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There are lots of funny e-mails floating around about “real” 9-1-1 calls. These probably won’t have you ROTFLOL, but I enjoyed it enough to share it.
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the brown House on the corner.
Dispatcher: Do you have an address?
Caller: No, I have on a blouse and slacks, why?
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Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: Someone broke into my house and took a bite out of my ham And cheese sandwich.
Dispatcher: Excuse me?
Caller: I made a ham and cheese sandwich and left it on the kitchen table and when I came back from the bathroom, Someone had taken a bite out of it.
DIspatcher: Was anything else taken?
Caller: No, but this has happened to me before and I’m sick and tired of it!
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is the Nature o f your emergency?
Caller: I’m trying to reach nine eleven but my phone doesn’t have an eleven on it.
Dispatcher: This is nine eleven.
Caller: I thought you just said it was nine-one-one
Dispatcher: Yes, ma’am nine-one-one and nine-eleven are the same thing.
Caller: Honey, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What’s the nature of your emergency?
Caller: My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller: No, you idiot! This is her husband!
And the winner is . . . . . . . . . . (scroll down below the ad to read it)
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Dispatcher: 9-1-1
Caller: Yeah, I’m having trouble breathing. I’m all out of breath. Darn . . . I think I’m going to pass out.
Dispatcher: Sir, where are you calling from?
Caller: I’m at a pay phone. North and Foster.
Dispatcher: Sir, an ambulance is on the way. Are you an asthmatic?
Caller: No
Dispatcher: What were you doing before you started having trouble Breathing?
Caller: Running from the Police.
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Thank you all for participating in the inaugural edition of The Carnival of Thoughtful Consideration! There are some wonderful submissions, and I look forward to learning from you through your posts.
Within each category I’ve listed the submissions in order based on which arrived first. Enjoy!
First the financial-related submissions:
Budgets and Saving
Credit and Debt
Education
Jobs, Employment, and Income
Misc. Investing
Net Worth
Personal Finance
Retirement
- makingourway presents Dealing with employer 401k contribution limitations posted at makingourway saying “This is an examination of a challenging situation: my employer has 401k contribution limitations that will prevent me from maxing out my 2006 contribution. I have identified an alternative approach to contribute the annual maximum.”
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And the non-financial related:
Blogging
Digital Photography
Language
Math and Science
Misc. Humor
Organization
Personal Development
Relationships and Parenting
Technology and Software
Book Reviews
Please be sure to participate in the future editions of The Carnival of Thoughtful Consideration through BlogCarnival.com by submitting your posts with the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.
Word Press is a great piece of software, and overall I’m very pleased with it. Those who want to setup a blog can do so with as little or as much involvement as they desire on the coding side of things. Unfortunately, it has a funny bug that leaves (or adds) little pieces of HTML code in a post, and that ends up affecting the rest of the content on the blog.
Though I am placing the blame with Word Press, it may actually lie in TinyMCE the JavaScript editor built into Word Press, or the combination of plug-ins that I have installed. Whatever the cause, I often have to clean up the HTML code in the post in order to keep ThoughtfulConsideration.com looking the way it should.
Generally speaking, the offending code is a “strong /” tag (my Code Escape plug-in isn’t working correctly, or I’d have just written the HTML tag) though it will often mix in an empty pair paragraph tags just to mix it up a little bit. Without a good tool, it could take quite a while to try to identify where the problem is.
Luckily, I came across a great editor. It’s wonderfully functional, and best of all, it’s free! PSPad from PSPad.com will allow you to edit a wide variety of file types, and like virtually every other editor, uses colors to highlight reserved words and code to make editing easier. None of that knocks your socks off, right?
Well, it has a couple of features that are especially helpful for resolving the kind of problem that I’m having with Word Press, and here’s how I use it:
- In Word Press, open the post that’s causing the problem and hit the HTML button to view the code.
- Cut the code from the browser window.
- Open PSPad and create a new HTML file.
- Highlight the auto-inserted HTML code (in order to replace it), and paste the code cut from Word Press.
- On the menu bar at the top, click HTML –> Reformat HTML Code to make it look nicer and make it easier to edit.
- Click HTML –> Check HTML Code (or CTRL + F10) to have it look for problems.
- A new pane will appear at the bottom of the window with a list of the problems that it found. Sometimes the messages are a little cryptic, but usually you can figure out what needs to be corrected, especially since it references line numbers.
- After correcting the problems, click HTML –> Check HTML Code again to make sure that everything is copacetic.
- Copy the code back into Word Press’s HTML window and hit the Update button.
Thank heavens for technology that helps solve the shortcomings of other technology!
