Saturday, April 30, 2016

Entry 331: At Least Lie to Us

S and I had a strange interaction with some friends of ours this week – or, more accurately, we had a strange lack of an interaction.  Some back story: A few summers ago, we went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina with two families.  True Crocodile DG aficionados will remember me blogging about the trip and bitching about a speeding ticket I got on the way back (such a racket!).  At first I didn’t want to go, but S did, and it caused a fight, but ultimately we went, and I was mostly on the wrong side of the fight in this one – we had a blast.  So this year the three families made plans to go again.  There were a few rounds of emails about dates and logistics and all that, and it was left at a point where one of our friends, B, was going to find us a house and get back to us.  So we waited… and waited… and waited… and then a few weeks ago I asked S about it (she’s better friends with this crowd than I am), and she tells me that she hasn’t heard anything, but she’s assuming the trip is off because B got pregnant.  OK.  I shrug my shoulders and forget about it.

But then a few days ago, S ran into her friend from the other couple, and she said that they are going.  And then she told S about how it caused a big tiff because they were originally supposed to go on one date, but B and her family couldn’t do it that week, so she booked the house for the prior week, but Sa (the woman talking to S) has a conference that week, so she can’t go.  Now, B and her family might be stuck with the entire house that week, which means their costs are doubled, and so she is apparently upset with Sa, and the two families are kinda in a fight or something like that.  The details are a little hazy, as I got the story second-hand, and Sa is obviously only telling her side of things (if we asked B what happened, she might have a different take).  But one thing is for certain: We never got brought in to the loop on any of this.  I have no idea why, and S thought it would be too awkward to ask Sa abou it point blank.

At first I didn’t care in the slightest.  If we’re not invited somewhere – so what?  Our friends could have all sorts of legitimate reasons they wouldn’t want us come.  We have all sorts of reasons we don’t invite certain people to certain things.  That’s just how things go.  It’s not a big deal, and it’s nothing to get mad about.  But then as we looked back over the email chain, I started to get genuinely piqued.  Because, the thing is, we were invited.  B sent an email expressly inviting us and discussing possible dates.  S replied to it.  There was a back-and-forth.  There was no gray area.  We said, yes, we would like to come, and then we just never heard anything.  We got totally left in the lurch.


Now, given that everything got messed up and the two families are in a tiff, it’s probably for the best we got left out.  However, all that happened after we got dissed.  There was initially a coordinated plan by the other two families on the date and the rental house and all that, and we weren’t a part of that conversation – no emails, no texts, no nothing.  It is very strange.  It would be one thing if it was just like a “oh hey, we should go to the beach again sometime” type of thing, and then we never heard back, but that wasn’t it.  We were way past the casually-flake-out stage.  It’s like, if you don’t want us to come, just tell us that, or if that's too awkward, make something up.  I feel exactly like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm when (he thought) Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen were snubbing him and his wife Cheryl, by inviting them to a concert and then not following through on it.
Larry: What kind of people invite you to go to a concert and then they don't call you? It's 4:30 p.m.
Cheryl: Maybe we should call them.
Larry: Do you know how awkward that is? They know they invited us to the concert.  They're obviously deliberately not calling.  How could I call them up and go, "We're waiting for your call."  And then they'll say, "Well, we don't want to go with you." At least lie to us.
Cheryl: Right, something.
Larry: Call us and lie.  Don't let us sit here like schmucks.
Cheryl: Yeah.
Larry: A lie is a gesture, it's a courtesy.  It's a little respect.
Exactly.  A lie is a little respect.

Now, to be fair, that’s probably not it.  Like Larry David, I am probably mistaken.  Our friends are actually really kind and giving people, so I’m probably assuming the worst.  There probably was an honest mistake, and they got it in their heads that we didn’t want to or couldn’t go or something.  But I don’t know how that happened.  They should know they invited us to the beach -- it's all recorded in Gmail and everything.

Also, it is doubly bad, because we kinda still want to go, but we don’t want to do it the same week as they will be there, because then things could get really awkward.  (If life actually was a Curb episode, we would go and then run into them there.)  But we don’t know exactly when they are going, and the two weeks they probably will go just so happen to be the best two weeks for us as well.  So I think we will probably just do something else altogether -- take the kids to Sesame Place or something like that.  I could do without that long drive, anyway.  I mean, the beach is fun and all, but we might go with my family when we are back in the Sea-Tac region in August.  Sure, it will probably be 55 degrees and overcast, and we will have to dodge pickup trucks because Washington state allows cars on the beach for some reason, but at least we will be with family, so we don’t have to worry about getting left in the lurch.  That’s the beauty of family: They have to tolerate you whether they want to or not.

