Terrible Analogies

…than rushing out the door with family in tow, late for an appointment, only to have your toddler throw a conniption because his favorite toy train he wanted to bring along isn’t working.  Taking a deep breath, you rush inside to grab a few batteries only to encounter the product packaging from hell.

After struggling with this thing for a minute I finally broke down and whipped out the carving knife and hacked my way in.

Listen, if you’re going to produce a product with a perforated flap, could you perform a few quality assurance tests to verify that it actually works?  After all, you’re not protecting gold bouillon, state secrets, or your sister’s virginity.  These are batteries.  Nothing more.  Please don’t demand that consumers pass a Mensa test before being granted access to your product.

And in my heart of hearts I sincerely hope that there’s a special place in Hell for companies who seal their products inside indestructible blister packs.  These razor sharp things are nothing short of a vile, viscous evil, and have no place in civilized society.

*deep breath*

Whew.  Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.  I feel much better now….

It’s 5pm, and the boss calls a meeting.  He doesn’t does have an agenda.  I swear to Gawd he just wants to hear his own voice, and I just want to go home.

He brings up the subject of remote sites, ODBC configurations, the football game from this past weekend, and asks us if we wanted to get together for happy hour.

I’m looking up at the clock and it’s fast approaching 6pm.  I should have been home half an hour ago.

He then begins to talk about NIC teaming, fault tolerances, fail-over plans, and whether or not he should install a pond in his backyard. He has concerns about data center security, getting more SAN storage, can I write a batch script to auto configure a SQL value key, and then he goes on about a hangnail that’s been bothering him today.

And I’m looking up at the clock as he jabbers on about mandatory lunches, eating at your desk and chiding people for using the color printer.  It’s nearing 6:30pm, and I just want to scream:

You ever have one of those days?

Karin and I found ourselves traversing the isles of our local Toys R Us curious to see if they stocked any interesting board games.  …Okay, that’s a lie.  I wanted to check out the action figures (they’re not dolls!).

Sorry, I couldn’t lie to you.

[HermanTurnip takes in a slow, deep breath...]

*Whew*  That felt good to get off my chest.

Anyway, we were wandering the isles like a pair of overwhelmed Communist-era Russians airdropped into the middle of a modern day grocery store, dumbstruck and staring wild-eyed at the sheer amount of food freely available to absolutely anybody stumbling in from the street, taking in as much as we could while trying not to trip over our own feet when we first saw it.

I’m not sure why it stuck out the way it did, drawing our attention away from every other gleaming, hyper-packaged toy on the shelves.  It just didn’t seem real.  It didn’t seem…right.

Is this a joke?  Was I really looking at a pink Ouija board, the very object employed by spiritualists and mediums worldwide to contact the dead, openly targeting the pre-teen set?  Is this an attempt to indoctrinate an impressionable segment of our society into the questionable ways of the occult and the paranormal?  The blatant color scheme given this product makes it painfully obvious who Toys R Us has their sharpened, brightly packaged claws aimed at.

If Toys R Us is so keen at exposing children to the mystical art of divination and transcendentalism then I have to ask, “Why stop there?”  This target demographic is far to valuable to stop at mere baubles and parlor tricks.  Why not hook them to a real habit early on to ensure a consistent source of valuable revenue for many years to come?

After giving it much thought, I think I’ve come up with a fool-proof way to market my favorite vice of choice to the youth of today:

All I need is a heartless corporation to back me.  Come on.  We’ll make a grip of cash…

It’s 9pm at the time of this writing, and after two days of working overtime I’m a bit beat.  We’re trying to implement SCCM into our network and things aren’t going well.  Stupid client either doesn’t want to push to the servers or just simply refuses to install.

I think I’ll just relax tonight, crack open a beer and watch this mesmerizing video about a guy who makes these awesome kinetic sculptures.  Now here’s someone who has life figured out.  He’s taken what he loves to do and makes a living from it, and people honestly appreciate what he’s able to create with his own two hands.  You have to admire the creativity and skill of this artist.

Now, if only I could get a job writing for a magazine.  Heck, I’d even take a job writing for a crummy 10-page Sunday newspaper insert like Parade, USA Weekend or Vista.  I’d write deep, meaningful articles like “Ten Way To Tell That You’re A Lousy Self-Lover”, “Socks: Comfortable Cotton or Fascist Conspiracy?”, and “100 Other Uses For Popsicle Sticks”.

(HermanTurnip’s face goes slump, and he gets that “far away” look in his eyes as he stares off into the distance and daydreams of the perfect job…)

But I guess for now I’ll have to be content with working in the IT field…

Oh…on a side note, I’ve never owned the Eagles Hotel California or Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back until tonight, and I have to say that both albums are everything that they’re advertised to be. If you don’t have these records/CDs, you can only blame yourself. You have been warned…

Happy Friday!

You ever have one of those days where you wake up late for work, hit traffic, nearly get into several accidents, forget to drop off your baby at the sitters and only discover this fact after after you pull into the parking lot at work.  You then have to drive all the way back to the sitters, then turn around to go back to work, hit traffic again, finally pull into work, then realize that you forgot your lunch at home.

And your wallet.

And your badge that grants you entry into work.

You then have to stand outside and shadow somebody into the building hoping that they don’t think you’re trying to engage in a bit of corporate espionage.

As luck would have it, as you round the corner there’s the boss sitting in your cubicle wondering where the heck you’ve been for the past hour.  He then asks you for the report that you promised him “first thing in the morning”, hoping that you’d get into work early today to finish it.

After spending a busy and hungry day at work you drive to the sitters and pick up the kid, hit traffic (again), get home and forget to turn on the stove like the wife asked you to and wind up having leftovers because when you finally did turn on the stove you misread the instructions and set it 100 degrees too high and burnt the pizza.

Finally, after sitting down to write a blog post you discover that the scanner drivers on your computer are no longer there because you recently re-imaged your laptop.  You spend twenty minutes hunting down the driver disk, finally locating it buried at the bottom of your desk drawer, slam it into the computer, only to discover that your laptop is no longer recognizing CDs.

In the end you throw your hands up in the air, curse your luck, post a lame video, then saunter over to the fridge and grab a beer, turn on the television and melt into the couch, thankful that the day’s finally over.