I wish people would just let me work

We offer a warranty on our locks. I'm not even going to get into the ways people abuse it, I'm mostly annoyed today with how people behave when they send something in for repair.

First they'll say something dumb, like "I need a new lock". Then I'll have to go through the whole dance with them, finding out that there is nothing wrong with the lock, it just needs the frizzen hardened. This uses up a lot of time as we have to go back and forth via email over it.

Eventually, they send the lock in...and tell me they sent it. Then the next phase starts where they write to me repeatedly asking "Did you get it yet? I see from the tracking number it was delivered yesterday, but I didn't hear anything yet".

Then it starts..."I sent it in on Friday but didn't hear anything yet".

I spend more than half of my day dealing with stupid emails like that. If people would just be grownups about it and let us do our jobs without feeling compelled to "check on" their locks, we could get them fixed and out the door a whole lot faster.

YOUR LOCK DOESN'T MISS YOU! You don't need to check in with it every day.

Please, just let us do our job.

Good bye old computer, hello Win8.1

It is time to say goodbye to an old friend, my 10 year old Compaq with Windows XP. It served me well and is still limping along, but it struggles to keep up with modern programs and downloads. It had reached a point where it could no longer play music or videos.

Sad, really, like watching your dog get old.

So now I went and bought myself a brand-spanking-new HP Envy with Win8.1 It'll take me some time to get used to it.

A further problem is that there is no telling which, if any, of my favorite programs will run on Win8.1.

On the bright side, it is a fresh start and the new machine is sooooo much faster than my old one. They are technologically worlds apart. Of course, I already had to go back to the computer store because the adapter that allows me to use my existing monitor was defective.

Setting up a new machine is a pause in the action that give me a chance to look over the previous era to see what happened, much like doing your taxes gives you a chance to look at a business's number for the year and to see how much money you spent on Chinese food.

For instance, since December of 2004 when my old machine went online, I have received 3732 Nigeria scam emails. I know this because they amuse me and I stuck them in an email folder. Without doing too much math, that is an average of more than one per day.

Now I'll delete that folder and start over to see how many the Win8.1 era brings. Let's hope the new Win8.1 machine lasts me as long as my XP machine did!