Pagers

Bother. We got that new pager, right? Well, it's not as good as the old one. Same company, older pager, smaller feature set. Basically a "starter" pager. It does everything we need, but...well. The old one had volumes of low/medium/high, a vibrate mode, a vibrate-and-beep mode, and a 'shut up and just take the message' mode (not legitimate to use here). This one has a single volume (screechingly loud, louder than the old loud), a vibrate mode, and that's it. Frankly, I don't miss the other things from that list, but volume control would be welcome, this thing hurts.

Plus, instead of three separate buttons, this one has TWO. One is one of those annoying "push this end for one result, that end for the other" type of buttons. It actually does the same thing the two split buttons on our first pager did, but pressing those dual-use buttons properly is a bitch compared to simple separate buttons.

They said, according to what I'm told, that they shipped us one like the one we had before. But apparently our contract is such that we have no say over it anyway, so complaining about what we did get is pointless.

Just ducky. I don't want the fancy musical beeps; or the dual mode; or the sleep mode we weren't supposed to use. But I do want a quieter beep, one that doesn't make my head throb, and I want a button that's not a nuisance to use. Oh, well, I imagine we'll get used to what we have.

Chicken toys.

I went to the grocery store tonight. And as I was getting close to the checkout stand (but still looking at other stuff), I heard this odd noise.

It can't be, I thought. But it sounded like, it sounded like one of those fake chickens from the 25-cent toy machines that were everywhere when I was little. You put your money in, the chicken "clucked", and the plastic egg with your toy dropped down. I haven't seen one of those in a while (oh, they keep the toys and containers, but the chickens seem to have left - probably just as well, they were annoying).

It wasn't. It was the circular conveyer at one register, which squeaked badly whenever it moved. But it sounded so very like my memories.

Strange, what associations we form.