Embrace the Potato

One of the best lines I ever heard on a Friends episode was when the janitor, Mr. Treeger, says, "I'm just a big potato with arms, and legs, and a head."  As I've put on weight, it's all seemed to congregate in the area of my midsection.  Unfairly, I don't have very big arms or legs, so I've started referring to myself as a potato too.  I'm skinny and fat in all the wrong places.  But, you know, even though I make fun of the way I look, and I certainly am not satisfied with leaving it the way it is, I still think it's important to like who you are inside.  Your looks are only part of who you are.  You have to embrace the potato inside the peel. Whether you're a skinny French Fry, an irregular Sweet Potato, or just a round Golden Russet; you have to learn to love what makes you who you are.  You're a potato, and no matter how you change yourself, you'll still be a potato.

The Basics

"Sometimes we does not have all the fields required..."

That is an extraction from a document written by one of my colleagues at work.  Why isn't a rudimentary grasp of the English language a requirement on job notices?  Who cares if you can use a word processor, if you can't even articulate in the language in which you'll be writing?  Have we focused too much on the advanced knowledge desired from an applicant and overlooked the basics?

Furthermore, most of these people have four-year degrees from accredited universities.  How on earth were they ever passed writing and speaking like this?

The Labra-genius

SM doesn't have a fence around his yard, so he's taken to chaining his Labrador to a stake in the yard.  She most obviously hates the arrangement, because generally people (and taunting squirrels) stand just outside her range of mobility.  So, she devised a scheme of genius proportions.  She took to peeing on her chain in the same place every day.  Eventually, the chain started to rust (and possibly corrode) from the excessive moisture.  When it became weak enough, she gave it one violent jerk, and "Ping!" it snapped.

R.I.P. Mr. Unsuspecting Gray Squirrel...

The Affiliation

Why do we all associate ourselves somewhere?  Like saying I'm Texan or Greek.  Does that define us, or somehow make us better or worse than someone else?  What characteristics do all Texans have - without fail, across the board - other than being from Texas?  What does me saying that I'm from Texas really tell someone about me?  We're not all short or tall, not all blonde or brunette, not all black or white.  We don't all have accents, or drive trucks, or own horses, or have a gun in the back window...much to the dismay of common belief.  We have such pride in where we come from, and yet where we come from really doesn't say anything about who we are.

MOlives

www.saveMOlives.com

I didn't know that Missouri olives were such a rare commodity that we had to set up an entire website devoted to saving them.

The Wind Tunnel

My senior year in high school, my parents took my girlfriend and me on a vacation with them to Colorado. In order to maintain decorum, we got two hotel rooms - my girlfriend and stepmother in one, and my dad and I in the other. This was one of those hotel rooms where the air conditioner was a unit at one end of the room, blowing air at high velocity back toward the other side. My dad and I both have sinus issues, and we sleep with a fan blowing on our faces all year long. So, we each set up a fan on the night stands by our beds in such a way that my fan blew back toward the air conditioner, and my dad's fan was between my fan and the air conditioner, also blowing back toward the air conditioner. Picture a sort of wind tunnel created by this setup. The air conditioner blew air from one end of the room to the other near the ceiling. The air bounced off the wall, got blown back across the room by my fan, got sucked up by my dad's fan, and then blown into the flow of the air conditioner, where it started the cycle all over again.

And that's when it happened. My dad...how shall we say it...let one rip into the breeze of his fan. Where it quickly got caught in the wind-tunnel current and distributed throughout the room. The bad part was that because of the nature of the current, it kept getting circulated around and around, so that every few seconds you received a new full-body waft. I nearly died before I could crawl to the fans and turn them both off until the smell had dissipated.

Coughart

Today at work, I had a coughart. I'm not sure if it was audible, because I had my headphones on, but my neighbor got up and left. Someone else passed out for 20 min two rows away. I started laughing so hard, I cougharted again. And the cycle continued...

Turn Your Back for One Minute

Wouldn't it piss you off if you left your dog in the car, while you popped into a shop to grab something really quick, only to come back out and find that he'd changed all your seat settings?

"Hey, you mangy mutt, put that seat back where you found it! And unlock this door! This is not funny!"

How Old Are You Again?

