CLASSES & JOBS

In middle school my friends used to joke that I thought they all smelled bad. They said this because one year I gave pretty much all my friends soap for gifts. I got all the soaps from a bath and body store, which was fun to shop at and had everything I needed. I didn’t really mean to do it, I just kept finding really fun types of soap for different people.

At this bath and body store, there was confetti soap, soap crayons for drawing on the shower, soap that smelled good, etc. It became a running joke and still to this day whenever I see any type of soap that different or interesting I send it to a friend from middle school. It’s fun to try different kinds of soap and body wash because some smell amazing, some wake you up, and some calm you down. It’s a simple thing that we use every day, but it can be made a bit more fun with some variation.

Recently, I watched Saturday Night Live where they had a skit featuring Andy Samberg pretending to be celebrity movie star Mark Wahlberg, where Andy walks around talking to animals. It was hilarious if you are a fan of Mark Wahlberg. What was even more funny though was when Mark Wahlberg showed up the next week and poked fun at the skit, telling Andy is was not like him at all, yet Mark talks to a goat during the middle of their conversation.

I know this is just acting, yet little things like showing up on SNL or making a joke at an interview really make me grow fond of certain celebrities. The fact that they can make fun of themselves and show us that some celebrities are not elitist or “too cool,” really goes along way. Another example is Peyton Manning. I have never been a Colts fan, but I will always be a Peyton Manning fan. He has done numerous commercials and appeared on SNL as well, and after viewing all of those it is hard not to cheer for him. Celebrities who can make fun of themselves will always be my favorite.

Sometimes I swear I am mildly O.C.D. and I have these little rituals that I do. It is an uncontrollable urge and I think about it over and over until it gets done. I haven’t gone to the doctor for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (nor am I making fun of people who really have been diagnosed with this disease). I just notice that sometimes I do weird things that my friends and family laugh at, so here they are:

• I constantly tug down on the bottom of my shirts. I buy long shirts, so this is pointless.
• Different foods can never touch on a plate. If they do, the parts that touch can’t be eaten.
• Shoes go through a morning “spider check”. I found a dead spider in my shoe one day after I took it off. Never got over it.
• The volume on my radio has to be on an even number.
• I rarely, if ever, open a soda can all the way (liken this to the spider story, except for this bug was almost swallowed).
• I have to repeatedly pet an animal on the bridge of the nose.
• I tug on my earrings and necklaces while I am thinking. I actually did this during an interview!
• I always have to wipe my hands on my pants after every bite. Note to self: This isn’t pretty when you’re eating greasy food and wearing white pants.
• I can’t help but touch something if someone tells me not to (fresh paint, wet floors, hot pans).
• I have to pick the second item of everything. So the second cup out of the dispenser, the second candy bar…you get the gist.
• Every poor animal that I deem “cute” has to go through my love tap torture…This consists of nine (yes, I’ve counted) consecutive fast little taps I give to their lovely little rear.

Anyway, these are some, but not all of the little quirks that make me well, me! So now it’s time to ask you, what are some of your bad little traits?

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with our computers. We rely on them to work, shop and bank. We depend on them for important research data or fun and mindless information. When they are working correctly, everything seems wonderful: the sun is shining in our hearts, the birds are sweetly chirping in our souls and the world looks great through our rose-tinted glasses. The next moment the system crashes or you get an unexpected error, or the power is out, and the lovely dreamy scenario plunges into a black abyss. Such is our connection with computers and technology.

A little humor can carry you through the times when, if looks could kill, and your computer was a living thing, it would be a frizzled piece of nothing lying on the carpet after malfunctioning yet again. Sometimes it requires more skill to fix the problem, and you have to call in an expert. Many of us can likely relate to the following:

Things You Never Want To Hear From Technical Support

“Do you have a sledgehammer or a brick handy?”
“That’s right, not even McGyver could fix it.”
“Duuuuuude! Bummer!”
“Looks like you’re gonna need some new dilithium crystals, Cap’n.”

What would YOU not want to hear from your technical support help?

