Dealing With The Apocalypse

I’m finding that office-related comic strips are even funnier now, here’s a small collection of recent (and in some cases all-time) favorites:

The Beginning Of The End

Well, I can’t say too much per the “agreement” but let’s just say my days are numbered.  Level one cost savings and bugeting for yours truely begins today.  I pray to The Gods that have admittedly provided me with comfortable employment thus far (all things considered and relatively speaking of course) to show me a way to continue on this path.  Or perhaps it’s just their way of telling me to open a bakery already.

Pulling A “Move To Mexico”

Let’s say you’ve committed some crime or some act that results in you really wanting to get away from the people that might chase after you. I call this desire the wish to “move to Mexico”. Mexico does extradite for most things, so it’s a little silly, but you get the idea.

I saw this today and was trying to interpret the label. The first thing I came up with was: I guess this is the stuff you use when running away from The Mafia. I mean, if you lost a big bet and they were chasing after you and gunna kill you or break your legs or something, and you were preparing to pull a Move To Mexico then perhaps the exact gear you’d need is conveniently located right inside this very cabinet!

Holidaze

I had a bit of a “moral” dilemma a couple days ago. It all started when the groceries at home were starting to dwindle. I knew I needed to go to the grocery store but really didn’t feel like going on the 2^nd. So then the sequence began; I knew it was rather futile to go to the grocery store on the 3^rd as all of the hotdog & hamburger buns would surely be gone. I tend to shop rather late (we’re talking 11pm timeframe) because of my “line disease” (that’s a whole ‘nuther post) so it’s pretty much a guarantee the “seasonal” items aren’t there when I am. I didn’t go on the 4^th either since they tend to have rather limited hours, if they’re even open at all; so it’d be a madhouse again and in all likelihood I probably wouldn’t be awake and ready to go (with time to shop) before they closed.

And so here it was, the evening of the Fourth of July, and since it’s been raining like crazy I hadn’t made any plans to blow stuff up this year, and I’m out of food. Now normally when one is “out” of food you can scavenge and usually drum up some semblance of a meal, but I’d already been doing that for two days. So came my dilemma.

I’m a pretty big stickler for time off. Vacation time is just that, there is to be absolutely no work during it. This is even more true when it’s a National Holiday. Personal vacation is one thing, but when there is a federal holiday going on, particularly one celebrating our nation’s independence, I pretty much expect the country to shut down. And so there is my dilemma. One of the things that makes this nation great are those very freedoms we’ve sought after from the beginning. If you run a business you should be able to do what you want with it. So here I am, in need of food, and have to decide if I really want to give my patronage to an establishment that is causing people to work on a holiday. In the end I was pretty darn hungry, and I figured at least the employees are getting double-time pay, so it was time to eat At least it was typical American fare.

They were pretty busy too, as they were one of the very few places open. I suppose you could say they had a chronopoly.

Kittens!

They were just 6 weeks old when we picked ‘em up.  They are Balinese with a little bit of Siamese.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/LunaMisty

Thinking Required

First up, the case of the obscured sign.  The Left Only sign has been there for a long time.  They just opened the toll road and stuck the dual 45 signs right in front of it.  Ok, this is bad enough on its own.  What makes it really bad is that the off ramp from the toll road that leads up to this empties directly into this lane!!!  That left only sign is the only indication that the lane is left-only.  There’s no paint arrows on the road because they stripped the road surface down to that wavy grated stuff a couple weeks ago.  I was hoping they were going to fix the car sensors, since the light switching has always completely sucked here; you’re guaranteed to get stuck underneath when you turn left even at 2am, but they haven’t.

