When did I enter 2014?

A co-worker made a request yesterday that left me so flummoxed, I actually inquired why she would do such a thing.

She asked for my phone number.

I don't mind using the phone -- unlike my wife, who prefers to do just about anything else -- but I don't actually do it all that often. Most of my phone calls consist of these four activities:

1. Talking to my parents and grandmother Sunday nights.

2. Calling for pizza Tuesday nights.

3. Yelling at customer service reps.

4. Taking calls from the guys who work for me when I work at home.

And ever since my wife and I ditched our land lines last year in favor of iPhones (I previously had a flip-phone that I pretty much only used for emergencies, but the phone number is the same), not that many people even have my number, which is awesome since I rarely get interrupted at dinner.

However, that's not the reason her request threw me off, to the point where I was worried she was asking because she had some horrible news about work that she could only share on the phone.

It was because there are so many other ways she could reach me. We're friends on Facebook and follow each other on Twitter; in fact, she follows me on personal and work accounts. Why did she need my phone? It seemed so, dare I say ... retro.

As it turned out, she was on a Facebook group message I sent out about work to some of my co-workers earlier in the day, but she doesn't like those, so she wanted, not to talk to me, but to text me about it ... another relatively modern contrivance (at least by my standards) that I never did until I got the new phone and my wife showed me how easy it was.

Instead, she sent me an individual message on Facebook ...

... and I did eventually give her my number.

Giving in on the burger battle

I'm not Sally of "When Harry Met Sally" fame, but rare is the meal that I order without some kind of deletion, addition or change.

I don't like vegetables or mashed potatoes with skins in them, and one of the guys who worked for me used to hear me order turkey subs enough that he developed a frighteningly good impression ("plain turkey, on white ... no, I don't want lettuce or tomato ... just meat and bread").

When I used to get soft drinks with my meal, I always ordered them without ice. Once, to the astonishment of my companions, I sent back a soda not because it had ice in it, but because the waiter brought it without ice and clearly only the amount of soda they'd put in if the drink had ice in it.

Now, I mostly drink water with my meals, so I don't care if there's ice (you can't water down water, after all), but I used to have a problem with servers disregarding my request to not have lemon in my drink until my wife suggested asking for it "without lemon" instead of "no lemon." I have no idea why -- maybe "without" registers because of the extra syllable -- but I can probably count the lemons in my water since then on one hand.

Which brings me to Wendy's.

I've written before about how it baffles me that Wendy's refuses to recognize hamburgers to the point of serving cheeseburgers even when I specifically say the word "hamburger." Much like Niagara Mohawk and mlb.tv, among others, I'm sure one of my rants is on a training video somewhere. (I've also gotten the "do you want lettuce, tomato and onion" line when I've asked for my triple hamburger plain, but far less often.)

But I do love their burgers, so when my wife and I went out for some errands today near a Wendy's, that's where we went for lunch. This time, however, I made a fateful decision.

I surrendered ... threw in the towel ... tapped out ... gave up. When it came time to order, I requested a plain ... triple ... hamburger ...

... without cheese.

I still think it's stupid that Wendy's defaults to cheeseburgers, and just as stupid that their employees either don't realize or are trained not to realize when someone wants a hamburger. But I just didn't feel like fighting it, and I did get exactly what I asked for.

And it was tasty.

Problem that is completely inconsequential in light of the many troubles in our world ... solved.

Oh yeah ... he's still got it

Not a bad way to spend an evening.

There once was a young singer, and his voice was a revelation. My wife and I saw him in concert for our anniversary not long after we were married, and it was terrific.

The young singer is now 33, and the album that first made people take notice is now nearly 13 years old.

Last night, my wife and I went to Tanglewood to see Josh Groban in concert for a second time. Our anniversary was more than a month ago, but my wife bought the lawn tickets as an anniversary gift. Fortunately, we got great weather.

As years go by, artists come and go and various songs catch your attention at any particular time, to the point where if you're flipping through the songs you've downloaded, you skip through a lot of songs in order to hear whatever's at the forefront of your mind at the time.

In recent months, Josh Groban's songs (among others) were among the ones I skipped a lot. It's not like he stopped being good. It's not like I stopped liking his music. But it had reached the point were it was just ... there ... and there was usually something else I wanted to hear.

Then he came out on stage last night, joined by the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra (think Boston July 4 celebration) ... and the reasons for his appeal came back all at once.

The voice is still amazing (dumbest review I ever read, and one I wish I could find, was the one that said he had a "generically pleasant voice). The stage patter is much improved, I assume the byproduct of being older and having spent a lot more time in front of audiences.

The songs, particularly the older ones, are the same as I remember them. As the nearly two-hour concert appeared to be winding down, it was like the audience was waiting to hear "You Raise Me Up," and he complied.

Yeah, he's still good. He's still real good.




   

Come one, come all to our Silly Emmys party

It's Emmy time again night, which means it's time for everyone to get together and take part in the most-enjoyable aspect of any awards show ... snarky remarks, wondering how they could have worn THAT, celebrating or bemoaning who won what and generally having a laugh at the proceedings. (The Robin Williams tribute will, of course, be a notable exception. I'm expecting lots of people wondering how the room got so dusty all of a sudden, or who's cutting the onions.)

The festivities here will start around 7ish, or whenever I get the chat fired up, so we can cover the exercise in vapidness that is the pre-show. So make sure you put on your best red-carpet-if-the-red-carpet-is-in-your-house attire and join in the fun! All it takes is a valid social media account -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

As always, there are only a few rules:

1. Do not actually come to my house unless you ask first. Otherwise, I will tell you to leave and probably call the cops.

