The Office Project Runway

Posted by John

In the past I’ve alluded to what I would consider proper work attire. It’s a subject I feel is grossly overlooked and deserves much more attention than it gets. I’ll try to explain why in the examples below but let me digress briefly to say when I talk about proper work attire I’m generally referring to proper work attire for the 20- or 30-something crowd. That’s not to say that if you’re 40+ you have carte blanche to be a douche, it just means that different standards apply. Over 40, go ahead and wear an entire golf outfit to work including mock turtleneck and windbreaker. I won’t be too critical. Under 40, if you’re wearing that you better be working a half-day then joining the PGA tour in the afternoon otherwise I’m going to make fun of you to your face.

Without further ado:

-If you have a job that doesn’t involve working from home, manual labor, or transporting illegal drugs, you need to look down at your socks right now (assuming you’re reading this while you’re at work, just like I’m writing it while I’m at work). If you are wearing white, cotton socks, go ahead and kick yourself in the face right now. That is so unacceptable and you’re a disgrace to young professionals everywhere. As soon as you get off work, drive immediately to Sam’s Club or Costco or something and spend $4 on a package of 24 black dress socks and a package of 24 navy blue dress socks then wear one of those 48 pairs of socks from now on. We’ll talk more later about whether your socks should match your shoes, pants, shirt, or tie but I don’t want to blow your mind too soon.

-If you’re unlucky enough to be a dude who has to wear a polo or button down shirt to work, tuck that shit in. I know, I know - tucking in is the bane of my existence too; right behind shaving and smiling, but seriously, it’s necessary because the point is not the shirt; the point is the belt. Look at your belt now. Does it match the color of your shoes? If not, take the belt off, go to the nearest person to you and ask them to beat you repeatedly and mercilessly about the head, neck, and face with it. Preferably with the buckle end. God didn’t make brown and black cows so you could mix and match their hides at your leisure.

Quick side note: the New Kid wears nothing but dress slacks to work. Pleated at that. Not even khakis. Pleated dress slacks. Except, for some reason he always wears this beaten up old black belt where the leather is all cracked and peeling away. He looks silly. It would be like driving a Lexus covered in bumper stickers. Ok, let’s be honest – pleated slacks are more like a Kia than a Lexus but you get the point. Anyway, the other day he admitted the belt was a hand-me-down from his dad. Your dad? First of all, who gets hand-me-downs from their dad? I think my dad is a pretty fashionable dude and we likely even own some of the same articles of clothing, but he’s still my dad and I don’t want to wear any of his clothes, let alone any of his old clothes. Second of all, a belt isn’t a hand-me-down item. Maybe a shirt, a sweater, or a jacket or something like that, but a belt? A belt is a pretty personal item. Thirdly, why do you have the same waistline as your dad?  At any rate, he admitted the belt was a hand-me-down then finally realized it looked too bush league in its ultra-worn in state so he went online to find a replacement. But not like a new belt; no, he went online to try to find the exact belt because it was alligator skin. Alligator skin? What, was your dad like an undercover narco cop in Miami or something? It’s a belt, dude. It keeps your pants on your waist. Why are you trying to spend $600 on an alligator skin belt when you can spend $20 on a bovine skin belt? Or $8 on a plastic skin belt? Well, it turns out he didn’t want to spend the big bucks on a real alligator skin belt so instead he spent slightly smaller bucks on a lizard skin belt. Lizard skin? What kind of lizard are we talking about here? Kimono dragon? Iguana maybe? A gecko perhaps? I’m almost inclined to say that you’re better off spending $600 on an alligator skin belt than $80 on some innocuous lizard-ish belt. To make matters even worse, if that’s possible, the belt came with a shiny metal buckle that he had engraved with his initials. His initials, I tell you! I was absolutely beside myself until I realized why he’d done it – he’s a jr. That means someday he wants to have a kid of his own who will become New Kid III, and he wants to be able to hand-me-down his belt to him. What a plan. What. A. Plan.

-Speaking of pleated pants, stop wearing them. I understand that different shapes of bodies call for different cuts of pants and sometimes the pockets on flat front pants stick out making it look like your hips have ears. That sucks. But it’s better than pleated pants that make it look like you’re getting ready to record an album of music featuring just a bass guitar.

I still remember the exact moment in 1999 when I found out pleated pants were no longer cool, sitting listening to Dr Dre’s “Still D.R.E.” where he raps, “Still rock my khakis with a cuff and a crease…” and I thought to myself, “Huh, that’s strange. Why would Dr. Dre of all people, who keeps uzi’s in his underwear and eats chronic with his Cheerios, need to declare to the world that he still rocks his khakis with a pleat and a cuff? Is Dre somehow saying that his chronic and machine guns give him the authority to defy standard convention and wear whatever he wants? Dear god! Are pleated khakis no longer in style???” As I was sitting there in a pair of pleated, cuffed khakis. I spent the next 24 hours checking out every pair of pants I passed and holy shit, I was the only toolbag on campus still wearing pleated pants (let’s face it, it was an engineering and pharmacy school; there were still A LOT of pleated pants around. Shit, there are probably still A LOT of pleated pants on that campus right now as we speak in 2010. At the time though I was more concerned about all the people in my social circle… All 8 of them). The point is, you’re not Dr. Dre, you don’t own uzi’s and you don’t eat chronic with your cereal so you can’t pull off pleated pants. As a matter of fact, I don’t think Dre can pull them off anymore either unless he comes out with Still D.R.E. Remix 2010 and it becomes the party anthem of the year or something.

