Karma's a bitch... you win this round New Jersey...

I do, on occasion, make a joke or two at New Jersey's expense. It's true.

Like, you all may not have noticed, but when I make seemingly innocuous words into links, like New Jersey and France, they're actually links to goofy (more often than not, not-too-nice) things.

Like the last time I did it for Jersey? It was a link to a picture of Oscar the Grouch in is garbage can. France? A YouTube clip of Cheap Trick's classic, "Surrender."

I guess I've made fun of New Jersey so much, it decided to get back at me.

When I first started working here, I applied for a free subway pass for the commute to and from work. The government offers this as a way to help keep more cars off the road, limit traffic, be more environmentally friendly, etc... and it would help my finances out in an amazing way. I spent approximately $80 a month right now to get to and from work.

So it takes a while for all the paperwork and stuff to go through and I finally got notified I can pick up my subway passes for the next couple months. Great!

I go and they're not subway passes, they basically look like traveler's cheques, but that say they're for mass transit. They were definitely not what I was supposed to be getting. So the lady explains that yeah it was a mess up, but I can just take those to the subway station and basically use them to buy what I was supposed to get in the first place... which isn't so bad.

So I go to the train station, and they tell me my normal station can't help me and I have to go basically over to the station by Ground Zero. Weak... so I wander over to that station and wait in line...

I get to the teller, and he says it's been years since my "cheques" could be used for the NYC subway system.

He said what I got was only good for the PATH Train. Jiggawha?

That's New Jersey's "subway" system that takes Jersey folk into the Manhattan for those who are confused. It has stops at prime destinations like Journal Square... me and JS go way back.

I was so pissed. I'm going to have a "conversation" with the person who messed up my paperwork tomorrow... it will probably be another month or two, which is a very weak, very expensive screw up. Oh well, worse things can happen, right?

As for the frugality experiment? I failed, miserably... but it was for a good cause. A friend from D.C. was in town so I went drinking with him and another from in the city. It was a lot of fun. I didn't spend too much though, so it wasn't so bad.

My undoing was when a buddy of mine kindly ordered me a triple bourbon... which the bartender opted to make more like a quadruple. We'll just say I got served in more ways than one. Again... lots of fun.

Also neat, despite the city having millions of people in it, I happened to bump into a friend of Lisa's girlfriend who I met in June. I was transferring to a different train and bumped into her at the platform... so that was random. We exchanged out contact info and hopefully we can hang out sometime. She was a lot of fun (and no, she's not single as I'm sure I'll get asked by plenty of folk).

Well, I didn't get too much sleep at all last night, so I gotta hit the hay...