I’ve told you about

Apparently I didn’t provide a satisfactory answer, because a form letter arrived in the mail a few days later that began, “Thank you for your interest in Magnet Bank.  Unfortunately…”  And it went downhill from there.  I still don’t know what the “correct” answer to such a question would be.  Any ideas?

I was thinking about that ridiculous episode last night at work, and started wondering…  If I were in charge of hiring at a large corporation, wanted to “weed out the shitty” as my brother would put it, and was limited to just one question, what would it be?  And I think I’ve got it pegged.

I’d ask:  What would you do if you won five million dollars in the lottery?

Is that perfect, or what?  Much better than a goddamn elephant, that’s for sure.  The person’s answer would tell me many things about him/her, and would allow me to gauge their intelligence, common sense, and decision-making skills.

For instance, here’s how I’d read a couple of the anticipated answers:

Buy a ludicrously expensive car A pure dumbass who doesn’t have a place in the company.  Especially if he starts talking about Italian sports cars, complete with model numbers, or mentions Bentley and/or Rolls Royce.  If that’s the first thing that pops into his mind, a rapidly depreciating piece of flash, he should be given the opportunity to work elsewhere.  Because he’s a bag of shit.

Continue working This person is a liar, and doesn’t have a place in the company.  He’s the type who tells people what he thinks they want to hear, with little regard for the truth.  He should receive one of the form letters that contain the word “unfortunately.”

Give most of it to charity Ha!  Even worse than the “continue working” folks…  Especially if the person provides this boolshit answer with a concerned, deeply saddened expression on his face.  It’s an Oprah-tinged manipulation, and the person doesn’t have a place in the company.  He should be escorted from the building by security guards, and thrown to the pavement in the parking lot.

You see, it’s easy to analyze every answer.  It’s perfect!  I should be heading up an HR department somewhere, with such innovative techniques bubbling up in my brain..  I really should.

Can you think of any other one-question interviews that would give you a window into the soul of applicants?  Since this is just imaginary, let’s not worry about ethics or laws, or any of that pesky stuff…  That’s for suckers.

Also, I’m sure we’ve all engaged in conversations with friends and coworkers about imaginary lottery windfalls.  “What would you do if you won five million dollars?” or whatever.  Why not attempt to analyze the common answers in the comments?  Do it, it’s fun!

And that’s gonna do it for today, my friends.  Please remember the ongoing Yurtathon 2010.  I sincerely appreciate everyone who’s already donated, or purchased shirts, to help me spend a week (or so) in a ridiculous roundhouse in the forest — and finish (finally finish!) my book.  If you’d like to chip in, every little bit helps.  Thanks in advance!

I probably won’t be able to post a real update again until Sunday, but be on the lookout for another blues singer exercise.  I’ve chosen the next room, and know it’ll be a lot of fun.  I’ll try to get that going on Friday.

Have a great day, boys and girls!

I’ll see ya next time.

Now playing in the bunker

It was starting

Clive Bull has been on vacation for two weeks, and I’ve been listening to his fill-in hosts, while I’m at work.  You know, since I pay two British pounds per month to have access to the full-show podcast, I need to get my money’s worth.

And the replacement guys aren’t bad, but there’s something missing.  Clive is laid-back, and his show is quiet and soothing.  But there’s more going on than meets the ear…  He has a talent for asking the callers questions that are slightly askew, and makes them go off on tangents they hadn’t intended.  He also gets his little dry and sarcastic digs in, which I appreciate.

The new guys aren’t as good at doing all that stuff.  Clive, like most seasoned professionals, makes it look easy.  And I wish he’d hurry up and get back to work.  ‘Cause when he takes time off, my ten-hour shifts seem hyper-extended.  And I can’t have that.

I’ve started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer via Netflix streaming.  I needed a new show to get into, and had tried a couple of others without luck.  But Buffy seems to be sticking… so far, anyway.

I watched a season of it, back when it was on regular TV, and liked it.  But I got off-track somehow.  Netflix has all the early seasons available through their cool-ass Watch It Now service, so I’m gonna use Buffy and her vampire-kicking pals to fill-in any stray hours I might have lying around.

I feel better having a show to watch, if I wanna.  I was starting to feel… adrift.  But Buffy will be my anchor.

