My wife and I visited Cleveland over the weekend and ate at a small restaurant in Little Italy. When I first heard Cleveland had a Little Italy, I figured it was a strip mall with a couple chain Italian restaurants sandwiched around a Starbucks and a Cell Phones ‘R Us. To my surprise it was several blocks of very authentic eateries and bakeries nestled in a tiny older neighborhood. There was the smell of home cooking (if home is Italy) in the air and they carried the authenticity right down to the double-parked streets and vendors selling their wares outside the main establishments. Of course, I was a little concerned when I passed by one shop selling “The Sopranos” posters at the entry to an alley with a sign reading, “To See More Wares, Please Come This Way” and an arrow pointing down the dark recesses of the alley. I passed on the opportunity to find out how truly authentic Little Italy really was.
After eating at one of the less crowded places, as we were waiting for the bill, a rather burly dark-haired, dark-skinned, darkly dressed man started lurking around the tables near to us. He pulled a large dark case from the shadows under a table. I was about to yell “Duck!”, or is that “La Duck!”, when he unsnapped the case and pulled out an accordion and started playing.
He looked much less ominous after I reappeared out from under the table.
Ah, yes, Friday the 13th. My computer didn’t want to boot up into Windows and recognize my mouse, Internet Explorer crashed on half the sites I tried to visit, and Outlook kept shutting down because of an unknown error.
Pretty much like every other day with Microsoft.
It was pointed out to me recently by a friend of mine that in the traditional work-world - you know, the one where you go somewhere you don’t really want to be to do things you don’t really want to do for someone you don’t respect - you get a two week vacation every year. Okay, sure, but what was he driving at? He went on to point out that there are 52 weeks in the year and when you divide the 2 week vacation into 52 you end up with 26. Still a blank look on my face. He further explained that working 50 weeks of the year for someone else and only having 2 weeks a year to yourself, it would take 26 years before you got one year’s worth of time that you could call your own.
Vacation time was a sham. Enough time to recharge the inner batteries - for management’s use. You can beat a dead horse but with two week’s vacation you can prop it back up at a desk and get another 50 week’s worth of status reports and project management out of it. Surely this was just more conspiracy theory; my friend had been watching too many episodes of the X-Files. So, I thought, time to investigate. Through a secret contact high in the levels of corporate management I was able to obtain a copy of the middle manager’s handbook. It turns out there isn’t actually an upper management handbook anymore - they had to stop passing them out when “Golf for Dummies” sued after finding out secretaries had been ordered (50 weeks out of the year) to make illegal photocopies and just change the cover to read “Upper Management Primer”. Anyway, I checked the index and sure enough, page 42, paragraph 1:
Vacation: Illusory benefit to help maintain productivity; to be used as incentive for massive overtime and tool for pushing up deadlines. Additional references, “Carrot on a stick” and “Pavlov’s dog”.
The reference was followed up with a subsection of preferred reading including titles like, “How to Make Your Employees Feel Guilty for Taking Vacation Time”, “101 Ways to Still Get Work from a Vacationing Employee”, and my personal favorite, “Expendable Employees - Arguments to Eliminate Vacation and Come in Under Budget”.
Oh yes, and of course, “Golf for Dummies”.
It was pretty late at night and I could barely see the road ahead of me. I was going about 70 miles per hour and getting ready to crest a hill when suddenly I had to stop the car.
You don’t see a lot of highway signs saying “Schroedinger’s Bridge, 1/4 mile”.
My wife bought me some cola from the grocery. The label reads:
Genuine Faygo Dee-licious™ Rock & Rye!
Artificially Flavored Creme Cola
I didn’t check before drinking it. I guess I got pretty lucky it was the Dee-licious™ version.
Insurance companies suck. Okay, to be fair, maybe they are just the purest form of “sell your mother down the river for a buck” capitalism. They’ve bypassed the whole supply and demand concept unless you make it supply and demand-that-you-have-it-in-order-to-live. Want to drive? You need insurance. Feeling sick? Better have insurance. Prefer not to have your mortal remains go to medical science? Insurance. Insurance has also gotten to the point where only the people that don’t really need to use it can get it. You give them money and don’t make any waves and they let you live your life. Perhaps I should revise my earlier statement - they might just be the purest form of “take your mother for a ride” racketeering.
