matching earrings and pendant. I stopped. Big mistake. A woman popped up and asked me what the occasion was. And when I say popped up , I’m not exaggerating. I lowered my eyes for just a second to look at the set, and when I raised my eyes, she was there like one of those pop-up targets at the police force practice range. Must have been a trapdoor in the floor or something.
I told her what the occasion was, and she told me that I have very good tastes. Not just good tastes, mind you, but very good tastes. Next she informed me that the items were very reasonable priced at “eight”. I agreed that “eight" was reasonable for some junk that somebody just picked up off the ground in Namibia because, after all, it cost them something to ship the stuff here. Even with tax, I was going to get out of the place for under “ten”.
But like the pitchperson in an infomercial, the woman was not done yet. The earrings and the pendant were sold separately. It was “eight” for the earrings and “eight” for the pendant. I knew I was fast getting behind the eight ball here, but she had just said the items were very reasonably priced. If I objected to the price now, then I was being very unreasonable by definition. Besides, even with both “eights” and sales tax, I was still getting out for less than “twenty”. Hell, I had a twenty in my wallet. No problemo.
In my defense, I must say that it was not until after we had agreed on “sixteen” that the word “HUNDRED” ever came up. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound! At least the saleslady put the stuff in a really nice box. Looked like a tiny casket in which to bury the corpse of my dead bank account. Then she put the box into a bag. Well hell! If I had seen the bag at the get go, I would have said forget the rocks, just gimme that sack! Damn thing probably added one of those hundreds onto the price.
The Bombastic Brit is already gushing over her new treasure. She is really happy, so I guess it was worth it, as far as that part goes, but now she is already pestering me to take her out so that she can show off her trophies. That’s a downside that even I didn’t anticipate to giving a woman portable property. Oh well--heavy sigh--just this once shouldn't hurt anything.
And she just loves that cute little bag too!~~ back to table of contents
SAVE YOUR BREATH
Every time I turn around, somebody is imploring me to SAVE something. I think a lot of this "saving" this and that is just hyperbole. Can there really be that many things in the universe that are endangered?
I see bumper stickers exhorting me to SAVE THE WHALES. Now I'm as fond of whales as your average elderly Japanese man, but a whale is pretty damned big. Do we really need that many of them? I am, however, for saving whales simply because I can't stand the thought of hurting one.
Then there's the SAVE THE POLAR BEARS campaign. Seems there are only a few thousand polar bears left in the wild. So what? As far as I know, there are no people left in the wild (probably because we're afraid of polar bears) even though we're breeding like rabbits on Viagra. Polar bears have sometimes been known to eat people. I suspect that the SAVE THE POLAR BEARS campaign is only going to result in the SAVE THE ESKIMOS campaign.
But I am an animal lover, of sorts. I don't see the need for killing anything except a few nasty germs and viruses out of the world. What I really can't stomach is all this business about saving stuff that's already dead. I was paying a bill, and when I went to put the stamp on the envelope, there was, SAVE A STAMP, PAY BILLS ONLINE. Why in the hell would I want to save a stamp? I don't care if they stamp out stamps forever!
Every time I turn on the TV, some car salesperson is exhorting me to "SAVE MONEY" by rushing to their lot and buying a car right now. Dollar bills have the same relationship to my wallet that polar bears have to the wild, there are definitely not enough of them in it. But is money really an endangered species? Do these salespeople contribute part of my monthly car payment to the U S Mint for the care and feeding of greenbacks?
It's all a big scam. Many popular products and services claim to SAVE TIME AND MONEY. If so many people are saving time and money, then why are we always running out of them both? We don't need to save anything or anybody. Nature and the wild will be just fine if we would just let them alone. There would definitely be more dollar bills in my wallet if I would just let them alone.~~ back to table of contents
NOBODY DOES IT BETTER
My boss will not accept Planned Obscurity as a career strategy. I simply cannot get him to understand. Since he is a supervisor, he is somebody, at least in relation to his underlings, so he is already too far gone to see the upside of being nobody.
