I just told two different people I'm 40 and it wasn't until I saw my own last post that I remembered, excuse me, I'm 41.

About 2 weeks ago someone told me about a web site called telefonkatalog.no, the Norwegian white pages. She said if you want to find out what realtives you still have in Norway, just put in your Norwegian family name, and look for listings in your ancestral home town, and write a letter to the people listed, and tell them who your great grandmother was, and ask if they're related. I did so, picked two people from the list that displayed, wrote to them ... and just two days ago I got an email from one of them. It said she was the daughter of my grandmother's cousin...and that the other person I'd written to was her own brother! She even knows who my branch of the family is because her parents came to Washington state to visit us when I was a teen ager, although she doesn't seem to remember when I visited them in 1985 and met her and her brother. It was just that easy, I am so excited. I have been able to tell my children that they do have relatives in Norway, I hope to know more of them soon.



That same day, the front desk receptionists handed me a brown padded envelope , mailed to me from our corporate office in Kansas City. I opened it. It was a small metallic lapel pin, and a brief note saying congratulations for winning your second such award, due to a compliment from one of our clients. I was confused. I took it to my manager's office and said why did I get this and why does it say it's my second? She scowled and said, "You weren't supposed to know about this. It was supposed to come to me. I was supposed to present this one and the other one I have for you , in an upcoming all-employee meeting."

"You're not supposed to know about that," and "You werent' supposed to find out about that," are becoming my least favorite phrases in the English language lately. And because I told my 12 year old daughter this incident, she teases me by saying , "You're not supposed to know about that," to me, at every occasion.

I had to write a note to the volunteer coordinator on my way out of my ESL volunteer job last night, and ask that our class room be moved from the pop-machine break room. People just walk in and out the whole 90 minutes, for pop, while we're trying to hold "English Conversation Group." It's so disruptive. Whose idea was that in the first place?

My birthday today. I turned 41.
It was our regular hectic Tuesday family schedule, however.

At work someone brought me a 6-pack of cupcakes, which was awkward because there are 9 people in the department. Luckily, after lunch,when I passed the cupcakes around most people didn't want one. She also put a Happy Birthday mylar balloon on my desk, so everyone walking by came over for a while to say Happy Birthday.

When I was in Colorado the previous week a co worker emailed me and two former co workers and arranged the 4 of us to go out for lunch on my birthday, which was very nice. A few years ago, the 4 of us went out together on each of our birthdays. I missed those guys (ok female guys), so it was great to see them again.

At home, my daughter had guitar lessons 4:30 - 5:00 , my son had Scouts at 7:00 pm, but my husband had to take him, because I teach ESL on Tuesday nights now, 7:00 to 8:30.

My current ESL class is 4 ladies, 2 from Africa and one from Central America, and a 4th one who has yet to show up, I've never met her, but she's officially enrolled. They're all very proficient in English, so the course is officialy "English Conversation" where we can sit around and just talk for 90 minutes, but I need to correct grammer and pronunciation, and I try to introduce new vocabulary.

I always say the immigrant population of New Brighton is entirly different than the ESL students that I used to teach in St Paul before my kids were born. In New Brighton, my students are often wives of foreign-born university professors (as is one of my current students) or recently arrived cousins of familes who have already been in Minnesota for a generation or 2, so they walk right in to mainstream middle class America when they get here. My two students from Africa, both women who must be about 30 years old, complained that their lives in America are much harder because they have to do all their own housework. Back at their parents' houses in Africa, their mothers had servants!

So we had about 90 minutes together as a family that night. Typical Tuesday. I had bought crab at the grocery store, earlier that day, so I made it for myself, along with the chicken patties I made everyone else, for dinner. I'm the only one who likes crab, but I love it! My husband picked up a cake with mini candy bars around the margins of it, yum! And he got me an MTV nostalgia DVD. Looks great, I think I will watch it this week end !

I really do feel like I went from being a "recent college graduate" to being "pre-menopausal" with no in-between part. I guess that's the beauty of an extremely extended adolescence.

Nov 9 I flew to Longmont Colorado for 3 days for work. I don't normally travel for work, or really travel at all except for the occasional driving trip to Green Bay Wisc to visit my in laws every 3 months or so, so I was really nervous about it.

In mid October, I was asked if I would accompany a gay male co worker to Longmont in early November, and be his assistant, as he is very experienced at doing system utilization reviews, and I have only done 2, locally. I agreed.

About a week later, only after agreeing, then I was told, Oh by the way, you'll have to travel together and you'll have to do all the driving, he's had his licence revoked. That would have been good information before I made my decision to say yes, but I still agreed.