I admit it. Try as I might to be healthy and save money, I am a total sucker for fast food. I rarely have the time or the skills to cook anything more complicated than Spaghettios or Ramen Noodles, and even those don’t turn out too pretty at times. I would rather pay more money for something fast, and save myself the time and frustration of making a big meal that is only for me. Call me lazy.

So imagine my surprise when I pulled up to the pay window at one of my favorite Mexican fast food restaurants, and instead of them telling me the price I hear this, “Today is customer appreciation day, so every twentieth customer gets free food! We’ll have that out to you in a second, free of cost”. Wow! In all my life I have never had that happen, unless there was a mistake on the order and I wound up with someone elses’ food. But absolutely free, no strings attached? That just upped my loyalty to that food place!

One of my new found hobbies after work is going fishing. I never knew just how much I would enjoy the dirty job that is baiting a line, sitting in the dirt, and waiting to reel in a big ugly fish just so I can pull the hook out.

So I left work, grabbed my fishing gear, and my friend Dale and I headed to the lake. We lucked out and found a spot that had a lot of fish jumping. “Piece of cake,” we think! So we throw our lines out a few times, and get absolutely nothing. Nope. Not a single bite. You know it’s bad when the fish are actually jumping over your line instead of being on the end of it.

“Well, I’m going to give it one more try, and then I say we go to a different spot,” Dale says. I couldn’t let him cast out and get one, so I threw my line out once more too. I got a bite! I start reeling in, and reality comes with it. I didn’t have a bite, I had a rock. I was stuck, hook, line, and sinker (pun intended). So I start jerking the pole trying to wiggle the hook free. After five minutes, I’d had about all I could take, and I told him we should just cut the line. But as a guy always does, they can’t admit defeat until they try to fix it themselves. So he gives it a go.

Me: “Don’t break my rod!”

Him: “That would be a bad rod if it broke before the line did!” SNAP! As my rod breaks right in the middle. We both stare at each other with open mouths. I’m trying to decide whether to laugh or cry.

Then, he just has to say the most perfectly wrong, guy-type of thing to say.

“Well, the good news is I got the snag out”. Oh that is completely um, wonderful.

Me: “Let’s see, my forty dollar fishing pole is broken, but the good news is I saved twenty cents by getting that hook back”. Yea right, and I just saved money switching my car insurance (Ok, I admit it. I didn’t switch my car insurance. That is just what went through my head). So I’m standing there, looking the opposite way from my poor splintered pole, when he says,

“You aren’t going to believe this…You have a fish!”

Next time you have an embarrassing verbal moment, think of these and remember that words are slippery things, and we all have some fumbles. A boss of mine during my college years made this lament whenever she tried to communicate with the younger generation, “Communication is an art; and I don’t have a paintbrush!” Language is ever-changing, and keeping up can be a challenge.

A friend who was into drama told of a girl’s audition for a singing part. She chose to sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by Irving Berlin. To get the full effect, bear with me while I spell phonetically. As this would-be artist sang the song, instead of pronouncing the words ‘potato’ and ‘po-tah-to,’ ‘tomato,’ ‘tom-ah-to,’ she sang them so they all sounded the same. “You say potato, I say potato. You say tomato, I say tomato” just misses something, don’t you think? You can tell she had never listened to this song. I wonder how likely it was that she got the part. . . .

This next incident is a personal favorite. I overheard this conversation while working in a college cafeteria during my university days. Let me set the scene: the participants of this verbal exchange were two college-aged girls and a young man. The boy and one of the girls obviously liked each other and wanted to impress one another. In the course of their conversation, the liked girl remarked, “I’ve always said, ‘The eyes are the window to the soul.’”
“Wow, that’s deep,” the awed boy responded.
The third girl ventured, “Umm, I think the president, or someone important said that. . . .”
The liked girl snapped, “Well, he got it from me, then, because I have always said it!”
I nearly bit through my lower lip, I was working so hard to fight back a laugh.
End of conversation.
Post Script: My friends and I looked up the source of this quote. It has been traced back at least as far as Joan of Arc.