Category Archives: raincoaster

Meet a Forum Volunteer: raincoaster, She’ll Fucking Cut You

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GPOY, bitch please edition

GPOY, bitch please edition

I can’t take credit for the title: that was all the doing of Gabriel, of Vankleek Hill fame. He thought the original title of my profile as a WordPress.com tech support forum volunteer was completely inappropriate: Meet a Forum Volunteer: Lorraine Murphy does lack a certain zing, does it not?

I’ve apparently answered 60,000 questions in the forums, and if I had to guess I’d say about 5% of those snippily (scroll through this blog for examples like this one). I didn’t include this in the interview, but once I got an email from a senior support staffer w/r/t a snarky reply I’d made some rando who insisted on being given instructions for something basic but NOT, god forbid, either a copy/paste of the info in the support docs or a link to the appropriate page: nooooo, he wanted someone to put the exact same thing into words in a completely unique way, just for him/her/it, because he/she/it was a very busy person/thing and couldn’t be bothered to read prefab answers but wanted bespoke, immediately, and for free.

My reply began, “Listen Princess…” and continued from there. The staffer emailed to say he probably SHOULD have deleted the thread, but it was just too damn funny, so it’s out there still somewhere in the archives. Happy Hunting.

But back to the glorious interview with ME ME ME! Here’s a taste of the wonders that lie within!

You’ve posted over 60,000 replies in the WordPress.com forums since 2006. Thank you for your support! What types of questions do you like helping users with, and what do you find the most rewarding about contributing?

I like answering someone’s first question the most. People are often shocked by how fast they get an answer, how clear it is, and how they can put the solution to work right away; they’re very grateful, and it’s wonderful to see. The next best thing is when people who’ve asked questions in the past come to the forums and start answering questions themselves.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from your volunteer experience in the forums?

Meaningful, strong relationships can be forged over mundane, repetitive questions about domain mapping. Really, my forum experience at WordPress.com shows that humans are, even in the midst of technology, fundamentally human.

One of my friends reported that his (positive) comment on the post had been first held in moderation, then deleted. And he didn’t even swear! They’re awfully careful at Corporate WordPress Global HQ, and very, very polite. As you can imagine, there was a titch of editing to my responses, but I’d tried hard not to swear so they didn’t change much except to cut for length.

One of the commenters called my situation a “rags to riches blogger story” which shows you how low people set the bar for riches nowadays, although it was very nice of her.

Anyhoodle, it’s very good for hits. Why, between this with it’s two hundred plus social shares, and the Mummified Fairy Post, now enjoying a renaissance thanks to some random OTHER mummified fairy trying to steal its thunder, looking at the stats graph is like travelling back in time to the glory days of Follow links on the Global Tag Pages. Sigh. It seems so, so long ago now.

We had to blog in black and white back then, kids. Uphill in the snow.

The Birth of a Meme

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You can blame Julian Assange for an awful lot: This whole Cablegate kerfuffle. The Collateral Murder video. Embarrassing virtually every nation and security company on the planet. Really stunningly poor relations with at least two exes. Annoying the staff at the Ecuadorian Embassy by humming to himself too loudly on occasion. That jacket.

And now, this. It’s all yesterday’s fault.

https://twitter.com/IanAMartin/status/331868173974503426

https://twitter.com/IanAMartin/status/331893331648978944

Words, my friends. They fail me.

Particularly when the poster in question fails to back it up with the magical words “I’m buying.” Sigh. Tease. Story of my life.

Now this girl, she has got it going on. Or had. Since nobody has heard from her since posting this.

Here Cthulhu! says Summon Cthulhu Kid

Here Cthulhu!

Seriously, I’m dying to find this kid and her dad, for soooo many reasons. So many questions.

  • Did she summon Cthulhu?
  • Did she do it twice, since she got over 2000 Likes?
  • Did she summon Cthluhu instead and if so what does s/he look like?
  • Did she summon Cthulhu and then just pick a random additional Great Old One to summon, and if so which one and why?
  • This.
  • Who the hell is she and where did she and her dad come up with this brilliant idea? Seriously, I want to interview her for the Daily Dot if I can find her but the only lead I’ve got is that it was uploaded to the Atheism Loves You Facebook page on Monday and they can’t remember where they got it. Anyone?
  • Also, what is an atheist site doing supporting theist endeavours such as this, however eldritch and unspeakable they may be?

