So far, I have had no less than four exchanges like this one.

A guy named David emails me saying he’s interested in the Mac Pro (1,700 Euros), but that it’s for his girlfriend who didn’t want to spend more than 1,000 Euros. Oh well, I say, guess it’s not for you then.

Can you lower the price just a bit? Sure, I’ll meet you half way, at 1.350 Euros.

Does it include a monitor? No. I do have a 24″ Cinema Display, and will include that for a total of 1.650 Euros.

Oh, I thought the 1.350 would include a monitor. Do you have the original boxes, CDs and manual? (They all ask if I have the original boxes, manuals and CDs…) Yes, I have them.

Ok, I think I’m going to take the Mac Pro and monitor for my girlfriend. She’s going to kill me! Do you have other Mac equipment to sell?

Yes, another 24″ and a 23″ Cinema Display, and a 2.5″ SSD.

What price will you give me if I can sell the other equipment? I have friends that might be interested.

If somebody wants to buy everything, I’ll sell it all for 2,300 Euros.

I’ll give you 2,100 Euros, and we’ll be on our way this afternoon. You need to take into account that I’m selling your other stuff, too!

I don’t care to whom you sell the other stuff. I’ve told you that if somebody wants to by the whole lot, I’ll sell it for 2,300 Euros. No less.

Ok, I’ll take it for 2,300.

Are you coming today then?

Well, my car is broken, and it’ll be a few days before its fixed.

Ok, then just give me a date.

Wait, my friend asks if the 24″ is compatible with Windows 7? I don’t know.

My friend asks what connector the 24″ has? I send him the Apple specs URL.

My friend wants to know if you have the original box, CDs and manuals? Yeah.

My friend wants to know if it’s compatible with a 2009 MacBook Pro. I think so, but you need an adapter.

Do you also sell the adapter? No, I’m not a store. You can buy it at FNAC.

What does FNAC sell it for? I don’t know. Call FNAC.

Ok, so I’m going to keep the Mac Pro, one 24″ Cinema Display, and the 23″ Cinema Display. One of my friends said the 24″ was just too much. I still think I can sell it, though, so I’ll still take everything for 2.300 Euros. Can I transfer you a small deposit?

I don’t want a deposit. Just confirm what you want to buy, and when you’ll come pick it up.

Well, I’m leaving this weekend for Madrid to pickup my girlfriend’s passport, and I’m going to take the opportunity to stay a week for my birthday. I’ll be back here a week from Saturday. But then, I’m not sure if I can come then either. Oh, but I do confirm I’d like to buy the SSD too, but in December for Christmas. Hey, let me transfer you a small deposit, and we’ll organize the date later.

Sorry, the first one that brings me the full purchase price gets the equipment.

WHAT?!? You promised you’d reserve it all for me. What a way to do business!!!

Seriously, this is the fourth such experience I’ve had, in which I get to listen to all sorts of stories about girlfriends, broken cars, other friends, pending tax returns, plans to pay soon, and potential trades for Wii’s and broken jet skis.

And they all end up with me somehow accused of being the bad guy. Amazing.

Summer camp in Europe.

Here in Spain, we signed up online, and subsequently received an email that said, “Great! See you in June! You can pay when you get here.”

Summer camp in the USA.

Here’s what the American — land of the free and home of the brave — experience was like:

• We had to pay a non-refundable $15 application fee, just to apply.

• We had to sign a set of terms and conditions, agreeing to things like, “Any child that brings a live firearm to the camp will be expelled.” (We’re talking about 10 year-olds here.)

• We had to sign an agreement, that for every 15 minutes we might be late picking our child up every afternoon, a $50 fee will be levied, payable the next morning.

• We had to sign a legal liability release, removing any and all liabilities from the university, for anything that might happen to our child while there. We acknowledge that although the camp focuses on computer programming, there’s always the potential for danger.

• Finally, we received a special announcement that the cafeteria building on campus has been considerably enhanced, now offering dining options from Pizza Hut, Burger King and Wendy’s! If a tobacco machine were installed, parents would be up in arms — but Pizza Hut, Burger King and Wendy’s represent considerably enhanced dining options for our children.

