I'm not really in favor of humility on a personal level, but I have been dealt several doses lately... and I don't like it. I enjoy feeling like I'm one of the smartest guys in the world. I've even got some other people convinced of it... and now they all know differently.

The cause of most of this is Joes' computer.

Why O why don't all computers behave the same way? I thought that was the general idea of a system like, for example, Windows95. Well, Joes' computer is just a little bit different. Like, some of the drivers, like for the modem and the monitor and the video output board, are not in the Win95 database. No, they're on a 3.5" floppy disk that came with the system.

And you can't do sh*t without them being properly loaded, either...

Last night That would be Wednesday night/Thursday morning...) was not too bad, workwise. Steady, but nothing very big or interesting... just enough to keep me awake. Tonight seems to be more of the same, only not even steady, more like sporadic. So I've got time to think about some things...

I was mildly chastised for a recent entry in which I called a new employee a "girl", and I must admit that that is not very politically correct. However, I am not widely known for my political correctness... or my tact.

However, most of the women that I know, of almost any age, refer to themselves as "girls", and most of the guys refer to themselves as "guys" Maybe this is just a midwestern middle-class thing; I don't really know. The aforementioned groups, the "girls" and the "guys" readily admit that they belong to the larger classes, namely "women" and "men" but they are more comfortable with the former. I, myself, am one of the "guys" and I have never thought it disrespectful of anyone to identify me as such.

There is another class of the female gender... "ladies". A little more formal in usage, and generally tinged with a little sarcasm, as is the counterpart, "gentlemen". These words are usually used when someone is being gently accused of "putting on airs", whatever the hell that means...

I remember once when I was in high school, my mother told me that she was going out with the "girls"; but I knew who these "girls" were, and said, "You mean the old women, don't you?" and she told me, "We'll be girls if we wanna be girls!" That was the end of that conversation.

The main thing is... there is no disrespect intended when I say "girls" or "guys" and I don't believe in "political correctness"; it wasn't all that long ago that it was "politically correct" to refer to Italians as "wops", Germans as "krauts" and Chinese as "chinks". These are derogatory words, meant to dehumanize a group of people (that makes it much easier to hate them and kill them...) "Girls" and "guys" does exactly the opposite: makes you want to love 'em! "Women" and "men" will always be correct, however.

Therefore, if you are a female that is beyond the age of puberty, and I call you a girl... I mean no disrespect. If you don't want to be called a "girl" then let me know and I won't do it... that's pretty simple, isn't it? And the same goes for the guys, natch.

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Later... at home, finally. Nobody was scheduled to come in at 07:00 again, so I had to stay until 07:30. A little easy OT, but I had to miss seeing Karen and Lacee this morning because of it, dammit!

And I didn't even have any patients to do! I just had to be there...

I think that today is a sleep catch-up day.... my bones are weary. So're my muscles, for that matter...

O'yeah, thanx to Bill and Lynda, who told me how to do the filters. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work, but I'll play with it some more when I'm not dead-tired...