Honey, Get the Fire Extinguisher - there are Salesmen at the Door

Things got even weirder last night, when we had about seven people knock at the door, all using the same knock. This makes things interesting if I have to work, watch tv, eat, or breathe. Our lovely new child is highly agitated by the door, starting the barking immediately and not stopping til about 10 minutes later. Like most of us, I refuse to answer the door, because it's never anything important - usually people telling me they happen to be doing work in the neighborhood and would I like an estimate... No thank you, SLAM. Vote for me (don't piss the dog off - she's a libertarian). I'm selling dirty socks for college..... SLAM.  Like the phone ringing, the door is just another irritant.



While taking the fur child for her morning trip outside, I started wondering..... [shaky video wooooo]. How do dogs decide where to do their stuff? The smell of each blade of grass hasn't changed overnight. Is one spot naturally better than another? Will the yard need to be defended from birds and squirrels? What if people had this routine?

"I gotta go before we eat - be right back."
Up steps... into bedroom... kick over some laundry and go through it, throw dirty clothes here and there... into bathroom. Kick over trash, spread it evenly across the floor... shit - this place stinks of ammonia or something... into guest room, jump on bed.... turn over trash... nah, not right.  Back downstairs, check out the window for people walking on my sidewalk.... yell at them a few times... into kitchen.... empty trash and spend some quality time digging through it and moving it around... yell at kids... yell at wife.. yell at company and sniff their laps. Finally, as if a light came on, run to bathroom... give final approval... do my stuff.  Sigh... all is well.

HONEY - someone needs to come in here and pick up after me!

• Define 'kinky'   - dog chewies in bed
• Define 'kinkier'   - dog eating chewies in bed while you're gettin busy

Dear lefty:

• Sam Smith, of San Salvador, asks why we're so ornery.
• Fuck you, Sam.

The American Psychological Association, long known for their great expertise on matters of gun ownership, says that traditional masculinity is harmful. If SJWs can reach the APA, we're doomed. The APA has some small influence... do you want to be treated by people who think your gender is harmful? As if they don't have a bad reputation already....

• Remember: if you shoot em, they'll never do it again.

Oh Charles...

Yes, my darling?

Oh Charles... feel my left breast.

Just the left one, my darling?

Yes, Charles. I'm saving the right one for marriage.

• My email program did a cleanup today. It saved exactly the amount of space my first hard drive had: 40 megs. It's interesting to think about this stuff... our phones have more RAM and horsepower than we could imagine 'back then'.

My house is so cold....

HOW COLD IS IT?

It's so cold, we have to put things in the fridge to keep them from freezing.

• Some kid in a Philly high school dyed his hair green, in support of Dem Iggles. The moment he gets a car, there will be a green Idiot Flag hanging on a window.

I think that Amazon Ring thing is pretty damn cool. Who couldn't love a video feed of whoever approaches your house? Unfortunately, Amazon security is an oxymoron. They're incredibly easy to access and Ring has a history of lax security. And of course, this involves The Cloud. And of course when The Cloud is involved, something will be misconfigured and accessed. And of course it was left open and everyone's videos were accessed. Internet of things: a very slow moving train wreck, where the train is carrying serious explosives.

• Honey - my adult diapers are here!

Yes, it's snowing.
And yes, I know I shouldn't complain about snow in the winter, but that won't stop me. The dog, who saw her first snow last year, is not impressed. She came from somewhere warm, where I'd like to move. I want snow to be something we watch on tv news, when it's happening in another state.

I asked a tv weatherman what the stats said on rain and general gloom. He told me the stats weren't different. The other day I heard that last year set the record for most rain in a year. They didn't mention total days without sun because they didn't want people to start committing suicide in large numbers. Rest assured, it would be filmed for reality tv, plus every idiot with a phone would be out, because you didn't die if it wasn't livestreamed on Faceyspaces.

Existential Dilemma: I've never been on Faceyspaces, therefore I don't exist. I'll bet you feel funny about reading this now, don't you?



Dear lefty:

• Dan Diamond, of Dover, Delaware, says you wouldn't know grammar if it jumped up and bit you.
• Readers often ask me why I hate people...

GUITAR PLAYERS
Don't tell anybody, but I'm going to let you in on a can't miss financial opportunity. Since all guitar players are poor (except Slash), we need all we can get.

With the news that Sears is closing, now's the time to pick up some bargains. Lowell George, RIP, of Little Feat, used a Craftsmen 11/16" socket for a slide. Get down to Sears and buy all the 11/16" sockets you can find. Craftsmen tools are moving to Lowes, so they'll still be around. Wait about a year, then sell the Special Lowell George 11/16" sockets. Mention that they're pre-Lowes, because the Lowes sockets don't sound as good.

Trust me, non-guitar players... this is hysterical.

Happy Belated Birthday

to Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame, who would have been seventy-two yesterday.


