Anybody still out there?

I suppose this blog fell by the wayside when I joined Facebook......I recently swore off Facebook and have decided to go back to blogging.

All by my lonesome...........

Labor day weekend, I'm gonna celebrate by.....working.

My lovely wife is in Ohio visiting relatives for the weekend and our son works hours opposite to mine, so none of us are gonna see each other until Monday night.

Next week, our store will have a licensed Starbucks and I get to oversee the whole thing as it's being added to my departments budget.

As an added bonus, I get to learn how to make all kinds of coffee drinks. I'll probably be bouncing off the walls from all the caffeine  (I hope we get to test what we make). I don't know a whole bunch about coffee, but I know Starbucks coffee is strong.
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Anyone been reading about the 9 year old girl that accidentally killed her shooting instructor? I honestly don't have a problem with a 9 year old learning to shoot a gun......but a freaking UZI sub-machine gun with full-auto? My dad took me shooting a couple times in the woods behind our house when I was a kid, but I shot a 22 caliber revolver. I think it's good to remove any possible mystery and mystique about shooting a gun by letting a kid actually shoot a gun. But not a machine gun....at least until you're old enough to psychically  andle the recoil.

I don't get it...as a parent of two grown adult children, I can't understand what this couple was thinking. Hopefully, the kids get a second chance with a loving foster family.

I love this article...musta been some good wine. I fly a remote controlled drone and a helicopter and they both have user configurable LED lights. I guess if you aren't familiar on how one of them flies.....it could easily be mistaken for a real UFO.

Dumbass of the Week.

I'm gonna burn in Hell for linking to this............

till later.

Oops.......

So, first day of vacation.......I rolled my ankle. I don't think I sprained it, just twisted it enough to be a pain in the ass for a couple days. I was walking in our backyard to turn on the hose to wash our son's car and slipped off of the raised sidewalk.

I'm a klutz.

Our son's 15 year old Saturn SL2 is a very reliable car and it's in great shape. It used to be my dad's car, when he passed away, I drove it for a few years and now it's my son's car. It only has 75,000 miles on it....our son is hoping it lasts for another 15 years.

 He certainly didn't inherit the "motorhead" gene from me......cars are a way for him to get from point "A" to point "B" and back and no more. This attitude will save him tens of thousands of dollars over the course of his life, so I guess it's hard to argue with this point of view.

Me? Hell, I'd buy a new car every year if my wife would let me. I love cars.
 
Sure, my new 2014 Hyundai Elantra will probably last me at least until I retire in 10 years, but I can always dream.

Unfortunately, the sunroof has started to leak on his car and I'm not really prepared to spend a thousand bucks to fix it......so I bought a couple of tubes of silicone sealant.So, it's not really a sunroof any longer.....just a window in the roof of the car that doesn't open anymore.

Am I a cheap bastard? No, not really, our son doesn't give a shit whether his sunroof works or not, so it's getting sealed up forever.
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This is NOT very smart.I don't have a motorcycle and haven't ridden one since before I got married, but I couldn't imagine all the abrasions you'd get being basically naked and crashing.


I miss this guy already......depression isn't something fuck around with.

If I could do this for a living instead of working retail.......

I'm gonna burn for posting this.......or maybe this.

I can tell you firsthand...Verizon customer service sucks. I spent a total of 35 minutes on hold to cancel my mom's DSL service only to find out that since it was bundled with her regular phone service......she isn't saving any money at all. I have her hooked up to Comcast internet for 10 more bucks a month....and it's 6 times faster then what she had with Verizon and way more reliable. Verizon can suck hind teat, as soon as I can find something to replace her phone service.....they are gone.

I've worked with awesome managers like this....but they are few and far between.

45 cents a fucking pound? Oh....it's from 1945.

I was planning on riding my mountain bike this week....gonna have to see how my ankle is tomorrow....I kinda have a feeling I'm gonna be a slacker this week.

The best part of being on vacation for me? Since I normally have to get up at 4AM every morning to be at work by 5AM......I love staying up late and sleeping in until 8 or 9 in the morning.

till later.

On vacation...........

You can say a lot of thing good and bad about the company I work for, but one thing is for sure- they are very generous when it comes to vacation time.