He and I agreed on which two days we would do it, leaving the day before coming back the day after. So I scheduled 4 days to be gone.

He and I got together and booked our flight and our hotel and agreed on a car. At that time I found out he'd altered out plans to a day earlier than he and I had agreed on , earlier. He'd even told the client, but he hadn't told me. But I still agreed, and now I thought we were all set.

Then the company re-assigned him that same week to a new more important project, and I was told you may be doing this SUR on your own ! I said OK, but just bear in mind it won't be as thorough, with just one person doing it, because I was still limited to just the 2 days.

Then just about a week before it was time to go, the company assigned me a new companion, who explained she was coming with me even though she was very very busy, so I would be the project leader, and she would be the assistant. She was so upset at our hotel plans she called , herself, and booked us a different hotel. She actually said , " I need more luxury than that, and I need a bar attached." So I ended up calling and cancelling the simpler less expensive hotel my ex partner and I had previously reserved. And our client has to pay more, just because she needs more luxury than that and needs a bar attached, because the client has to pay our expenses.

So she still wants me to do "leadership" of it, but she still wants to control all the details.

Every single one of these changes in plan made me more nervous and angry. I rarely travel and I just needed the stability of knowing for sure what the plans were. I wished I had said I couldn't go.

So Monday morning Nov 7 my husband drove me to the airport. I was so increasingly nervous over the last few days. I haven't flown since I took my 3 year old daughter to Washington State in 1997, and I knew that the airport rules were more strict than they used to be, and that I didn't know what they are. I met my new partner there. I had not eaten since I woke up, because my stomach felt too upset and I didn't want to risk eating. Also I had a huge head ache that stayed with me the entire day.

At the air port it was pretty easy to figure out what to do because I had to stand in line behind other people, and saw what they did. take off your shoes, take your laptop computer out of your shoulder bag, take off your coat, put them in separate bins on the conveyor belt, then put your shoulder bag on the conveyor belt after them. Walk through the metal detector, which I did not set off, and just pick everything up again on the other side. No prob.

Once we were seated on the plane, I felt much better. I felt like I'd finally made it OK.

The flight itself from Minneapolis to Denver was only 90 minutes. It felt like even less.

We took a shuttle van to Enterprise Rent a Car, and found, just as I'd always heard, no they had not reserved the exact car I signed up for. In fact they insisted they didn't have any sedans available at all, only big cars like Jeeps, which I've never driven before and don't intend to, with a passenger, on unfamiliar roads. My headache got worse . I insisted. Finaly yes, they had a Grand Prix in the back. My parnter was appalled. She wanted me to rent a big car . And the Grand Prix was white, and she loudly complained to me and to the rental person, "I hate white!" For gods sake who hates white? What is her problem? Plus, unlike my original partner, she has not had her license revoked, but she says she still wants me to drive. We drive away in our white Grand Prix and she loudly whines, "We're so low. Now I feel like I'm in a coffin!" and a few other things like that , as if to say even if I'm driving she still wanted to pick the car.

I decided I'm traveling with Endora from Bewitched, nothing is good enough for her. And she's about that same age, too.

Before we left Minneapolis, the week before, she said I should still drive and she can navegate. She did bring some map quest maps she's printed off . But later she said, "I hope the car has GPS, because I'm terrible with directions." Now she tells me.

I intended to keep the radio off because I couldn't believe she and I would ever agree on a radio station. But we both agreed on a classic rock radio station . Not my favorie genre, but I don't hate it. So Endora likes to rock out, who knew?

I stop-started all the way out of the parking lot because it had been so long since I'd driven an automatic I forgot you just don't do anything with your left foot. I was resting it on the brake, as if it were the clutch. Once I got that figured out, we drove well north out of Denver, and stopped in Boulder. Boulder has a town square, about 8 blocks square, all pedestrian -only! It was so fun and relaxing, it felt like a college town, which it is. It felt like the one time I visited Madison, Wisc , and like an 8-block-square Grand Avenue, near my old college. It was a very hippie neighborhood, but not just relegated to college age kids. Lots of people of all ages just hanging out, and most if not all of the shops were independent local businesses, which meant there were a lot of craft stores and clothing stores.