Urinus Interruptus

So I'm minding my own business, in the bathroom, when the door opens.  Of course the door opens - it's the cat, mortified by my human desire to eliminate alone and with the door closed.  I suspect this need of ours for solitude somehow offends felines, who are smart enough to figure out bi-fold doors.  We thought we had outsmarted him (and the dog) by installing the door backwards but this took only a day to figure out.  For both of them.


The Car is Back!

After only three weeks and a day, our beloved car is back from the collision shop, fully repaired.  For those of you keeping score, it's deer zero, us one, insurance four thousand, rental car seven hundred.  It's most fortunate that I'm independently wealthy.

The wife is beyond joyous; she loves her car.  I'm happy to not be paying for a rental, even if the seats were nicer.

Let me say something nice here about State Farm: they've been great and fast.  No crap, no fuss, it's done.  All insurance should work this way (take notice, health insurance).


A Word from the AntiSports

I don't usually bother but I came across this little factlet on the radio the other day: hockey is about to start again, after the lockout.  Philly is the city with the least amount of ticket refund requests, at two-hundred.

Seriously, Philly, you are a huge, dirty city of enablers.  You put up with crappy team performance and greedy millionaires.  What do you do?  You line up to pay them some more.  You deserve what you get.  You pay an egregious amount to simply park at football games, not to mention the now standard TSA-style groping.



In closing, I urge caution on the forced national panic about guns.  There is obviously an agenda here.

I'm Having One of Those Days Again

Nothing serious, just work stuff around my unreasonable expectations.

What are unreasonable expectations?  I'll tell you, in the form of a story.

Since it was lunchtime, I went to the kitchen to wash my hands and heat up my food.  The sink had no soap.  Needing a fork, I went to the silverware drawer, only to discover there were no forks.  There were spoons - lots of spoons.  In fact both the spoon spot and the knife spot were full of spoons.  But no forks.

We have soda machines.  Yes, we do...  for an outrageous sum, you can purchase the high fructose corn syrup-infused beverage of your choice, provided said beverage isn't Coke.  Last week someone blew up a picture of a Coke bottle to twice its size and taped it to the soda machine, with the word `Please' written on it.

In the Old Days (which, in this case, means last year or so), one could make a request and see it fulfilled by the next day or so.  We were all excited because we were going to be able to purchase Coke.  Within a few days, Coke failed to appear.  In fact, Coke stubbornly refused to show up in that machine for weeks.

We're a big outfit and we have two kitchen areas.  Sometimes I head out to the other end of the building (county) to see what the other machine has in store for me.  It's also a great place to find silverware when there isn't any in the normal lunchroom.  Since this area is closer to the VIPs, it is always well-stocked.  Our lunchroom is the bastard red-headed stepchild of the company.

You could have knocked me over with a feather because, standing right there where the soda machines stand, was a brand spankin' new Coke machine!  I almost ran across the room, in slow motion, like lovers do across a field, to purchase my first actual Coke.

You know what's coming, right?

I found Coke!  Well, when I say Coke, I mean Cherry Coke; which was fine that particular day.  Had I desired Diet Coke, I could have found that in spades, as well as in the Pepsi machine in our lunchroom.  Since I prefer to choose my cancers carefully, I do not drink diet anything.

Hours later I had to hit the men's room.  Judging by the small pond on the floor, I might not have been the only one.  It's been sitting there for two days and doesn't have any (visible) life.  Doesn't look like good fishing anyway.  After I washed my hands, which not all coworkers do, I discovered the paper towel machine cracked open, with no paper towels in it.

Sigh.

I turned to the other paper towel machine, which was completely full of paper towels, but alas, also full of dead batteries, so it wouldn't dispense the much-needed towels.  No matter, my hands were almost dry by that point anyway.

Fast forward to this morning, in the men's room again.  Automated soap dispenser was out of soap.  But there were paper towels.

My company is full of germphobes and compulsive hand-washers.  Outside of every bathroom and every ten feet thereafter on the walls, are water-free hand cleaner dispensers.   As of last month, all the soap dispensers and paper towel dispensers were automatic so all you had to do was wave your hand beneath it.  This is especially amusing when it allots you three inches of paper towel with which to dry your hands.  This is not a money or resource-saving measure; it's just the batteries wearing down.

The only place where you can pour your own soap is the kitchen.  While there was a soap sighting today, the (manual) paper towel dispenser was empty.  But there were forks.  And still no knives.

As one would expect, there was nothing to drink in the Pepsi machine except Diet Coke and other non-palatable items.  Trudging over to the next county, I headed straight for the brand new Coke machine.

Wait for it!!

There was no Coke.

In the Coke machine.

The machine with huge the red and white illustration.  Of Coke.
The machine with the wondrous inner workings which whisk your beverage on its merry way to you with great flourish.


But at least there was Diet Pepsi.