I've been with my company for a long time....I get close to 6 weeks off a year. Not many folks get that much time off unless you are a teacher or a union autoworker.

They say retail management is stressful......I say stress is the inability to slap the living shit out of someone that really needs a good slap upside the head.

Seriously, though...this is a good article about how to handle stress.

Basically, retail management feels like a "no win" situation on a bad day and on a good day....your customers will give you a compliment and that's when I tell the customer I have a great staff that does all the hard work.

All I do is the paperwork and fill displays.

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I just love modern NASCAR (not really)......my thoughts on the whole Tony Stewart thing? I think Tony wanted to scare the shit out of the other driver and he misjudged how much his car would sidestep when he gunned the motor. I used to go to a ton of sprint car races at Williams Grove and I've sat in WoO sprint car....you can't see shit out of them and that's without a helmet with a stack of tear-offs and bright stadium lighting in your face.

All I know is sprint cars are nasty beasts......and a young driver that wasn't thinking clearly got creamed by a famous guy. If it would have been a regular joe driving the sprint car that killed someone......we wouldn't be reading about it because shit like this happens more then you think.

These WRC dudes have it all over the NASCAR folks. Tell me it doesn't take a ton of talent to run balls-out in the middle of the woods with one of those rally cars. Funny thing is, that's pretty much how NASCAR started out....a bunch of moonshiners running logging roads.

till later.

Internet..........and a possible shitshow.

I'm an old geezer (54), but I remember when we first got internet. I bought one of the first Windows 95 computers when they came out.....cost us over a grand and it seemed like it crashed about every 15 minutes or so.

Windows 95A wasn't very stable.

I, like most of everyone else back then, had America Online......hell, I thought AOL was the internet for awhile. I never realized how much stuff was actually on the internet until we switched to Earthlink in 1998 or so.

Does everyone remember how damn slow dialup was? I ran two modems at once to get a blistering 108 k for awhile....when we finally got cable internet, it was like night and day. Unfortunately, I had recently purchased a new computer that ran Windows ME. This version of windows was worse than 95 if such a thing was possible.

People ask me how I got to be so good at configuring Windows computers....it was mostly trial and error on my part just from experimenting with stuff. I can't count the times I had to re-install the OS because I screwed something up in the Registry which made the computer unbootable.

I recently configured a new PC for a client...out of the box, this brand new laptop had 93 processes running at boot up, the client was wondering why his brand new laptop was slower then his 6 year old laptop. Once I was done uninstalling all the crapware, I got the running processes down to less than 40......which made it feel much more responsive. Not sure why PC manufacturers insist on installing so much crapware, but I make a nice penny off of uninstalling it.

At work, our store is in the middle of a minor remodeling....which means we are moving around just enough stuff to piss off our customers. Not sure what the thinking is where we move all the groceries around so none of our customers can find anything.......but I'm sure someone in our office that has never actually worked in a supermarket knows better then I do.....or not.

We are also installing a new coffee shop (it's a big *green* name in coffee) in our store and guess who gets to oversee it? Yeah, that would be me......while I'm sure it will prove to be very popular, but we only get two weeks of training before it opens. As long as most of the newly hired staff sticks it out......it should go smoothly....I hope.

If it doesn't go smoothly....my life will be pretty much hell for awhile.

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Dog shit. I don't have too many people in our neighborhood that does this but I never understood why its okay for you to let your dog piss all over my mailbox and kill all my grass. Maybe I'm an asshole, (correction-I am an asshole) but I have no problem confronting my neighbors when they let their dogs piss on my lawn, unsurprisingly, they usually cross the street when then get to my house.....suits me just fine.

If I won the lottery....I'd buy one of these to put in my 14 car garage. 707 horsepower? Yes, please.

This is my mind some mornings when I go to work.....

Better Call Saul......yeah, I'll be watching this for sure.

Crimes against nature? WTF is a crime against nature? I'm thinking something with farm animals, but I might be off-base....who knows?

Okay.....so someone is famous just because of her ass? I must be old....I don't get it.

It's fun to stay at the YMCA.......anyone remember this from the late 70's?

Wow....just fucking wow.

I bought one of these 18 months ago on Indiegogo....just got it today. What a piece of crap.....lesson learned, don't buy stuff that doesn't exist when you buy it. It seemed like such a cool concept a year and a half ago when I paid for it......the watch itself is a turd.

