The Thrill of Moving Day

I'd already been standing in line waiting for my U-Haul for 45 minutes when the woman called. She told me that I was 30 minutes late to pick up my moving truck, and they couldn't hold it any longer. I told her I'd been in line for an hour and she could come out and find me if she liked, then I asked where she sat in the office so I could try to run her over when leaving with the truck (assuming they hadn't given it away already). I said, "Just yell real loud and I'll come find you." People get a lot nicer when they know you're hanging out in the vicinity.

The Brids, The Brids

I've had this same experience repeated several times in my life, and it's fundamentally remained the same since the first time it happened in second grade. Our entire class turned in short stories, and mine was about birds, but I'd misspelled bird as 'brid' several times throughout the essay. It actually still looks right to me when I see it spelled that way on paper. Brid. So my teacher was in a foul mood (likely hungover), and she went off at great length about how poor the stories were, but the mood was lightened when she went on her tirade about how someone couldn't even spell 'bird' correctly. I laughed along with the rest of the class thinking it was someone else, then found out I was the butt of the joke when papers were handed back.

Lost in the E-mail

I stopped getting my own SteepandCheap e-mails a few weeks ago. Nothing they can do will start sending it again. One of my friends who stopped getting it years ago spontaneously started getting it last week. There's a ghost in the SteepandCheap machine. Me not getting my own e-mail shouldn't seem like a big deal, but I sometimes forget that I went to lunch, and so I'll go out to eat twice in one day. It's a miracle I haven't been repeating myself word-for-word all week.

Getting Ripped Out

I joined another gym since my work pays for it. Including my sweetheart deal at the climbing gym, I now belong to two gyms. Looking at me, most people would guess that I didn't belong to any. When I joined this new one, they insisted that I have a session with a personal trainer. It seems like a hustle to me. I made sure that I wouldn't have to pay for it, but I've mentally prepared myself for a one-hour sales pitch about buying training sessions. Are you supposed to tip these trainers? I might just bring him some homemade baked goods as a kind gesture instead.

Guessing Passwords

I've spent about five minutes each of the last few days trying to guess the password to my old university e-mail account. It was the same for about six years, then a security measure was installed where you had to change it every two months. I lost track of it shortly after that. My old university lets you guess all day, but I get sick of it pretty quick since there are no consequences. At my old job, our online meeting system only gave you three chances to sign-in, and if you got them all incorrect, it locked you out of the system for an hour. You could tell people were sweating their online presentations when they signed in more than an hour in advance just in case they messed up their password three times in a row.

The Viking Funeral

While camping on a well-populated lake, my friend's beloved camping cup broke. We debated about what to do with it for a few moments, and settled on the only appropriate tribute available: a Viking funeral. I'm not even going to try to justify the environmental ramifications of setting a cup on fire and pushing it to sea, so I'll just apologize; sorry for polluting. As luck would have it, the moment we lit the flammables in the cup and pushed it off the shore, we heard the puttering of a motorboat around the point. The sheriff must have heard about Zach breaking his cup, and he decided to come and pay his respects. That's the only reasonable explanation, since the guy floated about 50 feet offshore but didn't say anything. Usually, you'd be able to approach a group of guys watching a fire on the lake's surface and be confident that there's some law-breaking going on.

Anyone Catch Airwolf?

I've never seen the TV program Airwolf, and I'm not sure how that happened. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and Airwolf is something of a shared experience among the people of my generation and the generation above us. I must have been forbidden from watching the program, perhaps my mom thought it would inspire an already oddly piqued interest in explosions and fiery deaths, but beyond childhood, I still haven't seen the show. I had to look it up on Wikipedia just so I'd have some background for references splashed out in conversation. That show disappeared with no syndication deal, and I can't find it on any sites that illegally host streamed TV shows. Mr. T's still driving around in a white Rolls Royce and living in a gated community in Chicago on A-Team profits while the poor flight crew from Airwolf can't even get one night on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Running 'Shine 'Cross Hazard County

Remember that season of the Dukes of Hazard when Vance and Coy, who happened to look exactly like Bo and Luke, replaced the Duke Boys while they held out on their contract year for more money? The story was that Bo and Luke were off racing NASCAR, so their cousins arrived to hang out in Hazard County while they were gone. It was important that someone arrived to pick up the work of the Duke boys while they were gone, since Uncle Jesse's farm seemed like it was in permanent danger of foreclosure and they needed the cash coming in. See, the Dukes made their money by running moonshine in the trunk of the General Lee across dry counties. Running 'shine must have paid well since they didn't have to work much.