COMPLETELY UNRELATED POSTSCRIPT: Today’s celebrity encounter, thanks to a comment I made on a story Fidel wrote about “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell.

https://twitter.com/CandaceBushnell/status/331910083942432768

YOLO HOBO

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space explorer

And you want HOW MUCH for it?

Introducing the new blog category: hobocoaster!

Regular readers will be familiar with the story to this point; for the rest, we present a short recap.

About eight weeks or more ago, I made contact with a landlord in a beautiful small town in the BC wine country, a place I’d been spending many weeks a year already, and had developed a circle of friends. One of those friends knew a woman who was moving out of her place April 1, and the place was, quite frankly and without my typical exaggeration (moi? NEVER) absolutely perfect for me. The grounds were 14 acres of vineyards with horse pens and a flat riding arena, about three blocks from the community INDOOR riding arena (necessary in Canuckistan winters). The view? It was stunning. The house? It was immaculate. The horse pens? Profitable, since every horse on the property would basically lower my rent by $150 a month, and there was room for six horses; in other words, free rent plus cash.

The landlord? As it turned out, ambivalent.

He dodged the issue of emailing me a lease agreement. He waited till I got to town to even ask for references (he’d pooh-poohed them earlier).

Oh, ask the Queen of Social Media for references? Okay. I gave him references from:

  • The ex-president of the local riding club attesting to my ability to handle horses
  • The former head of the local Farmer’s Market and current head of the Children’s Festival
  • My ex-boss
  • A banker
  • A Justice of the Peace
  • A Judge
  • An internet millionaire
  • The Heir to a Fucking Kingdom if he’d bothered to google the man
  • A Blind Widow.
  • and more

Top that, bitches.

It was not what he wanted. What he wanted, apparently, was a way out. Seven days before I was supposed to move in, he emailed me saying he wanted to finish the renovations on the house without anyone inside. Okay. Fine. I get that. Nobody wants the house to slide down into the lake because you didn’t reinforce the foundation or deal with the erosion problem.

But more than a week’s notice would have been handy.

My last two emails have gone unanswered, and they were actually far more polite than you imagine: they were along the lines of “oh, so should I sign on a different place for April 1?” “Uh, should I sign on a different place for May 1 or, like, what?” And no, not being one to hold my breath on those, noppers.

Which brings us to the situation I was in a few days: Paying ten bucks a day for storage in Vancouver, with no home in sight, either in Vangroover or Pentikistan, thanks to SOMEONE leaving things rather to the last minute.

Which brings us to the League of Superheroes:

  • Ted volunteered to drive my stuff from Vancouver to Penticton, find the cheapest prices on everything and make all the reservations and carry things on his credit card. I tell ya, thank GOD for kind-hearted friends who are also easily manipulated. Where would I in particular be without them?
  • Ava showed up at 9:30am despite arm injury to do her level best to help, and not only pushed about a metric ton worth of trolleys but also kept everyone’s spirits up.
  • Cathy hucked aforesaid ton of old paperbacks and Vanity Fairs with the occasional case of Starbucks mugs and a vampire carved of human bone here and there onto the dollies, working like a goddam longshoreman despite being a petite, middle-aged blind widow. Parse that, Vancouverites who didn’t show up: a blind widow moved approximately a ton of boxes, and because of later developments with the truck I am relatively sure that’s an accurate weight, too. I think Cathy is about 130 by the way.
  • Bruce M. Campbell, no NOT the Bruce Campbell you’re thinking of. The other one, but every bit as much a hero. Soldiered on despite pulling some unspecified muscle I didn’t even hear about till later, and it must be said I truly appreciate a man who is willing to work up an actual sweat prior to having a client meeting. Not everyone has that level of comfort with themselves.

They showed up on a holiday Monday to huck boxes into the truck, which we SERIOUSLY overloaded as it turned out, and that at the ungodly hour of 9:30am no less. And I hadn’t been paid, so I didn’t even buy them coffee or beer, although if I win this thirty million in the 6/49 it’ll be espresso champagne cocktails I’ll be buying them instead of coffee and beer, I tell ya.

After a harrowing journey (it’s a cliche, but given the amount of time the truck’s undercarriage spent in contact with the asphalt not without literal accuracy) down a Blackcomb-like slope to Highway 1 and a long, slow, wallowing journey up to Penticton, then a bus the next day back to Vancouver, making my weekly road miles something around 1400, things appear to have stabilized.

