Alright. The other day I alluded to a great story about our favorite jeweler, Tony Bagdy. It’s time to document the story. Cue the music:

Some couples shop for rings together and others do it apart. In our case, we shopped for rings together. We got mine from Unicorn jewelry in Rancho Bernardo (San Diego), with which we were quite displeased. I don’t recommend their services or products to anyone. From that experience we went looking elsewhere and discovered Palomar Jewelers. While there Mrs. Smith located the ring. We ordered it to be her size and sometime thereafter I picked it up and proposed. Mrs. Smith elected to wear the whole thing, not merely the engagement band, because it was so nice which was fine with me.

Now, understand Mrs. Smith is not much of a jewelry person (yay!). She occasionally will wear something, but by and large she doesn’t rely on jewelry to enhance her physical features (yay!). Unfortunately, the byproduct of that is that when she washed her hands one night at an “Islands” restaurant, she took it off and failed to pick it back up. She discovered the ring’s absence a little later during the meal but the ring, by that point, was gone. She hunted through the trash, we had the U-drain checked, etc, but alas, no ring. Someone likely picked it up. 🙁

So, there we were: engaged and ringless. A few days later we stopped at a supermarket and plunked ~$5 into a toy machine trying to get a ring but, alas, no ring for us! Now we were ringless and $5 poorer – argh! So I went to Tony’s store, explained what happened, and requested a new one be created with the same design as it was the ring. When I went to pick up the ring several weeks later, Tony gave me a tremendous surprise: he charged us only for the band, not the precious stones (diamonds)!

First off, he certainly didn’t need to provide anything for free, yet he did. Secondly, the band is considerably cheaper than the diamonds, particularly since he specifically put in diamonds of better quality than what we originally purchased!

Think he got customers for life You betcha! Customer service may be a dying thing in many industries, but it’s alive and well at Palomar Jewelers!

Another fun-filled day of Marklogic training. This time, though, I was able to participate a little more than last time (though not much). Most of the time was spent working issues that arose today, and others that needed follow-up given my absence for the last couple of weeks.

I hate it when projects don’t communicate with needed personnel until it’s the 11th hour. Grrr.

So that’s my new title and I kinda like it: Great Squirrel Herder.

In conversation today with some co-workers it was mentioned that it sometimes feels like we’re herding sheep. However, we’re not shepherds because sheep willingly follow shepherds.  We’re more like sheep herders, behind the sheep with prods trying to keep them moving in a certain direction. Someone else brought up squirrels instead, implying that’s more accurate than sheep. I told him I was going to steal it, which I have.

Run free my minion squirrels – divide and conquer!

Wahoo, let me tell you how excited I am that tonight is the last session of my Chemistry 1215 lab! Now if only my other classes would hurry and finish (Chem 1210 and two Calculus courses).

I spent the day, from 9-5, in training for an XML database/application server. Although the concept is cool, it’s rather dry material to study for an entire day (no discredit to the presenter). I’ve noticed that many of the people present have heavily imbibed the “Kool-Aid” though, whereas I’m skeptical of the vendor’s claims.
Going on a date night tonight with my dearie, Mrs. Smith – wahoo! 😀

This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. BEEP.

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