Prince's "Sexy M.F." is a song so over-the-top that it veers head-on and crashes into awesome. For reasons that remain inexplicable it became the theme song of my bachelor party, which is the kind of wrong-headed thinking that occurs when 10 guys start doing shots of Bacardi 151 on a boat in Brainerd. (In a related development that will surprise no one, we woke up the next morning to discover that at some point during the night's proceedings we had broken off the sun deck off the back of the boat. It was just...gone.)
Maybe there have been more mis-matched bachelor party theme songs over the years than Sexy M.F. for a bunch of suburban guys getting liquored up on a lake in central Minnesota and gagging on cigars (OK, that was just me). But this came on the stereo at some point and we just ran with it. Or, more accurately, stumbled with it. I'm fairly certain there was dancing but the statute of limitations has run out on those abominations.
I'm sure all of this was foreseen by Prince. During the songwriting process I can envision him thinking, "Yes, a few years from now this song will be co-opted by a bunch of dufuses from the whitest suburb in Minnesota as their weekend theme song, with none dufus-ier than the soon-to-be groom. They will be the least sexy motherfucker-ish dopes to walk the earth. They will gyrate and thrust like birthing ostriches. They will sing along off-key and butcher half the lyrics. One of them will fall over backward into the lake. I write this anthem for them."
And who, exactly, is the Sexy Motherfucker described in the song? It can't be directed at the girl. "You sexy motherfucker" has to be at or near the bottom of effective pick-up lines.
Average Guy: "You sexy motherfucker!"
Her: "Why yes, I'd love to go out with you and start a fulfilling, long-lasting relationship."
Yeah, uh, no. This song may be ostensibly about a woman but the title isn't about her. The words of the song keep insisting this isn't about sex, until the end when, in fact, it's clearly all about sex. The crowning glory of the song are the deep-voiced lads at the end repeating, glee-style, "sexy motherfucker shakin that ass, shakin that ass."
Obviously Prince himself is the sexy motherfucker. He's of the class of guy that could walk into a room of babes, drop a line like that, and have it work. And it had worked for him for some time before he wrote this song. Much in the same way Justin Timberlake or Leo DiCaprio could walk into a gaggle of uber-hotties, say something inane like, "chicken salad" and each and every girl would launch herself at him. THAT is a sexy motherfucker.
On the other end of the spectrum, but still happy with our lot in life, was our group. The guys at the lake cabin that night had to use traditional means to land their women: cajolery and pleading, visual trickery obfuscating one's true physique and hairline, good old-fashioned sales puffery regarding career prospects, strategic use of alcohol, and puppies.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Posturing
Soon my daughter will be of dating age and the day is coming when I will be greeting prospective wooers at our front door. For the sake of argument I will assume these wooers will be boys. And like an end-of-the-world survivalist getting ready for imminent apocalypse I must begin preparing now.
I don't own a gun. Yet. But more on that in a moment. My first step is to decide what type of personality I will project with these hapless lads. Do I go with the traditional grim, stone-faced intimidator or the jolly, sure-you-can-talk-to-me confidant? I see this dilemma as similar to the choice a newbie professional wrestler must make when entering that business: hero or heel?
Either way, my goal in this endeavor is to ensure that these guys behave respectfully and conduct the romantic proceedings on terms agreeable to Jenna. Early on this probably won't be much of a problem since the laws of human growth are in our favor and Jenna is taller than pretty much every boy in her grade. This will probably hold until age 14 or 15 when the pipsqueaks start to catch up. But I need to have my strategy in place and well-established before any growth spurts kick in. Staying on message will be critical.
Playing the heel can be much more fun than being the nice guy. If I had any acting skills whatsoever this could be utterly hilarious. I don't see much need for gun ownership with our current, militia-free lifestyle but what if I started answering the door wearing a shoulder holster like I just left the set of a Beastie Boys video? (70's lamb chop sideburns optional.) Is there a 7-day waiting period on those? Or should I mount a large gun rack in the living room in sight of the front entryway?
Between my dad and my Marine friend I could probably collect enough large caliber weapons that, just on display, would scare the bejeesus out of any kid. Throw in a little creative story-telling and the beau is toast. "Junior, let me give you a little tour here. This is the .50 cal I used in Columbia back in the early 90's when I took out the Cali cartel. Let me show you this scar here..."
A path that requires fewer ATF permits would be to stage contrived, Ron Burgundy-style dioramas that spotlight faux physical supremacy. I could remove the entryway chandelier and replace it with a boxer's punching bag. Whenever the door rang I could quickly put on some gloves, squirt myself with a spray bottle to simulate sweat from exertion, and start slugging away while Jenna opened the door. "... 998, 999, 1000. Oh, I didn't see you there." Then I'd grab ridiculously heavy-looking dumbbells that I had strategically placed nearby and start curling those. I'd have to make sure he didn't linger lest he see that I could only muster 2 reps for show.
An even more subtle approach would be to create a "Most Interesting Man in the World" backstory combined with chucknorrisfacts.com absurdity. Prospective dates would have to review a special website listing my "accomplishments":
- Dave Carl invented the exclamation point
- Dave Carl once won a staring contest with one of the plastinated Body World cadavers
- The Titanic didn't hit an iceberg, it hit Dave Carl's toe. Specifically, the little piggy that went to market.
- In Transformers, Dave Carl was the stunt double for both Optimus Prime AND Megan Fox
As long as the prospective suitors retain some amount of fear of me, either due to ill-gotten admiration or the assumption of insanity, I've done my job.
Conversely, being the nice guy may require more finesse than I can muster. With this generation I would probably have to learn to speak in texting abbreviations to make a personal connection: "OMG, ROFL, DGTG, H&K." I'd have to offer to chillax and call him "brah," all without snickering. Yeah, this ain't gonna work.
So, heel it is. I'll arrange for my own bad-guy theme music to play whenever I enter a room with Jenna and the boyfriend. Something that instills fear and dread, like "Vader's Theme" or "Enter Sandman" or anything by Coldplay. Er, wait, Coldplay instills fear and dread in *me* -- never mind. I'll develop a signature move like the "Blatantly-Sending-a-Message Absurdly-Macho Crushing Handshake" or the "Arched Eyebrow of Disdain" or the "I-Was-Once-Your-Age-And-I-Know-EXACTLY-What-You're-Thinking-Hormone-Boy Glare of Death." I'll get inside their heads and then I'll have won.
I don't own a gun. Yet. But more on that in a moment. My first step is to decide what type of personality I will project with these hapless lads. Do I go with the traditional grim, stone-faced intimidator or the jolly, sure-you-can-talk-to-me confidant? I see this dilemma as similar to the choice a newbie professional wrestler must make when entering that business: hero or heel?
Either way, my goal in this endeavor is to ensure that these guys behave respectfully and conduct the romantic proceedings on terms agreeable to Jenna. Early on this probably won't be much of a problem since the laws of human growth are in our favor and Jenna is taller than pretty much every boy in her grade. This will probably hold until age 14 or 15 when the pipsqueaks start to catch up. But I need to have my strategy in place and well-established before any growth spurts kick in. Staying on message will be critical.
Playing the heel can be much more fun than being the nice guy. If I had any acting skills whatsoever this could be utterly hilarious. I don't see much need for gun ownership with our current, militia-free lifestyle but what if I started answering the door wearing a shoulder holster like I just left the set of a Beastie Boys video? (70's lamb chop sideburns optional.) Is there a 7-day waiting period on those? Or should I mount a large gun rack in the living room in sight of the front entryway?
Between my dad and my Marine friend I could probably collect enough large caliber weapons that, just on display, would scare the bejeesus out of any kid. Throw in a little creative story-telling and the beau is toast. "Junior, let me give you a little tour here. This is the .50 cal I used in Columbia back in the early 90's when I took out the Cali cartel. Let me show you this scar here..."