In my work life anyway, I’m such a nobody that saying I’m nobody would be an insult to nobody, which is OK as long as I don’t insult anybody. Being nobody at work works for me because people tend to leave you alone, until appraisal time comes around. Then they want a plan for success. Well if I become successful, then I would be somebody, which would ruin my carefully crafted karma.
An even worse scenario for an incorrigible nobody would be to implement a plan for success and not be successful. Then I would be somebody who failed, which sucks because one can never go back to being nobody, and all my friends are nobody. We lead a happy, rive gauche type of existence: wanting nothing, going nowhere, hanging out with nobody. What’s not to like?
Nobody has job security. When a company has a reduction in force, they don’t lay off nobody, but somebody gets the axe. I may even be immortal. When somebody dies, that’s exactly what happened. Nobody doesn’t die. Nobody is safe. Nobody is fun. It never sucks to be nobody.~~ back to table of contents
GIVEN WITH GREAT PLEASURE
Emails sent within a business should be succinct and to the point, so what’s with all the flowery emails I get at work. A lot of people seem to get great pleasure from sending out emails. And it’s always GREAT pleasure. I never get an email that starts with “It gives us a small, insignificant, hardly noticeable amount of pleasure.”
People also get a big kick out of announcing things to me with great fanfare. I don’t know why that is, but maybe I should ask the folks over at the values committee. They just sent me an email that starts “The Values Committee is happy to announce the winner of the Spring Values Egg Hunt!” The next sentence starts with “And the winner is…” Well I’m glad that they’re happy, but why couldn’t they have just said “Greetings: The winner of the Spring Values Egg Hunt is…”
When I get an email that starts out, “It is with Great Pleasure that…” I get extremely jealous. It must be wonderful to have an imaginary friend named Great Pleasure. All I have is a giant white rabbit named Harvey.~~ back to table of contents
FREE MIKE VICK
Just because I have a FREE MIKE VICK bumper sticker on my car, people think that I don’t like dogs. I like dogs and cats. I really do, especially in a taco. Just kidding! Dogs and cats are like children. I like well-behaved ones that are seen and not heard. The main problem with dogs and cats is dog and cat owners. Competent owner equals good dog or cat equals no problem. Apathetic owner equals rotten dog or cat equals big problem. And these days most dog owners don’t even own dogs. They own annoying little toy things that go yap rather than woof. A real dog is useful.
Another thing that frosts me is this idea that dogs and cats are better than other animals. Pigs are smarter than cats and they rival dogs in intelligence. Cows are about the most useful animals on the planet. I was amazed at how we overweight Americans, after a lifetime of eating pork and beef, had the audacity to complain about Mike Vick’s treatment of five pit bulls. We don’t complain about the millions of hogs and cattle that are tortured, up to and including vivisection, on a daily basis to allow us to pig out on pork chops and ribeyes. I wonder how much jail time will be given to that jerk who bulldozed a sick cow with a forklift? How about none. Don’t even get me started on what we do to chickens.
It’s not that I don’t like dogs and cats. It’s just that little fife dogs and house cats are not at the top of my hierarchy of useful animals. But cows and chickens, now you’re talking.~~ back to
table of contents
GOOD HURT
Remember when you were a little kid and Christmas was coming and it seemed like Christmas would never get here and the closer Christmas got, the suspense kept building up and up until it was downright painful to think about it. Well, Girl Scout Cookies are one of the few seasonal pleasures left that still builds up that air of anticipation until you just can’t take it anymore. We can buy all kinds of fruit all year round; kids expect a toy every time they go to the store; and you don’t even get to enjoy watching illegal immigrants picking fruits and vegetables anymore because we truck the stuff in from south of the border.
Girl Scout cookies still only come around once a year though. No instant gratification there. You have to buy them and wait… and wait… and wait until it’s almost painful. Girl Scout cookies are worth the wait though. And I like buying them almost as much as eating them. The girls come around in their little brown or green uniforms, looking like little wannabe Marines or Border Patrol Agents. And they’re so pleasant, with their parents are hovering over them like vultures. This year though we only had one little girl come through the office. I would have thought that we would have more parents of girl scouts.
At work I