You Will Do. Nothing.
Ah, titling the update with a Shatnerism. Could it get any better? Well, hello, tunkets, and welcome to a Very Special Oddball “December to Remember,” which I just ripped off shamelessly from a Lexus commercial. Speaking of which, can you believe that Lexus and Mercedes’ ad campaigns down here every Christmas tend to revolve around the subject of purchasing one of these expensive luxury cars as a gift for your loved ones? I mean…buying a car as a Christmas present, like it was a pair of Argyle socks or something! You got four children? Hell, buy ‘em all an IS-300! If that’s the target demographic down here, I guess I’m way off. That, in and of itself, is a luxury I don’t quite have.
Been a hellacious week so far. Tuesday, in particular, was shit-caked like a fifty year old crapper in a train station somewhere upstate. Today was quite a bit better, particularly near the end, but that’s only because the grueling new work assignment I was expecting never materialized. As a result, since I’d already cleared some time for it, I didn’t have anything to do for the last hour of the day. But that sits just fine with me. The “un-materialiation” of this assignment—just another blasted ad page, I’m sorry to say—is due to the fact that the very same troublesome account manager, whose antics just before the holiday nearly gave me a thrombosis, suddenly disappeared shortly after lunch and was not to be seen again. I don’t know what got into the woman, but I’m not here to ask questions, ma’am. Although I briefly—and with much chuckling—entertained the thought that perhaps she pulled a Mission: Impossible and spent the better part of three hours puking in the bathroom, like that dude Ethan Hunt gives the medication to so he’ll stay out of the computer room and…what? Hey, the movie was on USA during the Thanksgiving weekend. What do you want me to say?
Anyway, so that, combined with the fact that traffic was not too bad during either commute today, sent me home in a happy mood. I was even more pleased with myself because KITT’s new catalytic converters had been on a UPS truck since 5:30 this morning, “Out For Delivery.” (As their tracking system says.) So I was fully expecting to receive the converters when I got home, check the box contents to make sure everything was kosher, then truck ‘em down to the repair shop tomorrow morning before work so the guys there could have all day to put them on. But, inexplicably, UPS never showed up. At 9:00 tonight I checked the tracking report and it still said “Out For Delivery.” Sha, right! If you mean “Out For Delivery” as in “Driver Isn’t Gonna Make It So Right Now It’s Out But Is On Its Way Back In To Our Package Center Which Is Buried Six Miles Beneath The Earth’s Crust In An Undisclosed Location,” then yeah, that works.
So anyway, eventually the tracking report did switch over to “Rescheduled Delivery,” set for tomorrow. I guess they’re going to make another attempt. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like they came here and tried to deliver it. If they had, they’ve have left the package, I’m sure of it—there’s no signature required on this shipment. And there was no yellow post-it thingy on the front door signifying their presence. My guess is that all of the snowbird traffic down here caused the UPS dude to get behind in his deliveries; I must have been pretty far down the list so he just never showed up. Typically they don’t come to our community until 6:00 in the evening anyway, so we got the shaft. Thanks a lot, snowbirds. Because of you, I won’t see KITT this week. Is there anything else you’d like to foul up while you’re here? Whatever it is, make sure you’re done giving it a royal screw by your tee time, or you might miss all the nice weather we’re having lately.
I’m just kinda pissed at UPS anyway because they always do this crap to me when I have something delivered via Second Day Air, like I did these converters. Every blessed time I select the blue label option, they deliver it late. It’s like 2nd Day is not really 2nd Day, it’s just a “Pay Us More” option wherein you pay for a higher service level but your package gets treated with the same priority as Ground items. It really torques me off. I’m hoping that UPS will at least attempt to be nice and begin tomorrow’s deliveries with the ones they were supposed to get to today but didn’t. But I guess that’s like hoping for a Christmas bonus when your job is bleaching toilets at Hardee’s. (All Kinds of Good Stuff™.)
Recently I watched a lot of leftover recorded junk on our TiVo, so enough room on the unit’s hard drive was freed up for it to start recording TiVo Suggestions again. Ironically, in the past couple of days it’s recorded two nearly identical specials on two different channels, both about the mysterious medical secrets of Adolf Hitler. One of the shows was on the Hitler Channel…uh, I mean the History Channel (sorry, it just seems like they don’t talk about anything but World War II), and was called “High Hitler.” As in, high on methamphetamine. No joke. Not only that, but the docu-drama “revealed” that Hitler had secretly suffered from uncontrollable flatulence! For some reason, this sent me into ringing peals of laughter. Partially because my mind is just in the gutter like that anyway, but just imagining the one-time greatest threat to all humanity as this unrestrained farter is somehow brutally comical. Worse yet, in a “Very Nazi Doctor-Like” attempt to correct this ailment, Hitler’s personal physician is reported to have injected him with distilled pig crap and fed him minced bull testicles. I am totally not making this up. The “High Hitler” show might have been, but I’m just calling the shots as I see them, you understand. Anyway, it was quite a strange little hour of television.
Today I discovered a story about celebrity autographed staplers. I am not kidding. This was hilarious to me because it’s not far away from something similar which I jokingly predicted way back in the nineties. As a kid I used to draw fake advertiserments in little notebooks, mostly parodies of TV and magazine ads that were running at the time. Others, though, were just plain out of left field, and one such ad in particular touted a special collectible toothbrush, autographed by Rene Auberjoobiedoobiedoobie. Now, that’s just what I called Rene Auberjonois, the guy who played Odo on Deep Space 9, because at that age I couldn’t even begin to fathom how to pronounce the man’s name. (To be honest, I still couldn’t tell you for sure.) Of course, my high school friends and I got a laugh out of that. (I also seem to remember doodling up an ad for a stupid Milton Bradley game called “High Roller” wherein you take a pair of dice, roll them, and if you roll more than a 1, you win. Which, of course, is impossible not to do with two dice…that was the joke. It was a stab at how stupid a lot of the gimmicky board games seemed to be in the early nineties, especially around Christmas time, when they’d trot out stuff like “Mr. Bucket” or “FORBIDDEN!” or whatever that game was called with the sentient mountain that would yell at the cartoon explorers who tried to cross the river of lava and…okay, this paragraph ends now.)
And the Silliest Reason for a Recall in Automotive History Award goes to Toyota, which is recalling 92,577 Celicas because “their daytime running lights are too bright and could be a hazard to oncoming drivers.” Wow, can we get Toyota—or the NHTSB—to also recall the old fogeys who drive on Vanderbilt Road with their high-beams on? Because when they’re comin’ at you, the complete lack of any other ambient light makes those Lincoln headlamps resemble a binary star system. In the same story I just linked to, there’s a report that Chevy is also recalling 1,378 of their new Cobalt model (the Cavalier replacement) because of a frumpily designed headlamp bulb shield system. I think that figure represents every Cobalt ever made at this point.
Okay, I’m gonna wrap this entry up now. I could go on longer, but it’s getting late, so I’ll save some for tomorrow. Ciao.
Categorized as Life