A face that only his agent could love

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting our resident thespian, Mr. Jeffrey Fisher.
Coming very soon to a television advertising campaign near you...
(He's the one without the pocket protector)

http://www.drinkmilk.ca/
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Little.. pink....flippin crazy

I found this little pill on the floor in the hallway at my office. From what's stamped on the surface, it would appear to be 50 mgs of medicinal PMS. I'm gonna pop it one day, just to see what it feels like to be completely void of logic and rational thought.

Ken wants to play too.

Habnar... good ta hear yer gonna join us. The server you want is ULDUM.
Spencer, Craig and I will watch for ya.

Screenshot of the week

Late night fishing.

Polar bears are cute... in an "I could rip your face off without even having to stop and think about it" kinda way.

I remember when I was a kid, living in Princeton, there was this old pinup in the back of the kitchen pantry. It was a black and white picture of a huge polar bear, sprawled lazily on its back and facing the camera, with one giant paw raised in the air. I'm pretty sure the caption underneath read "Today I may rise, but I refuse to shine". When I was really young though, the image just never made sense to me, it looked like two creatures. One that vaguely resembled a bear, and the other some kinda crazy monster that had thrown the bear to the ground and was now looking over its shoulder. I still remember the minor epiphany I had when I finally recognized it as being just one polar bear. The monster was obviously the bear’s paw, with the pads resembling eyes and a mouth, and the claws being little horns on its head.
Yeah, whatever…. This picture reminded me of that one.

(I still don't know what's up with the purse wielding penguin on the left....)

Salesmen lie. It's what they do.

* My office phone rings, I answer it…*
Me: “Jeff here”
Slimeball: “Hello Jeff, this is Wayne Sumthinmumble, calling from Yadda-Blah-Yadda Advertising. Is this a good time to talk? Do you have a couple minutes?”
* I’m not leaving out names to protect anyone, they honestly just didn’t register in my brain *
Me: “Well, I am pretty busy this morning, but what’s up?”
Slimeball: “We handle promotional items, gifts, clothing and things of that nature. We spoke some time ago and I promised I’d call you in the new year if we had anything new and unique.”
Me: “Alllriiight…” (Knowing he's full of shit already)
Slimeball: “Are you a golfer Jeff?”
Me: “No”
Slimeball: “Well, are you familiar with what’s called a divot repair tool?”
Me: “Oh yeah, I remember this one now, it's the one with the cigar cutter and the fancy box, right?”
Slimeball: -slight pause- “Well, what it is, is a 14k gold set that includes a divot tool, cigar cutter, and somethin else, and it all comes in a beautifully finished wood grain box. We’ve just completed a big job with Microsoft in Seattle, where they ordered up hundreds of these to hand out to their business partners. We’ve got some left over, and I’d like to offer you a special deal so that you can help us clear the remaining inventory.”
Me: “Oh yeah, you called me about these things a month ago… except in that spiel, you had done the big job for Can-Am or Can West or somebody like that.”
Slimeball: -another slight pause- “Oh, I called you about these before?”
Me: “Yeah, just $19.99 each, right?
Slimeball: -long pause- “How many did you want?”
Me: “Ha-ha… naw, I’m good thanx.”
Slimeball: “Allrighttalktoyalaterbye”
* click *
Me (to the hung-up phone): “Yeah, and don’t call me again… dink.”

Screenshot of the week

All the assholes, all lined up.

