Air Travel and Punctuation

X-mas will soon be upon us and Kat and I are looking forward to visiting Canada. We've booked two weeks worth of time, which should be enough for visiting everyone and having enough 'down time' that it doesn't feel like constant running around.

I'm looking forward to being in Canada, but not looking forward to getting there. Air travel has become annoying, insulting and uncomfortable. I spent a good hour during Thanksgiving trying to understand why just about every American I talk to has no problem being treated like a criminal for attempting to get on a plane. Nude scans and intimate pat downs get a collective shrug from everybody. This is a country where the license plate in New Hampshire state have "Live Free or Die" as a motto. I'm starting to think they should be "Embrace Fear". Rather than bore people with my dislike of the new security rules I'm working on condensing it all down to a couple of bullet points so I can sum things up in 30 seconds or less. That way I waste less time ;)

Now I'm getting old I can fondly recall the day when air travel was considered classy and you used to get free wing badges, tours of the cockpit and free playing cards. Now children get intimate pat-downs from the TSA.

Kathleen's documentation for her massage certification finally arrived, yay! She took the documentation in to her workplace only to be told that she had been transferred to another location. Happily it is closer to home and has more athletic clientele. On her first six hour shift she did four massages and is back at work again today, probably going to do four more. She took a epsom salt bath last night to deal with the sore muscles. Sore muscles aside she really enjoyed the first day at work. Making people feel better, and getting paid for it, is a great way to spend the day.

During a particular stressful period at work last week (on a conference call trouble shooting one thing while carrying on two IM conversations dealing with other issues) I received an email from a co-worker with some serious punctuation abuse. I've learned to understand (not accept) that people under a certain age feel the need for punctuation, grammar and spelling in communication are far less important than brevity and the urge to follow memes. I figured work emails should be a bastion of normality. The offending email carried a question as to when we thought an application would be ready, the sentence was followed by not two, not three, but four question marks. As I stewed in righteous indignation trying to think of a properly business-like but snarky comment I was distracted by yet another IM, which was good.

When I finally got back to responding to the email I realized that we've moved in to an era of grammatical anarchy. Grammar, like the Catholic church, should change with the times. The Catholic church has decided that condoms have their value so why can't I roll with the times and accept free flowing punctuation? So here are some rules I came up with in regards to question marks:

• One question mark: interrogative.
• Two question marks: surprised interrogative.
• Three question marks: jaw dropping, OMG surprised interrogative.
• Four question marks: heart-stopping, panicked, shocked interrogative, as in "Is that Jesus stealing my car????"

Work based emails do not require quad question marks. Ever. Okay, if the CEO of your company decides that being payed 107 times the average worker is acceptable and was going to decrease his pay to that amount *then* you can use four question marks. For your information 107 times an average worker is what CEOs made back in 1990, now it is way higher.

I went to the REI 'returned and already opened' sale this morning. I told myself it was to look for good deals on X-mas gifts, but really it was just to see what fun stuff I could buy myself. The REI staff had tags on all the goods with the reasons why they were returned, it made for very amusing reading. Some of my favourites:
- Didn't like the way it was damaged after I fell.
- After only months of use it started pilling.
- Wore where seatbelt rubbed against it.
I wandered around amused at how petty people were, chuckling at the returned items. I then wandered over to the electronic area looking at high definition recorders (sporadically stops recording), GPS watches (didn't give good location information) and waterproof watches (the band was frayed). I figured I could get a good deal, REI was a respectable place and people were overly fussy. I noticed a GPS on sale (turns off randomly, hangs, battery life very bad) that had 'works fine' written on the tag. I recognized the GPS as the one I had returned months ago. All of a sudden all those petty return comments seemed not so funny. I didn't buy anything.