My wife says that I'm so immature that I act like a 4-year old. She says that she feels more like a mom than a wife. I'd have to say that half of the time, she's dead on. The other half of the time I feel more like 54 years old. My joints pop, I'm crotchety, and I make comments like, "I can't understand girls nowadays with their non-existent shorts."

Sometimes, the switch can be a day apart. The other day, I glued a quarter to the ground just to laugh while people stopped to try to pick it up. The next day, I had completely forgotten about it, and I stopped to try to pick up this quarter on the sidewalk, only to find that someone had glued it down.

Who's Packing?

A recent report showed that 1 in 10 people in any given movie theater in Missouri will be carrying a concealed handgun. That means that approximately one person on every single row of the theater has a handgun.

I come from the great state of Texas, and I suspect that this statistic would be closer to 1 in 2 people carrying a handgun in any give movie theater in Texas. It's so prevalent that we even have disclaimers at the beginning of the movie that said, "Be courteous to your fellow patrons. Please silence all cell phones and put all handguns on safety."

A Valuable Asset to the Company

Lately, we've had a large number of individuals leave our company in search of better pay and more lucrative reward opportunities. So, in an effort to raise morale, our supervisors have been pushing a message about how we are valuable assets to the company.

But let's really think about this a minute, because this is really one of those times when actions speak louder than words. "A valuable asset to the company" is really defined by how much money a company is willing to pay to have you work or stay working for them. I mean, a baseball card listed at $150 is not worth $150 if someone is only willing to pay $60 for it. So, regardless of how amazing we are as individuals, it means nothing if the company isn't willing to acknowledge that.

And in this situation, words of acknowledgment are useless. Money talks or people walk.

Deceased Status

I was working on a file layout at work, and one of the fields was called Deceased Status. The field had two acceptable statuses, "Alive" and "Otherwise." Is there another option besides "Alive" and "Dead" that we need to allow for? Why, "Otherwise" and not just "Dead"?

I posed this question to SM, and he suggested that maybe there is a status that is both "Alive" and "Dead," such as in the Princess Bride where Wesley was "Mostly Dead." Or maybe like in that Monty Python scene, "Bring out your dead...but I'm not dead yet...you're not fooling anyone, you will be soon enough."

Based on this new information, I had to give this more serious thought. What other statuses could you have then? How about "Undead" to describe zombies, vampires, etc.? And suddenly it became clear why they just went with "Otherwise," because the alternative is a lengthy list of possible statuses. It was just easier their way.

My New Workout Videos

I ordered this set of exercise videos off TV, because let’s face it, I’m not getting in shape by just sitting and watching people exercise on TV. It was a whole kit, complete with videos, diet plan, recipe book, work-out schedule, and fitness bands.

So last night, I decided to try out the first video. I bent over to pick up the box off the floor and pulled a muscle in my groin. I decided that was good enough for the first day.

Inside Shoes

When I was three years-old, a stupid little girl threw me off the monkey bars. The ultimate result of this disaster was that I broke my arm. I didn't know that specifically at the time, but I did know that it hurt...a lot. The teacher did her due diligence and called my parents. To their credit, both of them showed up to take care of me. I only remember two things vividly about this memory.

I remember that I would not leave the daycare until my parents changed my shoes. The daycare had a strict policy about not wearing your outside shoes inside, and vice versa. So, here are my poor parents trying to rush me to the emergency room, and I'm crying and won't leave until they changed my shoes.

I also remember that my father brought me a stuffed dinosaur. I named him Dino. I used to carry that thing around by the neck everywhere I went. I still have him. His head flops to one side now, because I squeezed all the stuffing out of his neck.

The Strangeness of Dreams

Have you ever had a dream where you dream about a person you know? In the dream you are consciously aware that the person you are dreaming about is the person you know. Your mind registers this fact. But they don't look like the person you know, act like the person you know, and your dream self doesn't feel about this dream person in the same way that your real self feels about the real person.

And yet your dream self also knows all this. So, you struggle in your dream with two sides to your self. One side acknowledges that this person is in fact exactly who they should be, while the other side tells you that something isn't quite right with them.

Toasting Up Before the Cold

When I was young, my Mom would always wake my brother and I up with steaming cups of hot chocolate on cold days. Each cup had extra marshmallows, hand counted to an equal number, so we wouldn't fight. And while we drank our hot chocolate and took our showers, she would toss our clothes for the day into the dryer to get them all toasty warm for us.

