Today was one of those days which confirm my general belief that there is no point to trying. My co-worker told me that she had some sort of hookup with the hotel I'm trying to arrange for my brother's visit. But I kept forgetting to ask her what it was. Long story short, I lost the double bed room I wanted, the hook-up was nothing, and now I'm putting him up at another hotel which is much less convenient in all aspects. Between calling for the hotel and cancelling out the rewards credit card I just got, I was unable to get some practice bowling in this morning, not to mention breakfast. Which would have been OK, if I had been able to get to the bank or gotten my dry cleaning in one shot (more on that rant later). Since both my weekend gigs cancelled, I figured that I'd finally have a night to go on the town, so I headed out to see the sights. Only town, apparently, is abandoned. Nobody was around on the West Side, and the Village was apparently a ghost town. To be fair, I didn't hit the East Village, which I hear is red hot nowadays, but I figured it would be slim pickings when Times Square was pretty empty. It was so dull I headed home at 9pm. I should have just stayed home and played America's Army all day. :: The computerized register has been something of a miracle worker for the dry cleaning industry, or so I gather. At the convention there were at least 5 different vendors hawking their wares. And every dry cleaners I've been to uses some varient of computer tracking. From tracking inventory, to tracking customers (and I'm sure their ytd purchases to segment their client base), the computer does it all. And, like all computers, sometimes it takes a holiday. In those cases, you have to go back to the good old pad and cabonized copy paper slips. No big deal. Except, it would be a good idea to use a dry cleaning slip, rather then a restaurant order slip. And in every dry cleaners I've ever worked in, we ALWAYS entered in the orders when we got the computer back up, so clothes wouldn't get lost. Apparently these self evident practices elude the dry cleaners I'm currently using. I forgot my slip, and the lady there had no idea what I was talking about (and her English was so-so ... since my Korean is nil I was out of luck there). I had to go home, hunt down my slip, return, explain my story (including details as when I dropped it off, what color were the items, and the invoice number ... because the restaurant order slip they used doesn't have a spot to mark down those vital pieces of information), and wait while the guy literally searched every hanging item for my clothes. I got my clothes back, but not the 20 minutes of my life I had to waste.