Thursday, October 30, 2008

"vacation"

What’s the most aggravating day possible? Combine being on hold, doing computer repair, and waiting in line for 3 hours.

My computer’s been on the fritz for 6 months, so I finally took the time to get it fixed. To be fair, I was only on hold for five minutes, then I decided to hang up. I’m a med student, I pay ridiculous sums of money to OSU, they forced me to buy this computer, they can fix it. So I brought it to the library and told them to fix it. At first they thought it would just take a few minutes. Twenty minutes later I decided it wasn’t going to take just a few minutes. So they told me to come back in a couple hours, and I did so. It still wasn’t fixed. So I came back five hours later. It was done, but the guy on staff didn’t know where it was. Eventually we found it, hopefully freezing-free. So far so good.

To be fair, I live a five minute walk from the library, so my combined wasted time for the first project is probably under an hour. My second project for the day (I’m on vacation, so force myself to have projects so I leave my room) was voting. Holy screw people, bring a book when you go to vote. I’m doing cardiology next week, so know there’s a significant chance that I’ll be at the hospital for 12-16 hours on Election Day. So I used my afternoon today to go. And wait. For 3 hours. The good news is that the first half of The Road is pretty good.

Here’s an idea: NOT having to wait for 3 hours to vote. Now I think we can all agree that it would be discriminatory to charge people to vote. But what if we had the option of paying for a shorter line? You show up at your local place of voting and look at the two lines. From there you decide, do I want to wait for 3 hours and vote for free, or do I want to pay twenty dollars and vote in 5 minutes? That’s freedom. And it would raise money. And it would get me back to my room faster.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

proud of you for doing your civic duty. but blaming you if McCain takes your state.
LBSR

Amy-Alisa said...

Trav did not enjoy 'The Road'. If you care. Sounds mighty depressing (and violent and dirty and icky) to me.

Anonymous said...

I am sure you can hire a line waiter on Craigslist. Next time, maybe, or do absentee--that only costs you a stamp.