33 and a Third

My parents were wed on September 9, 1948… yup, that’s 60 years. Wow.

My parents wanted a very quiet celebration (so quiet, they didn’t want to do *anything*), but we convinced them to go out for dinner. Our little party included only immediate family, including my father’s sister. It was very nice, as we don’t often get the chance to all be together. Unfortunately, my niece wasn’t able to make it… she was getting ready for her trip abroad.

As many people are getting married when they’re older, I guess 60 year anniversaries will become rarer. Then again, people are living longer. Let’s see… Reid and I will be 91 in order to celebrate our 60th anniversary. Hmmm.

Ah, well, the day has come. I knew it would, just thought I had a little longer.

It seems I am the shortest person in my family. Ronnie has surpassed me. I refused to believe it at first, but perhaps I should resign myself to it. We noticed during the weekend when we had a small get together in honour of friends Andrew and Jenny, who were visiting from California. I made Reid take repeated pictures to prove it to me. Ronnie is happy as a lark. A friend Tom helpfully suggested we have another child so I don’t have to be the shortest. I’ll take it up with Reid.

I’ve been working at Bell for a little over a year now (well, except for 3 months off), but no more. Lots of turmoil as they restructure, and most contracts were ended. They were more than fair to me, giving me a month notice. Very nice group of people and I hope I get to work there again one day.

I worked for the IVR group - that would be the automated answering system that takes your call and directs you to the right agent, or, lets you serve yourself. Being in IT for so long, I found it wild working on a phone system. Whenever I had to test the system, I had to use the phone rather than a computer. It was a hoot. And I have to admit, it’s a lot simpler to test a phone system than an application in most cases (not all!!)

I really enjoyed learning how their voice recognition works. I found we would anthropomorphise - referring to the system as “she”. Very easy to do when you’ve given the system a female name and when you’re talking to “her” all the time during analysis and testing.

Now I have a better appreciation of how deal with voice recognition IVRs as a customer (and boy, do I get pissed when they don’t work well!) I’ve heard a few people complain about Bell’s system, but I can attest to the fact that they work very, very hard to get it to work as smoothly as possible.

Not in too big a hurry to find another job. Hey, it’s August!

I didn’t know that 2 words could convey so much! Here are the only two words that an 18 year old male uses with his family:
1. Meh
2. Grunt

Hmmm. Maybe the second one isn’t really a word. It’s just a sound and can vary a bit depending on time of day. Cool, a 1 word vocabulary! Wait…. is “meh” a word?

I’ve seen the grunt used to convey:
Good morning.
Hi, how was your trip?
I don’t like pork chops.
I’m feeling fine, thanks for asking.

Reid thinks it’s a binary language
meh=1
grunt=0
Just to keep things interesting, grunt (or 0) does not always mean No. Depends on the context.

What’s your theory?