Story Archive - September 2008

Eatin a Brat at the Loaf n Jug (09/30/2008)

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. - C. S. Lewis

One of the biggest bonuses of living in the bay area is that it is never too hot. It is never too cold. For the past ten years I have pretty much left my bedroom windows open constantly. I love the sound of rain in the winter. I love the breeze.

The last few months have been especially hard. New neighbors moved in across the way and brought with them a dog that is far too large to be living inside of an apartment. This dog must go stir crazy. On the weekends they'll put the dog out into the porch area tied to the house where it lounges sleeping the days away. If a person passes by a little too closely and catches the dog's attention it will bark menacingly at them. More recently the owners have gotten into a new habit of putting the dog out on the porch when they wake up in the morning at around 7am. Do you see where I'm going with this?

All morning long as people are leaving to go to work they take notice of this large dog in the porch area and this is usually followed by barking. This wakes me around four out of every five mornings these days. It's terrible. It's horrible!

I realize that correct solution is to one of these mornings when the dog barks to wander down disheveled and knock on my neighbor's door. "Sir, could you for god sake's not put your dog on the porch until later in the day. It wakes me up every morning and as much as I dearly love animals my need to sleep means that I'm going to have to kill your dog at some point. It would spare us both that pain if you could compromise a little."

The main problem with this course of action is that talking with strangers terrifies me and it is far easier to just wait for the neighbors to move out. They are the third set of neighbors in the last two years, so I just need to wait another 6-12 months.

Sassy Hat Party (09/19/2008)

The only place a new hat can be carried into with safety is a church, for there is plenty of room there. - Leigh Hunt

A couple weekends ago, after returning from the east coast, India, England and the east coast I sent out a message to the friends "finally home; planning on spending the weekend on the porch with white wine playing cribbage." Turns out that little message spread across my network of friends, the world rumbled under it and they came. If you have white wine and cribbage, they will come.

What was going to be a weekend of peace and tranquility turned into a weekend of partying and peace and tranquility. Sometime on Saturday night we hit my hat stash. Everyone started putting something on. With Vodka showed up, she asked "no one told me this was a crazy hat party!" So we gave her a sassy beret and everyone was happy.

The Forbin Martini (09/17/2008)

An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. - Colossus (Colossus: The Forbin Project)

After hearing it references more than once on Slice, I finally decided to watch Colossus: The Forbin Project. Besides being an excellent drama film, it taught me how to make the perfect martini. The main problem with a martini is that in combines two of the worst alcohols ever invented: gin and vermouth. During one of the scenes Dr. Forbin starts pouring vermouth into a tumbler of ice and fills it to the top. Colossus (the super computer) helpfully points out, "you're using too much vermouth." Forbin chuckles knowingly and strains out all the vermouth, leaving only the ice in the tumbler, pours in the gin and filters it into his glass. It's nearly the perfect martini! All that's needed to complete the equation is to replace the gin with vodka and you're done. Last night I tasted the Forbin Vodka Martini (as I shall always call it) and it is delicious.

The Mobile Thing (09/15/2008)

Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you. - Alexander Graham Bell

My cousin just updated her mobile phone number to switch from the area code where she went to college to the area code of where she is now living. Do people really do this? When I first entered the world of adulthood a phone number was a location. My apartment had a phone number. My cubical had a phone number. The mobile phone changed that, didn't it? When I got my first mobile--to this day I still hate the phone portion of my mobile--all of a sudden there was a number that was not linked to a location, but linked to me. There was a number linked to me. I got to choose the area code of the number and choose the area code of my college. I was graduated, but it just seemed like that was where my heart was.

Going forward, the whole idea of the area code is going to grow obsolete. People will have an area code from wherever they got their first mobile and they will carry it with them forever. It's happening right now. I have so many friend and colleagues with mobile phone area codes from college or their first job (yeah, that's my age). Soon that whole thing will bubble away. Maybe India does it right. They have unique area codes for mobile phones and they aren't tied to any location. Good job being forward thinking India.

Let's Talk Money (09/14/2008)

I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. - Jimmy Hoffa

Up until about six months ago I thought it was against the law to discuss your compensation with your colleagues. I assumed that every company had a confidentiality clause that said its employees couldn't discuss compensation and if an employee did, the company had every right to terminate that person with cause. Compensation is just such a private thing in the US (or at least in my family) it has an air of mystery about it. I have no clue what my parent's salaries are. I have no clue what my sibling's salaries are. Even when I have been in the most committed relationships my partner and I haven't shared compensation information (more or less). That's just not something you talk about.

I was talking about my mistaken understanding of the law with one of my roommates who was kind enough to intellectually uppercut me. From time to time, it does pay to live with a communist. The US government passed a law way back in the early 1900s to explicitly protect a worker's right to discuss his compensation with his coworkers. It doesn't give a worker the right to tell it to the newspaper; a company can at least pass a confidentiality clause to keep that information in the company. It's in Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. So there you go! Call a meeting outside the building at work, everyone can swap compensation information with each other, and when you're all let go (you wouldn't be fired since you're probably an at-will employee like me), call up a lawyer for some good fun with the wrongful termination lawsuit. God bless America.