A path that requires fewer ATF permits would be to stage contrived, Ron Burgundy-style dioramas that spotlight faux physical supremacy. I could remove the entryway chandelier and replace it with a boxer's punching bag. Whenever the door rang I could quickly put on some gloves, squirt myself with a spray bottle to simulate sweat from exertion, and start slugging away while Jenna opened the door. "... 998, 999, 1000. Oh, I didn't see you there." Then I'd grab ridiculously heavy-looking dumbbells that I had strategically placed nearby and start curling those. I'd have to make sure he didn't linger lest he see that I could only muster 2 reps for show.
An even more subtle approach would be to create a "Most Interesting Man in the World" backstory combined with chucknorrisfacts.com absurdity. Prospective dates would have to review a special website listing my "accomplishments":
- Dave Carl invented the exclamation point
- Dave Carl once won a staring contest with one of the plastinated Body World cadavers
- The Titanic didn't hit an iceberg, it hit Dave Carl's toe. Specifically, the little piggy that went to market.
- In Transformers, Dave Carl was the stunt double for both Optimus Prime AND Megan Fox
As long as the prospective suitors retain some amount of fear of me, either due to ill-gotten admiration or the assumption of insanity, I've done my job.
Conversely, being the nice guy may require more finesse than I can muster. With this generation I would probably have to learn to speak in texting abbreviations to make a personal connection: "OMG, ROFL, DGTG, H&K." I'd have to offer to chillax and call him "brah," all without snickering. Yeah, this ain't gonna work.
So, heel it is. I'll arrange for my own bad-guy theme music to play whenever I enter a room with Jenna and the boyfriend. Something that instills fear and dread, like "Vader's Theme" or "Enter Sandman" or anything by Coldplay. Er, wait, Coldplay instills fear and dread in *me* -- never mind. I'll develop a signature move like the "Blatantly-Sending-a-Message Absurdly-Macho Crushing Handshake" or the "Arched Eyebrow of Disdain" or the "I-Was-Once-Your-Age-And-I-Know-EXACTLY-What-You're-Thinking-Hormone-Boy Glare of Death." I'll get inside their heads and then I'll have won.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Old School Road Trips
Kids these days, they have it so easy. This has been a generational lament since the Neanderthal days, back when Lothar grumbled, "Thag has it so easy now that we have a wheel. Back in my day I had to do yardwork pushing a squarebarrow." However, I think I have a legitimate gripe when comparing road trips between my heyday as a kid in the 70's and what my daughter gets to enjoy now.
Growing up near Chicago we would usually travel twice a year to Minnesota to see family at holidays or visit the lake cabin in Alexandria. This was back in the days of the 55 MPH speed limit so it was a good eight hour trip between Chicago and the Twin Cities each way. Like most other families contemplating similar trips those days, we drove it. And there wasn't much to do in a car back then.
Our family vehicle for road trips was a 1973 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. This may have been the largest, heaviest family car ever built. It was thick. It was girthy. It was brown, inside and out. To combine two Chevy Chase quotes from two separate movies: "It was an Oldsmo-Buick Family Truckster." Later on, when I had to choose between that car and a small, manual transmission Toyota for my driver's test, I took the stick shift. There was no parallel parking the Impala.
The boys at OPEC probably slapped each other on the backs and ordered another round of luxury yachts when this one rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. The doors appeared to be 1 foot thick and required two hands to swing shut. My dad was pleased that an entire 4x8 sheet of plywood could fit flat in the wagon area. Every time you stepped on the accelerator Exxon placed another order for light crude.
Wanting to preserve their substantial investment in this car, my parents ordered an aftermarket covering to protect the vinyl back seats. This amounted to reupholstering plastic with plastic. Was it a smooth, comfortable material? Oh no. It had a raised waffle pattern on the seat where your tush and legs go. If you're wearing shorts, as a young lad is often wont to do, you get up from the seats after a long drive and your legs look like Eggos.
We would get up early and shove off from the suburbs of Chicago. The first parts of a long trip are relatively exciting since you're on vacation and the new-ness of the trip hasn't worn off. For this part of the trip my dad provided his traditional entertainment with his usual gripes about the I-94 tollbooths. "They were supposed to take these down when the highway was paid for years ago!" Check that one off the trip list.
We would get into Wisconsin in about an hour and then the doldrums would set in. Nowadays, my daughter has an iPod for music, a Nook for reading books, and an entertainment system in the car for watching movies. Once we even plugged in the Xbox so she and a buddy could play video games the entire way. Someday she'll probably have a cell phone for texting and yakking with her friends about how her dad is such a dufus.
What did I have? I had the window. I could gaze out of the car and watch endless farms roll by. Not exactly a Pixar classic.
I had the aforementioned plastic wrap: I could amuse myself by pressing down on the waffle pattern with my fingers and see how long before it reformed its shape. That was good for about 2 minutes. 478 minutes to go.
We had the alphabet game. You'd look for billboards and road signs that started with letters in order of the alphabet. Quaker State and Dairy Queen were highly coveted, as were any kind of wildlife/varmint X-ing signs. If you saw an X or Q sign you were a family hero.
I had a sister but we didn't talk much so she provided me with no amusement. I could have read a book but would have gotten car sick well before lunch. There was no music. The car had the default AM radio, and that survived only because the dealer wouldn't give my non-musically-inclined parents a rebate for taking it out. I'm not sure if it would have helped anyway. Radio stations were probably littered with disco at the time. I say this with some confidence because I remember my older cousin's radio alarm going off twice when I stayed in his room at my aunt and uncle's house in St. Paul. Both times it was playing "The Hustle." As far as I know, no other song was released between 1974 and 1977.
We had a car-based bingo game that appeared to be from the 50's. If you saw a sight that was represented on your bingo board you'd close the cover on that item and hope for 5 in a row. The manufacturer's address was on the cardboard bingo boards which helped date it from a bygone era: 1) no zip code was listed after the city and state, 2) the telephone number had letters in the exchange, and 3) it was made in the U.S.
One advantage I had over kids of today: no seat belts! I was free to roam around the cavernous back seat with no consideration given to modern safety policy. If we had had an accident I would have been a 60 pound missile flying toward the windshield (which, given the ponderous nature of the car's design, was probably leaded glass and I would have bounced right back). This mobility kept the typical kid antsy-ness somewhat muted.
Another thing we didn't have was stops at gas stations. First of all, gas stations back then only sold gas, strangely enough. The days of gas stations with attached supermarkets-bordering-on-malls were still years away. So it was drive up, tell the guy "fill 'er up regular", and never get out of the car. "Regular," of course, meant with lead, at about 64 cents a gallon. Man, I'm old. Second, the Impala apparently had an 84 gallon gas tank. So even though our mileage was horrendous we could go a fair clip before needing to re-fuel.
The town of Mauston, WI will forever hold a special place in my heart because that's where we'd stop for lunch. By late morning we'd be passing Baraboo, home of the mystical, enchanted Wisconsin Dells. The Dells were mystical and enchanted to me because I'd constantly see ads for it all the time on Chicago TV. The ads always depicted water activities and kids having fun. But we NEVER went there because our vacation destination was always Minnesota. I didn't get to the Dells until my mid-30's. And by then I was paying for it which removes all enchantment and mysticism.
We'd pull into the Country Kitchen -- always the Country Kitchen -- and I already knew what I was going to order: spaghetti. It was my go-to restaurant order unless we were going out for pizza. I don't recall if they had kid's menus back then -- I think I was just ordering the most palatable thing off the regular adult menu. Occasionally I'd mix in a curveball and get the French toast. But only if I was feeling crazy. Unlike today, there weren't 12 well-known restaurants at each highway exit. Maybe you'd get a McDonald's, but often it was Aunt Maude's Grease Griddle where squirrel may or may not have been on the menu. At least at Country Kitchen you knew what you were getting.
Bellies full, we'd clamber back into the Impala and resume the trip. After about 20 minutes the excitement of eating and getting out of the car had faded and we were back to the sensory deprivation tank of the back seat. The window had a rolling TV show of corn, corn, cow, corn, silo, cow, farmhouse, bizarre roadside attraction such as a giant plaster moose, corn, silo, corn.