-Are you wearing a class ring right now? Cut your goddamn finger off. Never in my life have I ever seen someone wearing a class ring and thought to myself, “Wow, it is really impressive/neat this person graduated from Delaware University in 1998.” I have, however, thought to myself, “Wow, I don’t know a thing about this guy but I do know that he is a raging douchesicle.”

-I have never and will never understand animal prints. I understand in the real olden days when homo sapiens actually killed animals to wear their fur it was less a fashion statement than a status symbol. “Nice squirrel bikini you have there. Did you see my stone washed tiger pants? I killed this shit myself.” Nowadays you’re not impressing anyone with that cotton zebra you clearly didn’t slay yourself.

 -Grooming in general is a touchy subject, especially coming from a guy who looks like he has a small marsupial clinging to his face, but there are a few basics here. 1). Clearly I’m not a fan of shaving for myself but I am a fan of just about everyone else shaving. You either need to commit to a beard or commit to shaving every day. Yes, it’s possible to pull off the scruffy-5-days-of-growth look if you keep it maintained well enough. But if you look in the mirror and all you have is a 5-day-old neck beard, you need to shave that shit off. 2). For the love of baby Jesus, unless your name is Edward Scissor hands, keep you nails neatly trimmed and/or manicured. But for the love of God, do your nail maintenance at home, not at your goddamn desk. Every time it happens - and believe me, it happens at least twice a week at the office - when I hear the CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK of the nail clippers I get a shiver in my spine. I don’t care where the person is sitting, all I can think about is their nails somehow launching over the cubicle wall and getting stuck between the buttons on my keyboard, or dropping in my tea, or landing on my bagel. Oh, I just got a shiver just thinking about it.  

Clearly this is just a small selection of my personal rules for office attire/appearance and I could go on but I won’t. This may have been a bit traumatic for you but you’ll be thanking me later for helping you be less douchey one little bit at a time. 

Strange but True

Posted by John

Awhile back someone was kind enough to pass along the following text to the wife and I that came directly from a medical chart he had seen with his own two eyes. As you’ll soon see, he passed it along to us because it brought together our two industries – plumbing engineering and gastroenterology - in a remarkably unpredictable way. Almost a collision course, if you will. Now, let me preface this by saying the following text can be difficult to read, let alone comprehend and is not for the faint of heart, but I can assure you I would not even bring this up if it wasn’t true:

This morning, while lowering himself onto the commode, [the patient] reports slipping and had the metallic arm of the faucet on the toilet go up into his rectum. His wife shows multiple cell phone pictures depicting a faucet with a, ~3inch diameter head and long shaft. Patient and wife say that EMS reported 8 inches of stool on the faucet arm.

After my brain dry-heaved a few times as I tried to comprehend the words I’d just read, I set out to make sense of the whole ordeal, figuring the only way to do so was to look at it from several different perspectives:

Engineering: I don't know of a plumbing fixture that is both a commode and a sink, which is to say, what the fuck was a faucet doing in the vicinity of the toilet? Perhaps after having a 3" diameter, 8" long metal shaft jammed up his bum, the victim’s - I mean the patient's - memory could have been compromised and he was not in fact lowering himself onto the commode but rather the bidet, which could indeed have a faucet on it, depending on the make and model. However, based on the fact that his inconsiderate whore of a wife was taking pictures of the incident with her cell phone rather than helping him out, I'm guessing he's not the type of guy who even knows what a bidet is, let alone uses one a regular basis. 

Physics: Newton's First Law of Motion states that any object in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by a force. The Second Law of Motion states that a body of mass, m, experiencing a force, F, will accelerate at a rate, a, such that F = ma. The Third Law of Motion sates that when one body exerts a force, F, on a second body, the second body exerts a force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction on the first body. If we combine these three laws we can see that the man comprised of mass, m, was accelerating at a rate, a, due to the force of gravity, F, until a second body, the faucet, applied an equal and opposite force of friction normal to the man's ass, yet still took 8" in order to stop his fall... Ergo, we can conclude that this man’s sphincter is now in his esophagus. 

Physiological: This man will clearly need a colonoscopy to determine the extent of the damage to his colon but the good news is, the procedure can now be conducted with a periscope in lieu of an endoscope thanks to the blunt force trauma he received on his cornhole. I would recommend a first year intern perform said procedure. 

Sociological: When you're laid up on the couch for 4-6 weeks collecting long-term disability after an incident such as this, you better spend every second of every day thinking up the best fucking story to explain your absence from work because when you get back the last thing you're going to tell the boys at the office is the fucking truth.

If my analysis hasn’t satiated your concern over the probability of such an incident actually happening, no worries, I’ve already submitted this inquiry to Mythbusters so you can expect them to tackle the plausibility of all this in an upcoming episode. Until then, I’m sorry I ruined your next five meals with a discussion of this nature. 