R.E.M. sleep

Had the craziest dreams last night…. It would seem that my typical daytime activities are dominating my unconscious thoughts once again. The last time this happened was a couple years ago when we implemented SAP at my work. The bulk of the changeover lasted for a brutally stressful six weeks. Six weeks of 10-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week. In just over a month I logged 90 hours-worth of overtime. The anxiety and frustration that accompanied every long day of that incredibly difficult software transition eventually led to a near nervous breakdown on my part. I had come home early (7pm) on a Friday night cuz I was feeling kinda ill… and ended up in bed, shaking, crying and vomiting. I couldn’t get visions of SAP and work out of my head, every time I closed my eyes I would see my computer screen and my coworkers, clear as day. Needless to say I finally took a weekend off.
Alright, I didn’t mean to go quite that far in that direction… what I was getting at just reminded me of that time in my life… spending enough time at something that it began to dominate my off-time thinking. Except this is a happy thing. And what I was getting at was, *wait for it…*, World of Warcraft again.
Last night I had some dreams that were undoubtedly virtually stimulated. I dreamt that my brother, Spencer and I, and maybe a few other people that I undoubtedly knew but couldn’t identify, were exploring some kind of dungeonesque environment. We were standing in a large open chamber, surrounded by wide doors and open archways that led to other chambers. Every so often this one door would open up, and with the efficient predictability of an 8-bit Nintendo game, two shambling zombies would “jog” towards us. We’d meet them head-on and dispatch them rather quickly. They were, after all, just level 1 monsters... and we were all at least level 3 or 4. This got boring after a while, and it was decided that we would venture into one of the other doorways. Doorway number 1 was out of the question, we could see level 10+ monsters running around in there. We moved on to another door and headed in... this one turned out to be an underground city, inhabited by the undead; all going about their daily business like it was a big shopping mall. Our group somehow managed to instantly disguise ourselves to fit in, either that or the zombies just didn’t care that we were among them. This was kinda odd for me... in the game I play a Paladin, a holy warrior who’s gifted in battling the undead and their nasty ilk. So I’ve of course never been welcome in Undercity, the undead player’s capital…. but I doubt that it looks like a mall inside. Anyways, most of the group had wandered off now, and my brother and I were just touring about. We came to a glass-fronted store that had a big sign overtop of it, “Double Tamped Plots” was its name. I wondered what that meant…. graves that had been packed extra tight with dirt in order to ensure that their contents remained below? The inside of the store was just a large, unfurnished area, with a 40 ft circular dirt patch in the center… and there were 3 zombies playing baseball on it, just the pitcher, batter and catcher though, no bases. Something about this room made my brother really excited, he ran in through the sliding glass doors then back and forth across the dirt patch. The zombies stopped their game and stood against the wall, watching him with blank faces. Just as I figured that something wasn’t quite right, and moved to pull my brother out of the room, two giant gorilla skeletons burst from the dirt directly in front of him, and he ran right into them. He pulled out a sword and tried to fight them off, but they were a much higher level than him and he was in big trouble. So I reached for my weapon, which had for some reason transformed into my keychain remote for my car’s door locks. I pointed it at the nearest skeleton and began pushing the unlock button as quickly as I could, and noiseless little streams of green bullets came out in clustered groups. The keychain remote was impossible to aim, and even the ones that managed to make contact did frustratingly little damage to the monster. I knew this because I wondered if I was making any impact, and right then a health meter appeared in the corner of my vision, telling me that I was going to run out of ammunition long before this thing died... but I had no choice but to keep on firing. Right about there is where it ended, my brother and I obviously perishing shortly after I awoke from the odd crap that my subconscious had strung together.
Yeah. Back to work now.

She's (mostly) finished...

I'll be the first to admit that the final result was quite a bit different from what I first pictured in my head when I thought this project up... but the function is still the same. A combination of fountain, fogger humidifier, planter, and cat waterer. The wooden box surrounds a rubbermaid plastic bin which acts as a catch basin, from there a 4 watt pump sends the water up a 1/4" hose inside the length of bamboo at the back. It pours into the ceramic pot at the top also which has a fogger in it, (I still need to put some rocks in there to hide the wire), and that overflows into the bamboo trough in the front. Then it spills down into another catch trough at the bottom for the cats to drink from. The cats love "running" water, and took to drinking from it the first time I turned it on. All n' all I think it turned out pretty well, but next time I'm gonna use a slightly larger pump, I'm not too impressed with the flow rate outta this one. Now if I could only keep the trickling water noise from making people have to pee...

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Tub walkin'

As some of you may have gathered from previous posts here on my blog, our plant just underwent another major expansion to our production facilities. In keeping with "Lean thinking" and "Kaizan", (a new Japanese method of production streamlining that we've adopted), the new lines were laid out with the utmost efficiency in mind at all times. Part of that efficiency requires that all material flow patterns and work stations are clearly labeled with easy-to-read signs. A lot of signs. We actually acquired a large automatic cutter-plotter which trims out text and pictures from sticky vinyl, for placement on coroplast sheets. It all looks really pretty and....
oops... Gross
**Note to self: "Close mouth when clearing throat"***
There, now that my monitor is wiped off, I can continue. Where was I? Oh yeah, homemade signs, on to the point of my story. We've had a guy from the production staff here in the office for a little while now, temporarily upgraded from packager to full time sign maker. This is by no means an official position though, and he's floated back and forth a bit. So yesterday the shipping manager comes into the office to steal him for a bit, he lost one of his guys with zero notice and needed someone to fill in with moving tubs into the warehouse from the yard. I overheard the conversation and thought about that job for a moment... these guys spend eight hours a day taking finished tubs from outside the packaging areas, tipping them onto a handcart, and walking them into the shipping warehouse. There they use a barcode gun to scan the tub into a storage bin, then they walk back out to the yard for another one. Walk, walk, walk, walk, non-stop. Boring. I don't think I could do that for eight hours, but I could easily do it for one. Oh, now it's sounding like an idea: Wait until my regular purchaser duties are over at 4:30, then go spend an hour walking on level ground in the fresh air, and get paid overtime rate just for getting some needed exercise. Suddenly I was waving my hand in the air and yelling "Ooo, ooo.. me! Pick me!" to the shipping manager. He looked at me like I was being facetious, but I assured him I really did want to. Now the deal's been made. I spent an hour out there yesterday and it worked out pretty well. And unless they suddenly find themselves with too many people and not enough tubs, (not likely), I'm welcome to come back every afternoon to put in an hour of paid calorie burnin. Oh happy day!