I was starving by then, and as much as we would have preferred a local diner, we could only find bars and cafes with very limited menus. So we stopped at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, and now, at about 3:30 I finally ate something for the first time today. I was starved by then, my stomach had settled, and I hoped eating would get rid of my big headache, which it didn't. I had really fresh shrimp spring rolls, which they called Summer rolls on their menu for some reason. Very delicous and so big I couldn't finish it all. One great thing about this trip is that I didn't really worry about how much I was spending for food, in restaurants, because I'm going to receive a per-diem amount for each day, that is way more than I'd ever spend on food. My traveleing companion and I both shared our orders with each other, they were both great, and neither of us could finish. It felt great to relax. We both walked around the whole neighborhood, we had plenty of time.

The bad part of this trip is how much TIME I spent in restaurants, and how big the portions are, and that I'm trying so hard to avoid pop. I think its toxic. And I like it.

I drove further north, and although we did end up hunting and pecking around the entire city of Longmont looking for their Radison hotel, we did eventually find it. Both our rooms had two beds, why did we have to charge the client for two rooms. And neither of them had a bath tub. I was hoping a bath would relieve my head ache. I'll bet the first hotel my old partner and I reserved, I'll be they had a bath tub!

Of course my partner wanted to hit the attached bar right away, so I went with her and broke my non-pop rule as soon as I got there, because I'm weak.

Later that night she and I called each other, on our cell phones, right across the hall from each other, because the TV had menus for pay per view and billable video games, but not for regular free TV. We eventually figured out how to watch free tv, and then we couldn't get the hotel's advertised "wireless" connection to connect us to our home office on our lap tops, got a forced busy when we tried to use the modem-connection jack for that same reason. My partner called a fellow employee at home who walked us through adding a "dial 9 to dial out" 9 to the outgoing phone number.

Our beds were sleep number beds. Over rated. First I laid on it and it felt too hard. Then I pressed the sleep number button to lower the sleep number from 40 to 30 to 25. It just felt like I was laying on a deflating air bed. Softer didn't make it more comfortable. Maybe it made it slightly less uncomfortable. Remind me not to get a Sleep Number bed some day.

We spent the next 2 days eating breakfast at the hospital cafe across the street from our client's office, then meeting with the client for 4 hours, eating too much in a restaurant for lunch, or eating to much order-in lunch, then 4 more hours meeting with the client. It was a good trip, becuase they really do need help over there, and we will be able to make a lot of really good recomendations for them. I think they will be very pleased with the results. Then eating too much at a local Old Chicago for dinner. Endora had such an unbelievably undercooked burger there, that it put both us off our appetites for the next 24 hours. I don't mind rare, but I swear that one was barely thawed!

Our last night there, we were standing outside so my partner could smoke, and my partner said, "I'm so glad you do our System Utilization Reviews now. You know so many details." I stopped her right there! I've done 3, this is my first out of state, but I haven't commited to more. She argued, "You're the only one who can!" Great. I've been Shanghai'd. I almost fainted.

On Thursday morning we drove back the way we came. We had to stay an extra night because there would be no way we could leave the client's office at 5 pm and still make it to Denver for its only evening flight to Minneapolis. But we took a $3.50 toll way everyone told us about. I told Endora I needed to pull over in to the right lane to pay the tolls, but she absolutely insisted that we stay in the left "pass" lane, because it has one big toll booth at the end. But it didn't . The off ramp had no toll booth. I asked about that at the rental car agency. The attendent told us the "pass" lane is for people who have purchased a monthly pass, and that now our rental car was probably photographed, and I would get a fine in the mail! I told my partner you made me not stop at the toll booths. She said why did you listen ? The attendant printed the web site page of the toll lane department.

I went through the whole airport check in process easily because I'd just done it 3 days before and now I knew what to expect. We made it to our gate. I called the toll lane department on my cell phone to explain I am from out of town and did not know about the pass lane. But their phone greeting said they were closed for the holiday! What holiday is Nov 10 ? Nov 11 is Veterans Day, but not Nov 10. Since I normally work in a call center myself, I knew that their phone message was accidentally on a day early, the company was open, business was happening as usual, I would get an expensive ticket, but their call center people were sitting at their desks thinking, " I wonder why the phones aren't ringing?" I thought to myself that's it. If I owe a huge fine and the company won't pay it,I'm never traveling for them again.

I fumed for an hour, sitting there in the Airport. But I tried again later, and someone answered. She agreed they'd had "problems with our phones," earlier that morning. I explained my case and she let me pay the original $3.50 toll , just by yelling my corporate credit card number to her over my cell phone in a crowded airport. I was relieved.

I headed for a nearby gift shop and bought some souveniers for my husband and kids, came back and found everyone had boarded! I was one of the last ones on. The flight back home felt like no time at all. I was lucky my partner had offered to drive me home, so my husband didn't have to pick me up at the same time he needed to pick our kids up at school.

