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Neil Lewis from the NYT, taken to task.
“Can reporters be disbarred?”

I can not believe this.

After receiving a phone call informing
me that my long wait for phone service was
officially over, I am now without a telephone again.

At about 2PM (central daylight) I received a call from a telemarketer.
At about 3PM my manager sent me an email to inform me that he’d
tried to call me, and had been greeted with “bee-DEE-DOO! this
line is no longer in service.”

After bouncing between friendly but powerless customer service
representatives, I found that my service was not in fact
completely installed, and that the service order was never closed. In
fact, it was delayed until April 30, when a technician is supposed to
make the final splice and enable my service for what will officially be
the first time. According to the paperwork at the local telephone
service center, the construction at the tap that was necessary to
complete our service was only finished today (leaving some sort
of minor switch-flipping for Wednesday).

HATE HATE HATE

Happy
10th birthday, Mosaic. (Allow me to toast you with the original Captain Jim
page, ca. 1994. You really have to imagine it with Motif widgets
and a medium gray background.)

Salaries at Sapient were never outrageously high (I mean, not for me, or
anybody I knew well enough to talk even in rough terms about salaries).
Apparently, now they’re not even what they used to be…

From: rOD Begbie
(pronounced like American “road” in native dialect)
Subject: [ ] click here to open mail

Hey Dan.

Enjoyed your blurb about your prank at SAPE.

Ah, happy days!

rOD.

PS. A whole 45-50 USD a year?

☑ Check here to use phone

Man, memory lane.

Blaque tosses me an IM:

<bq> So, the phone at this desk has a piece
of paper taped to the handset, and that piece of paper says, “Check here to
use phone.”

My response is, essentially, “Huh?” I mean, it sounds familiar. Should
I get the reference? Was it a New Filing
Technique strip I’d read and forgotten about?

He responded:

<bq> You moron.

<bq>
You wrote that.

<bq> This was your phone.

After some more prodding, it all came flooding back. We were working on
a shameless ecommerce site
(in a previous life of mine) and
were forced to implement a product-view page that would add the product
to your cart … if you checked a box. It was a JavaScript hook
on a form checkbox that would go and (pop up a window, I think, and) add
the product to your cart.

This made my UI-spider-sense tingle so much (not in a good way) that I think I
went around the office, tagging everything with little labels: “Check here to
open door.” “Check here to flush toilet.” Each label had a small square box
leading the text. (Look, I was young and angry! Impetuous youth! And all
that.)

It turns out that Blaque is consulting for SAPE again, and—on his last
day consulting—is sitting at a desk (actually Tim’s) at One
Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA with my old phone at it.

What do you call it when you can’t remember if you really did something
yourself, or simply read about it somewhere?

I just received a very nice call from a technician at the phone company,
apologizing for the delay in setting up our service. I have to admit,
when the real phone rang, my first thought was, “Hmm, that’s odd.
What’s that noise?”