Jeans Day At Work!

Even the Snowmen are getting a bit agitated with all this snow

20 more inches of snow! Who cares, they're allowing us to wear jeans today! Party!

Prime example of how dillusional corporate America's executives are.  It's been snowing non stop for the past day.  My office just experienced two system crashes in two nights, the result being that I've worked 23 hours through Tuesday.  Do we get a notification that the office is closed for today? No. Free lunch? No. Extra vacation day? No. Gift card for the effort? No. We get to wear MOTHERFUCKING JEANS.

Hey thanks corporate, because I was really going to sludge into work in two feet of snow in a pair of pleated fucking slacks.  Jackasses.  How about at least an e-mail telling everyone to work from home and get the bare minimum done until the 7 signs of the apocalypse pass.  

Yes, I'm irritable and angry as shit.  I've got clients in Texas that closed up shop because they got a couple inches yesterday.  Offices in Charlotte shut down for 3 days last time they got 10 inches of snow.  We're averaging 10 inches of snow during our lunch break these days.  Cut the shit Southern States of America. If we have to be miserable up here then so do you. I'm tired of picking up the slack every time you slackjawed yokels decide you're too frigen lazy to pick up a shovel.  Give me a frigen day off. 

Yes, I'm starting to lose it.  God forbid the system crashes tonight.  CW will go viral the old fashioned way, via the 6 PM evening news. 

Ground Hog Day

Guess what this rodent and his obese handler are going to see. Snow.  Big frigen surprise. Go back in your hole vermin. Come back out in a couple weeks so we can at least get an accurate forecast.  Its February 2nd. Of course we're going to have more weeks of winter. I question your intelligence for thinking anything otherwise.

If Mailmen Can't Handle this Weather What Chance Do I Have?

WCVB Boston -  The U.S. Postal Service says dozens of mail carriers in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts have been hurt this winter as they tried to deliver mail in snowy and icy conditions...Christine Dugas, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service in Providence, said on Tuesday that at least 44 carriers have been hurt when they slipped, tripped or fell on the snow and ice. Their injuries range from bruised backs to broken wrists...Dugas said three more carriers were hit by cars as they walked in the street because sidewalks were not cleared.

I feel like I should be warning everyone to double up on Oxen and gun powder munitions a-la Oregon Trail before heading out of their house this morning.  That's how serious this is getting.  Just crude grave markings of fallen mailmen left and right, (replace dysentery with hypothermia).

Is there no hope? The Mailman, by and large the toughest sons of bitches to ever take the civil service exam can't even traverse safely in this weather.   These are a people who, for hundreds of years, have up held their pledge and credo of "neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, Nor Hail shall keep the postman from their appointed rounds."  Granted the motto kind of loses steam in the second half (its a bit wordy guys, clean it up) but still, they took an oath!

That's more than I can say, and I'm guessing more than you guys as well.  If they can't even uphold their sacred pact, how can the rest of us expect to be successful in our morning commute voyages today. 

Police Called In To Break UP Brawl At Southern Church

FLETCHER, N.C. — Authorities say a dispute over leadership at a church in western North Carolina turned from angry words to fistfights. About 30 police officers from five agencies were called to break up fights Sunday at Greater New Zion Baptist Church in Fletcher, about 94 miles west of Charlotte.

Henderson County Sheriff's Capt. Jerry Rice says the brawl is under investigation and no one appears to have been seriously hurt. Rice says there were about 75 people at the church when police arrived, but not all of them were scuffling. Church members are divided over the recent ouster of the Rev. LeVonia Ray as pastor of the church. The fighting apparently began over whether a vote should be held to reinstate him.

Two ways you can tell just how much more serious southerners are about religion than the rest of us.

1.  The clergy broke into an all out royal rumble over who their Pastor should be.  Now, its been a while since I've been to church, but for a while there my parents made sure I rode the pine for the God squad each and every Sunday, like a good Catholic, devout through Confirmation.  And in this time, we probably had 4 or 5 different Priests, and I can't remember anyone even batting an eye lash at any of the shake ups. In fact I'm not sure the old folks in the front even woke up from their naps. Never mind drawing battle lines and breaking out in fisticuffs like the West Side Story.   I think changes to the lead singer of the choir caused more of a ruckus than who was leading us in the Our Father.  Not many different ways you can lead a prayer, but the ways you can suck at singing are infinite.

2. Even World Star Hip-Hop doesn't have video of this fight. And up until now I just assumed if anyone threw down anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line World Star had to sanction and sponsor the event, but I can't find video of this fight anywhere.  If bringing a cell phone or flip cam to church is too taboo for even the biggest world-star fans/thugs than they definitely take church much more seriously than the rest of the country.