Survivor: Survivalism

Posted by John

I came across this article on one of my favorite websites, Slate.com, the other day and it instantly struck a chord with me:

http://www.slate.com/id/2244890/

If you’re like me and you don’t like reading stuff, especially stuff that’s on links people have sent you, I’ll summarize the article for you here:

The writer lost his job as a journalist for National Geographic Adventure. Instead of wallowing in misery and projecting that misery onto others, he secluded himself in a farmhouse in upstate New York to contemplate the meaning of his life and figure out how long he could live without a job. Apparently it didn’t last very long so he schemed a way to get published on Slate. He and a friend took 6 wilderness survival manuals, Woodcraft and Indian Lore, the US Army Survival Manual, National Geographic Complete Survival Manual, When All Hell Breaks Loose, and The Survival Handbook, into the actual wilderness to see if the contents of the books alone would actually help them survive, thereby determining which survival manual was in fact a manual for survival. Apparently none of the manuals started with a chapter about wearing gloves outside in the cold though because the dude had to abandon his mission at one point to return home and get gloves because he couldn’t feel his hands; but that’s neither here nor there unless at some point between here and there you want to evaluate whether or not the writer is a dumbass, which in this case he is. At any rate, per his analysis all of the books are rubbish except for The Survival Handbook. (Side Note: If you recall from my blog post, I'm Not Really Loving It, the gift I took to this year’s Office Dirty Santa gift exchange was in fact the Army Survival Manual, but we’ll keep that to ourselves lest the body of the receiver of the gift were to turn up somewhere in the wilderness with nothing but the book on his person causing his family to come looking for me for giving him a survival manual full of rubbish).

First of all, I was properly green with envy that the writer of the article thought of doing this before I did because it’s a positively brilliant idea. I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy thinking about survival situations (I told you how to get out of a bathroom if you’re locked inside, didn’t I?). Survival situations can come up at any time and in any form ranging from being trapped in your car, to getting lost in the wilderness, to getting bowled over in an avalanche, to Germans holding your entire office building hostage, to Russians holding your entire town hostage, to Ninja’s appearing out of nowhere while you’re shopping at the Gap, to whatever. It doesn’t matter the situation, you have to be ready at any point.

Now, when talking about survival situations it’s important to note there are three types of people out there:

1. People who don’t think about survival at all and will therefore perish in any such situation. Incidentally if you are not one of these people then you want to keep a few of these people around you at all times, but not too many. You need to have a few of these people in your life because if you ever find yourself in a survival situation with them you need to be able to count on them dying early in case you need to consume their flesh for your own survival. But at the same time, you can’t have too many around you because they’ll be like anchors dragging you to your own death.

2. People who think about survival all the time, are constantly vigilant of any potential survival situation, and will in fact survive any situation they are faced with. These people range in survivalism from the likes of Bear Grylls, the undisputed king god of survivalists, all the way down to your mild-mannered, everyday, average Joe survivor who can turn a pencil into a deadly weapon or a box of Kleenex into a winter coat. If you don’t know anyone in your life who falls into this category it’s because you are in the first category above and all the people in this category are actively avoiding you because you’re an anchor.

3. People who think about survival all the time because they believe the apocalypse will happen in their lifetime, quite possibly as soon as next week, and are therefore stockpiling water, rations, and an arsenal of weapons and ammunition for their own survival. These people are also most likely to have a firearm on their person as we speak, six more in their SUV, and a bunker somewhere on their property. These people are also most likely to “know a guy” who can get “stuff.” If you’re in the first group above you’ll want to be careful about canoodling with the people in this group. Yes, they’ll likely survive when the bad guys infiltrate the country, but they’re also most likely to shoot you first just to make sure the sight on their weapon is properly aligned then feed your flesh to their dog to keep it alive. If you’re in the second group above you also need to be wary of these people because in a survival situation they are most likely to watch you build a shelter then shoot you and take your shelter and cynically call it natural selection – “God selected me to own this gun, heheheh…”

Now that you know who you are, you can prepare for any situation. If you’re in the first group, go ahead and stop reading now because you won’t make it. If you’re in the third group, you’re not reading this blog. So, if you’re in the second group, read on.

Number twos need to identify other number twos. You don’t need to pal around with these people all the time, but it wouldn’t hurt and at the very least you need to know where to find them when the shit hits the fan. Part of being a number two is having the self-awareness to know your limitations. You don’t know all there is to know about survival, but you need to know how to leverage other’s knowledge as a mutual benefit. Do you know the tensile strength of human hair? Probably not, but you need to know who does.

It’s in this spirit that I’m going to start routinely posting survival advice on the blog. Be careful though; this information shall only be used for good and never evil, noting of course that in survival mode martial law is usually the rule of the land so the boundaries on good and evil can be adjusted a little bit.

If you think I’m full of shit about this survival stuff, I present you with this exact scenario that happened to me just moments ago. I have been writing this post throughout the day here at work, and thinking about survival all the while as I often do. Then, round about 3 PM, the power to the entire building went out. No shit. And not only was the power out to the entire building, it was out for half of the entire downtown area. No shit. So you know exactly what was going through my head, “Hells yeah, bitches! It’s time for some surviving!”