It was a small gesture, but one that obviously stuck with me. I still look back on it and remember it warmly (pun intended.)

Must Sign Your Credit Card

I went to the post office the other day and tried to use my credit card. The lady behind the counter wouldn't accept it because it wasn't signed. I offered to show her my ID, but she said that the card would still need to be signed. So, I signed the credit card, and she processed my transaction.

She then handed me the sales slip to sign. When I handed it back to her, she took it and compared it to the signature on the back of my credit card. Satisfied that they matched, she gave me my card and receipt and wished me a nice day. She never looked at my ID.

I would have to be the stupidest thief on the face of the planet to forge the signature on two documents, one right after the other, with different signatures. What kind of security is that really providing me?

Matches the Spec

BD was testing the latest release of his project's code, and he came upon a situation where the code wasn't acting as expected. He wrote up the defect, and the developer went to talk to him. The developer told BD that it wasn't a defect, because the code matched the spec. The developer then proceeded to pull the spec out and show BD. BD agreed that the spec the developer had printed did indeed say that, but he told the developer that he didn't have the latest version of the spec.

The developer pointed to the paper and said that that's what the spec said, so it wasn't a defect. BD pointed to the paper and said that it wasn't the latest version of the spec, so it was a defect. The developer tapped the paper and said that the code matched the spec, so it wasn't wrong.

BD having come to the end of his patience for the situation, picked up his pencil and marked through parts of the paper. He then told the developer that the code no longer matched the spec, so it needed to be changed. The developer stood there for several minutes looking at the paper, before he picked it up and walked away...beaten.

The Dangers of Low-Riding Pants

BK walked past this guy, how should we say it, of the darker persuasion, and the guy had his pants riding just above his kneecaps. He had on a belt, but BK could only surmise that it was only there to make the guy walk funny and to keep his pants from going completely to his ankles.

After BK was past the guy, he turned and shouted, "Hey, bro, you have a skid mark in your underwear!"

My Horn

The horn on my car is pathetic. I'm too embarrassed to even use it. It's this weak, barely audible "beep, beep." But that really doesn't do justice to just how pathetic it is. Every time I hear it, I imagine this weenie, timid little man saying something to the affect of, "Excuse me. Uh, could you please not cut me off like that? I mean, you know, if you feel like it. You don't really have to, if you don't want, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to swerve off on to the shoulder. Not that swerving off on the shoulder is a problem by any means. I just felt bad about the swatch of wild flowers I just took out with my tires. You know, on second thought, just forget I said anything. You're right, it's your road, and I had no business getting in your way. I hope you have a nice day."

The Coffee Pot

This morning the coffee pot made a "pfft" sound at me.  That's the best way I can describe the sound it made as I "compressed" out the last few drops from the canister.  It was mostly air with a few drops of coffee that sprayed all over the place.  Does that signify that your day couldn't possibly get much worse, when the first thing in the morning, the coffee pot basically tells you to f-off?

The Chirp

DH said that he was awoken by a chirping sound at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning.  He tracked the intermittent chirping all over the house until he finally figured out that it was coming from the smoke detector upstairs, telling him that the battery was low.

How come smoke detectors always wait until the middle of the night to let you know they're about to die?  Is that something designed by the engineers to give them a chuckle on slow nights?

The Woodpile

BK was telling me that he trained his dog to go get logs off the woodpile and bring them up to the house, so BK doesn't have to trek out to get firewood during the winter.

BD told me that his dog has a similar talent. He goes and gets the logs and piles them by the backdoor, then his dog takes them and drags them back out to the woodpile.  In his mind, I'm sure the dog thinks he's helping.  He probably thinks BD needs more exercise or something, so he's trying to help by forcing him to walk back down to the woodpile.

If You Write It, Nobody Will Read It

I realized my complete insignificance at my job today.  My team was meeting to discuss the tasks that were left to do.  The project leader made a comment that he felt that a lot of the requirements were being missed in the code, mostly because he didn't think the programmers were reading my requirements documents.  So, he point blank asked them, starting with the fact that he was guilty of not always reading them.  One of them said that she tried, but sometimes she got too busy and didn't always make it back to the documents.  The other one said that he didn't read the documents, nor did he have any intention of reading them.  At least he was honest, I guess, but it still hurt.

