Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Another new job

I've been at my new job at American Color Graphics for about a week now, and here are some factoids, observations, concerns, et cetera, about what I've witnessed thus far.
  • 80% of what I do is the same thing - feeding papers into a machine - over and over and over and over and over and over. The almost unbearable repetitiveness leaves a lot of time for spacing out and thinking off-the-wall thoughts, some of which will appear in my next blog entry.
  • I give myself about three months on the "How long until he snaps and jams his hands into a moving machine just so he never has to handle another Sun Newspaper?" office pool. When I worked at Target, I took four months on the "How long until he snaps and swan dives off the top shelf?" office pool - but, alas, I only worked there for three.
  • Why can't they have robots that stack the papers and feed the pockets? Then I could just operate one with a little joystick. That would be easier.
  • In China, this kind of job is done by hundreds of child laborers, rather than a few uneducated stiffs and many large pieces of machinery.
  • My co-workers are impressed by things that should not be impressive and attribute all of my intelligence to me having gone to college. When I happen to know something that they don't, they will call me "college boy," even when the thing in question was not learned in college and should be known to anyone.
  • I have only been called "hun" once thus far, and by a woman significantly older than myself. That is actually very impressive considering the, ehrm, quality of the workforce.
  • On my first night, the guy who was training me asked me if I smoked. When I told him no, he told me that I should start. Actually what he said was that smoking was "something to consider" if I'm going to be working the 6 pm to 6 am shift. What that has to do with smoking, I have no idea. HOWEVER, it must have something to do with it because EVERYBODY smokes. When I was at Target, I put my co-worker smoke rate at around 70-75%. At ACG, it has got to be pushing 90%.
  • Everyone there calls it the "backbone" of the paper instead of the "spine." Am I missing something? Isn't spine the more appropriate/common word to use? I have heard backbone said there probably fifty times by 7 or 8 different people, and not a single mention of spine. I didn't realize that anatomical terms for things were replaceable with other, less scientific and less appropriate words for the same piece of anatomy.
  • There is a large, man-like rat that walks around. He's covered in tattoos, and he never really does a whole lot. He just wanders around, very slowly. Every once in a while you'll see him pushing a paper bin or something. And every once in a while he'll come close to getting run over by one of the many tow motors driving around the place. Every break, he goes up and sits in the break room in the same spot in the same position - one leg on the floor and the other one up on the bench. There is one thing that this man-like rat does a lot of - nose picking. He picks his nose all the time. The first time I saw him pick his nose, I thought it was just by chance - but then I saw him do it again . . . and again. I think he spends more time picking his nose than doing any real, actual work. Hell, I spend more time picking MY nose than he does doing any real, actual work. Also, I hear from a co-worker that he has a blow-up doll that he's pretty fond of. Not sure how people know that - either he brought it to work or he talks about it at work. My question is, is it a blow-up human or a blow-up rat?

Monday, February 13, 2006

Cheney bags a big one

I'm sure that you've heard by now, but how can I not write about this? During a hunting outing in Texas over the weekend, the Vice-President of the United States, Dick Cheney, shot a 78 year-old friend. With a shotgun. And he is not a tortoise or anything like that. He's a human. Apparently the gentlemen had fallen behind the other hunters and was coming up behind them when Cheney turned to follow a quail in flight and fired, apparently missing the quail, but hitting the larger game, Harry Whittington, a lawyer and prominent Republican from Texas, in the face, shoulder and chest. According to the owner of the property upon which they were hunting, Whittington was "peppered pretty good" by the shot discharged from the Vice-President's gun. Well, as we can can see, this is hilarious. But what's even funnier is the reaction, or lack thereof, from the White House about this incident, and the delicate way that it is being handled. This incident happened on Saturday, but was not reported until Sunday, and not by the White House or by the Vice-President's office, but by a local journalist in Corpus Christi, Texas, who spoke with the owner of the ranch. Also, it is being said that Whittington was hit by "pellets," rather than that he was shot by a shotgun, making it sound like he was hit with a couple pops from a bb gun or air pistol.