Have an in-dash factory GPS unit in your car? This is some scary shit.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.......gotta love Dorothy Parker.

Pro tips for a good shopping experience........

Most folks walking this earth have never worked behind a retail counter or waited on tables or been at the beck and call of the general pubic.

Here are a few pro tips on how to get superior customer service.



-Don't use your cell phone.....if you are standing in front of my retail counter and your playing with your phone or having a conversation while trying to get my attention- I will ask you one time if I can help you. If you decline my invitation for service or ignore me- you have become for all intents and purposes...invisible.

If you at some point would like me to wait on you....put your damn phone away and make solid eye contact with me. At that time, I will ask you again if I can help you and hopefully, I will be able to help you with your purchases.

Don't be a dick.

Seriously.

Don't.

Be.

A.

Dick.

If you think you are being an asshole....you are an asshole.

If you run into one asshole in traffic on your way to work...you ran into an asshole.

If everyone is an asshole on your commute to work....you're the asshole.

If you wanna be an asshole ....sure, I'll wait on you and make sure you get whatever you asked for, but that's about it. If you are a genuinely nice person, or hell-even just be halfway human.....I will bend over backward to make sure you get exactly what you want and more.....I guarantee you that you'll walk out of my place of business with a smile on your face if you're at least a little bit nice to me.

If I screw something up and you come back and nicely explain why you aren't happy or tell me what I screwed up.....I will do everything in my power to not lose you as a customer. If I screw something up and you're a dick and loud and obnoxious, sure, you'll get your money refunded and I'll apologize for not meeting your expectations....but that's about it.  

Not a lot of rules, huh?

Be nice, don't be a dick and stay off your cellphone if you want decent service.

Pretty simple, yes?

You'd be surprised how many people can't figure that shit out.

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Stick sunscreen....not such a good idea.

This was pretty much my day at work today.....

I like fancy cars and everything,  but this is straight up dumbass....and this is windowlicker material.

Holy shit. I'm glad this shit didn't go down when I was 7 years old. I walked close to a 1/2 mile to elementary school unsupervised for 6 years and lived to tell about it. I had free rein with a 5 or 6 block radius (probably a good half square mile) when I was that age...but back then....everyone knew everyone and if I did something stupid....my mom knew about it before I got home.

I got home today and this image pretty much sums up how I felt about having a beer or three while I was cutting the grass. By the time I was done the lawn....I was in a pretty good frame of mind considering the day I had.

United Airlines really gives a shit.

Shitty people at the doctor. Not everyone gets hurt and has to see the doctor.....but everyone has to eat-so we get to see all that society has to offer where I work at.....one of the advantages of working in a grocery store.

Not really.

till later.

11th day out of 12.......

Today was my 11th day of a 12 day stretch of work with out a day off.

Grrr.

Thank God I get paid hourly.

I came home Thursday afternoon, got a shower, had dinner and then had a beer. That one beer pretty much  put me out of commission.....I was in bed and sleeping by 8 PM.

Before I nodded off......I was watching a BBC show about how bad smoking is for you. I smoked for almost 25 years....I quit 15 years ago.

Smoking will kill 1/2 of the people that do it.

I'm not sure why the fuck I ever started smoking, but I'm glad I stopped.....but I also know that the urge to smoke never goes away entirely.

I don't know if it's a similar addiction like alcohol, but I do know that if I chose to light up- I'd be hooked all over again....that ain't never gonna happen because I can't stand the smell of cigarettes....it makes me gag when I smell it.

I don't put myself into situations where I am around cigarette smoke because I am one of those asshole former smokers that will tell you to put that shit out if you are smoking someplace where you aren't supposed to.
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Looks like there are a few assholes in Congress. I'm shocked. Not really.

We damn near had a situation. Today's forecast.... 800 degrees with magnetic storms.

Best headline ever.......I just hope the damn thing doesn't land on my house. 

I don't get into politics a lot on this blog.......but this shit is just insane. I'm not taking one side or the other, but there are way too many innocent people getting killed.....and that ain't right.

Sunday should be a fun workday......gonna chip out about 8 inches of frozen ice from our rear storage freezer.

till later.