So what’s the first thing I do? I look around and immediately evaluate everyone in my vicinity¹, “One; one; one; three; one; three; three; two, but you’re old and have a bad heart, so you might as well be a one; one; one; three; three; three; three; three; three; okay that guy is actually loading a pistol right now, so three; three; three… Alright, looks like I’m doing this one on my own.”

Meanwhile, all of the ones are euphoric, "We get to go home early! Get the hell out of my way; I can make it in time for Oprah!" While all of the threes are in a near panic, "It's the terrorists. I know it's the goddamn Muslim terrorists! This is why we took the fight to them!" Then, as everyone is frantically filing to the stairwell, which is going to clog up faster than the arteries of your typical former president or vice president, I casually stroll over to the freight elevator because 1) it’s going to be backed up on emergency power, and 2) it’s going to dump me off in the loading dock where I have the highest probability of escaping the building and/or stealing a delivery truck that still has the keys in the ignition.

Fortunately the power was restored before I had to do anything drastic but you get the picture; this is what it means to survive and if you’re not ready to survive, you’re just weighing me down.

So in the meantime between now and my next post on survival you’re going to need to brush up on your survival tactics. Start by watching a lot of Man vs Wild and Mythbusters², then start reading The Survival Handbook. This isn't going to be easy, but I'm here to help you through it. 

1.     1. Let’s be honest, I already evaluated everyone the day I started working here, but for argument’s sake, let’s pretend I did right after the power went out.

2.     2. Oh, you don’t think Mythbusters is going to help you survive? Well then, tell me what you do when you find yourself inside a car that is sinking in a river. Do you know how to get out? No? Then shut up and watch some Mythbusters.

One of Those Days

Posted by John

You know those mornings when you wake up and it’s just too cold to get out of bed? The alarm has gone off even though the sun hasn’t even come up yet. Your eyes are still heavy with sleep as you open one lid just that fraction of a fraction of an inch to peak at the clock. The numbers seem to be mocking you, 6:00, as you think to yourself, “Can that honestly be right?” as you wonder if you actually slept at all through the night because it certainly doesn’t feel like it. It takes several moments to even figure out what day it is, “Is it Friday?... No, it’s Thursday,” then a few seconds later, “Shit… it’s Monday.”

Finally you roll out from under the covers and feel the numbness of the cold air, then shuffle off to the bathroom where you stand in front of the mirror for what seems like 15 minutes with your eyes closed because every time you try to open them the light feels like someone is trying to stab them out with a dull pair of scissors. You go through your shower routine – shampoo, rinse, shampoo… “Wait, did I already shampoo?”… Rinse again. You get out, look down and realize you were wearing one of your slippers the entire time in the shower.

You go to your closet, pick out an outfit, think to yourself, “I’m pretty sure I wore this last week,” but you put it on anyway. Go back to look in the mirror, “Yup, definitely wore this last week.” Drag a comb through your hair then head to the kitchen.

You get to the sink and look out the window at a blanket of snow laying across your yard, the third major snow storm this winter season even though when you were moving here everyone bragged about how it never snowed and they don’t even own boots or winter coats here or blah, blah, blah. “What the fuck? This is miserable. What happened to global warming? Was that all just a big fat lie or something?” you wonder because you don’t read anything but the local paper and don’t watch anything but the local news so you’re just angrily unaware that dozens of people died in a heat wave in South America last week, which is just inconceivable because you’re cold right now; how can it be hot somewhere else?

Then you get out a bowl and fill it with cereal, then pour a glass of milk and coat your high-fiber, flaxseed, bark-like-bullshit cereal with orange juice. “Shit. That’s the third time this month,” but you eat it anyway because it would be too much effort to fix a new bowl.

After you eat you put on your shoes, scarf, coat, gloves, “Fucking global warming. What a scam,” then grab your bag and walk out the door. Setting a foot on the driveway you realize you forgot to brush your teeth, “Oh well, too late now,” then walk to your car, which is covered in ice. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Scrape, scrape, scrape. “Global warming my ass.” When you finally scrape off enough ice to create a little 4” diameter peephole in the middle of the windshield, you get in and drive off.

The roads are absolute shite, nothing but snow and ice as you sleep drive the same route you drive to work day in and day out. You get stuck behind some dipshit Tennessean in an SUV the size of a commercial truck going 12 miles per hour. “Why do you own an SUV, you douche? 360 days out of the year you get 8 miles to the gallon on perfectly dry and clear roads yet here you are in the one condition for which your SUV was designed and you’re driving slower than a motorized wheelchair? Your only saving grace is that global warming is clearly not real.”

As you near downtown you cross two consecutive one-way streets as you do everyday. You’ve never seen a car on these roads. Never. At the first you look left, all clear, then drive across. At the second you look right, all clear, then drive across. But just as you get to the midpoint of the street you see something out of the left side of your peripheral and instinctively slam on the breaks and turn to stare at the sight before you, wondering if it's real. “Is that a snow plow?” you ask yourself. “Yes, yes it is,” you confirm. “Is it driving backwards?” you wonder, “Yes, yes it is,” you verify. “Backwards the wrong way down a one way street?” you ponder, “Yes, yes it is!” you validate. "Is it about to run right over top of me?!?" you panic, "Yes. Fucking-a, yes it is!!!" And suddenly for the first time since your alarm went off an hour earlier you’re awake. Like wide fucking awake. You slam your foot onto the gas pedal but the road is solid ice, the wheels just spinning in place as the snowplow continues to advance. It’s so close now the salt it’s spitting out is ricocheting off your windshield. You throw the gearshift into reverse and slam down the accelerator again. The wheels spin, catch finally, and your car shoots off just in time for your front bumper to clear the plow’s rear wheel by inches; rock salt still bouncing off your hood and windshield.

