Guys, guys, guys…I need the name calling, the insults, the strawman arguments, the DRAMA…what is this “Thanks” and “no problem” crap all about?

/s if it wasn’t obvious

Edit: Apparently one person doesn’t have a sense of humor. Yay!

“Tryin’ to catch me…” [server error - Please contact the Site Admins for support]

Mom’s spaghetti

Worked at a place where our CIO was completely unqualified to be a leader, much less a leader in IT. She was a micromanager who took the position of “telling stakeholders” instead of “working with stakeholders” so any project she was on was really her pushing through whatever agenda she had at the time. Meanwhile her deputy CIO was stealing computer equipment from the server room but I digress…

April fools one year and I decide to prank it up. I moved the hinges (not the door handles) of the freezer/fridge in the breakroom so that the handle and hinges were on the same side. It’s a fifteen minute job to move everything so I did it the night before the 1st.

The next morning our hungover CIO stumbles into the breakroom and cannot get the fridge to open. After a few seconds of futile tugging on the handle, she gave up and took her lunch to her office.

Others in the office figured it out pretty quickly and had a good chuckle.

Later on that day CIO sends out a nastygram about pranks being unprofessional, property damage, someone was going to be in huge trouble, yadda yadda…

But she’s not the director. The director tells her to basically fuck off, it was a funny prank, and perhaps she needed to lighten up.

She never found out it was me.

Here’s a method that’s always worked for me and others.

Get a glass of water, cool is preferred but any reasonable temperature is ok.

Take small, tiny, repeated sips from the rim of the glass, like an infant on a nipple, drinking and swallowing the water.

Do this for ten-twenty seconds and you’ll be rid of them.

maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.

Wow. A tornado needs to find its way there.

Nowadays? Depends on a whole set of indeterminate variables.

But odds point to tazing. arrest, something on that end of the spectrum.

A Catholic Christmas Eve Vigil (not Midnight - different kind of Mass).

The scene was thus: A strange-to-me Catholic church off of something and Capital in Milwaukee, near where my mom, not a religious person but a nice person, took me and my sis when Christmas happened to fall on our regular visitation weekend one particular year.

The priest spoke on and on, as fathers and Father tend to do. The readings familiar, unre(M)arkable, (L)ukewarm, Psalm verse, same as the first.

The Homily was delivered in the patented priestly monotonic nasally drone, the incense and insensitivity flowing too freely. The easily-employed white, gray-haired, “middle class rich”, Kohl’s-suited, stoic husbands stood, sat, knelt, genuflected, stood, knelt, stood, sat, stood, knelt, genuflected, prayed, sang-chanted, with their wives, who were fully guilt-jeweled for common marital slights, whether real or imagined, or who benefited from rich parents who left their ill-gotten legacies to their ill-raised, now boomer kids who have become reluctantly over-sexed wives. The department store credit cards tucked safely in their expensive clutch purses, these women were fully-prepared to wage full-out Karen-esque, post-Christmas sale consumerist war in the following post-holiday sales season.

Retail workers never stood a chance.

In short: The church was overheated, like hell hot, probably good prep for some of these people, and my not-Catholic mother was next to me trying to morally fix or better herself, or maybe she was trying to impress my sister and I, or, more than likely on reflection, trying to placate my very-Catholic dad and stepmom, but mostly I had been standing for what seemed like FOREVER, and my knees alternately locked and unlocked, and my youth-fitting suit that was too small but too expensive to replace at Kohls just yet sweltered me under imagined and real guilt, and the incense, and the droning, and the HEAT…

I was about 4 seconds from passing out when some stranger approached me and said “Hey, you don’t look OK. Let’s go outside now before you faint.” and I swear it’s the best religious experience I’ve ever had: A human being a human and taking pity on a young kid dealing with physical and emotional distress. I went outside and cooled off in the Midwestern December air. Soon after, my mom and sis came outside and we left in the beater car that smelt like gas if the heater was fully turned on, so we had to leave the freash air selector on and the slider control at no more than 3/4 quarters, but that’s OK because the A/C, which hadn’t functioned in many presidential election cycles, was fully-replaced by the December air, the religious experiment over.

I’m not at all religious but I hope that guy knows just what he did for us that night. We were faking faith, just trying to be good people, and the droning, heat, guilt, and THAT FUCKING CHRISTMAS INCENSE just did us in.

Lesson learned.

Pew or pew not - there is no die.