Good morning! Hello there. How’s it hanging? Monday go okay? Got through mine okay, nothing too too bad. Had a positively gloriously bureaucratic day. It was just so absurd I couldn’t help but laugh.
First, not long after I wrote this missive to you guys, I got five emails from my lawyers, all with subject lines that begin: “ACTION NEEDED.” Each one was related to a trademark or patent thing I’m working on with them. This is an ongoing thing in my life, when you apply for these things in, like, twenty countries, there’s always some form that needs to be signed, sometimes notarized. Each email is a looooong wall of text, inexplicably in a very, very small font. Like the law firm goes out of its way to shrink the dense text to make it even more unreadable. And it’s not lot like they make the action easy to find. Somewhere in the five paragraphs, there is one single sentence that tells you what you need to do. It’s not bolded, it’s not at the top. It is so easy to miss. And you’d think the big “ACTION NEEDED” headline would be useful in helping to figure out which ones require me to do something and which ones don’t, but they ALL say “ACTION NEEDED” on them. For example, I plowed my way through five paragraphs of dense text in one of them, only to get to the last paragraph where, in the middle, not at all clear, it says “no action is needed at this time.”
I decided to write back and call the lawyers on it and they said “ha! Automated system. What can you do?” And I’m like REALLY? You have an automated system that is just built to lie? That is so weird.
But anyway, I work my way through them. Sometimes you can digitally sign the thing and send it back in an email. Sometimes you can print it out, sign the paper copy, take a picture of the actual ink signature, and send that back. I’ve tried to fake that a few times but they would catch it and reject it, which… impressive. Years ago, at the beginning of this patent journey, I managed to convince myself that someday, we’ll be locked in some patent battle with a monopolistic tech titan and they’d find my “not real ink” signature on some form and that’ll be the end of the whole thing. So I don’t do that anymore.
Sometimes you have to print it out and sign it and send it back via the USPS, priority mail (they call it “air mail” which continually confuses me.
And sometimes you have to get an actual notary to notarize the thing, which means I have to head over to the PakMail and get a notary seal on some weird form in Chinese or Hindu or Japanese and I swear, every time I do it the woman that works there makes no effort to hide her deep skepticism.
Also, call me weird but I find it veerrrrrry unlikely that the Canadian, Chinese, Irish and Indian patent offices all decided to get back to the lawyers on the exact same day. I strongly suspect that “automated system” like, crashed or something for weeks and no one noticed.
So, I work my way through all those, and I have an email from my Chase rep (well, the one that will still talk to me), that says “we should talk today about your PPP forgiveness application because it’s missing files.” I have been expecting this email because I got an automated email last week saying the same thing, telling me that I didn’t include payroll information. This exact same thing happened with the PPP2 drawdown back in April, so I’m not entirely surprised. Luckily, it’s the same Chase rep, and I figure this is almost certainly some flaw in their automated system, because it keeps happening. So we schedule a call and it goes something like this:
“You seem to be missing your headcount and payroll information.”
“Okay, see that file that’s titled ‘Payroll 01-01-2020 to 12-31-2020.pdf?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the payroll information.”
“Oh. Yes. I wonder if they want it from the effective dates instead.”
“Okay, see that other file that’s titled ‘Payroll 04-09-21 to -09-23-21.pdf?”
“Yes.”
“That is the payroll information from the effective dates used.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Do you remember how this exact same thing happened last time?”
“No.”
“Okay, well it did. And we had this exact same conversation. And you went back and it got fixed.”
“Hrm. I wonder how I did that. Well, it’s interesting because they also say they want headcount.”
“Yeah, that’s a little confusing because why couldn’t they just count the number of people on the payroll? Am I supposed to, like, submit a piece of paper that just says ‘25’ on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Also do you see how it has the fields ‘headcount before loan’ and ‘headcount now’ on the Application form?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the headcount.”
“Ah. Hrm. Yes. Okay. Well you could also submit a form 829 to do this maybe you should just submit that.”
“I don’t have a form 829 I use a PEO. Do you see how on your instructions it says ‘if you use a PEO you will be unable to provide a Form 829 and should use your PEO’s reporting tool?”
“Yes. Okay. Right.”
“So maybe you need to go back and look into this?”
“I think I should go back and look into this.”
The first time around with Chase, I really thought that it was me. But now that we’re on round three with this horrible system, it’s really just astonishing how here we are, 16 months into the PPP program, and they still don’t have their systems working properly on even the most basic stuff.
Next I get to have a call to finish the negotiations on our AWS enterprise deal. Well, one of them, because Amazon has multiple enterprise deals, and they sort of overlap, and it’s not clear exactly how, so that’s one thing that I need to sort out and that gets sorted out pretty well! But the rest is all about commitments of spend, and hitting those commitments and what happens if you go under or over, because surprise it’s hard to spend exactly (and this is not the actual amount) $3,345,567.79 in a single year. You’re going to be under or over. And I wanna make sure we still get the discount if we go over, and I wanna make sure if we’re under we don’t incur some large bill.
And the contract says, and I quote:
For any Contract Year, any Commitment-Eligible Fees incurred in excess of the Contract Year Spend Commitment will be invoiced monthly at the discounted rates reflected in the PPA. Any spending over the Contract Year Spend Commitments will not reduce future Contract Year Commitments.