When we crossed the St. Croix river and saw the "Welcome to Minnesota" sign personal adrenaline levels went up. We're close! (Relatively speaking.) Civilization looms! I learned how to spot the Snelling Ave. exit early in life. The image of the diamond-shaped reflector sign at the base of the exit ramp was stamped in my brain well before that of, say, Big Bird's or Cookie Monster's. After that it was just a few minutes to my aunt and uncle's house and the return of sanity. I would roll out of the car and teeter around while I regained my land legs. Then I would try to recover before we had to make the return trip in a week.
Compare this to my wife and daughter, who on one trip without me stayed in the car longer than necessary so that they didn't interrupt the audio book they were listening to on the trip. Times have changed.
Growing up near Chicago we would usually travel twice a year to Minnesota to see family at holidays or visit the lake cabin in Alexandria. This was back in the days of the 55 MPH speed limit so it was a good eight hour trip between Chicago and the Twin Cities each way. Like most other families contemplating similar trips those days, we drove it. And there wasn't much to do in a car back then.
Our family vehicle for road trips was a 1973 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. This may have been the largest, heaviest family car ever built. It was thick. It was girthy. It was brown, inside and out. To combine two Chevy Chase quotes from two separate movies: "It was an Oldsmo-Buick Family Truckster." Later on, when I had to choose between that car and a small, manual transmission Toyota for my driver's test, I took the stick shift. There was no parallel parking the Impala.
The boys at OPEC probably slapped each other on the backs and ordered another round of luxury yachts when this one rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. The doors appeared to be 1 foot thick and required two hands to swing shut. My dad was pleased that an entire 4x8 sheet of plywood could fit flat in the wagon area. Every time you stepped on the accelerator Exxon placed another order for light crude.
Wanting to preserve their substantial investment in this car, my parents ordered an aftermarket covering to protect the vinyl back seats. This amounted to reupholstering plastic with plastic. Was it a smooth, comfortable material? Oh no. It had a raised waffle pattern on the seat where your tush and legs go. If you're wearing shorts, as a young lad is often wont to do, you get up from the seats after a long drive and your legs look like Eggos.
We would get up early and shove off from the suburbs of Chicago. The first parts of a long trip are relatively exciting since you're on vacation and the new-ness of the trip hasn't worn off. For this part of the trip my dad provided his traditional entertainment with his usual gripes about the I-94 tollbooths. "They were supposed to take these down when the highway was paid for years ago!" Check that one off the trip list.
We would get into Wisconsin in about an hour and then the doldrums would set in. Nowadays, my daughter has an iPod for music, a Nook for reading books, and an entertainment system in the car for watching movies. Once we even plugged in the Xbox so she and a buddy could play video games the entire way. Someday she'll probably have a cell phone for texting and yakking with her friends about how her dad is such a dufus.
What did I have? I had the window. I could gaze out of the car and watch endless farms roll by. Not exactly a Pixar classic.
I had the aforementioned plastic wrap: I could amuse myself by pressing down on the waffle pattern with my fingers and see how long before it reformed its shape. That was good for about 2 minutes. 478 minutes to go.
We had the alphabet game. You'd look for billboards and road signs that started with letters in order of the alphabet. Quaker State and Dairy Queen were highly coveted, as were any kind of wildlife/varmint X-ing signs. If you saw an X or Q sign you were a family hero.
I had a sister but we didn't talk much so she provided me with no amusement. I could have read a book but would have gotten car sick well before lunch. There was no music. The car had the default AM radio, and that survived only because the dealer wouldn't give my non-musically-inclined parents a rebate for taking it out. I'm not sure if it would have helped anyway. Radio stations were probably littered with disco at the time. I say this with some confidence because I remember my older cousin's radio alarm going off twice when I stayed in his room at my aunt and uncle's house in St. Paul. Both times it was playing "The Hustle." As far as I know, no other song was released between 1974 and 1977.
We had a car-based bingo game that appeared to be from the 50's. If you saw a sight that was represented on your bingo board you'd close the cover on that item and hope for 5 in a row. The manufacturer's address was on the cardboard bingo boards which helped date it from a bygone era: 1) no zip code was listed after the city and state, 2) the telephone number had letters in the exchange, and 3) it was made in the U.S.
One advantage I had over kids of today: no seat belts! I was free to roam around the cavernous back seat with no consideration given to modern safety policy. If we had had an accident I would have been a 60 pound missile flying toward the windshield (which, given the ponderous nature of the car's design, was probably leaded glass and I would have bounced right back). This mobility kept the typical kid antsy-ness somewhat muted.
Another thing we didn't have was stops at gas stations. First of all, gas stations back then only sold gas, strangely enough. The days of gas stations with attached supermarkets-bordering-on-malls were still years away. So it was drive up, tell the guy "fill 'er up regular", and never get out of the car. "Regular," of course, meant with lead, at about 64 cents a gallon. Man, I'm old. Second, the Impala apparently had an 84 gallon gas tank. So even though our mileage was horrendous we could go a fair clip before needing to re-fuel.
The town of Mauston, WI will forever hold a special place in my heart because that's where we'd stop for lunch. By late morning we'd be passing Baraboo, home of the mystical, enchanted Wisconsin Dells. The Dells were mystical and enchanted to me because I'd constantly see ads for it all the time on Chicago TV. The ads always depicted water activities and kids having fun. But we NEVER went there because our vacation destination was always Minnesota. I didn't get to the Dells until my mid-30's. And by then I was paying for it which removes all enchantment and mysticism.
We'd pull into the Country Kitchen -- always the Country Kitchen -- and I already knew what I was going to order: spaghetti. It was my go-to restaurant order unless we were going out for pizza. I don't recall if they had kid's menus back then -- I think I was just ordering the most palatable thing off the regular adult menu. Occasionally I'd mix in a curveball and get the French toast. But only if I was feeling crazy. Unlike today, there weren't 12 well-known restaurants at each highway exit. Maybe you'd get a McDonald's, but often it was Aunt Maude's Grease Griddle where squirrel may or may not have been on the menu. At least at Country Kitchen you knew what you were getting.
Bellies full, we'd clamber back into the Impala and resume the trip. After about 20 minutes the excitement of eating and getting out of the car had faded and we were back to the sensory deprivation tank of the back seat. The window had a rolling TV show of corn, corn, cow, corn, silo, cow, farmhouse, bizarre roadside attraction such as a giant plaster moose, corn, silo, corn.
When we crossed the St. Croix river and saw the "Welcome to Minnesota" sign personal adrenaline levels went up. We're close! (Relatively speaking.) Civilization looms! I learned how to spot the Snelling Ave. exit early in life. The image of the diamond-shaped reflector sign at the base of the exit ramp was stamped in my brain well before that of, say, Big Bird's or Cookie Monster's. After that it was just a few minutes to my aunt and uncle's house and the return of sanity. I would roll out of the car and teeter around while I regained my land legs. Then I would try to recover before we had to make the return trip in a week.
Compare this to my wife and daughter, who on one trip without me stayed in the car longer than necessary so that they didn't interrupt the audio book they were listening to on the trip. Times have changed.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Following The Script
For the second time in the past few years our wee doctor friends Mark and Trudie invited us to attend the St. David's School fundraiser gala. Our daughter went there in her early years, then both their kids did, and now Trudie is on the board, so she's got enough juice to get us an invite. The gala is a swanky event where the well-meaning folks at St. David's find all the wealthy people they can get, get them liquored up, and then invite them to bid on items at auction. There are two groups of attendees: those with Serious Money, and the rest of us who hide under the table when the auctioneer is scanning the room for a bid of $5000 for a custom prepared dinner by Chef Trendy McHighBrow.
I'm sure many scholars have analyzed the motivations and hidden agendas of wealthy people, men in particular, bidding large sums of money at public charity auctions. This is no such scholarly paper. I will merely attempt to document my motivations and competitive glee while bidding on a few items during the silent auction.