Dog Troubles

I was eating lunch in a park that had a heavily trafficked bike lane running alongside it. About every 30 seconds, the dog belonging to the woman sitting next to me would go berserk and start barking like it'd been set on fire. It took a few minutes to figure it out, but I realized the dog would go nuts whenever it saw someone on Rollerblades or a skateboard. It had issues, but I was more disturbed that the owner would sit down next to me and ruin my lunch with her twisted dog. It barked so much, I thought it might lose its voice, then I realized I'd never heard of a dog losing its voice. The thing is, you wouldn't really ever be able to tell a dog had lost its voice.

Surprise Party Arrival Policy

One thing you can't be late for is a surprise party for a friend. You never want to be that guy who your friend sees when he's walking in for the surprise. Even if you're only a few minutes late and there before the guest of honor arrives, you can throw things off by walking in and getting everyone's hopes up only to let them down. Then they begin to subconsciously make a mental association with seeing you and being disappointed, so the best idea is really to arrive well in advance for these things.

Important College Papers

As part of my undergrad work at college, I had to write a high-minded paper about a book. I choose something about Vladimir Nabokov, and went on at great lengths about the works that likely influenced him. It was the longest paper I ever wrote, and the culmination of my college career. The day it was due, my classmate called to ask if our professor had mentioned anything about font, font size, and maximum margin sizes. We agreed that if we both changed our fonts and tweaked the margins to get a few extra pages and meet the length requirement, he'd be in a weakened position to argue since he never specified layout parameters. We probably should have become lawyers instead of...well, instead of whatever we became. Literature students, I guess?

Spin Class vs Bike Races

I attended a spin class recently. For the uninitiated, you basically sit in a darkened room with 20 other people on exercise bikes while an over-eager instructor yells at you and plays music. Unless you count bike races, I’d never attended a structured workout before. This was essentially the same as a bike race except no one drank beers at the end and you didn’t get the thrill of riding down a trail. The similarity that reminded me most of bike racing (besides the pedaling) was that there was no negative recourse to simply standing up and taking a break while everyone around you turned themselves inside-out to pedal as fast as they could.

Suspicious Package

It seems every other day that traffic is shut down, the city grinds to a halt, and some guy in a bomb suit carries a white cooler into the back of a truck. Then you read about it later on trying to figure out if it was anything to actually worry about, and they tell you they hauled it out to a gun range in the country and blew it up. Am I the only one who thinks that blowing up suspicious packages might not be the wisest way to deal with them? What if a dying millionaire left a cooler full of cash on the sidewalk, or some foreign parent lost their newborn in a uniquely Swedish baby carrier? Then again, I don’t know much about this sort of thing, and I can agree that blowing things up is the coolest way to get rid of them.

So-and-So Has Accepted Your LinkedIn invitation

When I got laid-off about a year ago, I decided immediately that I needed a strong presence on LinkedIn. I thought it might help me find work, and mostly it was something to do between writing SteepandCheap e-mails and watching reruns of Braveheart on TBS. So I set up my profile and e-mailed every person I knew, got ‘linked in’ with them, and then branched out from their friends trying to find connections. I burned out after about a day and mostly gave up on the job networking site. But every once in awhile, I still get e-mails from people who are just now accepting my e-mails to network. It’s as if they’ve waited a year or so to see how I’d do, and now they’re finally giving the nod of approval. I appreciate even the latecomers.

Lost City of the Inca

I’ve never been to Machu Picchu in Peru, but that iconic photo of the overlook of the beautiful mountaintop city looks amazing. The greenery is absolutely pristine, and it stands out so starkly against the stone ruins. But I wonder, who mows the lawn there? They probably use a push mower instead of a gas one, but it would still be a hassle to drag up and down all those steps every few days.

Easily Annoyed

I met a guy who makes about $200k a year giving desperate men clinics on how to pick-up women. Of course the guy was such a massive creep that it's tough to encapsulate in one sentence how complete of a package he was in terms of sucking big time. Well, to be honest, I never really met him. He was pointed out from across the room, and I observed his habits. Only now does the possibility occurs to me that they guy was actually a clerk at the Gap, and my friend was messing with me. But really, that's far more interesting. Maybe he was some normal guy who I demonized from across the room by thinking he was making a ton of money and hardly working. I would have gone over and asked the guy if it was true about his job, but he was busy sharing his iPod with some girl who he began making out with in front of everyone after talking to her for about 10 minutes. Either way, he seemed like kind of a jerk.

