M.A. Drake's Blog, page 5

Dream I had 10 years ago, thought it was worth sharing.

I was walking to Wal-Mart, which is weird first of all, because I absolutely hate Wal-Mart. I was heading there because I'd gotten a raise on my credit card and wanted to buy an Ipod and a copy of Windows XP, since my PC was still using ME. On my way there, this girl that I used to know from MCI that I haven't seen in about a year pulled up in a car and asked me if I wanted a ride. I thought this was unusual, because I hadn't seen her in a long time, was never particularly close to her, and rarely think about her. I needed to head back home to look for something that I'd forgotten, and when we arrived, she followed me into my room. Once we were alone, she leaned over and kissed me. I started kissing her back. While I was kissing her I thought, how odd. I was never particularly attracted to her because she was pretty much the definition of "plain", and yet here I was. She became encouraged by my kissing her back and tried to take it a step further, but I stopped her. "I'm married," I said, "and I can't do this. I'm sorry, but I can't." Unsure why I lied. And she looked at me and whispered in my ear, "Abraham Lincoln had a mistress and he was a better man than you." First of all, what the hell kind of thing is that to say to a married guy? Somehow she's going to guilt me into cheating on my wife? And secondly, where the hell did my brain come up with that for it to show up in my dream? Abraham Lincoln didn't have a mistress that history knows of, and it's not as if I've been thinking about Abraham Lincoln a lot lately. Anyway, after I turned her down, she was really insulted and got mad at me, which I thought was hilarious.

Why are politics so bad?

I worked in the backroom at Target for a year and a half. One of the people I worked with frequently was a woman named Joyce. She was a squat lady in her 40's with a shaved head and a deep voice-- she looked obviously like a lesbian, but was actually married with kids. We used to joke that he was probably a stay-at-home, prissy father with a name like Francis or something who spent his time on-line looking for new drapery and scented candles.

One of the niceties about working in a back room is that, even during store open times, you can talk freely about pretty much whatever you want, because the customers can't hear you, provided you're not shouting at the top of your lungs. When you get a group of mostly males in a back room away from people in a real blue collar, physical job where you're lifting heavy boxes, climbing up and down ladders, using hydrolic lifts, your conversations tend to get pretty off-color. There was a guy there named Graham who used to tell the most ridiculously sexist jokes you could imagine, the type where even a tattoed guy with a shaved head and a "macho man" goatee would blush. There was a supervisor that worked in our department who used to refer to women as "broads" and would talk about girls that worked in the store and the hideously detailed things he would do to her if he had the chance. And you know what Joyce would do? She would shake her head with an embarrassed grin, as if saying "Boys will be boys".

My direct supervisor was named Ed, and he was a right-wing Christian Republican with virtually the exact opposite views I had on politics, and we used to get into it all the time with political discussions. Ed was a stubborn guy, just like me, but open minded and rarely got offended at anything I had to say (in fact, he would end lots of discussions by grinningly dismissing me as "just a kid", and once I got older I'd know better-- I would counter that he was an old man realizing his imminent death that made his fear and selfishness vote Republican). But you know who had a problem with it? Joyce. In fact, she told management about us talking about politics, and both Ed and I were next to being written up about it-- politics, management said, were not appropriate workplace discussions.

But let me tell you, nobody I knew ever got so much as a crooked eyebrow from management when it came to the horrendously sexist things the group of us would say. I can't tell you how frustrated it made me that when we were to say filthy things that, in all honesty, should have very well gotten us in deep trouble with, we just got a shrug with a dismissing "Boys will be boys," but whenever we tried to get topical and talk about intelligent things that actually mattered, we would get threatened with write-ups. Really, what sort of thing is politics to get offended by? Obviously politics are personal-- I take my politics very personally-- but it ultimately comes down to opinions, and as long as two people realize that's the beginning and end of it, I mean, I might think less of a person because of their politics, but there are a lot of things a person can do or say that aren't political that might make me think of them as less of a person. Just because politics can change my opinion of a person doesn't mean it in any way affects my working relationship with them. And besides, when you're not even involved with a political discussion, what is there to be offended about? That's like complaining about two men who have a heated discussion about sports, which, if you've ever been around a group of blue collar men, they do a lot, and will say really horrible and personal things about one another because of their thoughts on sports-- I've seen men come to work genuinely depressed because their favorite team lost the previous day, and I've seen them snap at the opposition's supporters when they gloat about a win or a loss. But having been around this, how has that affected me? It doesn't affect me at all, so who gives a shit what one person's opinions are over someone else's?

Thoughts about 9/11 many years later

I was reading an article about 9/11 a few weeks ago, in particular about the jumpers. I remembered the jumpers. I think it's perhaps the most horrifying aspect of 9/11-- the jumpers. And then the realization of what would happen to a person if they happened to get under a jumper, what would happen to a fireman trying to rush into this building just hours before it collapsed, if someone fell on top of them. The bodies didn't just fall here and there. They streamed. Four and five at a time. Four or five immediately afterward.

