Two Stories

I have two stories for you today. Here's the first. One of our machine rooms had to move. This was due to many reasons, not the least of which is that we were not paying rent on it any more. So some of the big noisy and hot machines moved into the small machine room next to my office. Each morning we would come in at the break of dawn to find the heat alarm shreaking and beeping and the ambient temperature around 45 degrees (C). This would just not do, so we brought in the A/C guys and today they installed another unit in the machine room.

They banged and clanked and broke pieces of the ceiling. You know, it's not so hard to make a clean hole in the sheetrock (geves) using a sharp knife. But, no they needed to let their inner A/C artists out. If that was not enough, look at where they
placed the compressor. The smokers outside patio never had a wonderful view, but now all you see is this bloody great compressor. On top of it all they never hung it straight. These guys need to work very hard to even get close to 80%.


The second story goes like this. Now, I'm not usually one to ridicule people's accents and speech idiosyncrasies but this morning was special. Yesterday, you might have read how we somehow ended up with a content filter on our internet connection. The customer service dude removed it last night, but advised me to call the accounting
office in the morning to remove any trace of the filter from our account. This way, he assured me, it would never again rears its ugly head. This I did.

Bright and early I called the accounts people at Bezeqint. I was obviously redirected three times (each time having to tell the whole story before I was informed, you need to speak to X... and then I was transferred and put on hold - all this time I was subjected to the horrendous, "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt. To my horror, with each redirect and hold, it picked up exactly where it had left off. I thought this song was reserved solely for slide shows at Bat Mitzvahs). I was finally put in touch with a nice Arab girl called Suaada. I explained my problem. She didn't really get it. I explained how all I wanted was the content filter removed permanently. "But, its free" she told me and asked my username. "It's petero. P-E-T-E-R-O", I spell. "No!" she says "There's no beetero in the system", "That's beetero with a Bee?" she asks. I speak slowly and calmly counting to ten, "Not a Bee a Peee, P-E-T-E-R-O". She repeats "a Beee as in Ben?". "No a PEEEEE, a PEEEEE" I scream. "Oh, a BEEEE as in BEEEEEople". Then I click - "Yes", I say, "a PEEE as in People".

Sigh. I really can't complain, my accent in Hebrew is the stuff
comedy shows here are made of.