Bathroom Design Issues

A nice new restaurant opened in Uptown Minneapolis years ago, and they installed an interesting feature in the bathroom. The room where you wash your hands was separate from the toilets, and you could vaguely make out the opposite sex’s hand-washing room through the mirror. It made for some shocking moments when washing your hands in there the first time, but the restaurant made a big mistake when they put in the trough-style sinks in that room. A couple bars in Minneapolis have trough urinals that look similar enough to the sinks in the new restaurant. So when my friend Dan started peeing in the sink (thinking it was the urinal), the shock in the women’s room was much greater than most times. 

Calls from the Military Recruiter

Towards the end of our junior year of high school, military recruiters began calling. I had no interest in the structure the military offered, and after I turned him down a couple times, the guy left me alone. I’m not sure if they were true, but there were stories around the school of the recruiter calling every day for weeks on end if he spotted a weakness in your negative reply. When he called my friend Trevor, he went out of his way to make it clear that he was uninterested in enlisting. As soon as Trevor realized it was the recruiter, he said, “I’m gay, I do drugs, and I have flat feet.” Then he hung up and put it out of his mind. He told me the next day at lunch. There was no recourse except for a call to appear in the office, which Trevor ignored and instead went home.

Dr. Yo

My elementary school was swept with a yo-yo frenzy sometime around fifth grade. I have no idea where it came from or why it ended so quickly, but I later thought that it would make an interesting sociology study. On Monday we were playing basketball at recess, and by Friday every kid on the playground had a yo-yo and we somehow knew all the trick names and had established a new social hierarchy based on command of the yo-yo. Rich kids had the ‘Butterfly’ yo-yos which were easier for walk-the-dog type tricks, which gave them a bit of an advantage in scaling up their quiver of tricks more quickly. What did I learn? The rich get richer. It was good to get that one before sixth grade.

Kid, This is the President of the United States

I realized that I was a fairly annoying little kid the other day when I called someone and their kid answered. I asked for his mom and he said, “May I ask who’s calling?” I used to do that all the time; must have driven people crazy. Hell no, kid, what business of yours is to ask whose calling for your mom? Maybe she called me because she needs to buy dangerous street drugs and she wants them delivered to your house. You want me to drop that on you and ruin your life forever?

Phone Interviews

If there’s any value to a telephone job interview beyond learning that the person on the other end of the line is not insane, I have yet to find it. I’ve sat on the phone for a number of these things and at the end the only thing I know for sure is that the person is punctual and has a good phone connection. Finding a place to conduct a phone interview is sometimes daunting. You’ll leave the office and go sit in your car, but then everyone wonders why you’re sitting in your car on the phone, plus the sun will heat the interior of your vehicle so much that you’ll sweat like crazy through the whole thing. It’s more of a test of the candidates ingenuity in lying their way out of work and finding a place to sit on the phone for 20 minutes than it is an actual interview.

Friend Recommendations

Facebook has a feature where they recommend ‘friends’ to you based on people you have in common on your friend list. I’ll see the same few faces over-and-over since we have 20 or 30 shared friends, but I don’t really want to get in touch with the people Facebook is recommending, so I ignore these offers. I felt a bit bad the other day, then I realized that it’s almost certain that they’re seeing my picture in that sidebar with the ‘20 friends in common’ on their page, and they’re also not bothering to reach out to me. Screw those guys.

Award Close-ups and Drink Conventions

It’s awkward when talking to a spitter -- one of those guys or girls who accidentally spit all the time when they talk. You have to stand close and lean in to hear them at the bar, and you feel little flecks of it hitting you in the face. Sometimes when they really get going, you can even see a tiny bit fly out of their mouth and land right in your drink. If you’re overly polite, you have to wait until they finish their conversation to wipe the spit off your face. It’s even worse when the roles are reversed and you notice a tiny bit of spit has escaped your mouth during conversation only to fly into your friend’s beer. What’s the right thing to do in this situation? I recommend pretending it never happened.

