Al's Blog-o-Sphere

A friend sent me this. I couldn’t keep it to myself!

I stopped at the local taco shop for some fast food tonight. I had just gotten done at the High School where I was working with the robotics team. It was about 7pm and I just didn’t feel like cooking.

I’ve always been a Mighty Taco fan. They’re a local institution known since the ’70s for their funky commercials and cartoonish artwork in their ads.
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I’ve always liked them better than say, Taco Bell, because they were a.) locally owned, b.) had decent portions and c.) had really cool advertising. Besides, they’ve given thousands of high school kids part-time jobs over the years. If you live in WNY, you probably know someone who once worked at one. Continue Reading…

…or just commented, which is close enough.

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We’ve been relying less and less on the traditional landline phone these days. Now that everyone in the family has their own cellphone, why shouldn’t calls be naturally routed to the specfic person? Most friends and family either have those numbers or know we almost never answer the regular phone unless we hear them leaving a message on the answering machine.

I make no apologies for the messages on the answering machine. Some of them have been borderline rude, but when people and/or companies insist on trying to defeat caller ID by blocking or disguising it, I’m not going to be nice to them. Real people are willing to say who they are trying to call and wait for us to answer. The majority of the calls we get don’t bother to leave a message.

It must be the phone we have, but it has an odd quirk. When a caller comes in from outside the local area, it can display the number, but not a name, so it calls them OUT OF AREA. My twisted sense of humor finds that hilarious, and I refer to them as spatially challenged callers. I can just envision the caller as being so remote, so minimized, that they no longer have a name, just a number and become dimensionless, reduced to a point. Continue Reading…