Like, OhMiGawd.

Corporate officers were visiting today.

You'd think that Emperor Palpatine had just arrived from the Death Star, with Darth Vader and a garrison of Storm troops in tow. The store manager was all running about like a chicken with his head chopped off.

The District manager spent the entire morning moving everything around on the shelves and on the counters. Like it really matters to the overall success of the operation as to where the chili crackers are. If anything, all she did was slow things down -- we had to hunt around to find stuff when we needed it. Golly gee -- wish I could get one o' dem high fancy ed-yoo-ma-kayshens in Bid-ness so as I ken be smartful like that.

Folks, it's time for me to fess up.

Here's the main reason why I haven't gotten very far in the world. I have an intense dislike for overly pretentious corporate ICE-holes. Especially those who deliberately foster an air of "bow and curtsy" when they arrive. Especially those who think they are geniuses for showing the rank and file how to do things they already know how to do. Especially those who wave their college degree around like a sacred talisman, but couldn't remember the first thing they learned while getting it.

IT STINKS.

The shop is all abuzz of late. It seems that "M," one of the more stalwart members of the crew, experienced a fall from grace lately.

The management forgot to let him have a break one day and he let loose on them about it. It was a big to-do. Since "M" is a smoker, I suspect it had something to do with a desperate need to get a drag. Word has it that yes, it is indeed the case. After the argument he was no-call/no-show for a couple of days. Therefore, he has been removed from the schedule and put on suspension.

Here's what I really, really, cannot understand. Is it such a terrible thing to miss a smoke for a couple of hours that you engage in anti-social behavior and more or less loose a job over it? What's up with that non-sense?

I have made many mistakes during the course of my life, but there is one thing I'm really proud of -- I never got in the habit of smoking. I'm very proud to say that I give my employer a full shift of work for what he pays, and my employer never has to worry about me wasting time smoking somewhere when I should be working. I don't cheat my employers out of worktime just to satiate a nic-fit.

I have lost count of the times that I've seen smoker co-workers run outside to smoke right in the middle of the busiest parts of the shift. Their selfishness and lack of consideration for me and for our customers just appalls me at times. Selfish, lazy, and WEAK-willed, they are. At the end of their lives, these people are going to be hooked up to all sorts of equipment, gasping for air with swiss-cheese lungs. While they're doing that, I'm going to be playing with my grand children in the yard. I HAVE NO SYMPATHY FOR THE FOOLS, WHATSOEVER.

I believe it was Steve Martin who summed it up best during one of his classic comedy routines, where a person asks "mind if I smoke?" to which someone else replies "I don't know, MIND IF I FART?"

WORMS.

This evening The Mrs. and I went out to eat with our kids. The whole time we were there at the restaurant, a group of fools stood against the wall closest to our table, yammering into their cell phones like they were God-Almighty C.E.O. emperors of the world. If there's one thing that really annoys my wife and me to no end, it's rude a*h*les with cell phones.

Let's think a little about this scenario, shall we? Let me talk to all the cell phone owners of the world who like to strut their stuff hollering about their big business deals into a little box while everyone else is trying to eat in peace. Here are some things to consider:

1. Nobody gives a flying F* about who you think you are, or about your dumbass business deals.
2. If your business affairs have made you into such a desperate slave to your telecom devices that you can't or won't enjoy a public meal in peace with your friends, then GUESS WHAT? YOU AIN'T NOBODY. YOU AIN'T RUNNING THE SHOW. THE SHOW IS RUNNING YOU.
3. Do you really want to show people how important you are? Do you want to know how to demonstrate REAL brass balls kind of POWER? Here's how you do it -- TURN YOUR PHONE OFF, AND MAKE THE WORLD WAIT while you finish your meal and then move to a private location.
   
4. Make your lackeys handle the phones FOR you, back at the office. THAT, my friends, is REAL power. Otherwise, if you waste half your life with phone to your ear, you ain't J* Sh*
5. Last but not least, when the GRAVE WORMS are eating your sorry A* in the casket below ground, they're going to ignore your cell phone. Worms love flesh and bone of dead idiots who thought they were really something, but they have no use for electronics.
   

I found a website that features a document you can download and cut into little cards to give out to a*h* cellphone users.

http://www.coudal.com/shhh.php [link]

Yeah, What HE Said.

"I've always said, to my kids and to anyone who'll listen, that the key to happiness is fooling yourself into thinking that what you do matters."

-- Anonymous Lawyer.

Women! Ya Can't Live With 'Em, and......pass the beer nuts!

Call me old school.

Mamma brought me up to expect proper behavior in ladies. I used to go by that training for many years. Nowadays, I’m cosmopolitan enough to know that we live in a day and age where women are free to explore their masculine sides. Often in quiet moments as I observe the women make attempts to do this, I find their human candor to be oddly refreshing. There is no better example I can give than my female coworkers at the fast food business I work for.

With all their beauties and their crudities, their graces and their warts, their curtsies and their grunts, I find them to be absolutely adorable. No matter how much they may irritate or annoy me, I always consider them to be “my girls.” When the staff on shift is fifty percent male or more, they pretty much mind their P’s and Q’s. When the staff on shift is predominantly female and the males get busy with their own things, the females interact, clash, unify, coalesce, and move about with the disorganized beauty of the flows and currents in a vigorous brook.