A safe distance away now, you look up at the driver of the plow as he passes. He looks down at you as if to say, “What the fuck were you doing behind my snowplow?”

“What? What the fuck was I doing? I was driving to work. Forwards. The correct way down a two-way street. What the fuck were you doing? You were snowplowing backwards. The wrong way down a one-way street! That’s not how you snowplow a street! In fact that is the exact opposite of how you snowplow a street! I understand you only snowplow like four times a year here but don’t you think you would try to get it right for those four times??? And by the way, why was your snowplow not making a loud beeping sound as you were backing up? Did you disengage that because it got annoying on account of all the backwards snowplowing you’ve been doing???”

You then sit in your car, idling, for several moments as you try to collect your breath. When you finally get the courage to continue, you look both ways at the one-way street. Eight times.

You know that old saying, “If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, will it make a sound?” I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know the answer to this saying: “If you’re all alone in your car with no one around to hear you, and you’re about to be mauled over by a snowplow driving backwards the wrong way down a one-way street, will you make a sound?” Yes. Yes you will. You’ll scream out like a profane little schoolgirl, “SHIIIIIIT!!!” And then you’ll spend the next few minutes collecting your bowels back into your abdomen from off the floor of your car.

Have you ever had one of those mornings?

Me, Myself and iPod

Posted by John

A few weeks ago I wrote about how odd the English language is and specifically how certain words and phrases lose their meaning over time due to over- or incorrect use. That has inspired some really great and thoroughly entertaining feedback from people sharing similar words and phrases that they’ve come across.

For instance, one of the most overused words in the English language is actually a very simple one: myself. At least once every three days in an e-mail or during a conversation, meeting, or presentation, someone will use the word incorrectly in an effort to sound smarter or more formal. Case in point, “The people working on the project will be Gina, Randy, and myself.” To be clear, this is technically not a grammatically incorrect use of the word. In fact, Webster.com states it this way:

Myself is often used where I or me might be expected. Such uses almost always occur when the speaker or writer is referring to himself or herself as an object of discourse rather than as a participant in discourse. The other reflexive personal pronouns are similarly but less frequently used in the same circumstances. Critics have frowned on these uses since about the turn of the century, probably unaware that they serve a definite purpose. Users themselves are as unaware as the critics—they simply follow their instincts.

Fine, I am a critic, and fine, I will grant you that the use of the word has a definite purpose, but if you are just following your instincts and specifically don’t know what the definite purpose of the usage is, you’re a definite jackass. I think the general rule of thumb for using the word “myself” should be: if you think using the word makes you sound smarter or more formal, yourself is using it incorrectly.

One segment of the population that absolutely loves using the word ‘myself’ as well as other unnecessary multi-syllable words in an effort to make themselves sound smart is professional athletes in America. At some point in the recent past, athletes, especially retired athletes who are now sports commentators, came to the conclusion that using the name of the sport they played to describe all aspects of that sport will make them sound smarter: “Today’s National Football League game was a hard-fought battle between two good football teams, the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints, each with some great football players, not just on the football field, but off it as well…” Or they’ll throw in a word that doesn’t’ even exist like, “The action on the football field was marveltastic today.”   What? You’re analyzing football, not literature. I already know you’re half-retarded; you don’t have to pretend like you’re not.

Imagine if we all talked like that, using redundantly descriptive words in everyday conversation? “This Monday morning I woke up from sleeping in my queen-size bed before eating a cereal bowl of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and drinking a glass glass of Tropicana orange juice made from oranges then drove in my Ford Taurus automobile to my construction occupation with Anderson Building, Incorporated where I saw with my eyeballs a 55-year-old caucasian male jay-walking across Montgomery Boulevard…” That’s not intelligent; that’s exhausting.

Sometimes catch phrases become so catchy that conversations just feel like one catch phrase after another without any real substance or meaning: “The bottom line is, you gotta do what you gotta do, so take that for what it’s worth…” Wait, what? That sentence actually isn’t worth anything so why don’t you just take it back? Anytime you un-ironically punctuate a statement by saying, “take that for what it’s worth,” really what you’re saying is, “I’ve made my point but I don’t want to stop talking just yet.”

One thing that always gets under my skin (cp!) is when someone substitutes a non-curse word in place of an actual curse word. The other day my boss forgot something and was like, “Ah, son of a bullfrog!” What? Isn’t the son of a bullfrog a tadpole? “Ah, tadpoles! I am so upset right now!” It was so ridiculous I don’t even remember what happened after that for the next 10 minutes because I was still thinking about it.

