Category: Life

Courtesy Right We Are. Caution: Might not be safe for work.

I just said that to make you click the link.

His Glenness relates a story about his recent trip wherein he and his family were in a hotel when the fire alarm sounded. InstaFamily escaped quickly, and the hotel sprinklers quickly doused the fire.

At least it was a real fire.

Last time I was in Milwaukee, staying in the Hyatt Regency, the fire alarm went off twice. Once on Saturday afternoon, when I was taking my pre-drinking nap and once at 3 am Sunday morning during my post-drinking-pre-driving-home slumber, someone tripped the fire alarm. Your paranoia shidoshi leapt into his trousers, shirt, and shoes quickly and stumbled, quite groggily in the second case, made his way down the narrow concrete steps.

If all the hotel’s denizens had been trying to make their ways down the stairs at the time, we would have had trouble. The stairs were only two people wide, and I was on the ninth floor. That would have made for some trampling if shidoshi had to sacrifice their lives to preserve his….

Oh, but no. The staircase was empty. All other patrons in the hotel waited in their rooms for the announcement that it was a false alarm.

Interesting strategy, guaranteed to only fail once.

My students, when that fire alarm rings, buzzes, or beeps, you leave the building. Perhaps Ashton Kutcher, wearing a fireman’s helmet, will meet you at on the street to tell you you’ve been punked. But maybe he won’t..

Or, if you’d rather not give up cable until you have to, feel free to make Brian J. Noggle the beneficiary of your traveler’s insurance as you go (e-mail me for my SSN, which you’ll need for the forms).

And do not ask your shidoshi about the “coincidence” that he never accepts employment in an office above the fifth floor, nor look in his lower left drawer and seek explanation for the fifty feet of nylon clothesline you might find.

Thank you, that is all.

I cannot praise 88.7 WSIE enough. It is the perfect radio station.

I mean, it only interrupts the jazz music to play St. Louis Blues hockey games.

One less reason for me to leave Musings Central here.

• Save buttons. I remember when we actually used those things depicted on the Save button to actually, you know, save information on.
• Rookies who turned into gritty veteran experience. I remember when Jochen Hecht, also known as “Youngun'” Hecht, broke into the NHL. Now he’s “a veteran guy that’s [sic] tough to lose.”
• Damn kid Subway workers who turn to one another when a Wham! song comes on and ask, “Do you know that song?”

(Apologies to Ravenwood whom I am channelling.)

James Lileks in New York:

The waitress just delivered the bill.

I almost want to stand up and say “do you all know how drunk you all could get for $24 in a Wisconsin tavern? We’re talking seven beers and a personal Tombstone with everything, and change left over for pinball!

Well, not exactly; usually I’ve had more or less money. But next time I am in La Crosse or Fountain City, Lileks, maybe we can conduct a scientific experiment.

If you’re a newspaper columnist like Neil Steinberg, you muse on how long you have been married, had children, and have lived in the suburbs.

If you’re a newspaper columnist’s fan, you think, has it been three years already since he moved out of Chicago?

I need to start measuring my life in more meaningful units. Like meaningful relationships between characters in Friends. Oops, too late.

All right, kids, you want to know how you tell the sign of a good company when you’re interviewing? Forget what any of the books tell you about how to judge a company during a job interview. Of course, it’s easy for me to say, since I have never read a book about job interviews, but if I had, this wouldn’t be a spurious law, would it?

To gauge what a company’s employees think of it and the environment there, ask, no demand that one of the interview platoon take you to see the cafeteria or kitchenette or the little alcove where they have the coffeemaker. Of course, if they don’t have a coffeepot, leave right away (unless you’re Heather, of course).

The best places I have ever worked, at least in a white collar fashion, had clean breakrooms. Best job I ever had, the breakroom was spotless, but that’s because my duty was to clean it, werd. But six dollars an hour doesn’t support five four cats.