Since I knew from our prior experience that we would be sitting out the live auction -- which is for high rollers only -- we were most interested in the silent auction. The twist this year was the electronic tool provided to facilitate bidding. An iPod with a customized app, using wireless networking set up just for the event, was handed to each couple upon entry. This app, called BidPal but more accurately described as BidJacker, allowed people to look up the current bids of items, place a bid, and view a list of all items personally bid on. The killer feature of the app was the notification when someone else outbid you for an item. This outbid feature knows how to stir the competitive juices. Outbid me? Ooooh, I'll show you...
The outbid feature, henceforth known as The OF, surely was responsible for as much wild price speculation as the free wine being proffered at every turn. But at this point I was still unaware of The OF as we entered the areas where the silent auction items were on display. There were autographed sporting goods, offers for photography sittings, a couple of XBoxes, an iPad, deals for numerous restaurants, concert tickets, and even an offer to have a tree guru come to your house and assess the state of your foliage. And my foliage could use some assessment, considering we currently have a tree pitched at a 45 degree angle. All kinds of interesting stuff was available. Items could be had for as little as $50 but some could run up close to $1000. Not Serious Money, but enough where us normal folks can't cover it with the float in our joint checking accounts. "Honey, we're not going to Olive Garden this month."
Since Mark and Trudie had essentially paid for our seats at the dinner table we felt like we should put in a few bids. After passing over the John Randle-autographed Hall of Fame helmet, an iPad (version 1 -- that's sooo 2010), and an offer for free Invisalign orthodontics, we stumbled across a display for 2 front-row tickets to see the Irish alt./pop rock band The Script.
Hmmmm. Karen REALLY likes The Script. I am ambivalent about The Script (their level of rocking is generally insufficient for me), but I'm not ambivalent about Karen, so I thought this would be a good one to take a run at. It was early in the silent auction and the current bid hadn't even cracked $100 yet. I boldly put in a bid of $85 (basically a tank of gas, I rationalized) and moved on to other items. We put in some half-hearted bids on a Chipotle dinner and a Fogo De Chao Brazilian restaurant gift card. I threw a token bid on the tree guru and an in-house interior decorating consultation.
And then The OF made it's presence known. I looked down at BidPal and it was telling me I'd been outbid. Outbid! How cheeky! The unmitigated gall of someone to surpass me! And it seemed so personal to have this little device tell me to my face that I was no longer in first place. Because that's how this evolved in my mind: this was a game.
There is no way to know who specifically is bidding. The silent auction was spread over several hallways of one floor of an open-plan office building so even looking around I could only 30 or so guests out of the few hundred in attendance. I furrowed my brow and stared holes in a few suit-clad potential perpetrators but I could glean no guilt. It was to be a silent, face-less battle, much like for opposing submarine commanders.
How was I to respond to this effrontery of being outbid? This impingement on my masculinity? Well, I was going to give him some of his own medicine. My foe could easily have been a woman but in my mind it was another guy. Probably a guy in a better suit, with cash hanging out of his pockets and a second home in Vail. If so, then I was toast. But if it was somebody with my middling wherewithal, then game on.
The minimum overbid was $5 but that just seemed lame. Let's not dabble in half-measures, people. I jumped up $20. I put the iPod down with the feeling that I had just lobbed an electronic grenade at some poor sap.
I checked the bidding in a few minutes and realized I'd been outbid. Although this was now expected, nonetheless a frisson of annoyance skittered down my spine. I re-bid. But in the few seconds I was pushing buttons someone else had overbid. I needed to bid even higher. Things were escalating.
We were now into the low hundreds for these tickets. We weren't really sure how much we wanted to spend on The Script. Karen clearly wanted to go but wasn't sure it was worth it. She wasn't sure how much *I* was willing to spend. I wasn't sure either but I still wanted to play the game. In my mind I was now equating this to the traditional male role of hunting and gathering. I'm not going to shoot an elk in downtown Minneapolis but I can sure as hell bag a pair of concert tickets. Re-bid.
I was enjoying the assumed knowledge that one or two other bidders were being routinely irked by getting OF'ed. Based on the pattern of bidding I could tell there were at least 2 other bidders. I didn't always instantly rebid after being notified by The OF. Sometimes I'd wait a while, letting a sense of complacency set in, letting the tension build, and then I'd jack it up. Shazam! Or, "another notch!" as Emeril would say.
The silent auction ended at 7:20 and the remaining time was ticking down like a bomb in BitPal. With about 10 minutes left it was time to plan for the End Game. We were now over $500 for these damn tickets. Did I really want to win them, or was I satisfied with simply stirring the pot? I decided I was comfortable spending a little more on these, that front row tickets would be pretty cool, and that I wanted to give it a shot. Huntin' and gatherin.'
I've only been involved in one eBay auction. A few years ago I put a bid on a corny Christmas jigsaw puzzle that my family used to put together when I was a kid. It was lost to the ages and various family dogs eating the puzzle pieces so I thought it would be cool to have it again. I put in a top bid and didn't pay attention during the last minute of bidding. Some bozo swept in at the end and overbid me by $1. C'mon, man! I would have paid double what I bid. A humbling defeat, but it laid the foundation for my end game strategy on this night.
I forsook the bidding on the interior decorator and the restaurant offers. No one seemed to be challenging my bid on the tree savant so I let that ride. We were now down to one minute left. The bid was at $715. My plan was to make a bid in the last 5 seconds, but to make sure it was high enough in case my rival did the same thing. His overbids were often in the $5-$10 range. I figured a big leap in the final seconds would be enough. I entered $750 and pushed Submit Bid with 4 seconds to go...
It was enough. $750 held up. I was filled with a sense of satisfaction disproportionate to the value of the victory. I was quite full of myself. I'll never know if the other bidder made a final too-low overbid on himself as insurance but I prefer to imagine that he did, cursing the ceiling as he became aware of being thwarted. In fact, I'll never know who that person was. Maybe it was Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, who was rattling around the event. Maybe it was crusty sports columnist and name-dropper Sid Hartman, a big supporter of St. David's. Maybe it was some hedge fund jockey who indirectly contributed to the lowering of my 401k a couple years ago. One can only hope...
$750 for tickets to a little known band? I can always pull out the "it was for a good cause" justification. $750 just to win a little personal contest seems a bit much. It definitely made the missus happy, and we all know THAT'S priceless. Plus, I got the tree guy coming over...
I'm sure many scholars have analyzed the motivations and hidden agendas of wealthy people, men in particular, bidding large sums of money at public charity auctions. This is no such scholarly paper. I will merely attempt to document my motivations and competitive glee while bidding on a few items during the silent auction.
Since I knew from our prior experience that we would be sitting out the live auction -- which is for high rollers only -- we were most interested in the silent auction. The twist this year was the electronic tool provided to facilitate bidding. An iPod with a customized app, using wireless networking set up just for the event, was handed to each couple upon entry. This app, called BidPal but more accurately described as BidJacker, allowed people to look up the current bids of items, place a bid, and view a list of all items personally bid on. The killer feature of the app was the notification when someone else outbid you for an item. This outbid feature knows how to stir the competitive juices. Outbid me? Ooooh, I'll show you...
The outbid feature, henceforth known as The OF, surely was responsible for as much wild price speculation as the free wine being proffered at every turn. But at this point I was still unaware of The OF as we entered the areas where the silent auction items were on display. There were autographed sporting goods, offers for photography sittings, a couple of XBoxes, an iPad, deals for numerous restaurants, concert tickets, and even an offer to have a tree guru come to your house and assess the state of your foliage. And my foliage could use some assessment, considering we currently have a tree pitched at a 45 degree angle. All kinds of interesting stuff was available. Items could be had for as little as $50 but some could run up close to $1000. Not Serious Money, but enough where us normal folks can't cover it with the float in our joint checking accounts. "Honey, we're not going to Olive Garden this month."
Since Mark and Trudie had essentially paid for our seats at the dinner table we felt like we should put in a few bids. After passing over the John Randle-autographed Hall of Fame helmet, an iPad (version 1 -- that's sooo 2010), and an offer for free Invisalign orthodontics, we stumbled across a display for 2 front-row tickets to see the Irish alt./pop rock band The Script.