I’m not saying that not cursing is a bad thing. Clearly I don’t have a problem using curse words but I respect people that don’t use them. But it’s one thing if you have a zen-like control over your emotions that you never need to cures or if you have a broad enough vocabulary to describe shit without using curse words, it’ an entirely other thing if you want to curse but don’t want to use the actual curse words. “This is a bunch of frickin’ bull-shoot!” Ok, clearly you’re upset but really you just sound silly. “What the heck? This gosh-darn thing is broken!” Fine, if you’re talking about a paperclip that stopped clipping papers, which you can get for a dime a dozen (cp!), then go ahead and refer to it as a “darn thing.” But if something really important breaks, then your choice of words should reflect the relative importance of the object and your relative level of pissiness – “Fucking whores! My goddamn iPod just stopped working. What a fucking piece of shit!”

Incidentally that phrase was taken from real life the other day because my iPod did break. It was an old-school 2^nd generation iPod that was at least 5-years old, so I couldn’t really be all that upset about it except when it stopped working a cartoonish image of an iPod with its eyes x-ed out as if it was dead appeared on the display just to taunt me. To make matters worse (cp!), I made an appointment at the Apple store to see if they could fix it but missed my appointment by 5 minutes because of the great Dixie Blizzard of 2010, so I had to reschedule for an hour later but when I returned the kid that made my appointment forgot to save it so I was positively at the end of my rope (cp!) when the kid was like, “Well, I’m going to have to reschedule you, what time works best for you? By the way, that’s a really nice beard…”

Holy shit you little tadpole, I am going to fucking destroy you. It’s going to be yourself and myself in an octagon ring of death unless yourself stops staring at myself’s beard and get’s on with fixing my goddamn Second Generation Apple iPod so I can get back to watching a fucking futbol match on my Sony television while drinking Carlsberg beers out of a 10 ounce glass pint glass! So take that for what it’s worth!

Dear John II

Posted by John

Just so you all know I’m not full of shit and just making stuff up for my own enjoyment here, a friend forwarded me the following timely e-mail she received at work today (obviously names and other identifying information have been changed to protect the innocent… and the guilty):

From: Bush, Barbara 


Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 3:58 PM


To: Cheney, Richard; Rice, Condeleezza; Rumsfeld, Richard; Ashcroft, John; Alito, Samuel; Roberts, John; Norton, Gale; Paulson, Hank; Veneman, Ann; Chao, Elaine; Gonzales, Alberto; Spellings, Margaret;

Subject: Cell Phone Found

A cell phone was found in the men’s bathroom, 8^th floor.  It can be claimed from Barbara, ext. 1500.

Literally, I’m not making that e-mail up. Three days after I posted an almost identical story, that e-mail hits my friend’s in-box. In no way am I trying to suggest that I’m some sort of restroom-lost-and-found-profit or some shit; all I’m saying is, this crazy stuff doesn’t just happen to me. There is an entire subset of the population out there consisting of people who lose their cell phones in bathrooms AND there’s an entire subset consisting of people who retrieve cell phones from bathrooms AND there’s an entire subset that send out horribly humiliating yet equally hilarious e-mails to try to find the rightful owners of said cell phones.

Honestly, if you ever find a cell phone in a bathroom, especially a bathroom that you frequent like the one at work, and actually have the immunization shots to give you the confidence to pick it up off the floor/toilet seat/paper dispenser, would you not just do a quick cross reference of the sent and received text messages to see who in the hell the phone belonged to? I mean, fuck it, maybe you’re not feeling that Jack Bauer-ish, but wouldn’t you at least just call one of the numbers in the contacts list and be like, “Hello… yeah, whose phone am I calling you on right now?... George’s phone?... Cool, thanks… Oh, nothing; I was just taking a big shit in the bathroom and found this phone. Figured someone else had just been in here taking an equally huge shit, on account of the fact that the seat was still warm and stuff, and thought I’d find out who it was so I could return the phone and tell him to courtesy flush next time; It smells like a goat crawled up a bears ass, took a shit then died, then the bear shit the goat and the goat’s shit out then died itself. It’s fucking awful.”

But instead of doing that, these people find the need to notify the entire department at work, and when I say the entire department, I mean the entire department. This e-mail went out to everyone – including the women! Honestly, why did they need to copy the women on this e-mail??? Does this place have a legitimate problem with women haphazardly wandering into the men’s room and misplacing their cell phones? Poor George is probably recently divorced and trying to get back into the game when out of nowhere Barbara sends this e-mail out, effectively notifying his entire pool of potential dates that he frequently rocks the thunder mug at work¹.  How cruel is that I ask you? How cruel?

The thing is though, I bet the first thing that every single person who read this e-mail did, both men and women, was check to make sure they had their cell phone on them. “Oh, thank god – it’s not my phone.” 

Seriously, if I ever find a cell phone in any bathroom, work or otherwise, I’m going to procure a pair of latex gloves, pick it up, and call every single one of my friends from that phone and be like, “You will not believe where I’m calling you from right now!... Some dude left his cell phone in the shitter!... I am not making it up!... I know, I know; I told you this shit happens all the time… Oh yeah, it’s positively awful. It smells like a bear shit a goat…”

That e-mail inspired a lively discussion among my friend and I during which she told me about one of her coworkers who once got locked in a bathroom at work in a remote part of the building where no one could hear his cries for help or pounding on the door. If not for his cell phone, he wouldn’t have been able to notify anyone of his predicament. How terrible is that? That is literally one of my nightmares.

