Neanderpundit

Vman is talking about Storks. I’ve just come in from yardwork where I saw a Red Tailed hawk.

I love the raptors. We have lots of chickenhawks (red shouldered hawks) in the area, but to see an honest-to-god redtail is a real treat. Of course, there are tons of cars here, and oil refineries and steel mills mere miles away, and I cut down a tree last week thus destroying habitat, so I must be mistaken. Maybe it was a pigeon.

In a conversation friday with some friends, we discussed a get together in Indiana.

I immediately thought Teibels. Mostly because of two things: Location. I travel all over the got-damned place seeing other people, for once I’d like to meet the folks at MY convenience.

Now, as for Teibels itself:Started in 1929, you were hard pressed to find a truck driver that didn’t know this place. The dinner menu hasn”t changed much in all that time.

This has had some repercussions. Teibels has remained constant, their food choices and service remaining constant through the years, and some people, looking for variety, have wandfered off to other places- still, if you want a good home cooked style meal, you’ll slide on in.

Teibels has also developed a strong following. So much so that men and women who have been eating there since childhood still show up for sunday dinner. Some of them are now in their 80’s. It’s doubly appropriate, then, that the waitresses wear the equivalent of white nurses uniforms, minus the funny sister bertrille hats. Any given sunday, you can find at least one ambulance pulled up in front of tiebels because a senior got dizzy during the relish course, and had to be toted off to Saint Margaret Mercy.

Ah, yes, the waitresses. There’s a whole thing about tiebels, waitresses, because they all dress the same, tight white (in the main hall) or dark blue (in the coffee shop) women with actual curves, and nice dispositions, who deal with cranky seniors all sunday afternoon, and ham-handed truckers and travellers through the week. From the slender to the rubinesque, I love them all. Always one of my favorite places, even if only for the chicken livers, stop by if you want a real meal, corner of US 30 and US 41.

Look, I hates me a cellphone. In fact, I would not bother to carry one unless it was company-provided. And I must have it for company business, which can (but fortunately doesn’t) happen 24/7.

We used to have Ameritech. They were OK phones but the service was so/so. We then moved to Nextel, little blue phones from Motorola that worked really well. Granted, when you weren’t close to a tower, you had trouble- but in any range, if you had a signal you could talk. The phones were also rock touch- at IMTS in 2002, I dropped my Nextel phone off a fourth floor balcony into traffic. It bounced off the hood of a semi going about 45, and crashed through the window of a dispatcher’s booth under where I was standing. I got down tho the booth, and grabbed the phone, and it hadn’t even dropped the call.

Now, we have Sprint. Sanyo phones. I understand that this was a phenominal cost savings for the company, and for most purposes, they’re like any other cellphone. On the other hand, personally, I feel that there can possibly be no worse phone company on earth. So, for Sprint, I have a few things to say:

1: Antennas. What prompted you to take disused WW2 radar antennae and use them on top of cell towers? This must be the case, because I can STAND STILL IN ONE PLACE and the signal varies between 0 and 4 bars. What the fuck are you nimrods thinking?

2: Sanyo phones? The name in electronics universally known for lame cheapshit? c’mon.

3: The Internet service you offer? Sucks. Sucks more than road construction. Sucks more than Microsoft corporation. Sucks more than, well, frankly, Apple. You change the menu choices all the time, your portals work only rarely, and the only thing that DOES work is Google, which, of course, has nothing to do with you. The phones can’t deal with an RSS feed, and the service wouldn’t be able to broadcast it cleanly if it did.

Rot in heck, Sprint. Hell is probably too busy, for your lame ass.