Hmmmm. Karen REALLY likes The Script. I am ambivalent about The Script (their level of rocking is generally insufficient for me), but I'm not ambivalent about Karen, so I thought this would be a good one to take a run at. It was early in the silent auction and the current bid hadn't even cracked $100 yet. I boldly put in a bid of $85 (basically a tank of gas, I rationalized) and moved on to other items. We put in some half-hearted bids on a Chipotle dinner and a Fogo De Chao Brazilian restaurant gift card. I threw a token bid on the tree guru and an in-house interior decorating consultation.
And then The OF made it's presence known. I looked down at BidPal and it was telling me I'd been outbid. Outbid! How cheeky! The unmitigated gall of someone to surpass me! And it seemed so personal to have this little device tell me to my face that I was no longer in first place. Because that's how this evolved in my mind: this was a game.
There is no way to know who specifically is bidding. The silent auction was spread over several hallways of one floor of an open-plan office building so even looking around I could only 30 or so guests out of the few hundred in attendance. I furrowed my brow and stared holes in a few suit-clad potential perpetrators but I could glean no guilt. It was to be a silent, face-less battle, much like for opposing submarine commanders.
How was I to respond to this effrontery of being outbid? This impingement on my masculinity? Well, I was going to give him some of his own medicine. My foe could easily have been a woman but in my mind it was another guy. Probably a guy in a better suit, with cash hanging out of his pockets and a second home in Vail. If so, then I was toast. But if it was somebody with my middling wherewithal, then game on.
The minimum overbid was $5 but that just seemed lame. Let's not dabble in half-measures, people. I jumped up $20. I put the iPod down with the feeling that I had just lobbed an electronic grenade at some poor sap.
I checked the bidding in a few minutes and realized I'd been outbid. Although this was now expected, nonetheless a frisson of annoyance skittered down my spine. I re-bid. But in the few seconds I was pushing buttons someone else had overbid. I needed to bid even higher. Things were escalating.
We were now into the low hundreds for these tickets. We weren't really sure how much we wanted to spend on The Script. Karen clearly wanted to go but wasn't sure it was worth it. She wasn't sure how much *I* was willing to spend. I wasn't sure either but I still wanted to play the game. In my mind I was now equating this to the traditional male role of hunting and gathering. I'm not going to shoot an elk in downtown Minneapolis but I can sure as hell bag a pair of concert tickets. Re-bid.
I was enjoying the assumed knowledge that one or two other bidders were being routinely irked by getting OF'ed. Based on the pattern of bidding I could tell there were at least 2 other bidders. I didn't always instantly rebid after being notified by The OF. Sometimes I'd wait a while, letting a sense of complacency set in, letting the tension build, and then I'd jack it up. Shazam! Or, "another notch!" as Emeril would say.
The silent auction ended at 7:20 and the remaining time was ticking down like a bomb in BitPal. With about 10 minutes left it was time to plan for the End Game. We were now over $500 for these damn tickets. Did I really want to win them, or was I satisfied with simply stirring the pot? I decided I was comfortable spending a little more on these, that front row tickets would be pretty cool, and that I wanted to give it a shot. Huntin' and gatherin.'
I've only been involved in one eBay auction. A few years ago I put a bid on a corny Christmas jigsaw puzzle that my family used to put together when I was a kid. It was lost to the ages and various family dogs eating the puzzle pieces so I thought it would be cool to have it again. I put in a top bid and didn't pay attention during the last minute of bidding. Some bozo swept in at the end and overbid me by $1. C'mon, man! I would have paid double what I bid. A humbling defeat, but it laid the foundation for my end game strategy on this night.
I forsook the bidding on the interior decorator and the restaurant offers. No one seemed to be challenging my bid on the tree savant so I let that ride. We were now down to one minute left. The bid was at $715. My plan was to make a bid in the last 5 seconds, but to make sure it was high enough in case my rival did the same thing. His overbids were often in the $5-$10 range. I figured a big leap in the final seconds would be enough. I entered $750 and pushed Submit Bid with 4 seconds to go...
It was enough. $750 held up. I was filled with a sense of satisfaction disproportionate to the value of the victory. I was quite full of myself. I'll never know if the other bidder made a final too-low overbid on himself as insurance but I prefer to imagine that he did, cursing the ceiling as he became aware of being thwarted. In fact, I'll never know who that person was. Maybe it was Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, who was rattling around the event. Maybe it was crusty sports columnist and name-dropper Sid Hartman, a big supporter of St. David's. Maybe it was some hedge fund jockey who indirectly contributed to the lowering of my 401k a couple years ago. One can only hope...
$750 for tickets to a little known band? I can always pull out the "it was for a good cause" justification. $750 just to win a little personal contest seems a bit much. It definitely made the missus happy, and we all know THAT'S priceless. Plus, I got the tree guy coming over...
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Fun Times in the Dojo De La Muerte
For the past couple months I've joined my neighbor Don in some particularly grueling exercise workouts in his basement. Both of us have a strong interest in exercise and fitness as a way to compensate for medically compromised body parts and general athletic ineffectiveness. If you assembled all of the healthy pieces between the two of us you might be able to construct one medically sound human. So we hit the workouts aggressively to have some strength and conditioning to fall back on when the odd knee, hip, or shoulder inevitably "takes the conversation off-line," as we like to say in corporate-speak.
Don has accumulated a variety of exercise equipment that gives us an unusual number of workout options for a home-based routine. The participants often include his early-20's daughter Jessie, his college-age son Ryan, the occasional other relative and Karen has joined us once. Jessie goes about 110 lbs. and routinely shames us with her core strength.
This all transpires in his basement and we've been trying to come up with an appropriate name for his "gym." For now I'm going with the "Dojo De La Muerte." "Dojo" is a Japanese term which has come to mean a place where people practice martial arts. Essentially, a workout area. "De La Muerte" is Spanish for "of Death." So we've done a classic American thing and appropriated from other cultures that which we desire to suit our needs. Plus, "of death" is what you feel like during most of the workout.
As we gather to begin the proceedings the first order of business is to pick the musical accompaniment for the workout. We use Pandora on Don's iPad or Macbook which requires that you to select an artist as the basis for a semi-random selection. Being old and male, Don and I are in agreement that 80's hard rock is a good genre for pain and suffering disguised as exercise. Usually we end up with Van Halen or the Scorpions, but Green Day has been reliable too. Karen wanted to pick Justin Timberlake or Pink when she participated which caused us to gawp at her in abject horror. Jessie likes to pick obscure indie bands because she's young and contrarian. Emo has no place in the Dojo. We make plenty emo of our own during the workout.
Before the warm-up there's the "pre" warm-up to get the heart rate going. Most of the time this entails me putting on the boxing gloves and Don putting on the pads to catch the punches, or vice versa. We jab and slug for a couple minutes with varying punch types. We can often tell what kind of day the puncher had based on the vigor of the warm-up swings. When there's a little oomph in the jabs and crosses then we know something's up. "Difficult budget meeting today?" "Having an argument with the missus?"
The regular routine is based on rotations of exercises with a focus on core muscles (primarly abs and lower back for you exercise noobs) and it's all upper body stuff. The warm-up circuit consists of 5 exercises done once. Then we do three circuits of 5-6 exercises, done twice in two rotations. It takes about 60-75 minutes to do the whole thing. The warm-up circuit is bad enough. We're already sweating and panting when that is done and making declarations like, "Well, that was a good workout. Time for cocktails?" But no, there is much more. So much more...
Don conjures up the specific exercises based on some workout books he has and things he has seen others do, plus I'll throw in my two cents on occasion. He types and prints out the routine so we can consult it as we go. Naming conventions are a bit of a struggle as there is often explanation required as we go.
Me: "OK, I'm on 'Plank of Death.' Which Plank of Death is this again? Is this the one with my arms on the exercise ball or the one with my toes on the ball?"
Don: "Uhhh, I think it's the toes."