No intention of reading them.  I guess they provide no practical benefit to him.  I guess outlining exactly what the system should do, the steps describing exactly how it should do it, and pseudocode to further show how it should be accomplished is useless.  Then again, that's probably why I write up more defects on his code than anybody else's.  His stuff doesn't work as expected.  There's stuff missing.  But who cares?  It doesn't matter what the client wants.  It doesn't matter that missing requirements puts the company into risk of liability.  It doesn't matter that the users of the system will lose money in their accounts, because he decided that he wanted to do this calculation before that one.

My favorite part is when I write up a defect, and he blames me for it.  Says that I didn't document it correctly in the requirements document.  How would he know?

Thwarted by a Bullet

Recently, it was brought up that we were duplicating the documentation on our project.  The BA writes up a User Interface Specification to explain how a screen works.  Then the QA would take the UI Spec and write test scripts to test the functionality on the screen.  However, when they got done, the test scripts contained no additional information from the UI Spec.  Then, all the test scripts had to be listed in a third sheet to show testing progress - Pass, Fail, Untested, etc.  All this was done in MS Word.

So, we spent weeks conducting meetings to decide how best to reduce this duplication of work.  I came up with a solution that utilized MS Excel to house the UI Spec, with columns that could also be used for testing, and code that tracked and recorded the testing progress.  The solution seemed to meet all our requirements.  There was less effort needed for duplicating work and less documents for housing all the crap we needed.

One day out of the blue, I was informed by the Lead BA that the project team would no longer be using my sheet.  When I asked him why not, he informed me that nobody on the team knew how to make a bullet in Excel, so they were scrapping the whole idea and going back to the old way.  I told him that I could help them figure out a solution, but he told me that it wasn't worth my time, because they'd already started converting everything back to MS Word.

A bullet?  Seriously?  How lame is that?  I did figure out how to do a bullet in Excel using an ASCI code, but it made no difference, as the Lead BA stated.  So, a quick easy solution was passed over in order to go back to what was familiar.  All progress toward a better system thwarted by a bullet.

Unbalanced Raises

In these trying financial times, everyone is feeling the pinch...well, almost everyone.  My company decided to suspend pay raises in an effort to curb costs.  Each year, the subject comes up again, a re-valuation to determine if this year will be the one.  We finally did get our raise, if you can call it that.  It amounted to about $25 a month.  I know that's at least something, and I'm truly thankful.  I was even satiated...that is until last December when the managers and directors pulled in their raises.  Which amounted to about $500 more a month.

Let me put this into perspective.  My bills, based solely on the cost of living, have gone up about $40 or so a month.  That means that I'm now $15 short each month.  Now, keep that in mind when I tell you that when my director got his raise, he started going around the office asking people if they thought he should buy a new Mercedes or new BMW.  I wish that was the end of this story, but it's not.  Last week, he was stopping people in the hall to ask them if they could figure out how to open the band on his new $10,000 Rolex watch.  This show was based partly on his ineptness and partly on his desire to show off the stupid watch.

So, basically he just spent an obscene amount of money on a watch...a watch...seriously, a watch.  I have a $15 watch from Wal-Mart, which tells the time in 2 countries, has a stop watch, is waterproof, and has a little light to see the time in the dark. (And I could easily figure out how to open the band.)  His just tells time.  And what he spent on it could pay my mortgage and house taxes for the entire year!

The discrepancy in raises is bad enough, but his complete cluelessness to how it makes people feel to see him spending money on luxuries and extravagances when they can't even make their bills each month, blows my mind.

Something tells me he didn't need that raise in December nearly as much as I did.

A Working Understanding

BK has a picture of the IT guy for his site asleep at his desk. When it came time for the IT guy to redo BK's machine, he asked him to make sure he got the standard Windows games with the new install. The IT guy told him they weren't allowed to have games on their work computers, and BK showed him the picture. BK enjoys playing Solitaire and Minesweeper during the slow times.

Some people might call this blackmail, but BK likes to refer to it as "a working understanding."

