28 May 2008

"Cartoon Character on Line 2 For You"

Nobody at work reads my blog. I keep it a secret. I don’t know them well enough or trust them to just hand out my blog URL. I guess they might find out and I could get “dooced” but I am outta here in roughly six weeks (hopefully fewer). Anyway…

There is a man that frequently calls to discuss projects with one of our project managers and when she is unavailable the receptionist pages her. The caller’s name is Buster and he happens to work for the Acme Co. Ok, Buster from Acme. Is this dude from Toontown? “Buster from Acme is on the phone for you. He and Wyle E. Coyote will be dropping off those sticks of dynamite you ordered.”

I see two issues here:
1) Who names their kid Buster (besides the Bluths)? Enough said.

2) Who names a company Acme? Wikipedia defines the Acme Corporation thusly:

“The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons…most significantly in the Loony Toons…which made Acme famous for outlandish and downright dangerous products that failed catastrophically at the worst possible times.”

Because every real company name should be associated with something that makes “products that fail catastrophically at the worst possible times.”

21 May 2008

Memo to the Annoying People at Work

Memorandum
To:
Everybody at Work
From: Mar
CC: My Adoring Blog Readers
Date: 5/21/2008
Re: Your Annoying Habits That Make Me Want to Slap You

Effective immediately, the following actions will not be tolerated:

Walking past the metal file cabinets on the opposite side of my cubicle and hitting them with your knuckles, thus creating a metal reverberation fit to drive me insane,

Using your speaker phone with your office door open for all to hear,

Failing to silence your cell phone, and

Calling out, “Hey preggers,” when I walk past you in the hall.

Employees who engage in the above mentioned activities will be put on probation and yelled at by “Preggers.”

14 May 2008

Public Business

As a pregnant woman with a fetus that sits on my bladder 24/7, I have gained more public restroom experience than I care to reflect upon. Generally, before leaving the house, I use our bathroom even if I don’t really have to. When I arrive at my destination, I use the restroom there and then depending on my length of stay, I go one to three more times.

Notes about some public restrooms:
Target’s bathroom toilets are a lot like fireworks. With an extremely touchy automatic flush that could ignite at any moment, it is necessary to pull down your pants and be at the ready before placing the toilet seat protector. Otherwise the fuse is ignited and the toilet will erupt into a flush just as you sit down, creating a bidet-type bum spray but without that clean European-chic feeling. Target’s toilets also have a flush that I like to call “light fuse and get away.” After business is done, you must rise and cling to the stall door (but without actually touching the door) in order to avoid the Vesuvius-type spray emitted by the toilet flush. It’s not a fun process and I try not to use the bathrooms at Target.

Albertson’s toilets are a fun story as well. In the last two months I have had to use them twice and both times I was forced to use the handicap stall. The issue here is that the rolls of toilet paper are enclosed entirely by a plastic snail-like shell that sits only one foot off the ground. Contrast that with the abnormal height of a handicap toilet and one has quite the conundrum in reaching down and then back up into the snail shell to retrieve toilet paper. Not to mention the toilet paper rolls are in there so tight they don’t turn, leaving the user with nothing but small particles of toilet paper at each attempt. I resorted to the Kleenex in my purse both times.

One of the cleanest, easiest to use bathrooms I have been in is at the Chevron just off of the Parkway Blvd. Exit of I-15 in Orem. It’s crazy because it’s a gas station but they take wicked good care of that thing.

Rumbi has decent restrooms with an automatic light that you don’t have to touch. I am all about automatic sinks, toilets (when the spray is under control), paper towel dispensers, and doors that open out so I don’t have to touch them very much.

The Red Iguana on 7th West and North Temple down town has sweet restrooms. They are a one-toilet-in-the-room-deal with separate restrooms for the “Damas” and the “Caballeros.” I obviously haven’t checked out the bathroom for the hombres but the one for the chicas is nice. It has artwork, a full-length mirror, a slider lock on the door to ensure privacy and safety and when you turn the light on, the Mexican Hat Dance begins to play. Just kidding about the Hat Dance but I secretly thought that should have happened.

08 May 2008

Apocalypse Now...er at 5pm

About a week ago, a person* I know of told some other people** I know very well that the Apocalypse will occur at 5pm today. Ben and I have some food storage and enough fresh water for 72 hours packed into our more than at-capacity condo so I am feeling pretty prepared. I also have a Gerber multi-tool that my live-in Scout Master told me to buy so I am hoping that I might get to use it.

BUT SERIOUSLY! She claims that it was “revealed” to her through some higher power that the world will come to an end at 5:00 pm on May 8, 2008. Maybe it’s a numbers thing. At 5pm, the 5th month, the 8th day, and the 8th year of this millennium. It totally makes sense. In that case, depending upon your spiritual outlook or otherwise you will either want to get on your knees and cry repentance or eat, drink, and be merry for at 5pm we die.

*I know of her; I don’t even consider her an acquaintance.
**Names of those I know very well have been withheld, just in case. (In case of what?)

01 May 2008

"Excuse Me, There's a Chair on Your Butt"

Certain circumstances landed me at the Olympus High dance concert last night. Over a decade has passed since I last was in that high school auditorium and I noticed a few things.

When I was in high school my hips never touched the sides of the auditorium chairs like they did last night. I blame pregnancy. And I worried that if I stood up too fast I might detach the whole row of chairs from the floor and have to walk around with them squished onto my backside. Luckily my self esteem is award-winningly better than it was in high school.

The girls’ bathroom smelled like a tanning salon. Are teenage girls fake baking so often that the restroom just continuously smells like burned flesh? I also forgot that the stall walls and doors in the bathrooms only rise to armpit height so when standing up, you can see the head of the people in the stalls next to you. Ever the tightwads, Olympus won’t buy paper towels for hand drying. Or even install a hand blower. It is still using the towel roll that just goes around and around on that spool in the box on the wall and gets reused an unbearably gross amount of times. I opted for air drying, which I think I always did during high school. I guess this method would be considered “going green” in this day and age. Fortunately for Olympus, its bathrooms didn’t have to “go” anywhere to achieve such environmental consciousness.

My last horrific observation: there were more boys there than girls. I know why and I probably noticed it during high school but now that I will have a little girl of my own, I don't like anybody that might look at her as something other than just my little girl. If my daughter ever decides to be in the dance company I will gladly attend all performances. But I will probably freak out if at the end of her dance, some sorry piece of high school schlub yells, “Gracie, you’re hot. Wanna go to prom?”