Future Posts to Salivate Over the Thought of.

I’ve got so many things in my head, I want to put them down now so I don’t forget them. This also will have the happy side effect of teasing you, the audience. Here are the blog posts you can expect coming up:

(some of these may be broken up into smaller, more blog-friendly posts. Nobody wants to read a book a day, for the love of all that is holy)

(I am listening to an interview with Bob Knight on the radio right now, and he keeps pronouncing the “Patriots” as the Pay-tree-ahts. “aht” being the same –ot sound as in “otter”. It’s unnerving, and it makes you wonder if Bob Knight does these things just to mess with people and see if they’ll call him on it. Sorry for the sidebar, him saying that word just reverberated in my brain. I had to mention it.)

1) Commentary on Alias: Season Three. You knew it was coming, just deal with it. Or I’ll kill you, just like in Alias. There may be some mention of the fact that a bunch of people I know are into Alias and I never realized it. It’s like they’re all double agents, hiding the fact that they like Alias until I prove I’m one of them. It’s very disconcerting – do they also like JAG? I hope not.

2) The next commentary on My Stupid Sweet Sixteen. You know you like it. And this week is really special – this girl is so spoiled she become something that can’t even be classified as human. She becomes a different, and whinier, species.

3) At some point I’m going to have to do a continuous short story, just for fun.

4) ESPN columnist Bill Simmons has come up with 5 quintessential songs of the 1980’s. I plan on demonstrating that his 1980’s were not my 1980’s, and that the decade in question (and the American culture that permeated it) is a lot more fractured than we are led to believe by, for example, VH-1. I will demonstrate that he is very wrong, but that he probably did as well as he could have under the circumstances. Included will be a discussion of his criteria, and what the criteria should be.

5) My obsession with MTV and their crapulence has hit new heights. I found an article about just how many references to sex there are on MTV, and I want to share that with you.

6) Every cloud has a bunch of rain in it, and so that’s why even though I can think of a few good things about my move at work, I still hate it. I may vent a bit.

You can expect to see these features as soon as I get some time to stop skimming and start writing. Oh, I also want to be judgmental towards Dallas’ most eligible bachelorettes (mostly out of jealousy? I don’t know) and parse the Sean Paul song, “Like Glue.” It is at that point that I will be able to take a deep breath and rest for real.

Blog roll

I figured out how to do a blogroll. I'm smart.

Retiring Legends of Sport

Rudy Thomjonovitch*, the man who cheated death, is resigning as Laker's coach after half a season with that lunatic Kobe and those other spares. One has to ask: what did the man expect? Anyway, he's the first legend to fall. But there were rumors of other, more legendary legends also contemplating retirement:

Emmitt "The Forehead" Smith, career NFL rushing leader and the man whose helmet-removing endzone celebrations caused the league to institute a special penalty for taking you helmet off on the field, and the man whose forehead was studied by NASA for use in the space program as a possible launch pad, it was that huge...announced that he will probably announce his retirement during this Super Bowl Week. He had a pretty good season last year even though he's old, but he's hanging it up anyway.

Brett Favre, 13-year QB for my beloved Green Bay Packers, is rumored to be contemplating leaving the game. I can totally see why(considering the deaths in his family and his kids growing and his wife having cancer), and even though this was the Mike sports equivalent of a nuke dropping on my head, I do not begrudge him at all. Donald Driver, a local Packer receiver and a guy who apparently talks to Favre a lot, told a radio station that he thinks Brett's going to call it quits. This is not set in stone, and it will only sink in for me if and when it happens. First Reggie White dies, and now this. Now all we need is for Leroy Butler to move to Guam, and we'll have some sort of bizarre trifecta.

*No matter how I try I can't get that last name spelled to my satisfaction. Mmm...satisfaction.

Still Just a Rat in a Cage

I’m now fully moved to my new home at work, and if I close my door I feel like I’m in one of those underground control centers. Let me lay it out for you, so you know what I’m dealing with:

<>I have to walk through one locked door (unless the tech support guy “Jose” is in there, in which case I just walk through the open door and past him) into the tech support room. My room is in the very back of this room, behind another locked door. When you walk through that second door, you will be in a 12x14 foot room with wooden shelves about a foot deep along the right wall and the back wall. On the ground along the right wall are filing cabinets with tabletops on them. These masquerade as desks. From the front of the room to the back, the desks are filled with equipment. In order: Tech support computer (not mine), a monitor, a dot-matrix printer (mine), a laser printer (mine), a WYSE terminal (my connection to the my work’s system), another monitor (for my regular computer), and a fax machine. In between the “desk” and the back wall shelves lies the computer I am using to compose this, which is standing ghetto on an upside-down garbage can. Even more ghetto is the clock-radio, which is on that computer itself since there is no more room on the desk. This right side is the part that looks like some sort of control center, and makes me feel like I’m at NASA or something. I reckon I’d be getting paid a bit more at NASA, though.

Above the “desk” are the wooden shelves, which have all the supplies I use on a day-to-day basis, including my “The Onion” desk calendar, which currently shows the headline “New Grill to Revive Foreman-Ali Rivalry”. There is a picture of a Muhammad Ali Grill on it, dubbed “The Greatest Grill of All Time.” I love The Onion. This headline replaced this previous one, which I had up for about 6 months: “Evil Genius Puts Windows 98 in Water Supply”. Apropos for a computer store, no?

On top of those shelves are huge cardboard boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling. I hope they don’t fall on me. I’m going to have nightmares about that now.

Moving to the back wall, you see a ton of little cardboard boxes on shelves that stretch from the floor 7 feet up the wall. You also see other misc. parts, and the overall effect is that of a bunch of computer crap. It’s very valuable to us, though, which is why I’m at such a secure location, behind 2 locked doors and out of the way of everything but the dust mites and paper shreds that literally litter my floor.

If you look to the left now you’ll see two huge wooden doors that open from the middle out. These doors have to remain clear, so I cannot stack the stuff against this (my only open) wall that I need to survive. So in the center of the room are two huge boxes – one with packing peanuts in it and the other with cardboard boxes. I improvise because I have to. I’d do just fine in the ghetto.

They tell me I’ll probably be moving right back to where I was in a month or so, which will be nice. I feel like a rat in a cage in here, despite all my rage. That line never did make sense. Anyway, most people around here feel the problem with this place of work is they never plan anything out properly, and don’t keep associates informed when they do something that will affect them. Another case in point: last Friday I lost internet access at work, with no warning to me or anyone else. I told my supervisor, and he told me that they just decided to get rid of all internet access for “departments” and go to the more easily-trackable “individual humans”, which is all well and good, but I NEED INTERNET ACCESS TO DO MY JOB. Apparently an e-mail was sent by home office to all the stores on December 21st, informing them of the change that would happen “sometime in January”,and it never got as far as even my supervisor. Of course, sending an e-mail like that in the middle of Christmas rush is mind-blowingly stupid as well. All these people share blame equally. I am now using my supervisor’s e-mail “account” until I get my own.

Here’s a word of advice: If you don’t have to get a job, don’t. These people are just maniacs out here.