You know what would be a great cell phone app?  Something that would cause your phone to get really, really hot, like a George Foreman grill, making it possible to cook burgers and hotdogs on it.  In fact, the Foreman people might want to develop it.  What do you think?  Pretty good, huh?

Do you have any ideas for new applications?  Tell us about it, won’t you?  Use the comments link below.

I’m currently blasting a shockingly good Hoodoo Gurus two-disc anthology, called Ampology.  I’m a power pop fiend, and don’t think the Gurus get the respect they deserve.  In fact, I suspect they’re pretty much forgotten at this point.

And that’s a goddamn crime…  The Ampology collection shows how great they were, even after they’d started flying beneath the hipster radar.  Really strong stuff: consistent, fun, and rockin’.  And, of course, out of print.  <sigh>  Most of their regular albums are still easily obtainable, though.

And speaking of music (sorry Buck), there’s something going around Facebook right now, where you’re supposed to list your Top 15 favorite albums of all time, in fifteen minutes or less.

You’re limited to only one album per artist, so you can’t just list fifteen Rolling Stones records, or whatever.  And the fifteen minute part is important.  It’s supposed to be the fifteen albums that jump IMMEDIATELY to your mind.  This will cut down, I guess, on people getting all pretentious and listing stuff for other peoples’ benefit, etc.

I generally ignore crap like this, but last night I gave it a shot and below is what I scribbled in my notebook.  I undoubtedly forgot some stone-cold classics that I’ll probably remember while driving to work today.  But these are the fifteen that immediately popped into my tiny Duke head.

The Replacements “Pleased to Meet Me”
Nick Lowe “Basher”
Boomtown Rats “A Tonic For The Troops”
Buzzcocks “Singles Going Steady”
Eels “Daisies of the Galaxy”
Elvis Costello “Armed Forces”
Beatles “Rubber Soul”
The Jam “Greatest Hits”
The Clash “London Calling”
The Kinks “Kink Kronikles”
Donald Fagen “The Nightfly”
Beautiful South “Carry On Up the Charts”
Dinosaur Jr. “Green Mind”
Graham Parker “Passion Is No Ordinary Word”
XTC “English Settlement”

Yeah, that’s far from accurate, but I do fully and completely love all those albums.  There are big problems with it, though.  There’s no Dylan or Randy Newman or Neil Young, or a bunch of other greats who should probably appear.  But I stuck to the fifteen minute thing…

If you’d like to post your fifteen off-the-top-o’-yer-head albums in the comments, please feel free.  Or make it five albums in five minutes… Whatever’s cool with me.

Also, don’t forget the phone app Question.

I need to get ready for work now, eat a Mandy Patinkin frozen meal, and get my big riffled ass out of here.  But before I call it a day, I’d like to alert you to a brand new blog authored by our old friend lakrfool.  Check it out, here.

He plans to update the site once a week, so please bookmark it, or add it to your feed reader, whatever.  lakrfool is a great guy, and funny as hell.  You won’t be disappointed.

And that’s that.  Have a great day, my friends.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

Now playing in the bunker
Please contribute to Yurtathon 2010!

Our upstairs toilet

One of our boys was the last to use it, of course.  Whenever a toilet overflows in this house, it has their fingerprints all over it… so to speak.  I don’t know what it is about teenagers, but they can apparently unleash eliminations like something out of the ham case at Wegmans.  Good god!  Have a glass of water every once in a while…

Anyway, I’m about ready to give up and call a plumber.  The upstairs catcher has been out of commission since Friday, I think, and we’re not able to fix the problem.

We even went out and bought a ludicrous “eel,” equipped with a crank and shit auger.  Yeah, and what a waste of money that turned out to be…  We also purchased some idiotic-looking super-plunger.  Ha!  Might as well flush those twelve dollars down the… ah hell, I can’t even do that!  Man, I’m starting to get whipped-up over here!!

I know some of you will advise me to remove the entire toilet, go out and buy a Watson 257-E something or other, perform the double-flowback procedure, etc. etc.  And that ain’t gonna happen.  I mean, seriously.  I have trouble changing the ink cartridges in my printer.

No, I’m gonna have to call the man.  We wanted to avoid it, because he charges $75.00 just to walk through the front door, then starts adding from there.  And right now is not the time to be throwing money around.  Sheesh.  It never stops.