And then, in the ensuing chaos and the media coverage, it stopped. Or rather, the media just stopped showing it. Just like that. Something about people's natural reaction to one of the most horrible acts in American history was just too shameful. Too embarassing. We can't show that. We can show everything but that. For those people's sakes. For the family's sake.

I didn't realize what it meant at the time, because I was so overwhelmed with everything. I did notice that the footage was missing, but I quickly put it to the back of my head, because I was trying to make sense of everything. But reading the article made me very deeply, profoundly sad. Not neccesarily at the people who could not find another way out, but at the reaction that, somehow, this was not valid. Somehow, these people's deaths just didn't happen. The fact that they died happened; you know that because they had been compiled into numbers. But how they died ceased to have ever happened. Their individual acts had been negated and compiled into incomprehensible data.

The artcile mentioned an artist who took a picture of his friend laying on the floor and made a sculpture of it called "tumbling woman", and it was banned from New York art galleries because it was said to be distasteful. I remember reading about this artist at the time, and thinking, wow, it's amazing what some jackasses will do for attention. But when I read his side of the story now, years after the horror of that day, it made me feel bad that I'd ever thought this way, and I'd felt angry that whatever newslink I'd read it on completely misconstrued what was really happening. What was so invalid about an artist trying to express his horror at what was happening? Isn't that we all were doing? The artist did not actually depict any single jumper in his sculpture-- it was his friend. It wasn't the art that people wanted to ignore, it was the fact that this ever happened that they wanted to ignore. But why?

During World War II, once the Americans breached the German concentration camps, Life magazine and other publications printed the most horrible, frightening photos of humanity, and the pictures we printed as quickly as they could be, essentially as they were happening. The prisoners barely looked human; depraved of food and shelter and anything resembling human rights. They were often shown naked, because this is how they were found. No one hesitated in printing them using the "out of respect to the families" excuse because this was history in the making. We needed to know what was happening, we needed to know everything, so it wouldn't happen again. In Vietnam the country saw horrible pictures of families and children, naked, scattering from the horrors of napalm. We saw these pictures and we were horrified, but they happened.

I don't need to know who the people that jumped were. I don't need to know their names. But to ignore that there were people that jumped seems, to me anyway, more disrespectful to the families than showing that they did. Ignoring such a horrific part of what happened that day seems counter-productive. I don't see how the nation could be deemed ready to handle the repeated footage of that day shown for years, but not ready to see certain aspects of it. Making 9/11 cuddlier and easier to swallow seems pretty offensive, doesn't it?

The article went on to detail a particular jumper in a particular photograph, and one man's job to find out who this jumper was. He had it narrowed down to a single family. When he approached the possible daughter and showed her the picture of the falling man, her response was "That piece of shit is not my father."

What I don't think I understand, what I think bothers me the most is that, somehow, America has found this very human reaction to something of this magnitude invalid. I don't get how we as Americans have somehow chosen to judge those poor souls, their eyes watering, their smoke-filled lungs gasping for one last breath of air, their mind trying to do anything to get away from this horror, and somehow, this is invalid. Obviously, I don't think most of us outright think they're "pieces of shit", but by collectively ignoring that it ever happened, I feel like it's effectively making those last moments of their life meaningless and without merit.

For all the comments and observations that America lost its innocence that day, we sure seem so much more willing to close our eyes to things we don't want to see.

Letter to a love I once had

My Dearest,

Baby, I know we've had our problems in the past. When we first met, 15 years ago, it was a match made in heaven. We thought the same, we cared about the same stuff; we were perfect. I thought it would last forever. Then, about in 2000, we started drifting. No, drifting isn't the word. Fighting is more like it. For some reason you were pretending to like the shittiest stuff (Creed was one of the most important bands of 2000? What the fuck?) and you were acting like you were trying to drive me away.

But then, you came crawling back to me, with your Foo Fighters cover, bearing a gift of a Foo Fighter's sampler for One By One (with an exclusive track!), and I hesitantly took you back. God, I've been so happy since we got back together. I feel fulfilled. Happy. Satisfied. You haven't let me down.

Anyway, this letter is just a token of appreciation. You put Nine Inch Nails on your cover again, when every other magazine was bothering with stupid crap. And then inside, there was a feature article on Queens of the Stone Age (who really deserve their own cover feature, but having NIN and QOTSA in the same magazine was still freaking awesome). I haven't been happier in months. And I just wanted you to know I appreciate the little things you do to make up for all those years ago.