And to compound the problem you can see, especially coming down the elevated off-ramp, there are 3 matching lanes on the other side of the intersection.  The problem is, the U-Turn on the far side (which no one ever uses; there’s not much down that way) dumps into the leftmost lane so they have the painted stripes preventing you from crossing straight through the intersection into that lane.  They’ve changed a couple other U-Turns near this intersection to get rid of that lane hijacking but not this one.  Add to that the limited distance from the off-ramp to the light (maybe a dozen car lengths if you really cram ‘em in there) and now you get the daily occurrence of non-locals clogging the (unbeknownst to them) left-only lane who then have to force their way into the middle lane at the intersection itself when they realize what’s going on.  These superfluous vehicles cause locals in the know to begin the fight much earlier to get over in the middle lane (the leftmost straight lane).  Thus people like me have to fight incredibly early to get over in the left lane.  Because for us, we’re coming in what ends up being the middle lane and the left lane “forms”; primarily due to the fact that they laid a lengthy (a key element in this equation) concrete median to cordon off the off-ramp; it used to be much easier to just drift into the left lane as it formed.  Now a battle commences at the end of that evil median and I’ve seen a couple of Jeeps jump it on occasion.  Because of course if you don’t get in the left lane in time, and you get a red light there, then you get yet another red light (the dreaded double-red) underneath and thus waste an entirely unnecessary 5 minutes of your life just sitting and wasting gas.

Next, too bad you can’t see it in the picture (I’ll have to go back and take it with a real camera), I give you AGAPE Pregnancy Resource Center.  As I always say, folks should check their list of potential names against Urban Dictionary; although in this case just any regular ol’ dictionary would suffice.  So unless these guys only specialize in Cesareans then they’ll definitely be living up to their name. I have a feeling this site is somewhat mega-religiously-psycho based, particularly seeing that they have a “sexual purity” page which apparently is the newer, more politically correct version of “abstinence”.  Which would of course explain why no one ever gave one thought to how ludicrous the name really is.  Apparently they pronounce their version ah-GAH-pay; but I always read it as ah-GAYP.  And no, I’m not going to let you “take it back” like a few other attempts on certain phrases these days.

 

Exit, or not.

So I ran across this rather disconcerting scene the other day.

Unfortunately it’s a place I like to frequent, so I’m not entirely sure if I want to say where this is or not.  I’m sure the Fire Marshall would take quite an interest in this particular setup.  At first I was thinking “oh, well at least the table is on the hinged side” but then I noticed the chair.  It’s a little hard to see, but I didn’t wanna linger too long in setting up the pic.

Do not help these people.

This goes against some of my most basic principles. 

Sure, I could probably conjure a fairly accurate guess as to what it’s really about, but it’s the wondering if the writer even stopped to think about any possible double meanings that makes me laugh.

Then I got a little worried… could there possibly be a Reading for Dummies???  Thankfully it doesn’t appear that there is (although I wouldn’t discount the existence of a book-on-tape) but they do offer these two selections:

So at least they couched it as teaching someone to read, which is at least theoretically possible as opposed to the alternative.

The 10 & 7 Rule

There is a concept I subscribe to heavily, I call it the “10 & 7 Rule”.  The simple explanation is this: If you offer to sell something to me for $7 dollars I will buy it and you make $7.  If you offer me the same thing for $10 I will not buy it and you make $0.

Obviously there is “recovery of cost” to be considered by the business in question but I’m basically referring to the general practice of gratuitous profit.  Offer me something at a fair price and you have a deal, try to rip me off and I walk away.

For some reason this always reminds me of something I saw in a high school economics class.  There was this sideways parabolic graph |) kinda like that (the tax rate is the vertical axis and tax revenue the horizontal) and the teacher was trying to explain Reagan’s newfangled tax strategy.  I can’t remember the details anymore but the basic concept was that Reagan thought the economy was on one side of the graph when it really was on the other.  So for sake of example let’s say he assumed people were getting taxed too heavily and thus figured if he lowered taxes the government would actually make more money (people would spend more, take fewer tax shelters, etc).  But in reality it was the other way around so he just made the problem worse; instead of approaching the maximum revenue point he moved further from it.

The same goes for products.  Charge too little and you don’t maximize profits; charge too much and people get pissed and don’t buy as much, so even though you’re making more off the people who continue to buy, on the whole you make less.