Nowhere in the painstakingly compiled government manuals on the subject have I seen it written that jackhammers operate
best or
most safely at the butt-crack of dawn. But the City of Cambridge appears committed to proceeding on that intuition, and the sounds of exploding street dug into my skull at exactly 7:15 a.m. today.
Down the road in Allston, Volkswagen mechanics would spend most of the morning plotting my demise (
i.e., piecing together a labor-and-parts estimate to set right the car they "fixed" last week). Approximately fourteen seconds after I approved the work, they called back to report that the car is ready -- they are apparently growing ever defter at the "Arthur Fonzarelli" approach to car repair, which entails little more than a gentle but authoritative
bump of the chassis with an elbow. That'll be $760, please.
Here at work I read about bomb threats to the building (delivered with the now
de rigeur white-powder attention grabber) and try to process assurances on the internal website that
THE SYSTEM IS WORKING NORMALLY TODAY.
I guess I'll be taking my beginning-of-week issues to the Help Desk now.