Coffee stains or dirty dishes on the counter can indicate a number of things, all of which are bad news for you, the new guy (or gal):

• The saps working here are jacked up all the time and are too busy to wipe up after themselves. That means the company has too few resources for what it does, and you better not have any plans on Saturday.
• The employees here delegate the cleaning up after themselves to, or worse yet assume it will be done by, underlings, ultimately the poor schmuck with only a community college degree who works afternoons to wipe out the bathrooms. If he’s busy, buddy (or buddiette), guess who’s going to be cleaning up after himself (herself) after he (she) brings the coffee to the important people? So, how long have you been here?

A clean kitchen indicates that the other employees are adults who can handle their own mistakes and spills, and that they’re concerned with giving a good first impression to the venture capitalists, board members, vendors, customers, or other employees who might wander in after them. This is good.

Of course, it could mean they’ve read this entry and are attempting to subvert NogSub Law IX, but the odds are definitely with the former.

Here’s a list of more signs you’re getting old.

I have to wonder the real age of the person who wrote this, though, because it seems hollow, as though it was compiled by a damn kid writing for us old people.

Some points:

• Your computer’s ready-mode was a black screen with a single cursor.
  There’s still just a single curser sitting at my computer. Me. Actually, my first computer’s ready screen was blue and grey. Viva la Commodore!
• And you thought it [the Pong arcade game] had the most advanced graphics imaginable.
  Look here, boy, Pong did have the most advanced graphics.

• AOL was just another start-up online service that could easily have lost out to rivals called Compuserve and Prodigy.
  Son, back in the day, we had Quantum Link, Delphi, and bulletin boards. AOL is a 1990s late bloomer.

• A 1-gig hard drive seemed as big as a warehouse. (Today, most are 40-times that.)
  Back in the day, the Lt. Kernal 1 Meg hard drive cost $1000, werd. I never had one.

• Even though there are plenty of LPs in antiques stores, you still have 400 in your attic, because deep down, you still think the format will come back.
  Dude, you cannot sell records for any decent money. Last time I tried to sell an LP or 45 was in the early 1990s, and the used music shop wouldn’t take them off my hands. So they’re up there because they’re worth more for the memories than the money. And who knows, one of these days we might find a working record player again, and when we do, it’s gonna be a party!. Albeit a party where one has to pause the beer-drinkng every couple of minutes to change or flip the record.

Now get offa my lawn!

Electric Venom’s got a post on caffeinated sausages in Germany. To sum up:

But “How does it taste?” you ask?

Dude, it keeps you awake longer so you can have more beer. Does it matter how it tastes?

But it’s more German beer.

Tonight I am drinking Peroni, whose very literature reminds us that it’s beer made by American ally. Werd. And you know, after a couple, they don’t taste too bad.

The very day I see one of these weird Chrysler Pacificas on the road, and I am thinking when did this contraption fall to Earth from the planet Minivania? I’d never heard of it. And do the owners realize that the name comes from the same root word as pacifier?

Then, the very same day, The Professor brings it up. Great minds move in tandem, so they say.

Jeez louise, I was just trying to figure out how to change the oil in a John Deere M655 54″ commercial grade lawn mower, and I am confronted with this gratuitous display of violence which only serves to remind me that I have not yet seen Freddy Vs Jason. Isn’t that a little graphic, Mr. Deere?

Cripes, I am going to have nightmares.

Entire nations have militaries that lack decent night vision gear for nighttime fighting, and here in America we give them to children to play with, for the low price of $9.95 plus shipping and handling.

As Yakov Smirnoff, who does not make vodka you damn kids, often says, “What a country!”

Hey, look at that! I found my list of chores from last weekend here on my desk, where it had been previously been buried by junk mail and other effluvia cast off because I didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with them. So as I was “dealing with them,” which means I left them around long enough for the cats to knock over, I rediscovered my list.

And son of a gun, but that’s what I was planning to do this weekend. So I am saving trees by recycling these lists, including tasks, week to week.

See, honey, I am doing it for the environment.

I get the pleas for money from the NRA because, well, I am the NRA, and the ACLU because I subscribe to Harper’s (at least, I did until my current subscription runs out).

I got pleas from them both today, and I swear I am going to write out $10 checks to both of them, and then I will put the checks into the wrong envelopes.

Let them figure it out.

There’s a lot of science in restrooms.