Insurance companies use what they call underwriters, which I suspect is just a fancy term for “bookie”, to set the odds on what kind of policy you can purchase. Health insurance is by far the scariest to go without because, let’s face it, we all get sick sooner or later. In this arena you have group plans and individual plans. If you are in what’s called a group plan then the insurance companies can’t turn you down, they can just try and jack your rates up a bit. A group plan means you’re basically working for someone else with a lot of other insured members. I believe the government only enforces this rule on the insurance companies because they like the concept of manageable herds of cattle as opposed to individual self-employed rogue strays - but that’s a story for another time. For the insurance company it’s like buying a “lot” at an auction for an experienced bidder; the bad pieces you’re forced to take are usually outweighed by the good pieces and, a lot of times, you can still manage to cover your costs on the bad ones.
Individual plans are tailor made for Hitler’s master race. Perfect body. Perfect health. Perfect progeny. You’re signed up. The rest of the everyday shmoes, like myself, who don’t qualify for the group plan safe harbor are made to feel like it’s a privilege to be accepted by an insurance plan that only takes half our income as a premium and still makes us pay for most of our own charges. I believe the only things they fully cover are diseases known to be eradicated from the face of the planet. I feel pretty good about my Black Plague coverage. Heaven help me, though, if I get a bad case of the flu. And for you women out there who might want an individual health insurance policy, don’t even think about pregnancy. You’d have a better chance with an Ebola virus rider! Insurance companies will even turn down the husband on an individual-only policy if his wife is pregnant. They can’t take the chance that the soon-to-be-father might add the child to his policy. If the child is a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan after birth, they might be willing to consider it. For a fee.
Okay, by who’s standards is today not really yesterday? I mean, I haven’t been to sleep yet so it’s still a physical day for me. I live in Indiana so it only complicates matters more with the non observance of daylight savings time. While everyone else is turning back their clocks or moving them forward, we just have to remember that all the television shows come on at different times (unless you have TiVo then programming time has no meaning). We sort of jump to the left and we’re Central Time - jump to the right and we’re Eastern Time. Or is that the other way around? Lord help those poor folks that live on the border. They must be routinely time-warping with every trip to the local grocer. Remember that obscure little cult series, Star Trek? Kirk, Spock, and the crew routinely dealt with the perils of time travel. Can’t you just imagine how all of this time-zone and daylight-savings bologna could have screwed up the Federation?
[Kirk] Scotty, have you got those engines fixed? If we don’t warp out of here now, the universe is screwed! (okay, Kirk never said screwed, but if you suspended belief that William Shatner could really act, then just work with me here)
[Scotty] Cap’n, I still have a bloody hour t’go!
[Kirk] Spock, I told you to set the ship’s computer forward an hour!
Now, of course, Wesley from Star Trek, The Next Generation would blithely fix it all with some sort of time correcting nanobots from the future, but I think we all understand the ridiculousness of daylight savings time, don’t we?
Just nod and say yes, or I’ll be forced to use a Brady Bunch analogy.
Good things to teach your 1-year-old daughter:
“Mom-ma.”
“Dad-da.”
“Patty-cake.”
Bad things to teach your 1-year-old daughter:
“@#$%^& Microsoft!”
“[ring] Hello? [pause] No, I do not want to switch my long distance. Now kindly please [censor] yourself and [censor] [censor] and a garden hose. [click]”
“Lyrics to heavy metal songs.”
This parenting stuff is tough.
I got to my desk at a client’s where I do some technical support work. Sitting on my chair was a streaky colored printout of a report, completely illegible in a wide stripe down the center of the page. A penned note at the bottom said, “Scott, This is what I got from the printer.” Below the message was a signature - a zig-zag sort of pattern.
My word, I thought, I’ve been contacted by Zorro! Who else would leave such a cryptic signature? Possibly a doctor, but I don’t work in a medical facility, so then Zorro it must be! Now what of this example printout? Zorro would not have need of such a device. It must be a message. I was to meet him by the color printer. Should I bring a sword? Zorro has a sword. I should take a sword. Held up for a definitive lack of swords in a marketing and communications building, I settled for a makeshift 3-foot sabre of dry-erase markers connected end to end. With the cap off the last one, I might get close enough to stun my enemies olfactory senses. Wait-a-minute! Zorro has a mask and cape too… Surely, if he called upon me, he knew of my prowess and resourcefulness. Several floppy disks stripped of their plastic shells and secured with a tie of CAT 5 cable made short work of my mask. As I was unrolling a man-sized length of bubble-wrap (a most new-age cape also providing insulation from enemy blows) my boss walked by the door to my office.
“You get my note?”
My job is really boring sometimes.
My daughter has gorgeous long eyelashes which my wife always points out to people came from me. After she says that, I like to chime in seriously with, “Yes, they come in great when I go out in drag.”
I’m a riot at social functions.