(starting this with a work rant)

Item the first:

Dear NC Education Lottery:

YOU ARE A BIG FAT THROBBING PAIN IN MY BIG FAT HEATHEN ASS.

No love,

AQ

Now, I am all for the lottery–when my home state of North Dakota got one, I knew it was but a matter of time before North Carolina got one too. But for the love of Tyr, it is SUCH a pain in the ass dealing with it–especially at my store, which chain is all et up with the paperwork-mania. As the Germans say (when talking about their governmental bureaucracy), “es ist der Inbegriff von Papierkrieg” (the epitome of red-tape). I mean, fook me in the arse-end sideways with a corn cob–it might be more pleasurable than all the paperwork and crap that I have to deal with because of the frickin’ lottery.

And on top of that, we’re not allowed to touch the “quick pick” buttons on our cute little touch-screen terminals–if a customer wants lottery picks, he’s gotta fill out a sheet…even if he wants a quick-pick. Why?  Because, some of the people that come into our store apparently feel that they just have to fuck with the clerk and ask for a bunch of lottery picks–and then say “I wanted POWER PLAY!  Can’t you listen?”, when they didn’t ask for the Power Play option on their Powerball tickets. So now we make them fill out a playslip–which leads to all kinds of fun, as we get stuff like:

“Can’t you just enter them yourself?  I don’t want to fill this out!”  I’m sorry, but we have to have everyone fill out a playslip.

“Why I gotta fill this out?  I just want quick picks!” Then please mark the “QP” boxes on the sheet.

And, of course, you get the people that fill out their slips WRONG and then don’t want to fix them–they expect you to fix them, even after you explain what they did wrong.

AND THEN…we have the people who come in at like ten minutes to 11 PM (which is when my store’s door locks–and our chain’s stores stop paying on lottery tickets at this time) and expect us to scan and pay out 40 scratch cards that they’ve won with, even though there’s a line of people at the counter already. Do they care?  NO!  They expect you to tell everyone else at the counter who’s trying to get their shit bought and paid for before the doors are locked at 11 to just step off, and do nothing but pay out their winning scratch tickets. If you people think I get mean in this space, just you come into my store at 5 to 11 with a huge-ass stack of winning scratch tickets and tell me to cash them all out in 5 minutes–not even I can do it, and I’m the fastest clerk in the store when it comes to getting lotto stuff processed and paid out.

But my favorite is when the terminal at the store decides that it doesn’t want to connect to the servers at Lotto HQ down on Yonkers Road–and it’s 9:45 PM on a Powerball night, and I have a line of people at the counter with sheafs and sheafs of Powerball playslips in their hands. Fuck you, GTECH, fuck you and your “we’re aware of the problem and our engineers are working on it, thank you have a nice night and don’t call cos I don’t know jack shit about what’s going on” bulldada right in your collective ear. *I* could get a headset on and bullshit callers better than the yobbos you’ve hired–and it’ll have at least some grain of truth to it!

“It seems that a BellSouth work crew decided to be stupid and cut our fiber line out of the building that houses our servers, and we’ve dispatched the Narn Bat Squad to deal with the miscreants, but unfortunately we have no estimated uptime” sounds about 500 times better than “Uhhh, we’re aware of the problem, and our engineers are working on it. Thank you for calling GTECH.” I had to actually tell the dude on the other end of the phone “So you have no idea if the problem is an internal or external network issue, and you have no estimated uptime?” in order to get a straight answer–which is that a BellSouth (or Progress Energy, the guy wasn’t sure which) work crew decided to be stupid and cut the fiber line out of Lotto HQ on Yonkers Road, amd the Narn Bat Squad had been dispatched to deal with the miscreants and get them to repair the damage.

Item the second:

NOW THAT I’M HOME FROM WORK and now that they’re done with that errant work crew, the Narn Bat Squad is being dispatched to gilooly Maxim Afinogenov before the next Buffalo-Carolina game. Love the guy when he’s humiliating Bobby Clarke’s Barely-Mobile Tree Stumps, hate him to smithereens when he pots the game-winner against us. And that’s the whack-ass thing about the Sabres. They’re a great team and I have a feeling that the Buffalo-Carolina games over the rest of the season are going to be some amazing frickin’ hockey. But I’m totally not feeling the love for the fans as a whole (except for Tom L., who is cool). It’s the reverse of how I feel about Washington. Love the fans, hate the whole team except for Alex Ovechkin (well OK, and Olie Kolzig). Go figure. It’s like the ones that are actually secure in their fandom are the rational ones that I can actually talk with–but unfortunately, they’re overshadowed by all the loudmouthed wankstains with a collective case of Small Penis Syndrome.

There. I’m officially done talking/bitching about SabresFan. That line of commentary is now exiled to join a certain unnamed “Sooper Sekrit Inzydar” on the “Don’t know WTF you’re talking about, doesn’t exist” list, and I shall speak of it no more. The horse is dead, I’m trying to keep it from rising as a Revenant, so let’s move on to the game (which I managed to watch part of on the DVR after I got home, before the hubby pitched a bitch and I had to delete it so he could record a re-showing of a Buffy re-run that he’s watched 234892742 times. Fuck you Joss Whedon, fuck you right in your left ear).

Can we trade David Tanabe again?  Please?  Seriously, I don’t want him here anymore. Mike Commodore, on the other hand…keeper. Definite keeper. Thank you, Flames, for giving him to us. This makes up for you bastards breaking my heart (with help from Steve Smith) in 1986. And Chancellor Jasmine Liao (the latest addition to the household) approves of him too, so there you go. Cat approval = good thing.
Thank you also to Nashville for Remo Williams–though I had to do a double-take. Sorry Joe, Lord of Evil got broked, guys. I swear, we didn’t break him before we sent him over the Blue Ridge Mountains to you.

The score aside, it was a goalie deathmatch and a frickin’ coin-toss of a game. I think I got another grey hair or three just watching what little I was able to watch.

Item the third:

There’s a new site I’m adding to Ye Olde Blogrolle: Southeast Shootout. Come for the weather, stay for the hockey (though I am a little disturbed at being compared to G. Gordon Liddy–I mean, the man is amusing in his own fanatical dude-switch-to-decaf-and-drop-the-assault-rifle-before-you-hurt-somebody way, but I’m greatly disappointed (heartbroken, even!) that I apparently don’t have enough Fun to be considered the Hunter S. Thompson of the Caniac Nation).

OK, so it was three things. Sue me.