So, the stuff is in a storage locker in Penticton now, at less than half the price of Vancouver storage.. I’m in Vancouver, since I volunteered to house and cat sit for a friend who’s flying East to deal with family drama for the month of April. After that, presuming my passport’s come through (Ron, that’s your cue to Contact the Authoritahs) I’ve been invited down to Portland, my absolute favorite American city, to stay with Lorelle, a god of the WordPressosphere. Lorelle and I met at WordCamp Whistler, when she, the keynote speaker, walked up to me, said, “You don’t look like you’re phased by much,” to which I assented, and then explained she had a shoulder injury and couldn’t reach her back, so would I mind reaching up under her shirt and pulling down her bra band.

Some women, I tell ya, know how to make an entrance.

And, she assures me, the rural confines of the property are not so uncivilized as to fail to contain a hot tub and a junker car for my own use. Well, that’s a relief: I was losing sleep, I tell ya.

So, since I’m hoping to volunteer at Hollyhock for September, that takes care of April (house-sitting), May/June perhaps July in Portland, August can be spent annoying and sponging off friends on Vancouver Island or even backpacking in Europe since if I do get a passport it’ll be an EU one thanks to being born in France, September is for Hollyhock on Cortez Island (and looking for Brother 12’s treasure!), and that leaves me at loose ends in October.

In October, average rents in Penticton fall by about a hundred dollars a month or more, because The Season is over. Which means an opportunity for moi, coming off the high of the opportunity of not paying rent all summer.

So far: so good?

I’ve found religion!

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Gin in Heaven

Gin in Heaven

Halleluiah!

Well, thank god I’ve found religion, otherwise I’d have made a sacrifice or two to Cthulhu this weekend.

It seems the prospective landlord of Panorama Palace, with whom I’ve been in communication for something like six weeks, has decided he wants to work on the house and doesn’t want to rent it out until those repairs are done.

Great.

Super.

I mean, nobody wants to slide into the lake in a brutal, bone-crushing avalanche in their sleep because of a flaw in the foundation, but they’d like to have known about this prior to eight days before move-in date.

Now I have another month at least to spend in limbo, house-sitting, couch-surfing, and whatever-worksing and in the meantime the prime time to get horses in the boarding business is slipping by…

So, just in case there was any doubt…

Just. Fine. Thank. You.

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Audible punctuation in my sentences is always a bad sign. If I also narrow my eyes while. enunciating. clearly. , adopt a defensive posture IMMEDIATELY: Stop, drop and roll and if you’re lucky you won’t be hit by the fallout. If you’re really clever, you’ll keep on rolling to the liquor cabinet and roll back with a very large, very cold stirred Botanist Martini for me.

and how was yours, motherfucker?

and how was yours, motherfucker?

“It’s not a done deal.”

There are many points in life when you don’t want to hear those words, but I’d venture to say that among the very mostest so is the seventeenth of the month when you are expecting to move into the house on the first of the next month. From your landlord.

Or maybe not-landlord.

Particularly having packed up everything you own and thrown it in storage at a cost, thanks to enthusiastic but amateur labour, of about $300 more than one had budgeted for labour.

THIS is my fortune?

THIS is my fortune? From lunch Saturday.

I. God. Damn. Well. Better. Be.

The possibility exists that he’s hoping to leverage my desperation against the price of the rent and pop it up by a hundred or so a month, which would frankly make this a non-possibility for me; I took that off the table immediately by being upfront about how much I do and do not earn in a month. As it is, the place would take slightly more than 50% of my income, but the lifestyle rewards would more than make up for that in my book.

It is indeed a lovely house in a lovely pocket valley with lovely vineyards, a spectacular view, a half-hour walk from my friend’s barn with her two horses, and a couple of blocks away from the covered riding arena. When I asked what the facilities fee was for the riding arena, I was told there is no fee.

Also, plenty of room in the house for Julian, should he wish to take refuge on a Canadian Indian Band reservation, with a very aggressive attitude towards independence from whitey’s Big Sweatervest in Ottawa. If the RCMP or, god forbid, the Yanks, set foot on the Rez for the purposes of nabbing Jules, there would be an international armed uprising the like if which hasn’t been seen since we Canucks looted and burned the White House. So, either way this is a win for a revolutionary, right? AMIRITE?

He's all like, I dunno, whatever you say, raincoaster

He’s all like, I dunno, whatever you say, raincoaster