Hugs and kisses,
M. Drake

criminal in metropolis

If I lived in Metropolis, I don't think I would be a criminal. I'm sure most criminals think, hey, Superman's busy fighting off intergalactic super villains from another dimension, so he has no time for me. And the Metropolis police are pussies who rely too heavily on Superman. So hey, I'm gonna knock off a jewelry store.

Not me, though. And it's not just cuz I'm a decent fellow.

Imagine Superman just got back from another dimension where Lex Luthor is worshipped as a God. Or say he's just getting over a really nasty Penance Stare from Darkseid. He's having a bad day. And here's your dumb ass robbing a bank. So he swoops down and grabs the loot, but instead he pulls a little too hard, and off come your arms. Or say he tries to tap you but it accidentally turns into a punch and you go flying into telephone wire?

Fuck that shit. All law-abiding for me.

music labels

I was having a discussion with a girl eight years my junior about music. She'd said she likes "all kinds of music", which, as I've said before, is a bad sign to me, because while I, in fact, listen to all sorts of music and have CDs and MP3s for just about every major genre of music, I still pick one when someone asks me what I like. Because to me "all kinds" means "I don't listen to any music with any seriousness," so it's a red flag.

And then the word "alternative" came up."

Here's the problem with the word "alternative" and I. I like the word "alternative". I like what it means. Music that cannot be classified in other categories. Different. Something else. It fit my music tastes. It's how you could find a connection between such disparate sounds as Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, and Bjork. "Don't try to classify everything" my snobby art friends would say. But that's the whole point to "alternative". It's a way of classifying music without classifying it at all. How anti-system is that? It's anti-everything. It's anti-anti-conformity. The definition of the post-ironic 90's.

And then, not-so-ironically, the word "alternative" came to be used for such made-for-radio sludge as matchbox20, Candlebox, Seven Mary Three, and a slew of shit that destroyed radio, which later turned into bands like Puddle of Mudd, Three Doors Down, and Nickelback. What's so alternative about that? And now, an entire generation of kids has grown up with the totally wrong idea of what alternative music is.

My friends all hate the word "alternative music" because it was ruined for them. Which frustrates me, because without that word, I have no idea how to describe my tastes in music. Indie rock? My favorite band of all time also happens to be everyone my age's favorite band-- Nirvana. What's so indie about one of the highest selling, most important bands of the 1990's? Or The Strokes, which never even had an indie album? Or Postal Service, a band that is the most sugary-sweety pop music ever, and has been name dropped constantly on The OC, of all places? Well, they have indie attitude, I guess, but my musical tastes don't do the term "indie rock" justice. I've never heard a Pavement record. Never heard Tortoise. The first Modest Mouse record in the house was Good News, their second major label record.

So why can't I have my word back? Why can't I just beat it into all the kids that listen to radio rock to stop using the word "alternative"? Punk rockers do it with their term. "The Hives are great, but they're not punk," they say. Metal heads do it too. "Yeah, Tool's great and all, but it's not really metal." I could do that. "Sure, The Killers are fun, but they're not alternative."

Problem is other alt aging hipsters need to understand the sanctity of our once-beloved term to get behind me and teach the kids a lesson. But they kind of just roll their eyes and shrug and ask me why I have to label everything. God, people like me are assholes.

Me, a gun, and an asshole.

The following is an actual email I sent to my former supervisor on February, Friday 13. That's right, Friday the thirteenth. It's a little long, but it's a really interesting, albeit somewhat scary story that you ought to read.


Ed,

This isn't the email you expected to get from me, I know, but considering what's been going on at work past couple days, I thought I should at least give you a heads up.

Friday, Nick showed up almost an hour late. Which made us all upset because when he wasn't there by 3:15 we assumed he wasn't going to come in at all-- wishful thinking.

It was weird, because after I finished stocking Health and Beauty, I went up to lock-ups where John and Chris Wilson were, and I said, "I just came by to ask you if I'm the only one that thinks if Nick gets fired, he'll come back the next day and shoot everyone." John and Chris smiled in that "this is eerie" kind of way-- turns out the reason Chris Wilson was talking to John was to find out what John thought of Nick, and John replied that we all hated him, but if he got fired he'd return and kill us all. It was funny, yet uncomfortable that all three of us were probably thinking the same thing at the exact same time.

...Turns out maybe we're not so far from the truth.

About an hour later, at 6, Nick and Jose start fighting. Not fist fighting, but... This is how I worded it later to a friend. You know when you're out in public, maybe at a park, maybe near a street basketball court, and you hear a group of grown men right before a fight? You know the noise men make right before fists start flying, the looks they get in their eyes, the way they puff themselves up? Two things can happen right at this moment; either the two of them will start fighting, or someone breaks them up because everyone has this internal instinct that this is what's right about to happen. This whole time I'm right next to them trying to get them to cool down, saying, look, we'll listen to 92.3 until 7-- that's right, another damned argument about the radio-- and from that point til 8 we'll listen to Jose's station, but it's as if I wasn't there, it was as if Nick wanted to fight Jose. They were calling each other horrible names, and Ed, I honestly thought I'd have to break apart two grown men from fighting because I'm standing right there.

