I tried to post this via email, but it didn’t work. Has anyone gotten the post by email function in WordPress working? Just curious…
Any way, I wanted to provide more details than typing in slowly on my phone allowed for any way.
So I got a rush call for an audition. I have an oil leak on my bike, so I use it as little as possible. I saw that the time for making the metrolink was quickly approaching, but I thought I could make it if I hurried. So hurry I did!
And I made the train. I also ended up in one of the kewl cars with outlets, so I was able to plug my laptop in and not drain all my battery power. Then, right before the first stop, all of the power went off on the train as the train jerked a little. I grabbed my laptop which was sliding off the table, and I looked around. I thought the electical just went out on the train and caused the jerk, then the conductor says, “Uh… yeah, we just hit a car.”
Then I hear an awful screech and some clunking below (I was on the top of the train car I was in). What you see below is the final result.
The woman driving the car is okay… because she got out of the car before the train hit. She’d evidently tried to make it through the intersection before the little arms came down, and the last one came down on her car. Rather than plow through the arm, she left her car there to get pummeled by the metrolink train.
After waiting around awhile, the train started to get too hot (the electrical was still out, so no a/c), and we were let off the train. Outside, I hear a man and a woman trying to convince a police officer they were injured in the accident. Uh huh. I didn’t even know we really hit something until the conductor tells us, and they had serious injuries? Yeah… Justice has a way of rearing its ugly head, however, and the two persons regretted talking to the police. They hadn’t purchased tickets, you see, and their insistence on their injuries led the police to ask them to see their tickets 
So instead of getting money from bogus injuries, they got citations for stealing away on the metrolink train.
I called my commercial agency and let them know I was going to be late. An hour later, I called and said I didn’t think I was going to make it because I was still at the train station. Then with some maneuvering, I made it at 5:08 (they told me the last time they were seeing actors was 5:15). They took us by charter bus to Union Station, where I jumped on the red line, and I had a friend in L.A. meet me at the Hollywood and Highland station and take me to the audition. With seven minutes to spare. Then the fun began!
The theme of the commercial, which I’m really not supposed to write about was… well… let’s just say what would a certain mob boss on a cable tv show do? Yeah, you guessed it, wwtd? So I got to improv beating the tar out of my boss at work on camera. Yeah, buddy. And because I was late, I got to do it a couple of times because they needed my part to read with another guy. It all worked out in the end!
I’m glad nobody was seriously hurt. Here in the Houston area we have people regularly getting hit by our fairly new light-rail system.
Oh, and re: posting via email. Yes, I have it working, but it’s not as simple as setting the values on the options page. There’s a file called wp-mail.php in your wordpress installation directory. It needs to be run on a regular basis (cron/scheduled task, whatever) to poll the mail server for messages. It’s only mentioned in the readme.html file, as far as I could determine.
Dwayne
May 11th, 2006