Sleeping Writer

I get amazing ideas for stories in my dreams. I wake up with my head swimming, and for a moment get a clear vision of the next great American novel. Then I decide that it’s not worth getting out of bed to jot down any notes, and that the idea is so great that I’ll never forget it, so I go back to bed knowing that I’ll remember the idea the next day. The next day it’s foggy, and I regret giving up my wonderful ideas for sleep. So now when I get a great idea, I grab my phone and jot it down as a note. Problem is, once I start actually thinking about my great idea to write it down, I realize that it actually makes absolutely no sense and was really just a messed up dream. Makes me regret all those times I gave up my best ideas for sleep all the more.

Big Shop of Horrors

I have bad luck with plants. Mostly because I neglect them, give them too much water, not enough water, too much sunlight, not enough sunlight, or forget they’re alive. So when I moved into my new place in Salt Lake and needed some greenery, I went to the local Home Depot. They said they’d take my plants back at a full refund if they died, as long as I held onto the receipt and made it back within a year. My two ‘extremely hardy’ plants foundered for a few weeks before succumbing to a combination of what I can only assume to be overwatering and not enough/too much light. I left them on the floor of my room for 11 more months, then right before the year was up, I took them back. The clerk at Home Depot looked at me like I was returning a dead puppy. Fortunately, I’m better at keeping receipts than plants, so I had all my money returned. I used it to buy AA batteries and a 12-pack of PBR from the gas station. I could have gotten the batteries from Home Depot, but I felt like I was robbing the place so I was in a big hurry to get out of there.

Losing Your Keys

I was home visiting my family a couple years ago, and I decided to walk to my parents’ house from my sister Melissa’s house after we’d been out late. It’s about a mile and a half. Plus there’s a bar on the
way, and I knew that one of the guys I used to work with at summer camp hangs out when he’s in town from Milwaukee. I walked into the bar on the off chance that he was in town, and he tackled me mid-stride. Rolling around on a bar floor is never wise, but it didn’t seem to bother either of us. I had a drink with him and then walked the remaining half-mile to my parents’ place. For some reason I had all of my camping gear in the trunk of my Buick Skylark, and it was such a beautiful night, that on my way home I  decided I’d sleep out in my tent. When I arrived at the car, I couldn’t find my keys. My logic only extended as far as getting my camping gear, so I decided to just forget it and sleep inside. The next morning I wanted to drive someplace, and that was when the bigger problem of not having my keys dawned on me. Not only could I not get my camping gear, but I also could not drive my car. I walked back to the bar, and the bartender gave them to me. She said they’d fallen out of my pocket while wrestling the night before, and that they’d held onto them since I obviously wasn’t driving home anyway.

Your Momma’s An Astronaut

In the movie White Men Can’t Jump, there’s a slam that goes, “Your momma’s an astronaut.” It confused me when I saw the movie in 7th grade, but I assumed there was some kind of subtext or adult reference that was simply over my head. I figured I’d get the joke when I was a bit older. Now, I’m pretty sure that I’ve reached a maturity level where I should understand this joke, but it still does not land with me. Maybe it’s cultural relevancy, or maybe it simply sails over my head. To me, “your momma’s an astronaut” still seems like a compliment to your mother’s dedication to science and education.

The Move to Cynicism

I was telling a friend about a college football player who pledged $2 million to his alma mater. It was days before the pro football draft, and assuming that he’d get a big contract, he told his school he’d send them the cash when it came through. I was describing to my friend how the school had already made a lot of money off his performance on the football field without paying him a dime, and they pushed him through the college program with an emphasis on football and not on academics. Then I realized that there might be a possibility that his school had inspired him to be a better person and become a leader who excelled in football and school. And then I realized that I’d become cynical. At least about college and pro football.

Stove Dilemma

I live in a small space, so running the ‘clean’ setting on my stove represents a difficult decision. The clean setting on my stove heats it up to about 1000F, and it simply burns all the garbage out of there. It gets vaporized and pumped out of the stove, filling the air with a noxious cloud of smoke. Even if I open all the windows, put a fan in the kitchen, and then stuff a towel under my bedroom door, my eyes will still water while hiding out in my bedroom. And there’s really nothing in the stove to burn off except some grease. I’m tempted to actually fill it with trash one day and turn on ‘clean’ to see what would happen. So you’re faced with a choice: stay home and deal with burning eyes while the stove cleans, or leave the house and pray that it doesn’t burn to the ground while you’re across the street drinking bloody marys. I moved any combustibles away from the stove opted for the later, with check-ins every hour or so. I’m still not sure if I’d be criminally liable if my apartment burnt down.