Question(s) of the day:
What is the biggest problem that you have faced with your blogging software? Have you really delved into any of the code in order to correct a bug or create new functionality?
Silicon Valley Blogger (AKA Curly Tree) at TheDigeratiLife.com tagged me along with several other bloggers including Steve at Steve-Olson.com, Frugal at My First Million At 33, Henry at Binary Dollar, and The Sun from The Sun’s Financial Diary.
I’m new enough to the blogosphere that I had to ask her what that meant . . .
- Here’s a boring one that is nonetheless true: there’s a pile of 8-10 personal finance-related books that I desperately want to read but haven’t been able to make time for yet.
- I had long hair in high school. During two years I spent in the Dominican Republic, I sometimes showed people a picture of me just before I cut my hair. One of my buddies got a kick out of telling people that it was actually my sister. On more than one occasion the response was, “No offense, but you’ve got a really ugly sister!”
- One spring during college I was the Easter bunny at the local mall. It was really hot and scratchy, but it paid better than my job on campus in the computer labs.
- ThoughtfulConsideration.com was made possible by a car accident a few months ago that I’m still recovering from. I would never have found the time to get it going otherwise, and on the other side of things, my recovery has been better because of it.
- My 1989 Toyota Camry (that was totaled when the guy pulled out in front of me on his red light) had more than 280,000 miles on it and still had more life in it. In fact, we didn’t even get the car until it was lightly broken in at 175,000 miles! I do a fair amount of my own car repairs, and had personally (and single-handedly) replaced a variety of components including the clutch and front axles.
One more thing about me is that I’m with Henry at Binary Dollar, “I love the idea of starting a company but I’m too scared to do it.”
I’m tagging:
- David at HowDoPeopleGetRich.com
- Derrich at Derrich.com
- Angel Chen at TheUsefulBlog.com
- Robyn Tippins at SleepyBlogger.com (thought I’m voting her least likely to respond because she’s so busy!)
- Halli at TrishAndHalli.com
The men’s organization that I belong to asked me to draft a newsletter that would include some basic elements including a message, upcoming calendar events, and other miscellaneous content. The requirements were originally fairly simple, but I wanted to come up with something that was visually appealing and that desire converted the 60-minute exercise into a task that occupied me for the better part of that evening.
Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I started by browsing Microsoft’s extensive online collection of newsletter templates. They have some great material and I eventually narrowed it down to a few finalists from which I selected my favorite. It was originally designed as a family Christmas update that you might send out to your friends with pictures of the kids.
I thought that I’d be printing separate mailing labels and using an envelope, but the newsletter’s design pleasantly surprised me. It was two pages long, front and back, and was intended to be folded into thirds as if you were going to mail it in an envelope. The cool part was that when folded, the newsletter included sender and recipient addresses and a place for a stamp. A simple Microsoft Word mail merge would yield a complete document that needed folding, a sticker (to hold it shut), and a stamp.
No problems, right? Everything was working out better than I had originally hoped. Perhaps that’s what contributed to my willingness to broaden my goals for the project.
Part of the design included beautiful, colorful pictures, so I replaced them with my own. It had space for the content that I had intended to include, so I quickly filled those. Unfortunately, it also had “extra” space for which I had no content (scope creep #1) and I felt obligated to generate additional content because the design looked funny with large blank spaces.
The template had really cool snowflake “water marks” (by which I mean light gray shapes that subtly contributed to the look) strewn randomly across the two pages and it seemed reasonable to replace them (scope creep #2) with a figure that was more relevant to the newsletter’s new purpose. A couple of hours later I had closely approximated the original look with my new shape, but the result was a little underwhelming.
Combine the sub-par end product with all the extra time I had unintentionally spent, and it’s easy to see why I was fairly frustrated. I will still submit the draft to the other leaders in the organization, but with significantly less pride than I had originally envisioned.
Given the description I’ve provided here, it’s pretty easy to derive some useful lessons from my experience. Part of what I find fulfilling in writing on ThoughtfulConsideration.com is the opportunity to think through things for my personal benefit, so you’ll excuse my stating the obvious (and not perceive my attitude as condescending).
When I work on (even small) projects in the future, I expect to:
- More carefully establish and manage scope creep
- Determine in advance how much time I’m willing to dedicate
- Minimize the influence of pride and/or other emotions with regard to setting lofty goals
- Rather than go way overboard, settle on a workable solution that still addresses the critical needs of the project
Question(s) of the day:
Have you ever spent way too much time on a project that didn’t deserve such attention? How do you keep that from happening all the time?
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Investing Opportunities
Misc. Finance Related
Money/Finance Blogs
Online Calculators
Saving Money
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