"Dips on Dangerous Wood" involve a piece of homemade workout equipment. Don and his son Ryan, neither of whom is a carpenter, fashioned out of 2x4's a device intended to support our weight while we do shoulder dips. Shoulder dips require you to hold yourself up with your arms straight up and down, and then lower and raise yourself using only your arms and shoulders. We have yet to dismember ourselves due to equipment failure but it's only a matter of time. I did nearly lose a pinkie once on another exercise when it got smushed between two dumbbells. The fingernail has been black and blue for 5 weeks. I keep thinking it's going to fall off but it's been barely hanging on -- like the Survivor contestant who isn't in any alliances.
"Dumbbell Swinging Thing" is the thing where we, uh, swing the dumbbell.
Each exercise lasts a standard amount of time regardless of how many reps you can complete. Our current duration is 50 seconds. If you can't do reps the whole time, you have to hold the position until the time is up. This is where the suckiness of the whole endeavor comes to the fore. The 50 seconds can be especially grueling for exercises like dips, pull-ups, or, OK, almost all of them. The greatest aid in surviving is having the person keeping the stopwatch call out the remaining time. Anyone failing to call out at least every 10 seconds is roundly cursed and abused. Jessie is particularly prone to forgetting to call it out -- or maybe she's just tweaking her elders -- which is guaranteed to elicit wails from us like, "For the love of GOD woman HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT!!!"
The other key coping mechanism is berating the other for getting one involved in such a painful use of one's free time. While we both use this outlet, Don is a little more talkative than I am and does it more frequently. Some examples:
"Davey, why do you make me do this? I hate you."
"Don't make me do the pull-ups again. Just don't."
"Why did you come over here? I was nice and comfortable on the couch."
Another focus of discussion is the debate about The Worst Exercise. We argue about this with such passion and energy it's like we're putting on a local production of 12 Angry Men. In my opinion there is no argument: it's the pull-ups. Regardless of how many legit pull-ups I can do, hanging by the arms for 50 seconds when you're a load like I am is nothing short of misery. It is truly unsurvivable without someone calling out the time. Then, when you can finally release, your hands and forearms hurt for a good 20-30 more seconds like the aftertaste from a $2 bottle of tequila. Don often tries to make the case that one of the Planks of Death is worse or maybe the "push-ups on Bosu with toes on exercise ball" (another crime against all that is good and pure in this world) but he knows in his heart it's the pull-ups.
That was my opinion...until we added two new heinous exercises this past week. One is the aforementioned Dips on Dangerous Wood. The final 10 seconds of that one is less humane than waterboarding. The other is Bosu ball crossover push-ups. This one is awful in its own right but comes at the very end of the workout when there is nothing left in the tank and your arms have the tensile strength of cotton candy. Basically you do a push-up with both hands on the rounded part of the Bosu, then swing one hand out to the side and do a push-up, then one back in the middle, then the other hand out to the side for a push-up, and so on. When we do it we're laughing at the absurdity of what we're attempting. It's one of those laughs that is surprisingly similar to sobbing. I'm still leaning toward the pull-ups as The Worst Exercise but it's a close call.
At the opposite end of the Worst Exercise are the one or two "vacation" exercises. There are a couple relative respites during the routine where the physical humiliation is less egregious compared to the rest. One of these is shoulder shrugs. We now call shrugs "Club Med." Even though you're lifting heavy dumbbells with your shoulders for 50 seconds it's a picnic compared to some of the others. You envy the person doing shrugs. You loathe them for the frolic in the springtime meadow they are doing compared to whatever you're doing.
Eventually the misery ends. We "police the Dojo" which involves putting the gear away so that it resembles a family basement again. Then we drag ourselves upstairs, talk about how we never want to do that ever again, how we will never speak of the horrors we just endured, and then we settle on a time to do it again a couple days later.
Don has accumulated a variety of exercise equipment that gives us an unusual number of workout options for a home-based routine. The participants often include his early-20's daughter Jessie, his college-age son Ryan, the occasional other relative and Karen has joined us once. Jessie goes about 110 lbs. and routinely shames us with her core strength.
This all transpires in his basement and we've been trying to come up with an appropriate name for his "gym." For now I'm going with the "Dojo De La Muerte." "Dojo" is a Japanese term which has come to mean a place where people practice martial arts. Essentially, a workout area. "De La Muerte" is Spanish for "of Death." So we've done a classic American thing and appropriated from other cultures that which we desire to suit our needs. Plus, "of death" is what you feel like during most of the workout.
As we gather to begin the proceedings the first order of business is to pick the musical accompaniment for the workout. We use Pandora on Don's iPad or Macbook which requires that you to select an artist as the basis for a semi-random selection. Being old and male, Don and I are in agreement that 80's hard rock is a good genre for pain and suffering disguised as exercise. Usually we end up with Van Halen or the Scorpions, but Green Day has been reliable too. Karen wanted to pick Justin Timberlake or Pink when she participated which caused us to gawp at her in abject horror. Jessie likes to pick obscure indie bands because she's young and contrarian. Emo has no place in the Dojo. We make plenty emo of our own during the workout.
Before the warm-up there's the "pre" warm-up to get the heart rate going. Most of the time this entails me putting on the boxing gloves and Don putting on the pads to catch the punches, or vice versa. We jab and slug for a couple minutes with varying punch types. We can often tell what kind of day the puncher had based on the vigor of the warm-up swings. When there's a little oomph in the jabs and crosses then we know something's up. "Difficult budget meeting today?" "Having an argument with the missus?"
The regular routine is based on rotations of exercises with a focus on core muscles (primarly abs and lower back for you exercise noobs) and it's all upper body stuff. The warm-up circuit consists of 5 exercises done once. Then we do three circuits of 5-6 exercises, done twice in two rotations. It takes about 60-75 minutes to do the whole thing. The warm-up circuit is bad enough. We're already sweating and panting when that is done and making declarations like, "Well, that was a good workout. Time for cocktails?" But no, there is much more. So much more...
Don conjures up the specific exercises based on some workout books he has and things he has seen others do, plus I'll throw in my two cents on occasion. He types and prints out the routine so we can consult it as we go. Naming conventions are a bit of a struggle as there is often explanation required as we go.
Me: "OK, I'm on 'Plank of Death.' Which Plank of Death is this again? Is this the one with my arms on the exercise ball or the one with my toes on the ball?"
Don: "Uhhh, I think it's the toes."
"Dips on Dangerous Wood" involve a piece of homemade workout equipment. Don and his son Ryan, neither of whom is a carpenter, fashioned out of 2x4's a device intended to support our weight while we do shoulder dips. Shoulder dips require you to hold yourself up with your arms straight up and down, and then lower and raise yourself using only your arms and shoulders. We have yet to dismember ourselves due to equipment failure but it's only a matter of time. I did nearly lose a pinkie once on another exercise when it got smushed between two dumbbells. The fingernail has been black and blue for 5 weeks. I keep thinking it's going to fall off but it's been barely hanging on -- like the Survivor contestant who isn't in any alliances.
"Dumbbell Swinging Thing" is the thing where we, uh, swing the dumbbell.
Each exercise lasts a standard amount of time regardless of how many reps you can complete. Our current duration is 50 seconds. If you can't do reps the whole time, you have to hold the position until the time is up. This is where the suckiness of the whole endeavor comes to the fore. The 50 seconds can be especially grueling for exercises like dips, pull-ups, or, OK, almost all of them. The greatest aid in surviving is having the person keeping the stopwatch call out the remaining time. Anyone failing to call out at least every 10 seconds is roundly cursed and abused. Jessie is particularly prone to forgetting to call it out -- or maybe she's just tweaking her elders -- which is guaranteed to elicit wails from us like, "For the love of GOD woman HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT!!!"
The other key coping mechanism is berating the other for getting one involved in such a painful use of one's free time. While we both use this outlet, Don is a little more talkative than I am and does it more frequently. Some examples:
"Davey, why do you make me do this? I hate you."
"Don't make me do the pull-ups again. Just don't."
"Why did you come over here? I was nice and comfortable on the couch."