1. I’ve climbed down an 800 foot smoke stack. Not sure I can tell this story… but what the heck, it was a long time ago…

   As a young co-op student working at Georgia Power’s Plant Yates, my co-op colleague Eric Garris came in one morning and informed me that the Plant Manager wasn’t in that day, and this was our grand opportunity to take the elevator to the top of the smoke stack and look around. So we squeezed into the rickety old cage elevator, and rattled our way to the top of the 800 foot structure. We looked around a bit, discovered some Playboy magazines up there, and decided to head on down. (I’m afraid of heights.) Getting back in the elevator, we pressed the down button, over and over. The elevator fought hard, but wouldn’t move. After a couple tries, we heard a boom from below, and the elevator was dead.

   Couple minutes later we discovered the elevator had a phone. They were calling, “Who the HECK is up there!!!”. “Uh, hi! It’s the coops! :)”…”You idiots, you burned out the elevator motor!” Turned out, we didn’t realize the elevator locks when it reaches the top, and you have to unlock it before it will move.

   The bad news is that they told us we had to climb down an emergency ladder that scales the entire inside wall of the smoke stack. I begged for them to fly in a helicopter, but no-can-do. I was in tears as I climbed out of the elevator, and made the hair-raising swing over and onto the ladder. (After Eric, of course– I wasn’t about to have him falling and knocking me off the ladder…)

   After, I don’t know, a few hours (?) we made it down, both covered in soot and looking like those cartoons characters after an explosion.

   Next morning, the plant manager was about to fire us, but then we were saved by an idea! About a month later, me and Erik appeared on the cover of the company wide “Safety” magazine. The article read, “On a routine inspection of the smoke stack, coop students Matt Henderson and Erik Garris found themselves stuck in a malfunctioning elevator. Due to their familiarity with safety procedures and training, they were able to safely escape the situation!”

2. I’ve trekked to the Base Camp area of Mount Everest.

   My wife, three friends and I (and a German guide) spent two weeks trekking from Lukla (a mountain city in Nepal) to the base camp area of Mount Everest. Since all the expeditions had returned home, we foregoed going to the actual base camp, instead choosing to climb the nearly 6000 meter peak of Kala Patar.

   Climbing that mountain, with 50% oxygen in my blood, must have been the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done. After what seemed like an eternity, I reached the top, pulled out the camera, snapped a picture of Everest, packed up, and headed down.

   A few weeks later, back home, I had the film developed, and discovered that the very peak of Everest was obscured in the photo by the bill of my hat! Three. Weeks. Of. Trekking. and I get a chopped off picture of Everest.

3. I’ve been cussed out by ex-Van Halen lead singer, David Lee Roth.

   My high school best friend, Todd Stover, and I were major fans of David Lee Roth, and traveled around (anywhere practically) to see him play. We drove one weekend to somewhere in Alabama, and given that the floor seating was first-come / first-serve, we camped out for hours at the door, to be the first in line.

   We ended up first row, and they sat everybody down on the floor, as we waited for Cinderella to come out (they were the warm-up band). The guards working the stage told us that many of us were heading to the hospital within an hour. “What???!!!” They told us that as soon as the lights went out, everybody sitting on the floor would stand up, and rush forward, and that many of us would get crushed against the barrier.

   Sure enough, lights out, and I experienced something I never want to experience again. I had no control of my body, as I was lifted a few inches off the ground by the mass of people and moved left, right, left and right again. I watch as my friend Todd drifted off in the opposite direction. We waved bye-bye to each other. Pretty soon unconscious bodies were being passed overhead to the guards. It was unreal.

   I got shifted left, and eventually spit out on the side next to the big speakers. I decided to leave the floor, and climb up into the seats. (I didn’t really pay attention to who I was sitting next to.)

   So eventually Dave comes over, jumps up on the speaker, and sings, “…Reach down, between my legs, ease the seat back…” Then, SMACK, he gets hit with a ball of ice in his face.

   He stops the music, mad as can be, and gets them to shine the spotlight down on us — on ME! He looks at me and starts cussing me out. I’m in shock. I can’t repeat all he said, but it included what he’d do to my GIRLFRIEND. My girlfriend!!!??? I look to my left, and there’s this fat girl sitting there eating a bucket OF ICE! So Dave sees this girl, and assumed I’d thrown the ice!

