cellio | short takes

I was pleasantly surprised to get my fish for free tonight at Giant Eagle. They have a policy that the first improperly-scanned item is free, but I did not experience a scanner error. I experienced an error in programming the register that generated the label for the fish. (That'll teach me not to look at the package they hand me before putting it in the cart, I guess.) That apparently counted. I wasn't trying to get groceries for free; I just wanted to not be charged double the posted price. But I'll take it. :-)

Dani's sister and her husband visited last night on their way from DC to Toronto. The husband is an extraordinarily picky customer; had I remembered this, I would not have suggested a restaurant that we'd like to be able to return to. :-) But it all worked out and the waitress we had was amazingly good (and flexible). I presume they got off ok this morning, as we did not receive distressed calls at work asking for clarification on the directions out of the city. (On the way in they set aside our directions for something they thought would work better; it set them back about an hour.) So either they got off ok or they were too embarrassed to ask for help.

I was reminded tonight that a lot of conversation works only because of shared references. My friend Yaakov was explaining this to me once in the context of allusions to Saturday-morning cartoons: since he has been an Orthodox Jew all his life, he has never seen Saturday-morning cartoons. He just doesn't have that shared experience. Similarly, those who are geeky about computers, or D&D, or science, or whatever can make cracks that only similar geeks will understand. This came to mind tonight when Dani made a very funny, very obscure comment that only music-history geeks will get, and I realized that we do this sort of thing much more often than we might think.

(Ok, I'll try to explain it. He was talking about some goofy-sounding accounting principles (that is, I say they're goofy and he says they're not), and I made a comment about red ink. He said that writing a number in red signifies that it has two-thirds the stated value, kind of like Canadian money. Certain medieval music was written in both black and red notes, where the color of the note alters its value. Black notes are bigger.)

I returned to work yesterday to find that the HR folks wanted to move me and my office-mate to a different office. (They have a new hire they really want to put in our space. And after we finally got the white-noise generator! Well, I guess he'll need it...) So they moved people out of a different office (I require a cave) and moved us into it today. I think both of the people who got bumped got worse space than what they got kicked out of; I hope they don't hold it against us. We didn't initiate this, after all, but we're now in better space than we were.