Now, I’m no MacGyver, but I consider myself a fairly resourceful dude, so I’m going to tell you all exactly what you need to do if you find yourself in this situation: First of all, put your cell phone away. The last thing you’re going to do is call someone to come rescue you from a bathroom. That is fucking humiliating. Instead what you do is, you pull out your wallet. You retrieve any denomination of paper money from the wallet. You go to the corner of the bathroom that the door is on because you know that’s an interior wall. You lay that paper bill flat against the wall and tight to the corner so the long edge of the bill is parallel to the ground and do so at a height equal to about mid-thigh. Pull out a pencil, pen, keys, whatever you have to make a mark on the wall at the leading edge of that bill. Then you slide the bill along the wall in a straight line, keeping it parallel to the floor so the edge that had been tight to the corner is then flush with the mark you just made on the wall. Make another mark on the wall at the leading edge of the bill again. Step back to observe your work. Put the bill away as well as the pencil, pen, keys or whatever, and mentally prepare yourself for what you’re about to do. Take a deep breath, and with all the force in your body you kick the living shit out of that wall (or inanimate shit, as the case were) with the heel of your foot right between the two marks you’ve made and you keep kicking and kicking and kicking until you’ve opened up a hole large enough to crawl out of. The next thing you do is, you walk straight out the side door of your office building, get in your car, drive home, and not until you get there do you pull out your cell phone to call your boss to say your kid was just in a fight at school and you had to rush out of the office to take care of it then you don’t go back to work until the next morning. When e-mails inevitably start flying and rumors begin swirly around the office about someone who vandalized the bathroom on the 9^th floor and put a hole through the wall and blah, blah, blah, you just play it cool. You keep your mouth shut because you’re never going to tell another living soul what happened to you ever in your life.

Now, you must be asking yourself, what’s with the dollar bill? Well, you see, in the corner of the wall there’s going to be a stud. Stud’s are set 16” apart, measured from center to center. A dollar bill is almost exactly 6” long. If you measure two dollar bill lengths you’ll confidently be kicking between two studs which gives you the best chance at breaking through a couple layers of drywall to free yourself. If you somehow measure incorrectly and kick a stud you’ve really fucked up because the last thing you want to be besides stuck in a bathroom is stuck in a bathroom with a broken foot. You will not be able to explain that to anyone.

Of course, if the walls in the bathroom are tiled, well then, you’ll have a lot of time to sit in that space and think about how you should have paid closer attention to that episode of MacGyver when he improvised a bomb out of paper towels, hand soap, urinal cakes, and toilet water because you are not kicking your way out of that bathroom.

1. I can’t possibly take credit for the term “thunder mug.” A term that brilliant needs credit where credit is due. Granted, I have a policy of never calling out anyone by name on the blog, so suffice it to say, I didn’t come up with the term, someone else did, and it’s fucking brilliant. 

Dear John

Posted by John

I apologize for the brief hiatus.

I spend a lot of time talking about humorous incidents that occur in public restrooms. I believe strongly that some of the funniest things in life happen in the lou, though truthfully I never go into one seeking such funniness. In all honesty I would avoid pubic bathrooms at every possible cost if I could, but that’s just not practical.  So every time I do enter one I’m always dreading what may unfold, even if it turns out to be a hilarious story I can retell for years to come.

Sometimes you don’t even need to be present to get a laugh out of someone’s bathroom experience and sometimes the whole event seems rather innocuous at first glance. For instance, just the other week the main administrative assistant for my division sent out an e-mail that was like, “So-and-so left their cell phone in the 12^th floor men’s restroom this afternoon. If you happen to have picked it up, please return it.” Your first thought after reading that is to wonder if you were ever in that bathroom and happened to see the cell phone and your second thought is to hope that so-and-so is able to find his phone. But then if you spend some more time thinking about it, you realize how hilarious this is. First of all, the guy was clearly taking a monster deuce whilst texting or playing games on his phone, set the phone down to finish up his business and forgot to pick it up again. None of that is stated in the e-mail, but it is implied. If I happened to lose my cell phone in the bathroom at work (or any bathroom really) the last thing I would do is send out a mass e-mail looking for the finder of my phone for three reasons: 1. I would be admitting to the entire company that I sometimes take such huge shits in the bathroom that I become disoriented and prone to misplacing my personal possessions as a result; 2. Even if that wasn’t the case, then the only other explanation is the phone slipped out of my pocket somehow which really just means that it spent some indeterminate amount of time resting on the floor of a disgusting bathroom and the last thing I want is to retrieve that phone and start placing it near my ear, eyes, and mouth to make phone calls; 3) The person who found the phone was also likely taking a shit at some point after I was taking a shit so that’s at least two shits within the immediate vicinity of my phone and that’s two shits too many that are too close. For me that phone is as good as lost and my next stop is the Verizon store to get a new one.

