the day trip

Rockland was fun, actually - the people were smart and very nice to me. :) If it weren't for having made a stupid mistake which caused us all to sit around for an extra half-hour as I tried to fix it and get their actual scores, and then having to drive to Portland and back home* in the pouring rain it might have been a pretty pleasant trip.

One of the guys who works there is an acquaintance to The Humble Farmer, and I had not previously been too very well-known to this guy - may have met him once, turned around a couple of emails, talked with him on the phone a couple of times, but not so much that he would remember me.

"You know Robert Skoglund?"

"The Humble Fumble?"

"That's him! He was a good friend of my Dad's, and my Dad died this spring, so I saw him at the funeral. And of course he asked me what I did, and when I told him he turned around and tried to tell his wife that I was your boss."

"You should have told him you were! And that I'm walking a very fine line!"

He is a pay grade higher than I am in the hierarchy, and even though I have two stripes I'm not in charge of anybody. :)

Also, he figured out an answer for my dilemma re their test scores which allowed us all to go home, and even so shook my hand and told me I'd given a good training. ;)

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*I don't know why the government thinks it makes more sense for me to drive a half hour south at the start of the day to get a car and then drive two hours north, so that then I have to drive past my home to drop off the gov't car and get my own car, increasing what they pay for gas and what they pay me for overtime. I know I bitch about this every time and you must be tired of hearing about it, but it's annoying. But I did make two hours of overtime. :P

Sad

I heard a couple of installments of this story on the news while I was driving, today:

Lions, tigers, cheetahs and grizzly bears on the loose in Ohio

Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz said his deputies had shot dead 25 of the 48 animals that escaped on Tuesday from cages on the exotic species farm near Zanesville in eastern Ohio.

I think now it's up to 50 animals they've killed. :( What I want to know is, why didn't they call Vladimir Putin? He knows how to use a dart gun.

(In the interview I heard with the Sheriff he said they had attempted to call in people who had dart guns but the response was too slow, they felt they had to act quickly the interests of public safety. However, the one time they actually did get a dart into a tiger it sounded as though they didn't wait for it to take effect, but when the tiger jumped up and started to run off they killed it.)