2. Bring your own food and beverage.

3. If you're going to come to my metaphorical house, do not pee in my metaphorical pool.

Hey Facebook, why stop at satire?

In an effort to aid those whose BS detectors aren't up to snuff, Facebook is apparently going to test a "satire" tag for people's news feeds. That way, people who can't tell the difference between what's real and what's fake can save themselves the potential embarrassment.

Although at least one friend of mine considers it a sign of the impending apocalypse, maybe Facebook should do even more.

For example, we've all seen posts/sent posts/seen or sent the email that can't possibly be true, right? That's because it's usually not. (Confirmation bias can play some serious tricks on the mind.) Therefore, perhaps Facebook could hook up with Snopes.

If someone can't wait to inform his or her friends that Barack Obama is the only president not to go to the D-Day Monument on the D-Day anniversary, or that Sarah Palin wanted to invade the Czech Republic after the Boston Marathon bombings (speaking of satire), a little message could pop up saying, "Before you do this, there's something you should know. What you're posting isn't true, and while your like-minded friends will probably say 'See, I knew all along!' when they see it, to everyone else you'll look kind of silly."

And while Facebook is at it, is there any way to build an algorithm that tries to keep people from posting racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted stuff? While I would never say that people shouldn't be allowed to post what they like, maybe a note stating, "This may not be a good idea. You may think that no one outside your circle will ever notice, or that you'll just take it down, but screengrabs are not your friend" would be enough to cause second thoughts. (This wouldn't be a bad idea for Twitter, either.)

I'm no expert at writing computer code, so I don't know if either of these are even possible, but if they are, surely someone at Facebook would know how.

So get on it, Zuckerberg.

(Now, the question is, "Am I being satirical?" Maybe a little, or more than a little ...)

Thoughts from the left side

So today is International Left-Handers Day. I didn't get any cards.

In fact, I didn't even know there was such a thing until a friend of mine (whose husband is left-handed), posted a funny pie chart in which the vast majority of people, when they notice someone writing left-handed, say, "Are you left-handed?"

Being left-handed means using those little scissors with the green handles and wiping ink smudges off your hands. It means always eating with your elbows close to your sides to protect yourself from chicken-winging right-handers and hearing people shout "LEFTY!" when you walk into the batter's box.

"Sinister" and "gauche" have their roots in left-ness, and I'm sure most of us have heard and said "If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side, then left-handers are the only people in their right minds" more often than we can count.

But in a world that finds us odd, being left-handed is just ... what I am. And it's not weird at all.

I've made some allowances for a right-handed world. I've known how to cut with right-handed scissors for years, and I was so used to right-handed desks in school that I usually refused on the rare occasions there was a left-handed desk available and someone offered. (To the righties reading this who may ask, "What's the difference?" a right-handed desk has the little area for your books and notebooks attached to the right side of the chair, while it's obviously the reverse for a left-handed desk. The intent is to not have to read or write across your body, but I got used to it.)

If I'm casually driving with one hand on the steering wheel, it's usually my right hand, and for whatever reason, I cannot type on a smartphone with my left hand at all.

Strangely enough, I've come to believe that one of the benefits of being left-handed is that lefties are aware that most of us have two hands. No matter how left-dominant a person is, it is a physical impossibility to be purely left-handed. The world isn't set up that way. However, I know right-handed people who can't do much with their left hand because they've never had to.

Yet using my left hand (or foot) to write, eat, throw, kick, roll a bowling ball, shoot a basketball (badly) or swing a bat or golf club (also badly) is as natural to me as breathing. There was no point where I realized I was left-handed, at least not that I remember, and I didn't have to be taught to do things with my left hand. I just did them, and fortunately, I'm young enough to have missed the era where left-handed kids were encouraged if not forced to change.

Sadly, the one thing I never learned how to do with my left hand was throw a curveball. Otherwise, I might still be pitching in the big leagues in my early 40s and be millions of dollars richer. (Jesse Orosco and Tony Fossas are our patron saints.)

So to all my fellow southpaws out there, Happy International Left-Handers Day. To the right-handers in my life, I like presents, but money and gift cards are nice, too.

Remember when the world was going to end because the computers were messed up?

Today, my wife and I went to Boston to meet up with an old friend of hers who's in town on vacation with his 13-year-old niece.

He's a funny guy, and she seemed like a really great kid. At one point, we were talking about various things she wouldn't know about by virtue of being only 13 -- after all, she was a newborn around the time of 9/11 -- when I brought up Y2K.

Remember Y2K, the worry that because computers used "00" for the year, they would pretty much all stop working at the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000, and therefore cause the entire world to descend into chaos?

I spent New Year's Eve 1999 watching the amazing coverage on CNN, and that night I went to First Night in Albany with my brother and a bunch of his friends, still the only one I've ever been to. We watched a couple performers, walked around a bit in the cold and then watched a countdown on a giant screen set up on the outside of what was Pepsi Arena and is now the Times Union Center.

At midnight, I looked around to see if anything horrible had happened. It didn't appear there were any issues, but then I heard a loud bang. Just when I started to wonder what it was, I turned around to see the fireworks going on behind me.

That was the noise. We all ran down the street to see the fireworks, called our ride to come get us and went back to one of my brother's friends' houses. I then went home and watched some more CNN.

So as I was explaining the Y2K hysteria to the 13-year-old sitting across the table from me, she looked at me a little like I was crazy.

And I have to admit, as I was telling her about it, it seemed pretty silly.