random thoughts – Day 1,539 – (Wednesday) – quirky weirdness

It’s been a week for some mysterious stuff. Oddball things. Weird things. What in the heck quirky things.

My work computer often has several shortcut icons on the desktop for active project files that are ready to be loaded into the review system or emailed out before being saved as final files on the department shared server. Then they are deleted from the desktop. 

Lately, deleted shortcut icons keep reappearing, without rhyme or reason. Some were deleted a week ago, but in the past couple weeks, files from six months ago and even a year ago have reappeared. It’s like a haunting. Some have been deleted four or five times, but keep coming back.

On Tuesday, not only did old icons reappear, but all the icons on the remote office desktop are four times larger than they used to be. The large print format hot mess continued today on the office-office computer. Awesome. 

This morning, the technology is trying to drive me insane hijinks continued. I have the Jeep set to deliver guidance when I’m seven miles over the speed limit. Out of the blue this morning, as I crept above the speed limit, the voice in the system made the announcement, but in kilometers, not miles. Luckily there were a lot of red lights on the way and I was able to dig into the settings menus and change it back to mph.

A dental cleaning scheduled six months ago was this afternoon. The weather toolbar widget on the haunted computer noted it was 82 when I left the office-office for the dental office. The temperature reading on the dashboard read 30-something degrees. Celsius. There was another dive into the menu settings to set it back to Fahrenheit. So weird.

After the dental visit, I took the longer, preferred route out of town. Turning left out of the dentist is nearly impossible with the volume of oncoming traffic. By turning right and heading away from the highway, then taking a couple more rights to Route 12 provides the opportunity to buy gas at a lower price than found in Lowell. A stop was made at AL Prime for some $3.09 a gallon gas. A bit up the street is the $5 Car Wash, which had no line and no traffic impeding the left turn into the place. Victory!

My car speaks Italian!

Always, when the car is in neutral during the car wash, a message appears on the dashboard screen about pressing the brake and putting the car into drive, or something. Today, in the day of weird technical oddities, the message appeared in what I thought was Spanish, but Google translate says is Italian. Fancy. Very weird. But at least the temperature was back to Fahrenheit. 

In summary, my work computer is haunted by the ghosts of gigantic icons past. My vehicle has decided to convert to the metric system, the Celsius temperature scale, and a foreign language. Surely, these are the early signs of the robot uprising to wipe out us humans. Surprise, confusion, and frustration seem like a solid start. And Italian is a nice touch.