Another focus of discussion is the debate about The Worst Exercise. We argue about this with such passion and energy it's like we're putting on a local production of 12 Angry Men. In my opinion there is no argument: it's the pull-ups. Regardless of how many legit pull-ups I can do, hanging by the arms for 50 seconds when you're a load like I am is nothing short of misery. It is truly unsurvivable without someone calling out the time. Then, when you can finally release, your hands and forearms hurt for a good 20-30 more seconds like the aftertaste from a $2 bottle of tequila. Don often tries to make the case that one of the Planks of Death is worse or maybe the "push-ups on Bosu with toes on exercise ball" (another crime against all that is good and pure in this world) but he knows in his heart it's the pull-ups.
That was my opinion...until we added two new heinous exercises this past week. One is the aforementioned Dips on Dangerous Wood. The final 10 seconds of that one is less humane than waterboarding. The other is Bosu ball crossover push-ups. This one is awful in its own right but comes at the very end of the workout when there is nothing left in the tank and your arms have the tensile strength of cotton candy. Basically you do a push-up with both hands on the rounded part of the Bosu, then swing one hand out to the side and do a push-up, then one back in the middle, then the other hand out to the side for a push-up, and so on. When we do it we're laughing at the absurdity of what we're attempting. It's one of those laughs that is surprisingly similar to sobbing. I'm still leaning toward the pull-ups as The Worst Exercise but it's a close call.
At the opposite end of the Worst Exercise are the one or two "vacation" exercises. There are a couple relative respites during the routine where the physical humiliation is less egregious compared to the rest. One of these is shoulder shrugs. We now call shrugs "Club Med." Even though you're lifting heavy dumbbells with your shoulders for 50 seconds it's a picnic compared to some of the others. You envy the person doing shrugs. You loathe them for the frolic in the springtime meadow they are doing compared to whatever you're doing.
Eventually the misery ends. We "police the Dojo" which involves putting the gear away so that it resembles a family basement again. Then we drag ourselves upstairs, talk about how we never want to do that ever again, how we will never speak of the horrors we just endured, and then we settle on a time to do it again a couple days later.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
There's the Service Industry, and Then There's the Servicing Industry, Where Apparently I Work
As my management mentor, Inigo Montoya, once told me, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Where I work, co-workers repeatedly use the word "service" or "servicing" to describe the products we offer to our customers. We don't seem to "serve" our customers anymore, we "service" them. The use of this usage is increasing to the point of becoming an epidemic and is reflective of the overall corporate trend of using overcomplicated words when simpler ones will do. But even worse than being unnecessarily highfalutin, "service" as a verb has a double-meaning that is, er, quite randy. The wordsmith and grammarian in me is horrified. My inner Beavis is highly amused.
For those of you unaware of the connotation of "servicing," let's consult that highly valuable resource: www.urbandictionary.com.* According to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=service, well, you can read for yourself. It casts these office meetings in a whole new light, doesn't it. These are highly educated, highly competent people. But they're just not getting it. The other day I was in a project meeting where I was told that my part of the project would include "servicing our medical practitioner network." Really? Just me? The network has tens of thousands of people -- I don't get any help? Are there any stretching exercises I should be doing? I better make sure my doctor friends Mark and Trudie are dropped from our network before I have to knock on their door with a glum, "time to make the doughnuts" expression on my face.
In another conference call (are you getting a feel for what my work day is like?) someone announced, "Dave Carl is in charge of the servicing platform." Crikey! It was a good thing I was on mute. What would a servicing platform really look like? Would there be couch? A waterbed? A dentist's chair? Should I get the rights to the Barry White music catalog?
My greatest fear is that I will eventually be evaluated on the quantity and quality of servicing I provide to my internal customers. My year-end performance rating and raise could be determined by how well my boss feels I serviced people over the past year. I can already see the performance feedback questionnaire distributed at the end of the year to my key internal business partners:
1) On a scale of 1-10, overall how well did Dave Carl service you this year?
2) Please list three areas where Dave Carl can improve his servicing techniques. Provide detailed examples.
3) Can you recommend any training that would help Dave Carl improve his ability to service you?
4) Did Dave Carl service you often enough to achieve your desired goals?
5) Did the uptime on Dave Carl's servicing platform meet your minimum requirements? Scalability? Throughput performance?
Please, people -- let's think twice before using this word so blithely. When the millennial generation enters the workforce and we're still carrying on about servicing millions of people they won't be able to contain their snickering. Otherwise, this will be a common interjection on conference calls: "Sorry, I was on mute...laughing my ass off."
* On a side note, I expect urbandictionary to be an incredibly valuable resource as my daughter reaches her teen years. It'll be a teen slang version of the German WWII Enigma machine, allowing me to break coded messages that otherwise would have passed me by. "Hmmm, she just called me a 'poser toolbag' after I grounded her. I better look that up..."
For those of you unaware of the connotation of "servicing," let's consult that highly valuable resource: www.urbandictionary.com.* According to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=service, well, you can read for yourself. It casts these office meetings in a whole new light, doesn't it. These are highly educated, highly competent people. But they're just not getting it. The other day I was in a project meeting where I was told that my part of the project would include "servicing our medical practitioner network." Really? Just me? The network has tens of thousands of people -- I don't get any help? Are there any stretching exercises I should be doing? I better make sure my doctor friends Mark and Trudie are dropped from our network before I have to knock on their door with a glum, "time to make the doughnuts" expression on my face.
In another conference call (are you getting a feel for what my work day is like?) someone announced, "Dave Carl is in charge of the servicing platform." Crikey! It was a good thing I was on mute. What would a servicing platform really look like? Would there be couch? A waterbed? A dentist's chair? Should I get the rights to the Barry White music catalog?
My greatest fear is that I will eventually be evaluated on the quantity and quality of servicing I provide to my internal customers. My year-end performance rating and raise could be determined by how well my boss feels I serviced people over the past year. I can already see the performance feedback questionnaire distributed at the end of the year to my key internal business partners:
1) On a scale of 1-10, overall how well did Dave Carl service you this year?
2) Please list three areas where Dave Carl can improve his servicing techniques. Provide detailed examples.
3) Can you recommend any training that would help Dave Carl improve his ability to service you?
4) Did Dave Carl service you often enough to achieve your desired goals?
5) Did the uptime on Dave Carl's servicing platform meet your minimum requirements? Scalability? Throughput performance?
Please, people -- let's think twice before using this word so blithely. When the millennial generation enters the workforce and we're still carrying on about servicing millions of people they won't be able to contain their snickering. Otherwise, this will be a common interjection on conference calls: "Sorry, I was on mute...laughing my ass off."
* On a side note, I expect urbandictionary to be an incredibly valuable resource as my daughter reaches her teen years. It'll be a teen slang version of the German WWII Enigma machine, allowing me to break coded messages that otherwise would have passed me by. "Hmmm, she just called me a 'poser toolbag' after I grounded her. I better look that up..."
Friday, December 31, 2010
Bathroom Flooding and Compensating for Generational Shortcomings
I like to think of myself as a modern-thinking guy when it comes to gender roles in our household. I'm fine if Karen wants to have a career or doesn't want to have a career. I do my share of the housework. I don't feel the need to be the driver every time we go somewhere in the car. I will watch the occasional Oprah. (But not The View! That's the kind of show that keeps me going back to the office every day.)
Of course, there is a tradeoff with all of this. I will not also fill all of the traditional duties that my father's generation took care of. I don't want to nor do I feel compelled to manage our budget. A woman can handle a snowblower just as well as a guy can. And you'd better have low expectations when it comes to household repair and home improvement. My dad can't cook a pork chop but he can single-handedly put on an entire addition to a house. Sadly, these particular genes didn't roll downhill to me, and there's nothing in my liberal arts schooling or years of office-based employment to counteract this. As my grandfather once pointed out, "I was never very good at home improvement stuff but your dad is really good. That skill must skip generations in our family." And just like that he threw himself and his grandson under the bus.