Okay, so, like, I have questions, because it’s an annual commitment, and they haven’t talked anywhere about the monthly until now, and, like, you know, I’m not going to use exactly 1/12th of my commitment every month because we’re growing, so does this imply some weird thing where they are taking the annual and dividing it by 12 and you have to use 1/12th every month, because it certainly seems that way with this whole “invoiced monthly” thing on Contract Year Spend Commitment?
Nope, that whole paragraph apparently just means “you still get the discount if you spend over but you don’t get a bigger discount.”
Okay then just say that!
I kinda get what they’re going for here, but it took us like 10 minutes on the phone to really understand it.
Bureaucracy!
And that was my work day. The end.
Oh I did get a really sweet Trademark certificate in the mail from China, though. That’s pretty cool:
I’ve been texting a few old friends, trying to stay in touch. I have this piece of art on my wall, by my bedside, by an old friend. I hadn’t talked to her, in, oh, I don’t know, a decade. We’re Facebook friends, but, you know. Drifted. So I text her a photo of the picture on the wall, tell her I was thinking of her, hoping she was well, etc. She texts back. It’s nice. But it’s completely, you know. We don’t really get into it, say how we’re doing, talk like old friends. Just sort of a passing wave. And that’s fine but every time I do that I am always torn between saying something kinda weird and creepy about how I miss them and we used to be, like, such good friends, and it’s sad we don’t talk more and I would love to know what’s really going on in their life, but of course doing all that is just weird and kinda creepy when you’ve passed a certain threshold in time. Haven’t talked to them in a year, or for the pandemic? It’s probably fine. I texted another friend and she was like “everything okay it’s weird you’re texting out of the blue” and I basically just said that: everything’s okay, we’re just good old friends and I miss her and was thinking about her and I know she had some tough times during the pandemic and I hope everything’s going okay, and it didn’t feel weird at all because it’d only been, like, four months since we talked. But the first friend. That feeling. I hate that feeling. But it’s all you can really do. Put a feeler out, say hi, leave it there. I guess. But I never like it.
And then! Another friend! We talk semi regularly but not tons. And we were texting, and at one point I was going to text her some random personal opinion and I realized “oh that’ll sound a little bit crazy I don’t want her thinking that I’m, like, a lunatic conspiracy theorist these days.” I can’t remember what the specific thing was, but it was some not-too-controversial opinion if you pay attention to the topic, like it was probably big tech antitrust or something since this person does not particularly pay attention to big tech antitrust. But I don’t remember. I just remember thinking that: “ha, I wonder if there’s some formula where the longer two friends have gone without talking in the modern era, there’s an increasing chance that one of them has been lost to conspiracy theories.” That seems entirely plausible.
And then! We were chatting on text and she texted something and she was like “oh god that sounds like I’m turning into a conspiracy theorist I swear I’m not.” And ah ha! New formula theory validated!
So, new theory: The longer two friends go without talking, the more likely it is that one has descended into conspiracy theories.
I should clarify: I’m not on some new “oh I’ve been a terrible friend I’m lonely I need to text with old friends” kick. I am doing it at the same rate I always do. I’m always trying to text an old friend and say “hi.” I manage, like, one a week. These were over the course of a couple weeks.
I don’t know why I needed to clarify that.
I have a note here to talk about “chips” or “chime” but I have no idea what that is referring to, so I guess you’re off the hook.
The squirrel screening on the tomatoes seems to be going well. Yesterday there were three squirrels on the porch, trying to get in there, but they couldn’t. Three days so far. So far so good. Knowing my Mark Rober, this is not the end of it, but I’m already impressed it’s lasted this long.
Incidentally, on his latest video, another Shark Week video — Mark Rober seems to have some weird deal with Discovery these days — he actually used the mythbusters busted sign. I mean, on the one hand, how dare you. But on the other, I love it so much when manifestly famous people just completely use the thing that they admire. Like when the Jesus and Mary Chain just unabashedly, randomly, sampled for the first time and put like ten seconds of Neubauten’s “Steh Auf Berlin” into one of their songs. Just own your influences. No shame.
Okay! Let’s do a mix. FUN TIMEZ. MIX TIMEZ. I’ve been whittling away the backlog in the “to investigate” playlist. I’ve listened to it all at least once, but every album in it needs a second listen, add a few more starred tracks to the 2021 playlist. When I started the process a couple weeks ago, there was 55 hours of music in the playlist. Now I’m down to 34, and that’s with adding about 10 hours of new music to the playlist — mainly full albums that have come out from artists in the playlist who only had singles in there. It’s kinda tedious work but it’s also fun giving albums another shot. I’m listening to a Erika de Casier album right now that I sorta glossed over on first listen but I really like right now. And the process results in the addition of a lot of “medium new” songs onto the playlists. Like, not new this week, but this year.
So, today, justa mix. Vol 74. Mostly medium-new. Some new new. The new Fucked Up album is crazy and insane and it’s a four-album rock opera about a horse. Strong recommend. Did I mention this before? Probably. It’s so all over the place that songs from it are appearing on all my different genre mixes. Oh this does have a few oldies on it: Star Trekkin’ cuz why not? It’s such a dumb song but even dumb great songs deserve to be listened to once in a while. And A Lou Reed track from New York since I finally found an affordable copy on Vinyl. And The Apartments. And Minnie Riperton, but she’s a new discovery for me. And that weird Ben Folds song but I enjoy that one, and Yo La Tengo. Wow actually maybe this thing is like 50% old. Well, good. A nice mix. I hope you like it.
Okay let’s do this Tuesday thing and Tuesday the hell out of this Tuesday I’m a computer. Stop all the downloadin.