OK, that's it.  Until next time...

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Entry 330: Now It's Conjunctivitis

I’ve always liked the term conjunctivitis.  It don’t know why; it just sounds cool.  The disease itself... not so much.  I’ve gotten it a few times, and it sucks.  The worst was on a red-eye (ironically) from Seattle to DC.  I feel asleep – like full-on R.E.M. asleep, a rarity for me on a flight – and when I woke up I couldn’t see.  Both eyes were crusted closed, and I was completely discombobulated.  It was as if I had been unfrozen from carbonite.  Eventually I figured out what was going on and where I was, which was unfortunate, because, although I was not in Jabba’s palace on Tatooine*, I was on an airplane somewhere over Mid-America.  This meant I had to sit there and do nothing for three more hours before I could even attempt to contact a doctor.  Also, I had to avoid freaking everybody out in my row with my pus-oozing eyeballs.  Luckily, I had one of those sleep masks, so I put it on for the rest of the flight, even though I couldn’t fall back asleep.


At the time I had a lousy health insurance plan under Kaiser Permanente, and if I went anywhere but this one Kaiser clinic I got hit with out-of-network fees, so I drove straight to the clinic from the airport, even though they don’t take walk-ins.  The not-at-all-friendly woman at the desk said I would need to make an appointment, and they didn’t have anything open until the next day.  I pleaded with her for a few minutes (she could clearly see I needed help), and then she did something people in her position often do that I don’t understand: She got me what I wanted, but she kept me in suspense about it.  It's like she felt obligated to help me, but she still wanted to deny me the satisfaction of being helped.  She told me to sit down, and she would see what she could do -- all with an attitude as if I had infected my eyes intentionally for the sole purpose of slightly inconveniencing her.  Then she made arrangements to get me in – I could see her talking to people and marking stuff on her calendar – but she never told me that that’s what she was doing.  So I just sat there for about a half-hour and then a nurse called my name, and I got to see the doctor.  The receptionist didn’t say another word to me.  I spent, literally, fewer than five minutes with the doctor; she came in shined that little light in my eye, said, “you’ve got conjunctivitis,” wrote me a scrip, and sent me on my way.  It cleared up in a few days with the medication.

But this time I’m not the one with the affliction; it’s my son Lil’ S1.  They pulled him out of school on Wednesday because his eye was red and itchy, and I had to get him and take him to the doctor.  It was an equally brief session with the doctor, but the receptionist was much more pleasant.  Pinkeye is not a terrible malady, in that it typically goes away pretty quickly with antibiotics, and the afflicted party is no longer contagious after a few days of treatment, but in other ways it is quite annoying – especially for a three-year-old.

For one thing, it is highly contagious before the antibiotics go to work, so we were constantly slathering Lil’ S1 with hand sanitizer and washing our own hands and making sure not to rub our eyes.  And we had to keep him away from his baby brother, which was also quite annoying.  For another thing, the medication comes in drop form, and getting a three-year-old to let you put a drop in his eye is not the easiest thing in the world.  The natural reaction is to close your eye and fight it to the bitter end, so you either have to do a "sneak attack," which is not ideal because in your haste you are likely to miss with the drop, or you have to hold him down and pry his eye open, which also is not ideal because it's really difficult to do, and because he acts like he's being waterboarded while it is going on.  But we've been able to get them in somehow thus far, and it seems to be clearing up.

In other news, Prince died, as I'm sure you heard.  I never completely "got" Prince.  I mean, I get that he was influential -- as I read on FaceBook "Prince gave black people permission to be weird," which is very cool -- but I never really got his music, at least not like everybody else apparently did.  Anytime a celebrity dies we have a tendency to lionize them and overstate the impact of their work, but with Prince it feels different.  I think everybody genuinely loved him.  I've heard the word "genius" used more times in the past few two days than I had in the entire year before that.  When David Bowie died it was a pretty big deal, but not like this.  Immediately after the news broke, I went on FaceBook and 19 of the first 20 posts in my feed were about Prince.  That is nuts.

