Uncle Biek

Bas and I had planned on going to Utrecht to some old-timer exchange today so I went out to get some cash from an ATM last night. Those cash machines are more common every day but you never know if a hall like that has one so to be sure it’s good to carry some cash around.

After the usual procedure of entering the code, choosing the amount and way you want receive it from the machine, the bank card comes out and you wait until that thing has counted the money after which it hands it to you. Or so it should.

This time around it did all the usual things right up to the part where it was supposed to hand me the money. ‘There has been an error’ it said on the screen, ‘please contact your bank and note down the ATM number’. Ah, just my luck. You would think I have had my fair share of hardware failures over the past period but no, wrong again, there’s always room for one more …

So I called the bank, which answered in a record three rings so that was good, and explained the situation:

‘Oh‘, said the friendly voice on the other side, ‘it happens from time to time. You have nothing to worry about though sir, the machine can tell it hasn’t given the money out and it will be refunded to your account before you get home.’

‘So can I try again just now?’ I asked a bit reluctant.

‘That shouldn’t be a problem, unless the screen still has an error message on it.’

‘Ok, I’ll give it a try then. Thanks.’

‘This may not be the best of times to ask you this sir, but I see that we’re not having you listed for having travel insurance. Did you ever consider having it with us?‘

I was a bit astonished. I phoned them to tell about my ATM problem and now they wanted to use my phone minutes to ask me about insurance? What’s the world coming to I wonder …

‘Well to tell you the truth miss, I haven’t even considered travel insurance at all since I’m lucky to even get out of this state from time to time, let alone leave the entire country. But should the opportunity present itself I promise you you’ll be among the first I’ll call.’

‘Thank you sir, I appreciate that.’

‘No problem, good night.’

After I hung up I tried that ATM again and just like the lady had predicted it worked nicely and handed me my money. When I got home I checked my account directly and, again like she had told me, the refund was there already, it had been booked mere seconds after the withdrawal had taken place.

My my. Yesterday evening when I had that Amazon ‘issue’ I though I was just getting old and that it was part of that process. But today during lunch I experienced something that made me feel even older. A lot even.

Somehow my colleagues and me came to talk about old TV shows and how they were re-run every now and then. Marco and I started naming a few, having fun with the memories that came back when hearing those names. Titles like ‘The Man from Uncle’, ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Shaft’, ‘Starsky and Hutch’ and even ‘The Thunderbirds’ passed by before we came to ‘Kojak’.

Upon mentioning Kojak, my younger colleague across the table from me looked at me, raising his shoulders. ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Kojak. You know, good ol’ Telly. Bald guy, lollipop, cool punch lines, chasing bad guys all over the US. Kojak!’ ‘He honestly had never heard of that name. I even showed him the guy on Wiki when we came back, but that still didn’t ring a bell.

As it turns out the series were aired until nineteen seventy eight, he was born in eighty two, and somehow missed it all together. It’s little discussions like these that make you feel old. He said he’s not that young because he is twenty five now, but us ‘old people’ can remember what we did twenty five years ago.

Sigh …

As you all probably know I’m the (almost) new owner of an absolutely beautiful Volvo P121 ‘Amazon’. So yesterday evening I was lurking around on the net a bit, looking for all sorts of information I could find about that car. Dad had kind of made it clear that he figured that I needed to know a more about that car than I do, now that I’ll have one pretty soon again, and I’m an easy going guy so … I started reading.

While doing so I first found all sorts of cool but loose fragments of information but then stumbled onto a large group of links all pointing to one website. It were a lot of links to books and even DVD’s from what I understood from the Google search results so I was really exited. Even more so because it seemed I had found a website specifically for my model car: www.amazon.com. I mean, how cool is that?

Before I continue I feel I should explain something. My favored browser is Firefox and mainly because they understood from the very beginning how tabbed browsing should work. My usual action is that I start a search by asking my good friend Google his opinion on something and they center-click all found links so they open in separate tabs. And when the tab bar fills up a bit I start reading the found pages and keep the ones I like.

So when I had filled my bar with the pages I wanted to read I switched to the first tab and looked at what I had found. It took me about three to four seconds to realize that I have been fooled big time. It’s a good thing I didn’t do this in public because these are the typical things you’ll then be reminded of at birthday parties, social get-togethers and other meetings.

As you may have figured out on your own by now, the website I found is the worlds largest webshop: Amazon.com. And yes, they have books, CD’s, DVD’s and lots more. And possibly even some material on my Volvo, but I didn’t bother checking yet.

Only one word sums up the moment nicely: ‘Doh!’ (originally by Homer Simpson ;-) Man I felt silly. They say love makes blind but this blind!? Come on!

Anyway, you may laugh now if you want and I might even join in. :-)

My mom and Babs must have teamed up to get me outside a bit more and take in more fresh air. I found myself wondering around outdoors a few times for her (Babs) today and I’m still wondering how I got tricked into that, especially considering the fact that she wasn’t even in the office! She must have found a weak spot somewhere and didn’t tell me. I’ll check her desk for kryptonite tomorrow, that’s for sure. ;-)

Well that was an easy weekend; I didn’t have to do a thing to have it go by virtually unnoticed.

My head was pretty busy though, since it has been with my future Volvo just about the entire weekend. I still can only half believe it that I’ll be driving that beauty within a few weeks. I owe my dad a huge thanks for letting me buy her from him, without that I would probably be looking for a simple thing that would get me from A to B without breaking down.

Thanks dad!

Tomorrow I’ll be wrapping up things with Brunel and Wednesday is contract signing day at Quipment already so this week things will be put in black and white. When this week is over all that’s left is the countdown to the thirty first of March.

Speaking of that countdown by the way … I caught myself realizing that I wasn’t thinking so much of a countdown, but rather that the time until the end of the month was going pretty fast. As opposed to what you usually hear people saying about countdowns like these, being that time seems to get to a halt when the last few weeks are in progress. I really think I’ll be missing this place and the people I’m working with here at Philips. Let’s make these last few weeks a few good ones.