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vagabondsurf.com
It's about life - not "lifestyle"

vagabondsurf.com ... It's about life - not "lifestyle"

That's our credo around here, and as with anything else sometimes it gets hard to live up to it. Take last week for instance...

The vagabondsurf.com phone number either used to be a fax line, a fax/phone line, or is really close to one or both of those. For over a year we've been receiving attempted fax calls from somewhere in Asia. They come after 2 or 3 a.m. during the week, and often on Saturday morning. We've contemplated slapping a fax machine on the line at night just to see what comes out, but tHere are so many cords and lines behind the computers now that any trip back there is fraught with peril. Besides, the imagination can be more fun.

I picture the voice behind the two voice messages left on the line from a heavily accented Asian woman on back-to-back Saturday mornings some time ago. She was insistent upon receiving a return call to verify receipt of her fax. Personally, I made a major downshift some time ago just so I wouldn't have to answer that type of call - screw her (handy hint: leave your phone number even if you think you are calling someone you know). I sit satisfied with the picture of some anal little company expeditor faxing in status reports to an increasingly angry customer who remains mystified as to why he or she never gets faxed reports from this company no matter how many requests and no matter what they promise.

We also get infrequent calls this year from a polite little boy, who usually is thanking his Daddy for a present or card. He always ends the message with a simple, non-whiney request to "Call me when you get home". Obviously Daddy doesn't live with Mommy any more. The boy never leaves his number, and the mother never places the call - she probably sits and curses the Father for being out with That Other Woman. We would call back on that one if we could.

For a while we got some messages obviously in error from an elderly woman in Bakersfield, California. She would mumble around wondering "where he could be". That eventually tapered off, but I digress...and a serious subject is at hand.

Between phone weirdnesses and an incredible heat wave here in Southern California, we also had a variety of computer situations which had to be addressed during the last Olympic week of February. One of them was a problem from the expanded use of corporate firewalls and a shortcut many of them use to speed things up. Basically, it meant they cached either old pages or shortcuts - I can't figure out how doing whatever it does makes things quicker - with the end result being many corporate users weren't seeing updates or new content for a while. The solution turns out to be hitting your browser "refresh" button periodically. Took a week of tech support to identify possible problems and then simple button pushing to solve this...

Staff Intern Candy is in the news too. It was an Olympic month, and Candy got tired of answering the phone. She decided to turn down the ringer, and forgot to turn back on the message machine when she left the office...for a week before we discovered it. She remains rather unrepenetant about this, claiming most of the business activity is done through email anyway. She wants to stay through March, and I suppose we could let her (doesn't cost us anything...we think). Jeez...

And then, of course, we had to spend the weekend desperately trying to purchase a new surfwear wardrobe to replace our Hurley attire. Gotta stay core...

So, a new week is upon us, and new content is going to be coming. Spring is drawing near, weather has been great in this part of the world, evil dwarf figure skaters didn't win Olympic Gold, and life is good.

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