[On his podcast "The Gist", Mike Pesca brought up a funny point: Prince is more famous than any actual prince.]

I liked Prince's style and creativity, but I thought his music was just kinda "yeah, it's pop" pop.  I never got what distinguished it from that of any other contemporary pop artist.  Everybody is talking about what a great guitarist he was, and that could very well be true, but a lot of his songs don't even sound guitar-y -- they sound synthpoppy, especially his '80s stuff that put him on the map.  I do like some of his songs though.  I actually really like "Cream," which for some reason I think real fans would tell me is minor Prince... oh well.  His music is fun to dance to, as well.



Anyway, I'm not trying to speak ill of somebody who just passed, or be an annoying contrarian, or anything like that.  I'm just giving you my honest opinion on the matter, which seems appropriate since the sole purpose of this blog is for me to opine on whatever I feel like opining about.  Prince was important to a lot of people, and he was still relatively young and making new music and trying new things and finding new ways to be weird and interesting.  We need more, not fewer, people like that in the world.  R.I.P.

And with that... Until next time...

*You will have to excuse the Star Wars references.  We just watched Return of the Jedi with Lil’ S1 – or tried to anyway.  He couldn’t really follow what was going on, so unless there was an active fight in progress, he started getting bored.  Eventually he started asking to watch something else (“I wanna watch Dinosaur King”), so we turned it off.  It also didn’t help that S kept trying to shield his eyes during the particularly violent parts (and she was the one who wanted to put it one for him in the first place), but he wasn’t the least bit scared.  I guess that’s one of the good things about not understanding it.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Entry 329: Night Out

Feeling groggy today.  My good friend DK was in town for a work conference this week, and we went out last night.  Actually, as it so happened, some other friends of mine were having a joint birthday party at a bar here in DC, so S and I were planning on going out anyway, and so DK came along with us.  It was definitely a we-are-all-almost-40 party; it started at 6 p.m. and only went to 9 p.m. because so many people have kids now.  S didn't even make it to the end.  She bailed about 8 and then DK and I went out for a "night cap" afterward.  We also had to get a late night snack.  We both ate dinner at the bar, but it was one of those trendy places that sell super overpriced, small meals, and everything on the menu sounds super pretentious -- like they sell a hamburger, but it comes topped with gruyere cheese and bone marrow.  I order a "fancified" rib eye steak, and it was actually quite good (my tongue doesn't discriminate against pretension), but the portions were tiny, so afterward we had to go to a sports bar in my old stamping grounds and get some buffalo wings.

Both of us are well past our drinking primes, so it was actually a pretty mellow night.  (On the major plus side, I only feel kinda groggy this morning instead of incredibly hung over.)  Also, I was super tired last night; Saturday is S's sleep-in day, so I had been up with Lil' S1 since 6:30 a.m.  At one point toward the end of the night, we were debating about whether or not we should get a last beer and wisely decided against it.  I went to the bathroom, and on the way back got us a couple glasses of water, and said, "C'mon man, we can't wimp out so early, I got us another round!"  And DK let out an exacerbated sigh and gave me a side-eye look before realizing it was just water, and then he said, "Oh yes!  This is perfect.  Just what I wanted."  That's where we are at in life: Excited by water.

But even if we can't throw down like we could in our twenties, it is still great to get together.  We've known each other since preschool (literally) and have been good friends since high school.  We went to different colleges and often lived in different parts of the country, but we always managed to keep in touch and hang out over the summer and whatnot.  He lives in Connecticut now and has two young kids, so we are at very similar stages in life.  And both of us are on the other side of the country from our "home," so although I hadn't seen him in years, we've had a lot of parallel experiences.  Plus, he lives very close to his in-laws, and I currently live with my in-laws (or maybe it's more accurate to say they live with us), so there is never a shortage of relatable tales to tell about our current lives.  And when there isn't we can always reminisce about the "good old days," which weren't actually especially good; it's just that you tend not to remember the bad days.  Nostalgia is bullshit.


In other news, Lil' S2 has made some big breakthroughs of late.  He can full-on crawl now, and he can stand up if he has something to grab onto.  If he keeps up this pace he is going to be walking much earlier than average kid -- but that's a big if.  Kids develop at their own (nonlinear) pace, so you never know when the milestones are going to occur.