   After the concert, back at the car, my friend Todd says, “Oh man, can you believe what happened to that dude that threw the ice!!”. “Yeah, Todd, I can believe it…”

4. I was a European Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gold medalist.

   Ok, it was the senior division, blue belt, ad the 73 kg weight class, but I beat everybody to become the European BJJ champion last year.

5. I love country music. (Hey, I grew up in Duluth, Georgia. What do you expect?)

   The sappier the better. It’s one of the things I miss most about the United States. There just aren’t any country music stations in this part of Spain. Thank goodness for iTunes.

And with that, the meme stops here. :)

Somehow things happen to me that don’t seem to happen to others, and a friend recently suggested I start documenting some of my past and future stories on my weblog. This is the first installment, about a traffic ticket I once received, in historic Whitesville Whitesburg, deep south Georgia.

I worked my way through Georgia Tech as a coop student, initially spending alternate quarters at the Georgia Power Company‘s power generation plant, Plant Yates, in lovely Newnan, Georgia. It was an interesting experience, some of which I’ll be documenting in future stories. (Like the time me and the other coop got stuck at the top of the 800 ft tall smoke stack.) Just to set the mood, on my first day at Plant Yates, I was told by the lead engineer that “coop” is the sound horse crap makes when it hits the ground. Welcome to your new job.

But today’s story deals with a speeding ticket that I recieved, when returning to my dorm room at West Georgia University, where I stayed while working at Plant Yates.

It was around two in the morning, and I was returning home in my 1982 diesel Volkswagen Rabbit along the highway towards Carrollton (the home of West Georgia University). The highway speed limit was something like 50 mph, and that’s about what I was doing. What I didn’t realize, though, was that once you enter the city limits of tiny little Whitesville Whitesburg — and you need to understand, you could, back then, enter and exit Whitesville Whitesburg in about 15 seconds — the speed limit drops to 30 mph.

Just as I exited Whitesville Whitesburg (in fact, I didn’t even realized I’d passed a town), I saw a police car pull out of the forest on the outskirts of town, and fire up the lights and sirens, in hot pursuit of my little Rabbit. I pulled over, and a somewhat overweight Officer Buford (or something like that like) came moseying up alongside the driver’s window, hand on his gun. He looks in, chompin’ on a wad of chewing tobacco, and we have the following conversation:

Officer: Boy, I don’t know about Gwinnett county (spit) but down here in Whitesville Whitesburg we have traffic laws. You know how fast you just drove through town? 70 MILES-AN-HOUR!

Me: Sir, that’s kinda hard to believe, since my diesel Rabbit only has 42 horsepower. I actually don’t think I’ve ever exceeded 65 mph in this car.

Officer: Don’t go gittin’ smart with me, BOY! (Hand tightens up on the gun. Spit.) You wanna come look at the screen of my radar?

Me: No, no.. that’s ok, sir.

So Officer Buford proceeds to write me out a $50 speeding ticket, and sends me on my way.

Now, 50 bucks was quite a lot for a struggling coop student. I got to thinking on the way back home, that (a) he was perpendicular to the road on a secluded forest path when he scanned me, (b) I may have been going above 30 mph, but my diesel Rabbit really wasn’t capable of going 70, and (c) this just wasn’t right! Talking to a friend who said he knew something about police radars, I was later told that often the radar’s calibration speed is 70 mph — meaning, if he was right, that Office Buford could make his radar read 70 mph anytime he wants.

So, I decided to fight the ticket in court.

Well, turns out court in Whitesville Whitesburg only happens every now and then, when the traveling Judge makes his rounds, and so my date was scheduled for a month into the future, when I’d already be back in Atlanta at school.

I carefully prepared my case, with charts, diagrams, analysis and references, explaining how radar doesn’t work on a perpendicular vector, how Buford’s calibration frequency needs to be checked to see if it was a coincidental 70 mph, how my little car doesn’t go 70 mph, and, for good measure, how it was my first offense. With that all ready, I was convinced I’d win.

So, on a Thursday afternoon, I confidently headed back down to Whitesville Whitesburg. As at the time, there was no courthouse in Whitesville Whitesburg, court was held in the basement of a Miss Dorothy’s lovely colonial house. Miss Dorothy even had chocolate cookies ready for the occassion. All us accused sat in little metal folding chairs, and the Honorable Judge behind a fake wood-grain folding table.