Hey, wonder if I could have an industrial paper shredder customized and attached below the seat of the toilet, so it would act almost like a wood-chipper and cut down on the trauma being loosed on our plumbing system every day?  Is that feasible?  Please let me know your thoughts.

And since we’re on the subject, kinda sorta, I know a guy who went to TGI Friday’s on Friday night, ordered boneless chicken wings, tossed the leftovers into the backseat of his car… and ate them while driving to work yesterday.

“They were warm from the sun,” he said.  “I didn’t even have to heat them up!”

Heh.  Predictably, he spent the rest of the night near or atop a toilet.  It’s a wonder they didn’t have to LifeFlight his ass to the Warren G. Harding Food Poisoning Clinic.  Crazy.

I know I’m probably jinxing myself, big time, but I’ve never had food poisoning.  Even after eating roughly a million restaurant meals during my life…  Apparently I’ve been lucky, because almost everybody I know has a horror story or two.

Toney, for instance, had shrimp at a restaurant in Valencia years ago (a place called Sisley), and was sick for a week.  It was around the time Princess Diana died, and she still groans when she sees footage of the funeral.

And I know this one is kinda short, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.  For a Question, predictably enough, please tell us your personal stories about food poisoning, as well as any stopped-up, overflowing toilet tales you might know.  Use the comments link below.

And finally, to get all PBS ‘n’ shit with ya, I’m going to occasionally update you guys on the progress of Yurtathon 2010.  I’m going to need to raise a certain amount of money (not all that much, actually), to go back to the yurt village and finish my book, sometime in September.  And every shirt sale, and beer contribution, will go toward that goal.

And right now we’re at 10% of the target.  So, please buy yourself a shirt or three, and help me get back to the ridiculous roundhouse in the woods.

Thanks for your continued support!

I’ll see you again tomorrow.

Now playing in the bunker

I spent Thursday

The good news:  I made some decent progress over the past few days.  I’m happy with my efforts, but am concerned about meeting the final deadline.  I might have to return to the yurt colony to pull it off.  I need two full days inside an internetless roundhouse in the middle of the woods, with a coffee maker and a crate o’ Little Debbies.  That would do it, I think.

So, look for me to start pushing the Evil Twin shirts even harder than normal in the near future.  I’m gonna need some yurt money…  I haven’t checked with the CEO, but I’m almost certain there’s no room for another such adventure in the general fund.  Toney doesn’t work during August, and that’ll flat-out smash a man’s yurtly dreams.

Anyway… I notice some interesting things while sequestered inside the public library.  It might seem kinda dull on the surface, but there’s actually quite a bit going on in there.

For instance, there are almost always one or two old ladies learning how to use the internet from a teenage nerd.  Never men, only women.  At first I wondered why, and then I imagined myself as an old man, after being pitched the idea.  And here’s what I heard, inside my head:

Are you kidding me?  I fought in Korea, and now you expect me to sit down with some doughy mama’s boy and learn how to shop for shoes on an electronic faggot box?  I don’t think so, liver lips.  I’m a man.

Yeah, that sounds about right…  But I find it interesting to eavesdrop on the ladies’ training sessions.  It’s amazing to me, that there are still people out there who don’t know ANYTHING about the internet.  Nothing, whatsoever.

They get a tutorial on how to operate a mouse, and where to type a URL (they always insist on using the www. at the beginning of every address), and the usefulness of Google…  And many of the women are amazed and almost giddy with excitement.

It’s kinda cool.

There’s also a lot of math tutoring that goes on in there.  It’s usually some fat kid (once again) trying to break through a wall constructed entirely of disinterest and dumb.  The tutor usually gets exasperated near the end, and it’s fun to listen in on their conversations.

And, of course, it’s shockingly noisy in the library.  In fact, they have a “quiet room,” where you can go to read, or whatever.  When I was a kid, the whole library was a quiet room, but not anymore.  It’s more of a community center at this point.  And I’m not a fan of all the loud talking, and discussions of replacement hips, etc.  Sheesh.  Some of us are trying to write a mean-spirited novel in here!

