Suburban Adventure

Each holiday has a set of basic and immutable elements to it, such as Christmas being the time where everyone, regardless of faith, celebrates the birthday of Santa Claus. For the past few years, the Robinson family got together and watched the holiday classic, the Shawshank Redemption. This picture outlines the fixture of the holidays for my mother. Of the elements in the picture, one should be eaten, one should be buried, one should be sold and two should be burned. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.

For any of you who don’t know, my mother moved out in April 2003 after I turned 18 and has lived separately since.  To put the point on the cliche, I got a dog and hi-def TV for my mother, good trade.  Anyway, open dislike has given way to more subtle forms of snarkiness.  This year, I want to send my mother a picture of my father, brother, brother’s girlfriend, cat, dog and various things living under the floor and entitle it “Merry Christmas, from the Robinsons”.  Maybe in 2008 we’ll do it.  Then we’ll have something to give to all my brother’s god-damn friends who’ve discovered that pictures of their children can be mailed.  I the process I’ve learned something that Mendel taught us long ago: ugly dumb-looking people have ugly dumb-looking babies.

My efforts to update my web page backend have proven slow.  I spent about 3 hours today creating a template and troubleshooting it until I realized I’d successfully edited the help file and created a template only the administrator can see.  Woo hoo, progress!

Last weekend I received a mediocre hair cut and went back today to have it fixed by another person.  Being the only man in the salon as well as having the only stylist not chatting nicely.  Her morbid and depressing answers nicely proved why she probably didn’t talk unless provoked.
Me: So, what does it take to become a stylist.
Her: A cosmetology degree that means nothing and two years of pain and losing your best friend.
Me: Well, if it makes you feel any better I make products for people who can’t shit.
Her: You know what’s shitty?  Having your new best friend get the job while you were away on maternity leave because she slept with the salon manager.
Me: Ha ha…  I sometimes have problems with my co-workers, but we all bear down when we realize what’s at stake.
Her:  My grandfather had inoperable brain cancer.
I decided to shut my mouth at this point after realizing anything I said from this point on would probably involver her responding that she had her first three children in a steamer trunk in her crawl space.

After FNM we underwent an epic quest to acquire Rock Band which involved around 38 miles of driving and breaking into the store-room of a K-mart.  In my mind it wasn’t breaking and entering in that the door was open and we had a legitimate purpose in being there so the manager was way out of line when he threw us out.  Anyway, we found it but the place’s credit card machine was broke and I was the only one with sufficient cash to buy it out right.  I was reluctant to let Gregg and Ryan borrow 200 dollars until I realized that doing so would allow me to see a fat racist white dullard butcher the lyrics to “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benetar.  The Benjamins came out and I was on my way to what amounted to karaoke night at a klan meeting.  If the idiocy of racists isn’t enough to dissuade you of their philosophy I strongly recommend you watch them play a fake bass guitar.

I did the same test today 570 times.  Why you might ask?  Because I wanted to know that they were all done and that I’d never have to deal with the passive aggressive sniping of one of the pilot plant employees.  When I finished the 600 samples (30 were done by someone else) I returned them to the in-house manufacturers and was met by two things.  1) Good job! But said in the passive aggressive way that questioned my competance.  “Wow, I didn’t think you could test them so quickly without taking short cuts or mis-labeling samples.” and 2) “now that we know how quickly you can do them, you should have no trouble testing the next batch of 9000.”I was at first angered by this until I heard how it came about: one of our departments has been dragging its heels regarding a project were doing and kept coming up with excused to delay.  Finally, there was a show down where the evil department head said the only way the project could go forward was if we produced 10000 sample products by the end of January, an attempt to break our spirits.  The project head with R&D literally responded by saying “bring it”.  At least I have an excuse for overtime, now.

Grades were posted today at Temple and I stumbled on a bit of a conundrum.  I did better than I expected in my statistical forecasting class, significantly so, like 40 percent.  So, I was off egregiously,  but it was a statistical forecasting class so I feel that if I say anything my error may result in my grade going back closer to expectation.At Work: I got into an argument over whether it was ethical to have chicken fat in potato chips without indicating so.  I said they should just jam little chunks of chicken in to improve the chips in anyway as should be done with all foods.  The vegetarian was not amused.

I received a message from Tom Leitz, assistant camp director that he probably won’t be back from vacation in time for the Staff Reunion and he forwarded me a list of the RSVP’d staff.  Interestingly, this was identical to the list that RSVP’d to me.  To find this next part bewildering one needs to realize that we started using the RSVP system so that camp admin could take payment and provide the person running the event with a person count.  I asked to about this to which he replied “you can check the office”, the old I’m-going-on-vacation-and-am-going-to-make-you-drive-for-an-hour-and-a-half-to-do-my-job excuse.  I like to think of it merely as a retro Christmas where things were like they were in years past except for this time, Dan Rowley, the host having a heart attack after he hears what’s happening.At Work:  Today, one of my coworkers dropped a part for use in a clinical device and was told to destroy it at significant cost to dispose and re-manufacture.  This normal procedures for most medical devices with the following differences:
1) the part was designed to be covered in shit
2) dust is cleaner than shit
3) the product works strictly on the outside of the body
4) the part is irradiated with the rest of the parts in the product before shipping
and
5) the part was designed to be covered in shit
Am I the only one to see slight differences?