4/24/01

My orals are still a month away (actually they're exactly one month from today) and I think about them all the time. I usually have a few happy seconds when I first wake up in the morning before I remember that I'm supposed to be stressing about my orals, but that's about the only conscious time I have when I'm not thinking about my proposal or what my committee might ask me. Even running, which was supposed to be my big distraction, isn't quite panning out that way. All that time by myself out on the road gives me lots of time to think...and it's hard to think about anything else these days.

Right now, I'm watching PBS's show on GM food, "Harvest of Fear". It seems pretty good so far, although obviously it's a bit simplistic since it's only a 2-hour program. And who knew that Monsanto's COO is a bald guy with a Scottish accent named Hugh Grant?

This past Saturday, I found a strongly-worded note slipped under my door saying that my rent for this month hadn't been received, and that I now owed not just one month's rent, but also a $30 late fee plus an additional $2 per day for every day since April 15. This was rather disturbing to me as I had paid my rent on the day it was due. Ordinarily, I might wonder if I'd spaced out and forgotten to put the check in my landlord's mailbox, but this time, not only did I know I'd written the check (because I had a carbon copy of it), but I distinctly remembered putting it in my landlord's mailbox, because I did it when my sister was with me right after she arrived here from New York.

This had happened before back in December 1999. On that occasion, I'd called my bank, they told me the check had already gone through, so I called my landlord and asked him to recheck his records. Sure enough, his records were just screwed up. So, this time around, I figured the same thing had happened. So, I called the bank. But this check hadn't gone through. I called the landlord and left a message asking him to recheck his records.

By the next day, I hadn't heard back from him. So, I followed up my phone message with a note, figuring that if this whole thing became really problematic, I'd be better off leaving some sort of paper trail. Later that evening, he finally got back to me and left a message on my answering machine saying that he'd never received the check. Clearly, either someone had stolen it out of his mailbox, or else he'd just lost it. The latter seemed more likely to me, because his recordkeeping didn't have the best track record, and if someone had stolen the check, they probably would have cashed it already.

After consulting a few friends and family members (none of whom, unfortunately, are lawyers) I decided to put a stop on the check and just write another one for the amount of rent usually due and just not pay the late fee, because I knew I had paid on time, and I had some evidence to back me up. I really wanted to deduct the $18 it had cost me to stop payment on the first check, but ultimately decided not to push my luck. I did, however, write my landlord a nasty note suggesting that he look into improving his recordkeeping, which made me feel a little bit better.

Other than fuming about my landlord, I didn't do a whole lot this weekend. On Sunday, I went to a barbecue one of the postdocs in my lab was having, and I ate way too much and sat out in the sun too long and got a terrible sunburn on the back of my neck.

Later that evening, Andy and I went out to see "Memento." Before the movie, we stopped at a restaurant where we had terrible service. It took forever for them to take our order (while a crowd of waiters stood around chatting), they tried to bring us the wrong food, the soda machine was broken, so they brought me water instead of Diet Coke, they inexplicably put my salad on two plates, and the tea I drank after my meal was served lukewarm. Obviously, this economy still has a way down to go before competent people in San Francisco are willing to wait tables again. Sigh.

(That was just a joke)

Before the movie, they showed a preview for "Startup.com," the documentary featuring two of my old high school classmates. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of watching parts of a documentary about someone you know, but it's very weird seeing the guy who used to be in your high school physics class up on a 20-foot screen shaking hands with Bill Clinton. Today, while looking for more information about the movie I came upon this opinion piece, which suggests that my classmates' company was behind a conspiracy involving the Clintons which resulted in the death of the founder of a rival company and his wife. I guess that gives me one degree of separation from the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.

"Memento" was excellent. If you haven't seen it, go.

And finally, thanks to Dave Van, I now have another domain name. Well, OK, it's only indirectly because of Dave Van. The real credit goes to Ryan, who had been bugging me for a while about the hyphen in my tight-science.com domain. Ryan doesn't like hyphens, so he went and registered tightscience.com for me! Also, he read a post by Dave Van somewhere threatening to register the domain for himself and was horrified by the thought. Anyway, that was, of course, very nice of him. Thanks, Ryan!

In the forum: Bad Service and Did you know them when?