A woman sitting in front of me yesterday had a laptop computer that looked like an open pizza box, with an electric cord straight off a 1947 vacuum cleaner.  She had it plugged into a big ol’ international adapter, so I’m assuming she was European or somesuch.

She continuously sighed because of the noise, all the kids crying and people playing YouTube videos right out in the open air, and finally snapped.  She stood up, dramatically unplugged her euro-box, and marched out of there.  And boy, will she have a few things to say about our little town when she gets back to Helsinki…

Tomorrow I’ll try to get back into the real world.  I have a few non-library items in my notebook, believe it or not.  So, I’ll see you then.

In the meantime, I’d like to know what you think about, when I ask, “Who is the ugliest person you’ve ever met?”  Maybe I’m unusual, but I can answer that question without hesitation: a guy I used to work with in Atlanta.  Hands down: ugliest.  The man could scare varnish off a door.

And there’s a woman who lives near us with a gigantic lantern jaw, but all her features are at the top of her face.  Lots and lots of wasted real estate…

What about you?  Can you answer that question?  If so, please do.  And describe the guy or gal.  What made ‘em so ugly?  Use the comments link below.

And I’ll see you again tomorrow.

Now playing in the bunker

Since I had little

On Monday the final tweak to the footer happened, and for the first time ever… I’m happy with it.  There are always two or three things about the homepage that bug the crap out of me, but not now.  It’s close to perfect, I think.

Sure, some of the inner pages suck, like the ABOUT page, and the Surf Report gift shop.  But those are different projects for a different day.  I’ll deal with them, eventually.

Right now I’m just gonna hit refresh and watch how lightning-fast the page loads, sigh with satisfaction, and smile like a large retarded man who just won a cake raffle.

I downloaded the new Eels album this morning, and it’s gonna take a few listens…  It’s definitely not a record that grabs you by the throat on the first listen; an investment of time will be necessary.  But I’m confident I’ll eventually dig it.  I mean, it’s the Eels, right?

Here’s a review.

And Steve and I will be traveling to Philadelphia to see the “band” perform next month.  I’m excited.  They’re great live, and will rip your head clean off.  Anybody else planning to be at the show?  Maybe we can meet-up for a pre-concert adult beverage somewhere?  Let me know.

At work they installed all new vending machines.  I think the previous company lost their contract, or something, and now we’ve got some crazy-ass machines.  Oh, nothing like the ones in Japan, ours still sell normal stuff.  They’re just extra-flashy and unusual.

The soda machines have video screens that display commercials and sometimes the current temperature inside the machine itself.  The candy bar/chips machines accept credit cards(?!), and also feature a large screen where you must confirm your purchase before committing to a contract to purchase a 3 Musketeers or whatever.

I kinda like the confirmation requirement.  ‘Cause it sucks when you have your mind set on a certain candy bar, hit the wrong button, and a sack of trail mix drops — along with your heart.  So, I give the confirmation requirement a big sausage thumb-up.

I haven’t seen anyone busting out the Visa card to buy Funyuns yet, but I’ll undoubtedly do it someday.  I’m often without cash, so I can see myself taking advantage of the feature.  In fact, the only reason I ever have actual cash is because of the vending machines at work… This might be the final nudge to a completely cashless existence.

Yeah, the things are pretty crazy.  The soda machines are like something off the Jetsons.   If a person from the 1890s was transported to our break room, he’d probably cower behind a chair every time someone bought a Coke.

“Balderdash, bully, and greasy shitballs, my good fellow!!”

One thing bothers me, though.  All the candy bars are $1.00, except Milky Way.  And they’re $1.10.  Why?  What’s that all about it??  I don’t get it.  Is Milky Way a premium bar now?  Can anyone explain this to me?

It was a challenge to get this update written, on account of a cranked-up Playstation game and constant interruptions, but I hope it wasn’t too suckin’.  As for a Question… yesterday we talked about stuff that’s pissing us off.  Why not do the opposite today, and discuss the things we’re excited about?

You know, specific things.  Not abstract goop like “my wonderful family, who provide joy and inspiration every day…”  This ain’t the Hallmark Channel.  Or Facebook.  Tell us about something that’s excited you recently.

Or just talk about vending machines, whatever.

I probably won’t be able to update again until Sunday.  So, have a great weekend, my friends.

I’ll see ya next time!

Now playing in the bunker