Actually, that's all people, not just kids.  My twenty-year high school reunion is coming up this summer.  I won't be able to make it, because I already have plans that weekend (and it doesn't really fit in with our summer travel plans anyway).  But I'm on the FaceBook thread for it, so I've been looking through people's profiles, and is quite interesting to see how everybody aged -- who has kids, who's single, who has what job, who's political (right and left), who's gay, who's balding (check), who's going gray, who got chubby, etc.  Now it's FaceBook, so of course you are not getting an accurate portrayal -- nobody puts up posts about what a fat loser they are (actually, one of my old classmates does that, but she's trying to funny, which she is), but you can still kinda puzzle it together.  And it's really interesting to think about what people were like in high school, grade school even compared to what they are like today.

Alright, I'm going to have to end this entry pretty abruptly.  Lil' S1 is getting up from his nap, and he will mostly definitely demand my attention.

Until next time...

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Entry 328: Phonies and Fakers

Time for everybody's favorite segment of this blog: Health Update!

(Don't worry I'll be brief.)

I'm continuing to rehab my bum shoulder.  It's still nagging at me.  It's extremely frustrating, but so far I've been good about not letting my frustration get the better of me.  That's partly why it hurts in the first place.  When I first noticed it, I had just gotten into a good exercise routine and was so annoyed by the thought of an injury stopping me that I just pretended like it wasn't there.  I didn't alter my routine and kept putting pressure on my shoulder even though it hurt.  That was very stupid and it surely made it worse.  Had I just babied it for a few weeks or a few months -- whatever it took.  It probably would be better now.  But I didn't.  So now I get to spend five hours of should-be free time and $60 in co-payments every week at physical therapy.  That's my punishment.

Today, however, I tried a new thing -- dry needling -- to relieve some of the tightness in my shoulder, as the therapist is convinced that taut muscles are a big part of my discomfort.  (She's funny; she's like 24 years old and was pressuring me to do it without acting like she was pressuring me, so all here conversations started like, "Hey, have you read that material I gave you on dry needling?  Because it's totally up to you, but what I was thinking was if you want to give it a try then it might be a good idea -- no pressure or anything -- totally up to you, but if you wanted to -- it's your choice...")  I think it worked.  I would sum up dry needling thus: It's much less fun than dry humping, but much more satisfying.

I was hesitant to try it, because it's a lot like acupuncture, and acupuncture kinda seems like bullshit to me, but as I said the therapist was really pushing for it, so I agreed, and I must admit, my shoulder felt a lot better when it was over.  It might be the placebo effect, but I'm a firm believer in the efficacy of the placebo effect, so that's totally cool with me.  And actually I don't not believe in acupuncture, per se, I just find the people who are pushing it are also the people who will tell you all about "toxins" and how bad GMOs are and how Western medicine is all just a giant scam to enrich the pharmaceutical industry.  But I'm basing this entirely off three people who post on FaceBook, so it's not exactly a huge sample.  And even if this is an accurate portrayal of acupuncture believers, I shouldn't be dismissive of a message just because I find the messenger annoying.  I did that with yoga, and now I love yoga.  Maybe it will be the same with dry needling.

Anyway...

[Rosie Ruiz was the winner of the 1980 Boston Marathon -- until it was revealed that she probably rode public transportation for a long portion of it.  I thought it was funny that one reason people suspected she was a phony is that her legs were too flabby to be a world-class runner.  Yeah, check out those thunder-thighs!  (That's sarcasm, by the way.)] 

I've been really into stories of plagiarists and phonies of late.  It started with the crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal a few weeks ago (broken down nicely into layman's terms by Matt Gaffney in Slate).  That one hit really close to home.  Every time I make a crossword puzzle, I search all the online databases to make sure as best I can that nobody else has done something similar.  It's funny too because when I get what I think is a good idea, my first impulse is "somebody else must have done this already."  And then if I find out nobody has, which is frequently the case, my next thought is, "I have to do this as soon as possible before somebody scoops me."  So I rush through it, which is almost certainly unnecessary, because everybody else as their own thoughts that they are thinking and they probably aren't the same as mine.  But apparently I'm not the only person who does this.  I heard an interview with Larry David, and he said this happened to him when he came up with the "survivor" joke, so it happens really successful people too.  (When I was linking to that YouTube clip, I also watched this one, which is hilarious.  I didn't even realize it was Bob Odenkirk the first time I saw it.  Warning: very NSFW.)