Best of the Blogs

New feature I'm going to try and incorporate more often in the same spirit as Friday's Alt-Tabs of the week. Best of the Blogs is going to be a compilation of blog posts that caught my eye over the course of a couple days.  I try not to step on the toes of blogs I read creatively but that results in a lot of content I consider blog-worthy being skipped over. Instead I'll just publish them here. For the most part I'm going to focus on smaller less known blogs, they need love too.

Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Maps Street View- Pretty self explanatory, enjoy.

Bryant Gumbel is Mystified by this "internet thing" -This clip made the rounds yesterday, Bryan Gumbel spitefully discussing the burgeoning internet in 1994, and mocking his staffs communication skills on air.  Odd that even back then mainstream media was fearful and grumpy about the internet.

10 Beers to Stop Drinking at Age 30 -Not sure I can completely reconcile their disclaimer of "Eschewing these brews and then becoming a beer snob is perhaps the most reprehensible of acts. Just order your beer and drink it."  Pretty much when you eliminate beers based on price you've hit Beer Snob status. It's just a fact. None the less it's an entertaining read and a pretty succinct list of cheap brews for all the underemployed, unemployed, college students, and under 30 people out there.  Glad I'm not over the hill yet.  Also glad PBR and Bud Light didn't make the list, I'd be prepping for war right no instead of another 20 inches of snow.

I'm All For America Shutting Down the Internet Like Egypt

CBS - For Americans addicted to Facebook and Google, a day without the Internet might seem to last forever, but the effect of going offline would be no less traumatic for the entire U.S. economy, experts say. While the economy probably could reverse the damage from being offline a few days, every day without the Internet would be a step closer to calamity for manufacturing, finance and other sectors of the economy. Such would be the consequence if the United States ever followed the example of Egypt, which shut off its Internet Jan. 27 in an attempt to silence widespread protests.

Is CBS serious? Have they ever worked in a real office?  A day without the internet would be a frigen joy and would, at least in the short term, increase productivity 10-fold.

It might come as a shock that I'd welcome a day without the internet in the office but I'm completely serious.  Do you know how much stress I have each day trying to decide between crushing a few hours of work or aimlessly browsing the corporate sanititzed depths of the internet?  Not being able to check the hit count on this blog alone would save me one hour a day, never mind the couple of hours or so spent on LongReads. 

Yes it would suck to have to have information faxed or relayed over the phone as opposed to receiving it via email or websites, but honestly it would still be at least as efficient.  I average somewhere around 250-300 emails received at my work address per day.  75 or so are my friends and I having arguments via one line pot-shots at eachother, 50 are duplicate or triplicate emails because my address has been added to lists multiple times, another 75 may involve me on the periphery but ultimately I just file them without ever reading, and 50 are just pure corporate junk that I don't even think of opening or filing, and that leaves 50 more that are actually pertinent to my job.  I spend probably an hour a day just deleting emails, another hour returning shots at my friends or debating the merits of the current BCS football system in detail, despite the fact that none of us work for a BCS school or the NCAA.  

If you've been meticulously following along I've just noted roughly 5 hours of waste in my normal 8.5 hour day, and really I meant to exaggerate the time wasted but if I honestly think about it that might be fairly accurate, I'm a fast worker and get a lot done in 10 minute spurts (yes, that is what she said). I rarely work for more than 15 minutes straight(ditto). 

With all that excess slacking off time I'm farily certain that even with the crippled capabilities an internet-less workplace would have to deal with, an extra 5 hours would allow ample time to make up for and exceed my normal days production.  

This blog would suffer though, and as such so would all of you.

Massachusetts Snowpocalypse Continues

Pretty much Massachuestts in a nutshell this winter...About as hopeless as it gets.

I'd like to take the time to blame this on my cousin Andy. About two months back he was telling us how his boss is a weather fanatic and told everyone its going to be a light winter. Andy, your boss is a jackass.

Drug Dealers With A Sense of Humor

Oldest trick in the book, you're not fooling anyone.  I assume the only reason a SWAT team isn't storming this drug den is that it's outside of 1,000 feet of a school, which we all know is governed much like international waters. Anything goes.

Worlds Biggest Yo-Yo (vid inside)

I don't mean to burst your bubble any further, but I'm not sure that counts as a yo-yo. I would think rising back up is a crucial element to the definition of a yo-yo.

And don't get me wrong, it's a fine looking Yo-Yo prototype, but was building it from scratch really necessary? Couldn't you have just strung up one of those over-sized industrial spools to the same effect? There's no way that wouldn't have been the biggest Yo-Yo.  

Would have saved a lot of time too, could have gotten a job months ago, instead of collecting unemployment and spending a year and a half slapping two pieces of round wood together with rope wrapped through the middle.  Must be a former union worker, working at that pace.