I walked right back in to our family's hectic evening of activities however . My son's school had 1st grade all-class choir concert that night, but my daughter's Scouts had a field trip to see a variety show put on at the local high school at that very same times, and no one else could take my daughter, believe me I asked. So my husband took my son to sing in his concert. I drove my daughter 4 blocks away to her Scouts, but I made it back to my son's school just in time for the first graders including myson to be done singing, and the second graders to come on ! Arg! Luckily both classes had some songs to sing toghether at the end , and I ran up front and took pictures. My son,however, cannot stand still.While the rest of his class stood straight and tall, to sing, my son slowly twirled himself around in slow circles while he sang.

I felt like kissing the ground when I got home. Apparently I'm not the thrill seeking aging punk rock girl I like to think I am. I am a neurotic control freak who doens't like my routine disrupted. I was thrilled to go back to my regular office on Friday and put in a 8 our day getting the phone, in the call center, where I'm familiar with everything.

At work today someone asked us to list our funniest customer service moments, whether we were the customer or the rep, so here is what I listed:


A client once called our department when it was about 2:00 in the afternoon.
The client said, " I need to let you know that at 8:00 this morning we got an error message. I don't remember exactly what it said. It said something about how I should write this message down and call client support immediately."
What was remarkable to us in the client support department is that she was able to correctly remember only two things about that error message, and clearly she hadn't acted on either one.

One of my very first calls I ever got in client support was this.
"The message on the screen says 'If you wish to continue, insert new back up tape and press Y,' I've put in a new tape, and I do want to continue! WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW?"
I thought, wow, this new job is going to be so easy! I almost never got one that easy ever again.

One customer was all upset and out of breath and kept reputing, "I can't get my white stickies on the fly! I can't get my white stickies on the fly."
Clearly this was going to be another case of a clinic with its own unique terminology.
I remembered my old cultural anthropology professor, as I so often do, reminding us, "To get the most information from the informant, don't ask for meaning, ask for use."
So I picked one of the words in this sentence I didn't understand, "What do you use those 'stickies' for?" She answered , "We stick them on laboratory specimens and chart notes. They have the patient's name on them." OK we call them "lab labels" in our department. So, one down.
Then I asked, " And what do you use the fly for?" She answered, "No, no! 'On-the-fly.' I don't get them right away. They usually just print out as soon as I make an appointment!" Now I knew that she was really saying that her lab labels that normally print as soon as the appointment is scheduled, did not print, and I was able to investigate and determine that the printer itself just needed to be restarted. I wonder where that fly is, today? I hope he gots his white stickies.

Back when I was a collector, I neede to call the provider services of various insurance companies all the time. It got to the point where I frequently got the same representataives from the same insurance companies, often enough that we remembered each other, similarly to how many of our clients know each of us now. But I got a lot of complaints from them at first, that I talked to fast, and not clearly enough. So I slowed my speech way down, on the phone, and did my best to enunciate more clearly. One day, later in my career as an insurance collector, I called provider services at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. I introduced myself to the provider services rep, and I heard him cover the phone with his hand and say something to his co workers. I could hear them all laugh. He came back on the line and explained, "I just told everyone I got the 'Time Lady' again. We all know you and we think you sound like the recorded message that tells everyone what time it is. You know, 'At the tone, the time will be eight fifty-two, and ten seconds. Beeeeep.' "
To this day I don’t know how I should have responded. I guess if I'm just a recorded message, I don’t have to reply, do I?

Another provider services rep from another insurance company said she would only answer my question about an unpaid health claim if I could tell her what the name was, of the van that the teen agers always rode around in, on Scooby Doo. It's The Mystery Machine, duh. Who doesn't know that ? She explained that they were having an argument about it in her department, and needed a tie-breaker. And the frustrating thing is that when she turned around and told her co workers my answer, I could still hear some of them disagreeing with me! I started to forget my original business reason for calling , and, on company time, started arguing about a television cartoon. I do have my priorities, you know. I may not know all the fields on a 837A electronic claim fomrat, don't argue with me about 70's TV.

4 more days until I board a plane for Colorado & spend 3 days there, for work. I rarely travel, haven't flown since 1996, and am panicing the closer it gets. I dread airports and airport guards, and driving highways and streets I don't know. And it doensn't help that I've had my travel schedule changed for me, almost daily, for the last 2 weeks. People better not alter their plans for me any further unless it's to call the whole thing off, which I would be perfectly fine with!!!