Then I came across this FiveThirtyEight story about a researcher named David Brockman who was trying to replicate a groundbreaking social science study by a different researcher named Michael Lacour, but instead he (Brockman) came to the conclusion that Lacour's data was fraudulently generated.  I found this very interesting, in part because I heard about the original study on an episode of This American Life (the study was about the effectiveness of changing people's minds about gay rights issue by having gay people talk to them one-on-one), but also in part because, like with the Crossword puzzle story, it hit close to home.

[Remember Jayson Blair?  He was that New York Times writer who was fired for making a bunch of shit up.]

I spent about a decade of my life in postgraduate programs.  I've published a half dozen or so academic papers and written a dissertation that is over 1,000 pages with all the data included.  I totally get the impulse to falsify your results.  It's very stressful when you can't get your experiments (or in my case algorithms) to do what you want them to do.  It does cross your mind, frequently, how easy it would be to message things -- just a little bit.  But it's really only easy in the short term.  That's the thing about cooking the books: Not only is it unethical, but it is also difficult and stressful in the long-run.  I've never done it, but I did accidentally transpose two digits in an input datum in my thesis work (like instead of being 123.76 it was 123.67), and this gave me a result something like 0.01% better than I should have gotten.  It's a minuscule difference, and still a random researcher from a different university noticed it and contacted me about it!  Now, it was obviously an honest mistake (the rest of my data backed this up) and a tiny one at that -- the equivalent of a typo in a novel -- but it was still upsetting and embarrassing.  I can't imagine trying to carry on with the burden of knowing that your crowning achievement is total bullshit.  How could you carry on with your normal life?  Wouldn't the worry that somebody is going to expose you, consume all your thoughts and take over your life?  It would for me.  And likely for good reason.  People are smart.  Somebody probably will expose you eventually.

And the ironic thing about this guy Lacour's study is that it probably would have been an interesting and meaningful study even if he did it honestly.  Maybe Ira Glass isn't talking about it, but it sounds as if he did develop some intriguing methods and ideas about the effectiveness of persuasion by canvassing.  If he plays it straight, he probably gets respect and citations within his field.  Instead his reputation has irreparably marred.

Which brings me to my final topic: Jonah Lehrer.  This story is four years old, but somehow I just stumbled onto it in the last few days.  Actually I know how: I heard Jon Ronson, author of the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed on a podcast, and he writes in depth about Lehrer.  If you don't know Lehrer's story, the short of it is that he was a wunderkind science writer, who wrote three best-sellers, and then it was discovered that he had fabricated/plagiarized a bunch of stuff and so the publishers withdrew two of them.  Once this came to light -- over falsified Bob Dylan quotes of all things -- he had an incredibly hard fall from grace.  Ronson makes the point in his book that we were too hard on Lehrer -- too torch-and-pitchforky.  But this piece in Slate by Daniel Engbar says the opposite.  And after reading it, I staunchly agree with Engbar.  (To be fair, I haven't read Ronson's passages on Lehrer in full.)

[Mike Daisey made up a story about going to an Apple factory in China, and then presented it as if it was real.]

Anyway, I have a lot more thoughts on this.  But my time is just about out, and there is no point rehashing an old story that others can speak to more informatively and eloquently than me anyway.  But I do recommend reading the stories about Lehrer to which I linked above.  Those links have other links, and it's a pretty interesting rabbit hole to venture down, if you, like me, missed it the first go-round.

Alright, I have to go.  But before I do, in the interest of full disclosure, here is a disclaimer the legal team here at Crocodile DG asked me to put up.
This blog is for entertainment purposes only.  It is not meant to be a completely accurate historical account.  Sometimes the author quotes things verbatim that he could not possibly remember exactly.  Sometimes he omits boring details and otherwise modifies the timeline of an event so that it makes a smoother narrative.  Sometimes he writes things that are untrue to be funny.  (If you don't have a good sense of humor, you might believe it literally.)  It is even possible the author occasionally misremembers things, but it is unlikely, being that he can still tell you off the top of his head how many home runs John Kruk hit in 1987 (20 -- bang!).  As the author is fond of saying: "Everything on this blog is 100% accurate.  But 100 is in base-eight."
Until next time...