Better Bathroom Strategies in the Workplace

Today's topic is the bathroom, or loo, for my UK guests.

More specifically, it's the continuing circus that seems to have set itself up around the bathrooms where I work. Being the Twilight Zone, it simply couldn't be normal.

I'm going to take it on faith that the greater majority of bathrooms in the greater majority of workplaces are managed reasonably well, and by that I mean the fixtures are generally adhered to the walls and one doesn't have to swim to the urinal.

You probably think I'm kidding.

Work has introduced yet another great move forward in Bathroom Husbandry this week with its brand new Temperature Initiative.  If you were to go into the bathroom, you would notice that the heat was sufficient, that is to say it's so hot and dry there that you could hang laundry.  As most of the employees do not do laundry at work (one of the few things they don't do, in fact), the heat is somewhat of a puzzle.

At first I suspected Manglement wanted to make the area so inhospitable that mortals wouldn't want to spend any time there, thus cutting down bathroom breaks.  This was until someone reminded me of what the bathrooms are like normally.  Ok, there's one theory shot.

The remaining theory is that the bathroom is just getting all of the heat that's missing from other unimportant areas of the building, like employees' desks.

Then there's the continuing saga of Business Lake.   There is no official lake by that name but it is the name I've chosen to give to the lake in the bathroom.  It's a body of water that just seems to be there, on the floor, regardless of what else is happening.  We thought it might be the result of a stall overflowing or the urinal that drenches its user, but no.

Recently the lake disappeared, triggering a visit from the Bureau of Land Management as well as Clean Water Act volunteers.  Homeland Security can't be far behind but we're lower on their priorities as there's simply nothing to grope.

We had a urinal.

Ok, to be fair, we have a urinal.  As mentioned previously, it had a tendency to splash water up on whoever was using it.  Perhaps for that reason (but by no means definitely), it was removed from service.  The sign and the plastic bag over it did nothing to dissuade the hardcore bathroom enthusiasts from using the urinal.  Perhaps as a result (but by no means definitely), the urinal was removed.  From the wall and the bathroom.

For a month.

I want to qualify my statements: I have absolutely no knowledge of plumbing.  That said, this must have been some urinal replacement.   When I need something done in the bathroom, I call the local expert (my wife).  When the job exceeds my wife's expertise, we do what everyone else does and call the plumber.  The plumber does what he does to everyone else and doesn't call us back.

We have what appears to be a fully-staffed maintenance department so it shakes the foundation of my being to imagine the urinal issue that could not have been solved in under thirty days.  My head is starting to throb, so I'll drop this line of inquiry immediately.

And I'll head right over to the stall.  The stall holds within its walls a standard-issue toilet (or so it would seem).  It was fairly prone to flooding, which led us to believe that it fed Business Lake.  So at some point, the ubiquitous They closed the stall.  The stall didn't work but the lake was still there.

The stall, much like the urinal, stayed closed for close to thirty days.  We actually got a call from In Search Of, who wanted to do a show on the errant toilet.  Eventually, without ceremony, it reopened.

BUT - GERMS!

I work with an incredibly large population of germphobes.  I noticed antibacterial waterless soap dispensers appearing all over the building with frightening frequency.  It was only after I asked for some desk cleaner and my neighbor brought out this eighteen inch tall can of aerosol antibacterial spray that I knew what was happening: the building is full of people with undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Naturally it wasn't long before the bathroom soap dispensers were replaced.  Not only was the soap antibacterial, the dispensers were automatic.  You only had to put your hand under them to get a premeasured dosage of that lovely and comforting antibacterial goodness.

And when you are done with all this antibacterial madness, you can dry your hands on the paper towels.  You know, the paper towels provided by the automatic paper towel dispenser.  Just put your wet hands under the dispenser and you get a premeasured (for your convenience and safety) piece of paper towel.  There is no word on whether the towel is antibacterial or not.

The white paper towels were ok but in order to save money, they went to the brown paper towels.  Shortly after this point it was discovered that the automatic paper towel dispensers weren't all that automatic.  The towels would get shorter and shorter.  You had to `swipe' repeatedly to get enough towel to dry your antibacterial hands.  Shortly thereafter the dispensers simply stopped working entirely, with an unsatisfying BEEP.

While we were waiting for the paper towel dispensers to be put back into service (hopefully under the thirty day minimum), the antibacterial soap dispensers ran out of soap.

For three days.

So to sum things up, we have urinals and stalls out of service for thirty days and now there are dispensers that require daily maintenance or refilling.  How successful do you think this program is going to be?  Perhaps the evil plot is to stop everyone from using the bathrooms in the first place, in which case Manglement is in for a rather rude surprise.

But don't worry - even if you have to wipe your hands on your pants, you can walk out the bathroom door and use the antibacterial waterless soap on the post outside the door.  And again halfway down the hall.