RUSH: I think everybody knows. Everybody who knows me and all of you in this audience, you know I don’t complain. I never complain. You know why? Because I don’t know how to deal with people who do. I have never known how to deal with people who complain. Do you say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and try to come up with similar experiences to kind of share the whining and moaning or do you tell them to shut up; you don’t care about it? I don’t know how to do it.
None of it’s major, but you add it all up, and it just portends… I’m just fit to be tied. The first thing that happened… Actually, it started last night. The cat has to go to the vet today. The cat has gingivitis. The cat needs a dental checkup. My cat, we can’t get it in the cage no matter what we do. The vet said, “You can’t feed the cat after midnight.” I said, “There’s no way we’re gonna get the cat in the cage.” “Sorry, you can’t do it or the cat will puke during the surgery and might die. We can’t do it.”
So I fed the cat the last thing — a little morsel of treats — at 10 p.m., and at 5 a.m. the cat starts head-buttin’ me and waking me up. I know that it’s starving, it wants to eat, but I have to be the mean master and say “no.” And here I am like an idiot saying, “Allie, I can’t feed you. You have to go to the dentist.” What am I doing? The cat doesn’t know what I’m saying. So I’m saying all this for me to feel better. Meanwhile, the cat will not stop head-butting me. I know what the cat wants and I can’t provide for the cat. Then when I finally do get up, there’s a tweet.
There’s a message on my phone: “Hey, did you see the president’s tweet about you?” “No, I just got up!” The tweet is, “Rush Limbaugh’s a great guy who truly gets it.” Yeah, yeah? He’s just figuring that out? I said, “What’s this about?” Nobody knows! We still don’t know! It’s six hours after I got the message; I still don’t know what it’s about. We have to guess. So now I get out of bed, and the cat is going nuts, wants to be fed, doesn’t know it’s gotta go to the dentist for gingivitis. So I do the shave, shower, all that routine.
The cat’s just bugging me, does not understand why it’s not been fed. I can’t blame it. I created a welfare recipient out of the damn thing. I feed it three times; it expects to be fed. It’s not gonna get fed ’cause it’s gotta go to the vet for gingivitis. (sigh) I don’t stop to think maybe I should put the cat in the travel cage, because the staff is gonna do that later. Well, because the cat didn’t eat, the cat was fit to be tied. The staff couldn’t get the cat in the cage, had to call the vet and explain it. The vet said, “Okay, we’ll try for next week.”
So I gotta go through all of this all over again next week, and I gotta be the one to find a way to get the cat in the cage after not feeding it again. I think that’s Monday or Tuesday. Okay. So then I get in the car, and I’m on the way. As you people know, I run beta software from Apple. I’m a tester. I understand that beta is beta. I mean, it’s not gonna work and things in it are gonna break, and so I have other devices — phones and iPads and computers — that I use that are running release software.
But after five betas, I’m thinking the audio from phone calls in the CarPlay device that I have in my phone should start working. But it’s not. Every source… Do you know what CarPlay is? CarPlay is where you plug the phone into a cable in your car, and it allows you to send messages, make phone calls, all via Siri. You can listen to music, Sirius satellite, whatever you want to do, through the car’s speakers with a direct wire so the audio connection, the audio quality is fine. All the audio works fine. If I need to play music, I hear it.
Siri reads messages; I hear it. But when it comes to phone audio, the person I’m talking to on the phone doesn’t leave the phone. Of course, I can’t hear it if it’s not going through the car speakers. So I figure it’s just beta software problem and after few more betas it will get fixed. So it’s not fixed. So I start testing new cables today. I tried pairing the phone with Bluetooth in the car. Nothing worked. I called some friends who I know are running iOS 12 beta 5 in CarPlay. It’s working fine for them! It’s not working for me.
So now I know I’ve gotta take it to the dealer. The dealership is gonna tell me, “Sorry. It’s beta software. We’re not working on it.” So I’m looking at another two months of having this not work with no end in sight to fixing it. Of course, whoever you tell it isn’t working is not the slightest bit interested in helping you fix it! They don’t even try to come up with ideas or workarounds. I have other things to do, but I’m sitting out there in the carport! After the cat blew the trip to the vet, after I still don’t know what the president’s tweet about, now I’m trying to get the tone audio to work in my car and I’m already about to blow up.
I had to wait. Pulling out of my driveway, I had to wait because of all the traffic. The traffic is construction and repair vendors and so forth. And I get behind buses and trucks doing 15 miles an hour on the way to work with no way to pass them, have to sit there and endure it while realizing the CarPlay audio on my phone system is not working, realizing the whole cat-to-the-vet thing didn’t work. I got a presidential tweet and don’t know what it’s about. I’m steaming. I am stewing! I finally get here.
There was a new beta release yesterday for Mac. It’s called Mojave, it’s beta 5, and it fixed a couple things on my laptop. The previous beta brightness could not be adjusted and Siri didn’t work. But it’s beta. I understand this. I have workarounds. So I fire up the laptop, I start doing show prep, and I’m printing and printing and printing away. I have about 25 things I’ve printed. Most of my show prep, when I get to the studio, is printing things that I have decided I need for the next day.
After printing 25 or 30 jobs — which is about 50 pages — I turn around to the printer and I see that every damn page is blank! Beta 5 printing is broken from the mail app, and I don’t find this out until 25 jobs in and about 50 pages. There happens to be a computer technician standing right next to me when this happens who offers not a single bit of suggestion or help or even interest! I said, “Look at this. I’ve got 50 blank pages.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure! Look at it!”
“Did you try the second printer?”
“Yes, I tried the second printer. I tried printing every printer in this place.”
“Are they all blank?”
“Yes, they’re all blank. Can’t you see?”
“Yeah, okay. Well, I’ll file a bug report.”
“Good! We’ll file a bug report! That’s gonna get seen in about six weeks! Way to deal with it. We will file a bug report.”
I found a work-around about 10 minutes later that adds three steps to printing whatever I want to print. I have to copy it, paste it into another app, resize it, and then print from that app, and it works. But I got it working. In the midst of all this, as you people know, I smoke cigars. I have thrown away six cigars today. I have tried six cigars, and every one of them had a major flaw. A bunch of them couldn’t draw.
I was gonna get a hernia if I tried to smoke ’em. Another one just fell apart. All of them were bitter as they could be. I said, “There’s not a thing — there’s not a single thing — that’s going right today.” Then it came time to change implants and put on the show implant, which is the one I wear on my belt. I went over there; grabbed it. The battery overnight didn’t charge! I attach it and it’s only got 25% battery. It’s been in the charger overnight.
“What the hell happened?” Luckily, I have a backup, since I’m used to things like this happening. So I put the backup in, but the backup battery doesn’t stay seated here in this unit very well, so I may lose audio two or three times for 10 or 15 seconds during the program — and I still don’t know what the president’s tweet’s about! We think that it’s something that Fox & Friends played a clip from this program from yesterday.
Now, I don’t complain.
This is the kind of stuff I hear from people every day.
Everybody complains to me about whatever. So I thought, “I have to get this stuff out,” and I’m just wait. What else is gonna go wrong the rest of the day? Because not a thing… Well, some things have gone right. The show has started without any problems, which is amazing. And I haven’t said anything here that needs to be bleeped, so that’s good. So we’ll just see. (interruption) I know how to get a cat in the carrier! It’s just if the cat doesn’t eat, you can’t even catch it. The cat’s too smart!