If I’m understanding the reports on the iTunes developer website correctly (and it’s entirely possible I’m not), iProv has been downloaded nearly 1,000 times in the 5 days since its release. Primarily in the U.S., but also Canada and the rest of the world as well, including (more surprisingly) many non-English speaking countries. Not bad for an application with a very narrow audience… especially since it doesn’t show up in any lists on iTunes that I’ve seen, so unless you’re searching specifically for it, you won’t find it. I’ve spread the word in a couple online improv communities but I wasn’t expecting it to reach a tenth of that many people, especially in its first week. I just wish I could find out more about the folks who’ve been downloading it.
My attempts to get my washer repaired have been frustrating. I called a company on Thursday, and after spending several minutes setting up an appointment they informed me they couldn’t work on a washer that had a dryer stacked on top of it. So I canceled the appointment, called another company and was grateful when they told me that they would be able to send someone out later the same day, they would call to set up the appointment and the stacked washer/dryer wasn’t a problem.
Only, I never heard back from them. So I hit redial on my phone the next day and called them back to find out what had happened. After much confusion they said they had me in their records, but that I had canceled because of the stacked unit problem. Realizing I must have accidentally dialed the first company instead of the second, I apologized profusely and dialed the other number in my phone, which after another bout of confusion I realized had taken me to the exact same company.
After some furious scouring on the Internet to try and figure out just who I’d been calling the other day, I realized that there were multiple listings of companies with different names and phone numbers but all operating out of the same address, and they were actually aliases for a single company. So what had in fact happened the previous day was that I had phoned the same company twice on two different numbers, with two completely different results. It just seemed they had conveniently forgotten about the second time.
I’ve since made an appointment for Tuesday with what I’ve confirmed is an entirely different company that says they can handle the stacked washer/dryer. Hopefully there won’t be more surprises… I need to do laundry.
I had some friends over last night and amidst a few too many drinks and stories from our youths, I became acutely aware of how much events that are much more significant to us as children than they are to the grown-ups around us can stick with us and affect who we are as adults. Their stories triggered me to tell a story I’d never told anyone before, not because I was embarrassed by it so much as it had never seemed important or interesting enough to tell. I actually surprised myself that I had never told it to anyone before, though, and was in fact so surprised that I want to retell it here before I forget about it again.
When I was about twelve, I was the youngest volunteer at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, something I took immense (and nerdy) pride in. I worked as a sub-counselor of sorts for the daycamp programs that took place in the summer and over March Break for kids maybe about a third younger than I was, and I reveled in the responsibility of it and the maturity it showcased in me.
I don’t remember what or when the specific program was, but one day the boss-man called me into his office to warn me about some complaints he’d received about me from my direct superior, a woman who (I think) was in her thirties or so, relatively ugly-looking to me and with a thick European accent that I didn’t find any more attractive than she was. I don’t remember exactly what the boss-man said, but I remember him ending the paragraph by looking furtively down at his desk and saying “and she also has complained that you’ve been staring at her breasts.”
My jaw must have just about hit the ground at this. I was mortified, and at an age where I lacked the vocabulary with which to make my case other than to object: “I have not!” At my age boobs were a curiosity but that was about it; I was still some way’s off from appreciating them on a more aesthetic level. While I couldn’t yet fathom anything about that, I immediately realized where the misunderstanding came from: I wasn’t yet confident making eye contact with people and so my gaze tended to drift downwards.
I was unable to explain that, though. In fact, the main thought that preoccupied me was that I thought she was horribly unattractive, why would I even want to stare at her boobs in the first place? But while I was still young and extremely naive I mercifully had the wisdom not to use that as a defence, and so I stuck with simple, shocked denial. I took my lumps and I suppose everything turned out okay because I don’t remember much after that other than the woman in question smiling and being friendly to me as though it had never happened.
I took two important life lessons away from it, though: the first was that people are going to always attach their own meanings to everything I say or do, so it was important to always choose my words and actions carefully. The second (far simpler, and perhaps even more useful) lesson was to always make eye-contact with women, and don’t let them catch you checking them out down there. (I’m a fan of how Seinfeld puts it: “Looking at a cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don’t stare at it. It’s too risky. You get a sense of it and then you look away.”)
It’s weird how those lessons still figure prominently in my life, even when I don’t often think on the source of them. It’s even weirder now for me to think back on that incident, which at the time had more gravity and adult shame than just about anything I’d experienced up to that age, but today I just find myself thinking about the guy who was probably no older than I am now, perhaps aspiring but still doing the job of a low-level manager of a museum daycamp, having to handle such an embarrassing “problem” and not knowing the proper way to deal with a precocious pre-adolescent that he was used to treating as staff.
My heart goes out to him.
Dan.
Tags: embarrassment, iphone, things that annoy, younger times