Other times you’re inescapably present for the funny awkwardness in a public lav. Just today I had to go up to a different floor than the one I work on to go through several filing cabinets of archived materials to find some information on a project the firm did a number of years ago. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily like looking for a needle in a haystack but I would say it was a lot like looking for a turd in a pile of shit. It seems that “archiving” is just a term the company uses to refer to things they’d rather throw away but legally can’t so it just goes into a poorly organized repository that we try to pretend isn’t there. Really these files are not unlike that girlfriend we had in high school that was fine to date during the school year but once the summer rolled around she was just kind of old news but we didn’t have the balls to really dump her so we just tried to ambiguously get rid of her by saying we wanted to reset the relationship to the point when we first started to get to know one another but she didn’t really get the hint so she just kind of lingered around for three months until she got fed up with us ignoring her and finally moved on to some other relationship that was, quite frankly, a step down from us.

Actually, I’m not sure how that is remotely related to archiving files at work but I appreciate the opportunity to kind of get that out; it was rather therapeutic. I’m actually also not sure how I got so far away from my original discussion about going to the bathroom. Basically I had to go to another floor in the building to dig through a pile of shit looking for a turd and during that long and drawn out process I ended really, really having to take a whiz. The thing is, I can generally go hours upon hours without using the bathroom. I do it all the time when I’m working on the house or driving nonstop for 6 or 8 hours at a time. It’s just that when I really get into something, the absolute last thing on my mind is draining the ol’ bladder. But for some godforsaken reason, the second I get into something that is the least bit outside my normal comfort zone, I have to piss like a racehorse instantly. If I’m walking into a meeting, I have to pee right away. If I’m wandering around a new city, I’m pissing like every 4 minutes. If I get on an airplane I could really go for a catheter in lieu of a barf bag. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve been this way my entire life. When I was a kid I absolutely loved to play games like hide-and-seek, flashlight tag, or capture the flag – games that required stealth, patience, and deception. Without fail though, whenever I was playing those games the second I got into my hiding spot it’s like I’d just chugged 117 ounces of Caprice Sun – my bladder would instantly be on the verge of bursting. It didn’t matter if I had the best goddamn hiding spot in the entire world; I’d be there doing the pee-pee dance trying my hardest not to piss my pants. I can tell you, the only thing worse than being caught in a game of flashlight tag is getting caught in a game of flashlight tag taking a piss on the side of your neighbor’s shed behind their wood pile because you have the bladder of a fucking prairie dog.

I’m pretty sure that the absolute first test anyone goes through to become a sniper is a game of flashlight tag. If you don’t instantly piss yourself you pass onto the next phase where they install a shut-off valve in your urethra and systematically turn your bladder into a pressurized storage tank for urine. I don’t see any other way for them to do it. You make me into sniper and you better send me into the wilderness with like 12 empty Gatorade bottles because that’s the only way I’m killing my target without pissing my pants every few minutes.

Anyway, again the whole point of my story was that I had to go to some other unfamiliar floor to search through a bunch of documents and the second I got there I had to pee but if there’s anything worse than going into a restroom it’s going into a strange restroom so I was loath to acquiesce to the pressure. Unfortunately eventually I had to.

So I went into a strange bathroom on an unfamiliar floor to take care of business. The thing about the building I work in is, the plumbing in the place absolutely blows. There’s constantly backups or overflows and whatever else because it was likely designed poorly, installed improperly, and overused. So when I walked in I found the flush valve on one of the two urinals was stuck so it was just sucking water down the drain non-stop. Normally I wouldn’t even bother with something like that but lately if there’s anything I hate more than people that don’t recycle it’s people that waste water and if there’s anything I hate more than people that don’t conserve water it’s people that are just conservative. Normally when a flush valve on a urinal is stuck you just have to give the handle a good whack to get it to un-stick and stop running. So I did that but in this case the plumbing was so shoddy that when I whacked the flush valve that was stuck it did in fact come unstuck but somehow caused a pressure imbalance in the other urinal so that it started to flow constantly instead. So I went over to that one, gave it a good whack to free it up and wouldn’t you know it, the exact same thing happened to the original urinal and caused it to start flowing constantly. That really started to properly piss me off but I was committed to solving the problem so I stepped back to think for a second and decided maybe the solution was to give both flush valves a good whack at exactly the same time. So I did.

Now, I can tell you with certainty that if you ever find yourself in this situation, hitting both flush valves really hard at the same time will solve the problem. I can also tell you with complete certainty that it is not possible to explain to someone who has just walked into the bathroom at the exact moment that you are attempting to flush two urinals that are side by side at precisely the same time by karate chopping their respective flush valves what in the fuck you are doing.

I would describe the look on the dude’s face as something similar to what I would expect if he had just walked in on his wife having an affair with an avatar. I could quite figuratively see the wheels in his head turning as he thought, “What in the fuck is going on in here???”

I can only imaging the look on my face was similar to what I would expect if Sarah Palin were caught reading Dostoevsky while playing chess, sipping cognac, and listening to NPR. “I would like to explain… but I can’t.”

The moral of the story is, none of this would have happened if I’d enrolled in sniper school like I wanted to after high school. It probably also wouldn’t have happened if I’d just dumped that girl outright instead of letting her linger around all summer. What a waste of time that was.