and professional line in the workplace.
Weather he agreed with it or not he was not willing to listen to anybody else?s opinion.
Since he pointed out that I am so new I will agree 100% with him, but ever since I started working with this company he has not set the standards. So weather I was right or wrong I did not know where the boundaries were. Basically I cannot cross the boundaries if you do not set them. With every new relationship even if it personal or professional everybody always tests the boundaries so they know was is ok and not ok to do. This is just a natural way to learn the standards. Therefore I was not in the wrong for learning my new environment.
He never came back to apologize. Although he may have lost his cool all would have been disregarded as a learning experience if he had come back to apologize.

I think this is good enough I will leave it at that. I just felt this encounter should be a great learning experience for all. Tomorrow is another day!

A few weeks ago I had gotten home from work and realized I needed to wash laundry. Since I was washing laundry anyway I decided to wash the shorts I was wearing. So I loaded the washing machine and started the load of laundry. While I was waiting for the laundry to get done I had to make a phone call. After searching all over for about 15 minutes I couldn’t remember where I had my phone last. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, in some attempt that I may rescue the phone I ran to the washing machine and looked inside. There it was. I managed to wash my cell phone. After contemplating the cell phone may not be a complete loss I tried disassembling it and leaving it out to dry.
The next morning I put the phone together to see if it would work. Needless to say it didn’t. I took the phone to the nearest T-mobile store to see what options I had. The clerk told me to leave it out to dry. I told him I did and it still doesn’t work. Then he advised me I need to buy another. After looking around the store I decided to go with the cheapest phone they had the Samsung X105 model. After having this phone for a few weeks I realized why it was the cheapest they had. This phone sucks! I tried adjusting the settings and it doesn’t keep the settings. I’ll be in the middle of a phone call and the phone will disconnect for no reason. I try turning off the password for my voice mail then the phone puts it right back on. I’ve tried everything with stupid phone. This phone does have one feature that works, the alarm works great. Basically this is a high priced alarm clock. The next thing I’m going to do with it is take it back. Maybe it’s just my experience, but I recommend staying away from this phone.

I recently was looking online for a movie I hadn’t seen for about 12 years, ?If looks could kill?”. While searching around on the internet I wasn’t having much luck. Then I decided to check on eBay. There it was, I managed to find the DVD and starwars9111 was the user selling it. So I decided to check out the description to make sure it wasn’t a scam. The description showed the following, as excact:

Region Code: –
Genre: Comedy
Sub-Genre: Action
Display Format: Full Screen
Condition: Used

THIS AUCTION IS FOR THE DVD OF IF LOOKS COULD KILL STARING RICHARD GRIECO. THIS IS A DVD, NOT VCD. COMES WITH CASE, COVER AND ART ON DISC. ALL MY DVD”S ARE NTSC REGION 0. THEY WILL PLAY IN 95% OF ALL U.S. AND CANADIAN DVD PLAYERS. ALL DVD”S HAVE MENUS AND CHAPTER SEARCH. WINNER TO PAY $5 FOR S/H IN THE U.S. AND $7 WORLDWIDE. WILL ONLY ACCEPT U.S. MONEY ORDERS, CASH OR ONLINE CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS ONLINE THROUGH BIDPAY.COM – NO PAYPAL. RETURN POLICY – EXCHANGE ONLY, NO REFUNDS. PAYMENT MUST BE RECIVED IN 7 DAYS OR NEGATIVE FEEDBACK WILL BE LEFT FOR BUYER. THANKS FOR LOOKING AND PLEASE CHECK OUT THE OTHER DVD”S I HAVE UP FOR AUCTION. EMAIL ME IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS.

Since this user does not accept Paypal payments I mailed off a money order. After 3 weeks I still had not received the DVD so I shot the user a message, then low and behold the next day the DVD arrived. Once I received the DVD I opened the package to find out this DVD was a pirated copy. It was not used as said in the description. The quality of this pirated DVD was worse than VCD quality.

Since this was my first bad experience I decided to post it as a warning to all other eBay users. I strongly recommend to never do business with this person and to report them for pirating DVD’s for profit. Stay away from the following person:

eBay username: starwars9111
Name as listed on package: A. Andrews
Address as listed on package: 1101 E Tropicana Street Las Vegas, Nevada 89119

Last night I was bored so I decided to walk over to a friend’s house nearby. While there some other people showed up. Then they start prank calling people who they had in their cell phone address book. I felt like I was back in middle school again so I decided to go back home and take my dog for a walk.

After I had finished the walk I decided to call them up and let them know that if they were going out to give me a call. They said they were going to just hand out at home and for me to come back over. So I decided it was much better to hang out with them than it was to stay at home. While over there people had been drinking for a while and I was behind the power curve so I decided I did not want to drink.

We played a game of euchre and then moved onto spades. During the game of spades this one punk was making up rules as he went along. This proved to me that he had no idea how to play spades, but because nobody wanted to argue we all decided to go along with him. While we were playing spades the husband and wife of that address decided they were going to get into a fight. Imagine this 4 players sitting around playing spades outside your door and you decide to go inside and have a fight where everybody can hear. It was kind of an embarrassing situation for everybody.

After the game of spades was over the drunk spade player who kept changing the rules decided we should go to a party. Since I was the only sober one of the group I volunteered to drive. After driving around for 45 minutes we finally found this party and went inside. There were some hot chicks there, but soon after we arrived the police also decided to show up. We hung out at this party for a while then the cops decided to show up again and the person who was throwing this party had to break it up.

After that I ended up just taking everybody home. The point being that no matter how bad a night is or how juvenile people act, it sure beats sitting at home alone.