March 15, 2001
ell,
it finally happened. Last Friday, I wrote a letter of complaint
to the management company of this apartment complex, detailing
the number and dates of my attempts to get the HVAC (high voltage
air conditioning) unit repaired/replaced in my unit. It's been
a struggle that has been ongoing since December 8, when I initially
reported it. And yesterday, the manager of the complex finally
called me, and indicated that "the unit had come in today"
and that they would replace it, with my permission to enter the
apartment, that morning. It took about 10 minutes of discussion
with her to get her to finally offer an apology for the length
of time it took to resolve this... she wanted just to continue
to tell me it was the manufacturers fault, not their. It certainly
may be, I wasn't willing to argue that. What I was looking for
in that conversation was an understanding of my plight (there
have been mornings where my apartment was in the high 40s, low
50s) and some apology not for any error, but just for how long
it took to resolve. Those of you with an ounce of customer service
experience know that there isn't any reason not to apologize
for that, which doesn't implicate you in anything else, it just
shows sympathy for the customer's feelings.
Bah, enough ranting about that! I noticed about 3 minutes after I posted yesterday that Dave had already posted the same information about Fluxx... wise man that he is. And yes, I'm all for doing a Fluxx online...if you do it for PC in addition to Mac. I don't have my Mac set up here, and am strongly thinking about shipping it to my sister, so if we're going to play online, your wife and I will need a PC version too. I'm curious if it would be harder to code, though, with its constantly changing victory conditions.
The emotions that Suz is feeling is echoing in my own soul right now. I guess my understanding of her feelings is raising the same feelings within me. I still miss all the good folks in Mooville, from the programmers, Andy, Bryan, Greg, Johnny, Jim, to the Billing folks, Beth, Bryan, Chris, Joe, Mike, to the OSGMs Dave, Jeff, Mike, Steph to the PMs, Bubba and Melissa, to Tamma, our office guru, to Eric and Suz, producers for "other stuff". What a great bunch of people. I miss having you all in my immediate life. All I have right now is John.... and that's not quite the same thing as all of you :) {Yea, I can hear Melissa arguing with me on that now :)}
But in truth, leaving Mooville was also an extraordinarily hard thing for me to do, just as Suz is finding out for herself. The wonderful thing is that in this day and age, it no longer is necessary to lose touch with them all... they can remain cherished friends. I truly miss the days of sitting in the conference room every night with various people dropping by depending on their schedules, and playing Settlers, or Scrabble, or whatever new game had come in that week (and yes.... I miss Nora something fierce too.) Those were indeed "golden days", to be held in cherished memory.
The next effort is to make more of those types of memories. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll have the chance to do so at the Con.... as my work schedule is a little crazy right at that time. We've already been asked to put in extra hours, and that is including weekends. So, we'll have to see.... and it would probably be better to come out when there aren't 500 other people vying for the attention of those I cherish.