This non-skill was never more evident than in a recent incident involving a leak in our daughter's bathroom. I'm not completely useless around the house -- I can do a few minor things without blowing up the place. But if you want something complicated done then we're going to have to call in the experts. It was in this vein that I tried to pin down the source of the leak in Jenna's tub spout, thinking it was low-risk for household destruction and insurance adjuster visits.
My Holmesian detection skills eventually determined that the source of the slow drip-drip from the spout probably originated in the faucet where water flow and temperature were governed. I started looking for a way to get at a washer in the assembly which I figured was the real culprit. In the back of my mind I had a whisper of a thought that maybe I should turn off the water but figured I wasn't going to go that far into plumbing innards. (<sniff> <sniff> Yes, this has the faint aroma of foreshadowing.)
After some superficial poking around I found a way to unscrew the faucet handle cover. Or what I thought was the faucet handle cover. After a couple of twists it came loose and an immediate geyser of water burst from where I had just removed the cover, which we all know now wasn't just the cover but the entire assembly. If the fire department ever has to show up to extinguish roaring flames in our house, I would be happy if their hoses produced half the water pressure flying out of Jenna's shower right now.
My brain now operated on two levels. At a superficial level I immediately attempted to put the faucet assembly back on while this torrent of water began to fill the tub. At a lower level I felt like I was in a classic sitcom situation. With all of the water pressure there was no way I was getting that faucet back on. But I made a game attempt anyway, completely drenching myself in a futile effort while also mentally running through my catalog of Seinfeld and Three's Company episodes to recall if any applied here.
After about 10 seconds of that aquatic insanity I realized the clock was ticking before the house would be flooded. The pressure was such that the water stream bursting from the pipe reached the opposite wall of the tiled shower/tub area in a straight line. I finally dropped the faucet assembly and flew down two flights of stairs to the basement to find the water shutoff valve. Along the way I tried to confidently convey to my daughter, in a .8 second window as I passed her on the couch, that I had 1) encountered a minor problem in her bathroom, 2) was going to shut off the water in the house, and 3) Don't be alarmed! Everything's under control! Your dad knows what to do!
As luck would have it I found the shutoff valve fairly quickly. One of the arrows in my meager quiver of household usefulness is knowing where to shut off the water to our lawn sprinkler system. I found a similar-looking valve lower in the copper piping, turned it off, and listened as water gradually stopped moving through our pipes. Now, back upstairs to assess the damage.
There was a fair bit of standing water but nothing cataclysmic. More concerning were the faucet parts strewn about the tub. They had come flying out with the explosion of water and I had no idea how they went back together. This was like putting together a puzzle with no picture on the cover of the box. The one guiding principle I kept in mind was, "Having parts left over is not good."
I'm sure you will be shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that I was not able to successfully put the faucet back together myself. Much later I learned that two small key parts had slipped down the drain in the torrent of water. So I was NEVER going to get this thing together without help. At that point I initiated my "break glass in case of emergency" option of last resort: call Dad.
When I'm out of my league around the house -- which is often -- my dad can usually restore order. I feel bad that if Jenna is in a similar situation in her house later on in life she's going to call me and I'll come over, wander around earnestly but cluelessly, and then help her look up a plumber on the Googlenet. My dad did some hemming and hawing, figured out the puzzle without the cover picture, spear-headed a quick trip to Home Depot, and got the thing working again. The faucet was restored, the water was turned on, and people could pee again.
Most of the couples in my generation that I know have an overlap of skills: both can do laundry, both can cook, both can hold down a corporate job. But many of us have gaps in these skills that require outside help that older generations handled themselves. Maybe my dad can't do a load of laundry but he can do a bunch of other stuff I've never gotten the hang of which is his contribution to a balanced household. That night I retreated into my comfort zone of known skills and made dinner to compensate for my particular shortcomings that day.
Of course, there is a tradeoff with all of this. I will not also fill all of the traditional duties that my father's generation took care of. I don't want to nor do I feel compelled to manage our budget. A woman can handle a snowblower just as well as a guy can. And you'd better have low expectations when it comes to household repair and home improvement. My dad can't cook a pork chop but he can single-handedly put on an entire addition to a house. Sadly, these particular genes didn't roll downhill to me, and there's nothing in my liberal arts schooling or years of office-based employment to counteract this. As my grandfather once pointed out, "I was never very good at home improvement stuff but your dad is really good. That skill must skip generations in our family." And just like that he threw himself and his grandson under the bus.
This non-skill was never more evident than in a recent incident involving a leak in our daughter's bathroom. I'm not completely useless around the house -- I can do a few minor things without blowing up the place. But if you want something complicated done then we're going to have to call in the experts. It was in this vein that I tried to pin down the source of the leak in Jenna's tub spout, thinking it was low-risk for household destruction and insurance adjuster visits.
My Holmesian detection skills eventually determined that the source of the slow drip-drip from the spout probably originated in the faucet where water flow and temperature were governed. I started looking for a way to get at a washer in the assembly which I figured was the real culprit. In the back of my mind I had a whisper of a thought that maybe I should turn off the water but figured I wasn't going to go that far into plumbing innards. (<sniff> <sniff> Yes, this has the faint aroma of foreshadowing.)
After some superficial poking around I found a way to unscrew the faucet handle cover. Or what I thought was the faucet handle cover. After a couple of twists it came loose and an immediate geyser of water burst from where I had just removed the cover, which we all know now wasn't just the cover but the entire assembly. If the fire department ever has to show up to extinguish roaring flames in our house, I would be happy if their hoses produced half the water pressure flying out of Jenna's shower right now.
My brain now operated on two levels. At a superficial level I immediately attempted to put the faucet assembly back on while this torrent of water began to fill the tub. At a lower level I felt like I was in a classic sitcom situation. With all of the water pressure there was no way I was getting that faucet back on. But I made a game attempt anyway, completely drenching myself in a futile effort while also mentally running through my catalog of Seinfeld and Three's Company episodes to recall if any applied here.
After about 10 seconds of that aquatic insanity I realized the clock was ticking before the house would be flooded. The pressure was such that the water stream bursting from the pipe reached the opposite wall of the tiled shower/tub area in a straight line. I finally dropped the faucet assembly and flew down two flights of stairs to the basement to find the water shutoff valve. Along the way I tried to confidently convey to my daughter, in a .8 second window as I passed her on the couch, that I had 1) encountered a minor problem in her bathroom, 2) was going to shut off the water in the house, and 3) Don't be alarmed! Everything's under control! Your dad knows what to do!
As luck would have it I found the shutoff valve fairly quickly. One of the arrows in my meager quiver of household usefulness is knowing where to shut off the water to our lawn sprinkler system. I found a similar-looking valve lower in the copper piping, turned it off, and listened as water gradually stopped moving through our pipes. Now, back upstairs to assess the damage.
There was a fair bit of standing water but nothing cataclysmic. More concerning were the faucet parts strewn about the tub. They had come flying out with the explosion of water and I had no idea how they went back together. This was like putting together a puzzle with no picture on the cover of the box. The one guiding principle I kept in mind was, "Having parts left over is not good."
I'm sure you will be shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that I was not able to successfully put the faucet back together myself. Much later I learned that two small key parts had slipped down the drain in the torrent of water. So I was NEVER going to get this thing together without help. At that point I initiated my "break glass in case of emergency" option of last resort: call Dad.
When I'm out of my league around the house -- which is often -- my dad can usually restore order. I feel bad that if Jenna is in a similar situation in her house later on in life she's going to call me and I'll come over, wander around earnestly but cluelessly, and then help her look up a plumber on the Googlenet. My dad did some hemming and hawing, figured out the puzzle without the cover picture, spear-headed a quick trip to Home Depot, and got the thing working again. The faucet was restored, the water was turned on, and people could pee again.
Most of the couples in my generation that I know have an overlap of skills: both can do laundry, both can cook, both can hold down a corporate job. But many of us have gaps in these skills that require outside help that older generations handled themselves. Maybe my dad can't do a load of laundry but he can do a bunch of other stuff I've never gotten the hang of which is his contribution to a balanced household. That night I retreated into my comfort zone of known skills and made dinner to compensate for my particular shortcomings that day.
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