[Update: I wrote this post last night, and then I woke up this morning and read the NY Times.  What was the first story I saw?  This one about a cheating triathlete.  How fitting!  It's a really good story.]

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Entry 327: My App Idea

I'm short on time tonight -- or energy, rather.  I'm short on energy.  As I mentioned in my last post, S was out of town this week, so I was on double dad duty.  S's parents are around, and they can handle the baby (S's mom does most the work, but her dad has actually been helping out too -- fixing bottles and whatnot), but Lil' S1 is a whole different story.  He runs circles around them, and he won't let them help with anything, even if they are offering, if he knows I'm home.  ("I want Daddy to put my shoes on... I want Daddy to brush my teeth... I want Daddy to get me milk... I want Daddy...")  And to make even more work for me, it was his Spring Break, so we were out of our usual routine, and I had to drive him to gymnastic camp three days a week.*  Oh... and also he decided that he's not going to take naps anymore, so I don't even get a break in the middle of the day on the weekends anymore.  And he got into my bed with me and slept with every night (I was too tired to fight it), and he woke me up every morning at the crack of dawn.  Needless to say I'm exhausted.



But I wanted to tell everybody about my awesome app idea: Park Blast.  It's an app that sends you a message when other parents in your kid's social circle are going to the park.  That's it.  I was thinking about it the other day when I was taking Lil' S1 to the park.  I like it when other kids he knows are there, but I don't like to set stuff up with other parents, because that requires planning and then it becomes an "event," and you become accountable if you skip out or are late or anything like that.  Most the time I take Lil' S1 to the park it's somewhat spur-of -the-moment.  I usually know that I'm going to take him, say, Sunday afternoon but that could be anytime from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, depending on everything else that happens to arise in our lives that day.  I don't want to be pinned down to a time because I've made plans with other parents.  Plus I don't know all the parents that well, and some of the ones I do know, I don't necessarily want to contact.

But with Park Blast, you get everybody on a list once, and that's all the "planning" you have to do.  Then before you take your kid to the park, you shoot off a blast: "Lil' S1, Hamilton Park, 2:00 pm."  That's it.  And all the parents on the list see it, and they can meet you there if they want or not, whatever.  This way your kid can see other kids he knows sometimes, but there's no obligation on the parents end.  You aren't accountable for anything.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Uh... We already have that: It's called texting!"  But Park Blast would be better for a few reasons.  For one thing, texts lists aren't really a thing, or if they are, I don't use them.  In fact, one of the most annoying features of the iPhone is that there is no way to even save a text list without a special app (that I know of).  For another thing, there's a social aspect of it, in that texting somebody seems more personal than Park Blast would be.  I don't just text people I hardly know out of the blue to say I'm taking my kid to the park, but that would be the very purpose of Park Blast.  It's more like a Facebook update than a text.  Then there is the maintenance aspect of it.  When people are scrolling through their texts they don't want to see a bunch of Park Blast garbage.  It would get to be very spammy (same thing with email).  So what Park Blast would do is show a message on your phone, but once you swipe it, it is gone for good, unless you actively open up a folder through the app.  Everything is hidden from sight unless you go looking for it.  Simple, clean, and effective.

Anyway, I think it's a good idea.  I would program it, but first I would have to learn an app programming language, and then I would actually have to sit down and do it.  And did I mention I don't have much time these days?  I think my kids would be too old for me to take them to the park by the time I finished.  But if you want to do it or know anybody who does, go ahead.  The only thing I ask is $10,000 up front and 95% of whatever revenue it generates.  That's all.

Until next time...    

*I was late one day picking him up because I thought the pick-up time was 12:30, but it was actually noon.  In my defense, I signed him up for a half day and a full day is from 8:30 to 4:30, so I was working under the (wrong) assumption that half actually meant half.  They had S's number on file, not mine (despite the fact I specifically gave them my number at the beginning of the week and told them to use it if there was a problem), and they called her like eight times.  When I got there the woman was kinda copping an attitude, but I defused it by admitting I was wrong and apologizing.  I could tell she wanted to chastise me more, but there was really nothing else to say at that point, so she said, "Yeah, well, pick up time was noon, so... just so... yeah... just so you know."  But I obviously already knew because we just went through it.  I thought maybe they'd charge me extra but they didn't.