Don't Wake the Bear

Yesterday morning my dead beat brother-in-law (who lives in my house) turns the TV on at 5:30 in the morning, and wakes me up. So instead of flipping out and yelling at him, which I would do in the past. I went into the garage and loosened his cable cord so it would go in and out. Then he says to me. "My cable is messed up, can you look at it?" I said, "I have too much work to do right now, but I will get to it later." He's still waiting.

- Contributed by BK

Good...Or Is It Well?

When I was a freshman in high school, my uncle came over to our house for a cookout one weekend. While we were sitting outside, basking in the aroma of sizzling hamburgers, he asked me how school was going. I replied, "Most of my classes are fine, but English is not going so good." He smiled and said, "Well, it's no wonder when you speak like that. It should be that 'English is not going well.'"

For some reason that conversation stuck with me. It defined me. I strove to improve my grammar. I also went on a tear, correcting everyone who used "good" and "well" improperly. My stepmother still hesitates whenever she's about to use "good" or "well" in a sentence. I can almost see the processing of which one she wants to use. Either that, or she's trying desperately to find another way to say it and avoid using "good" or "well" altogether.

Wallets and Geniuses

My brother once told me that you could always tell a genius, because he carried his wallet in his front pocket. I found this statement fascinating, so I asked him how he knew that. He said because the two smartest people he knew both carried their wallets in their front pocket. His best friend, Chris, and me.

That was the nicest compliment he ever gave me.

Death by Sneeze

When I was in high school, I worked for an accounting firm, copying and organizing tax returns. My place of work consisted of a 4 foot by 6 foot former closet with no windows or vents. There was one small door at the far end, and you had to squeeze by the quite-large copier to get to it.

My boss was notorious for having bad breath. In one sitting he'd eat tortillas with mayonnaise, chocolate cake, pretzels, and a large Diet Coke. To top it off, I don't think he ever brushed his teeth...ever. He also had space issues. He felt the need to get very close to speak to you. Being cornered by him in my "closet" was bad enough, but it really sucked when he'd come in there and sneeze. This noxious cloud would slowly fill the entire room and hang. It would cling to everything, emitting its deadly ghastliness.

As I've previously said, this was a closet without windows or vents. I had no circulation. So, that Death Sneeze would just sit in there and slowly take years off my life. I couldn't leave, because I had to complete my work. I was trapped.

One day, I came crawling out on all fours gasping, "Air...I need air." I thought the receptionist was going to fall out her chair laughing. When she got done laughing, she felt sorry for me, so she brought me a fan that I could switch on when my boss left to help blow the Stink Cloud out the door. That fan was the only reason I'm here today to tell you this story.

Thank you, Judy!

Sasquaflops

My wife doesn't have big feet by any stretch of the imagination, but for some reason she bought these enormous house shoes. It's a "feet" that she manages to stay in them as she's walking (pun intended). I think it has a lot to do with the fact that she mostly just shuffles around without actually picking up her feet. She claims they're warm and well-padded, but I tease her that she looks like she has gigantic feet and that her footprints look like sasquatch has been trapsing through our house. Today, she told me to leave her Sasquaflops alone. I think it's catchy. We just might start a whole new line of enormous house shoes called, "Sasquaflops." So, be on the lookout for them in your local Wal-Mart.

The Pope Becomes a Saint?

In an article from MSNBC, evidence is given that the Catholic Church is trying to make Pope John Paul II a saint. The article discusses the steps that need to take place before sainthood can be bestowed on the former pope. At the end, readers are asked to provide comments and reactions to the news.

One reader wrote:
"The Saints could use him in their ranks. Their secondary sucked against the Seahawks."

Classic.

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41072284/ns/world_news-europe/?gt1=43001

Taco Bell...Authentic Mexican Food

Taco Bell cannot, or rather should not, advertise as authentic Mexican food. When 16-year old white kids make it, it can't possibly be authentic. At least in Texas they hired authentic Mexican people to make the food. It was a good way to demean the employees even more (as if working at a fast-food restaurant isn't demeaning enough) by forcing them to make fake Mexican food for people who have no appreciation for authentic quality. Of course, you FEEL as if it's authentic, since authentic Mexican people are serving it to you. And then, there's that Chihuahua that speaks Spanish...well, Spanglish, but close enough. Just like the food.

Cake

Why do they say you can't have your cake and eat it too? Of course you can! Just because you eat it doesn't mean you don't have it anymore. It's just inside you.