You have to think that the thought went through Cheneys head to shoot the man again to make sure he was dead, then turn to the other members of his hunting party and the secret service agents present and say, "It was a suicide - you all saw it, right?" while still holding his weapon, a la Jayson Williams after killing his limo driver. Either that, or yelling, "It's every man for himself!" and then shooting at the rest of his companions. All in all, I'd say it's the second-best vice-presidential shooting ever - after the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton incident.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

What a city

Something was brought to my attention yesterday that sounded so ridiculous I just had to share it. Unless you've been living under a sports-free rock recently, you know that Jerome Bettis of the Pittsburgh Steelers is returning to his hometown of Detroit to play in the Superbowl this Sunday. Well, as a token of appreciation for his years of service in the league and being an ambassador for the city, the mayor of Detroit bestowed upon Jerome the "key to the city." It's an honorary gesture but a prestigious one at that. And with that distinction, Jerome certainly enters into some prestigious company, joining the likes of Louis Farrakhan, the rock band KISS, and perhaps most impressively of all, Saddam Hussein. That's right, folks. Saddam Hussein has a key to the city of Detroit. Apparently, a couple of decades before he was crawling out of a spider hole, he was donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to a church in the city. So then-mayor Coleman Young decided that this Saddam is a pretty good guy and deserved a reward for his generosity. Solid choice there, Coleman. Think you might want to have a do-over on that one? THIS JUST IN. Here are the other recipients of the key to the city of Detroit:
Joe Piscopo
Richard Simmons
Jake "The Snake" Roberts
Captain Janeway
Pol Pot
Marshall Applewhite
Jesse Katsopolis
Aquaman

Some other things that have been on my mind:

You know who I hate? Little kids with glasses. I just want to punch them in the face. All of them. Even the retarded ones. Also, adults with no teeth. They're lucky they don't have any teeth because if they did I would knock them out. Of course if they had teeth, I wouldn't be punching them in the first place because the reason I hate them is because they have no teeth. GRRRRR. If there were only a way to knock somebody with no teeth's teeth out. GRRRRR.

I will be starting a new, more lucrative job soon. Now don't be too proud of me, more lucrative is a relative term. Walking around town checking the coin return slots in pay phones and vending machines would be more lucrative than working at Target. But this job will be lucrative enough that it will allow me to purchase a new car in the near future. But this has me in quite a dilemma, because I HATE new car smell. I know a lot of people love it, but it makes me want to puke my guts out. Hell, I'd rather smell puke than new car smell. Maybe somebody can answer this for me - when you buy a used car, does it have new car smell? Like, do they recondition it and get that smell back in somehow? God, I hope not, or I will become a motorcyle rider very shortly.

I have never, not once, found a southern accent charming. Any kind of southern accent - Texas, Georgia, Virginia, whatever. It's all fingernails on the chalkboard to me. You know what? I'd rather listen to a roundtable discussion between a Scotsman, a Newfoundlander, a Bostonian, a Buffalonian, a Bronxite and a guy from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan than hear one damn person say younguns, ya reckon, puddin, plum tuckered, much obliged, y'all, swayt tay or chitlins.

Butterfingers. You ever eat them? I do, sometimes. But I'll tell you what, I don't get them at all. I mean, they're supposed to be peanut butter. But they're so damn hard! That has got to be the hardest peanut butter produced in the world. How can they even call it butter? They're tagline is "crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery!" But peanut butter is neither "crispety" nor "crunchety." So why did they make the candy bar that way? Reese's cup? Nutrageous? Fast break? Fifth Avenue? Those products are of the appropriate consistency. I'm just waiting for the day that they start advertising products as "smoothety, creamety, potato chippety!"

They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, so here is my admission. Ever since I saw the movie Phone Booth a few years ago, I've been calling up strangers and, in my best Kiefer Sutherland, saying, "If you hang up, I will kill you." They always hang up.