Often men mistakenly believe that locker room talk is a “guy thing.” What they fail to realize is that while they are comparing notes about an individual woman and her relative willingness for certain activities, women compare notes about the relative lack of finesse, talent, or length that an individual man may or may not possess. Once you get them going, the women will describe this with all the frankness of a linebacker, while blithely shuffling fries into paper sleeves and capping lids on drinks with all the tender loving care of a mother feeding her child.

At times, the girls can really make me blush.

This afternoon “J,” one of my favorites, stepped behind the wall between the kitchen and the counter. She had a desperate, miserable itch that could be ignored no longer. She reached into her clothing, and with an earthy grunt, vigorously relocated offending undergarments into their proper position around sensitive places. Like a gentleman, I tried to be sure I gave her the privacy she needed by looking the other way and pretending not to notice. “Mama Kitty,” the female shift leader on duty at the time, shouted “J! Stop groping yer chick bits and get back up here to help out!”

Yikes. Never would I dare say such a thing, but I guess you can get away with it when it is woman to woman. By the way, they don’t call her “Mama Kitty” because she’s like a mother cat. One of the girls clued me in to the real meaning of the name, which is cruder and far more ribald.

“S” is another one of my favorites. For a brief time she used to be a model, but life and children got in the way of that dream, and she’s desperately trying survive while working the drive through. She’s part Latina, part Native American, part Caucasian, and the blend gives her a deeply enchanting, spellbindingly exotic look that still shines through her fast food hat, headphones, and baggy restaurant shirt. She has faded gang tattoos that have been reworked and redrawn into less stark images, yet when she takes change from the redneck construction workers, she stands tall with all the pride, majesty, and grace of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She is Mother Mary personified.

Whenever “S” opens her mouth to speak to the customers, I hear the kind of cheer, warmth and tenderness a new mother would give to her infant child. Then, on a dime, she can whirl around and give a stern warning to a female coworker who bothers her. “Back off, b*!” she says, and you realize that Mother Mary can command the very lightning of the sky. Today, she stepped up to the grill and laid out a line fresh beef to help Matt while he had to step away temporarily. “Mama Kitty” called her to help up front, and sweet little “S” shouted back “hold on a minute, I’m still playing with Matt’s meat!” She looked sideways at me and winked.

Of course, as I wax eloquent about what I love in these ladies, I conveniently forget all the times they sorely bother me. But with “my girls,” I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Corporate Mergers I'd Like To See.

In the wake of the Exxon/Mobil deal and the AOL/Netscape deal, here are some corporate mergers that would be interesting to see:

Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush, and W.R. Grace Company merge to become "Hale Mary Fuller Grace".

Polygram Records, Warner Brothers, and Keebler Crackers merge to become "Polly-Warner-Cracker."

3M and Goodyear merge to become "MMMGood."

John Deere and Abitibi-Price merge to become "Deere Abi."

Zippo Manufacturing, Audi Motors, Dofasco, and Dakota Mining merge to become "Zip Audi Do Da."

Honeywell, Imasco, and Home Oil merge to become "Honey I'm Home."

Denison Mines, and Alliance and Metal Mining merge to become "Mine All Mine."

Federal Express and UPS merge to become "FED UP"

Fairchild Electronics and Honeywell Computers will merge and become "Fairwell Honeychild"

3M, J.C. Penney and the Canadian Opera Company will merge and become "3 Penney Opera"

Grey Poupon & Dockers Pants will merge and becomes "Poupon Pants"

Knott's Berry Farm & National Organization of Women will merge and become "Knott NOW!"

Cessna Aircraft and the Whirlpool Corporation are merging to form "Cesspool."

Stock Advice.

One of the basic criteria most investors use when buying stock in a company is the performance of management. Some investors will even go so far as to examine the personalities and decision making strategies of executive running the companies they have equity in.

Here's an example of a company whose management obviously doesn't have anything better to do with their time.

T-Mobile has sent a cease and desist letter to the operators of the Engadget Mobile weblog demanding that they stop using the color fuschia in their logo, saying that it is trademarked and that it causes confusion in the marketplace. Read the article here at Wired News. [link]

I sure wish I could get paid millions of dollars a year just to sit around writing letters demanding that people stop using my color.

In an industry as fast paced, complex, and highly competitive as telecommunications, its a good thing to know that someone out there is paying attention to such vital, do-or-die details like the color pink. They must have taken a class about color as part of their Harvard M.B.A. curriculum.

If I were an owner of T-mobile stock, I would think long and hard about why I even have it.

Although the issue is minor, I take it as an intuitive sign that T-mobile management spends too much time in their offices, and not enough time in the trenches managing the company. I take it as an intuitive sign that they sorely lack marketing knowledge. Consumers care more about such complicated arcane things as GOOD SERVICE, than they do about logo colors. Time that management spends untwisting their panties about logo colors is time they could spend designing and producing better products and services that consumers want.

I can just imagine executive reports to the shareholders: "we added value to your investment because we earned our over-inflated salaries by spending hundreds of thousands on attorneys to defend the logo color."

Another blog article I found on the matter mentions that yes, T-mobile sales are declining and they are struggling for subscribers. What sense does it make, then, to give a rat's ass about the color when all the rats are leaving the ship before it sinks anyway?

I think it definitely would be time to sell.