Court began, and there were about 27 other cases to be heard, — half of which were DUI’s and the other half, wife beatings. Somehow, mine was the last case to be heard, and the Judge woke up when I was the first person to plead, “Not Guilty.”

So after painstakingly walking through my presentation and analysis, the judge, with furrowed brow, looks at me over the top if his spectacles and thoughtfully says, “Mister Henderson, I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to be traveling 70 mph. (long pause) But, Officer Buford here says you were traveling 70 mph, and I do believe him. Now, son, since this is your first offense, I’m gonna go easy on you. Plaintiff to pay a fee of $50. [gavel slams down on table] See you all next month.”

If you want to survive living in Andalucia, in southern Spain, you’re going to need, in addition to a huge amount of patience, the following:

• A darn good battery backup for your computers. Every time a cloud passes overhead, our electricity for some reason shuts off — temporarily, for periods of about 10 to 30 seconds. And don’t get one of the ones with an alarm. I generally know perfectly well when the power is out, and don’t need my UPS honking at me in the middle of the night for these short outages.
• A whole lot of bottled water. This morning as I stood under the shower and turned on the water, I was doused with a new brownish variety of H2O. Seems the local water treatment plant had an accident, and large quantities of magnesium are being deposited into our water supply. We’ve been told the water can be used for “hygienic” purposes, but should not be consumed for prolonged periods. Yeah.
• A good lawyer. Looks like we’ll be having our first get together with our brand new neighbors in court, as they’ve decided they don’t like the remodeling we did to our apartment four years ago. What a way to start a relationship.

I find it surprising that we have such spectacularly poor infrastructure here, given that just down the road you’ve got the White House replica of King Fahn from Saudi Arabia, where, until he passed on, he would come to visit every other year and spend a million Euros a day during the Summer months. Can’t imagine him putting up with brown water, and flaky electricity. (Then again, maybe he had his own water and electricity systems…)

Anyway, good food, good wine, (mostly) friendly people, and 340 days of sunshine a year go a long way to making up for such inconveniences, but still.

Technorati Tags: culture, spain

Neal went to his HMO doctor, who inspected the swollen hand, and immediately recommended him to a “Hand Specialist.” Next day, the Hand Specialist took some x-rays and had Neal scheduled for surgery the very following day. Neal left surgery with a finger full of allen screws to allow for little weekly adjustments to make sure, when all healed up, that his finger is just like new. Neal has weekly follow-ups with x-rays to make sure everything’s on track. And Neal got some pain medicine.

On the other hand…

After breaking my little toe, I went to the local clinic’s emergency room, and waited, and waited, and waited, until I finally got to see the resident student doctor. Without hardly acknowledging my presence, he sends me off for x-rays. Thirty minutes later, I’m back in the office, the doc’s still busy studying something obviously much more important than me on his desk. He looks up at the x-rays, “Yep, it’s broken. In two places. Guess that must hurt.”

Me: “Yeah, doc, so, uh, what do I do? What’s the protocol? Will I ever walk again? Why is my entire foot purple? First time for me here, you know.”

Doc: “Buddy tape it to the adjacent toe, and come back if it still hurts in two months.”

Me: “Er, uh… Buddy what? Ok, so let’s talk about what that means. How do I manage with a broken toe? Will this affect my diet? Should I place any weight on it? Can I wear shoes? Can I type? Can I…”

Doc: “That’ll be all. Sheryl will be in a few minutes to buddy tape it before you leave.”

Me: “Uh, hold on.. What about….”

(Doctor leaves the room… Sheryl enters without a word, and starts taping…)

Me: “Hi, Sheryl, first time customer here! :-) … :-( So… uh, what’s the taping strategy? What kind of angle you going for there? Is that special tape? How long between changes? Biodegrable? Washable?…”

(Sheryl finishes and walks out without a word. Must be going to fetch me the broken-toe literature or something.)

(10 minutes pass. Matt opens the door, looks down the hall. Begins to understand nobody’s coming back…)

So there you go. What a difference. While Neal gets a brand new straight finger, I get a little toe that will forever lean to the right from months of being buddy taped. And I didn’t even get pain meds.

Ok, readers, on the agenda tomorrow: my next trip to this same clinic, where I had to undergo “an analysis”.

Technorati Tags: culture, spain