At one point during the most heated part of the shout-match, me right in between, Nick says to Jose, "So, I guess you never had your stuff pushed in?" That's right. In those words. Stuff.

The whole time I'm trying to break these two up, and when he says this, suddenly I'm just taken aback, as was Jose. There was a pause in the air, and Jose and I both let out a "What?" simultaneously. In hindsight, it was definitely the most hysterical thing any man could threaten or insult another man with, especially considering Nick's only 5'3" and Jose's got a good foot on him.

"What are you, a fucking fag?" Jose retorted after Nick repeated what he'd said. I would expect that sort of response from a monkey like Jose, and I knew exactly how Nick would react, seeing as how he'd been fueling this fight from the get-go.

Nick froze, his eyes widened. "...What did you just call me?" Nick asked.

I knew what was going to happen next, and I felt like whatever I did wouldn't stop it, and I could feel myself shrinking away back into the aisle that was closest to me. I wanted to be as far away from all this as possible.

Jose finally turned around with a "Fuck you, man, forget you," and walked away, and Nick-- and I'm standing maybe five feet away from him at this point-- got this look on his face as if he were unsatisfied with the outcome of the argument, that it indeed was not over for him, and he darted-- he made a freaking bee-line-- over to his jacket, and pulled something out of his pocket, which he shoved underneath his shirt.

...Ed, you know there's only one of two things a man will reach into his jacket pocket for immediately after a heated argument, and neither of them are good. I guarantee you he wasn't whipping out a poetry book to write down how angry he was. I thought he was going to shoot Jose right in front of me.

...He tucks it into his shirt and he looks up at me-- we'd made eye contact maybe three times as he ran up to his jacket to get whatever it was, as if deciding whether it was worth doing in front of me or not, deciding it was worth it because maybe I'm too afraid of him to tell or whatever the hell was his thinking-- he tucked it into his shirt and looked up at me and gave me this dirty look, as if it were understood that I'd better keep this exchange to myself.

After much internal debating, I told Judd about five minutes later-- I had to take a walk around the store a couple times to cool myself off, and also to decide what the hell to do. I wouldn't have even hesitated if he didn't freaking see me watching this exchange, but he looked right up at me, he knew I knew what was about to happen. And if I were to tell, I didn't want this guy after me for snitching. But on the other hand, I couldn't stand it if I had known this all along and Jose got shot or stabbed.

...Long story short, nothing happened. After I told Judd, he went and checked out how things were going, didn't mention anything to them that he knew about what I'd told him, said he didn't see anything under Nick's shirt, which simply means that Nick put it back-- maybe it's because he knew I was standing there watching him.

But it gets slightly worse. Nick and Jose continued to argue fiercely and loudly throughout the rest of the day, and Nick left at 8:30, without any explanation to Judd, telling only Will, "I don't need this shit anymore."

For job abandonment, Judd told the operator to call him and tell him not to come back until you contacted him.

End of that, right?

He showed up this morning at 3:00am sharp, asking, "Where the fuck is Ed?"

Judd told him that you weren't there. Nick said, and I'm quoting here, "I've got a couple bones to pick with Ed."

To make matters even worse, I got confirmation from Joey that it was indeed a gun. I know Joey's a lying sack of shit, but the way it was brought up in conversation I know he wasn't lying about it.

On Saturday, Joey, who wasn't there on Friday, asked what happened to Nick, since he was supposed to be there that day. I informed him that Nick had been fired.

"What, because of the gun?" Joey asked jokingly. I looked at him with a "How in the hell did you know?" face, and his eyes widened and his face turned white. Turns out Nick and he were talking about how Joey lives in a bad neighborhood, and Nick offered to sell his spare gun, which he said he had on him. Joey assumed it was bullshit, because Nick's the kind of wanna-be thug trying to make himself look tough. Joey took it as a joke. When I told him everything that happened on Friday, he got really scared and nervous. Again, Joey's a lying sack of crap most of the time, but he brought up the gun thing before I ever mentioned it.

...I don't want to get you paranoid or anything. Maybe Monday will go by without incident. But I know Nick had a weapon on him on Friday, and intended to use it-- he either decided it wasn't worth it, or didn't because he knew I'd seen him, but the point is this maniac had a weapon on him at work, and now that he's been told not to come back to work, he wants to speak to you.

Maybe nothing will happen, but jeez Ed, I would never forgive myself if he did something we're all going to regret on Monday and I didn't warn you, knowing what I know. Security is aware of him and what happened, Judd and I were told that head of security would check the camera tapes, but it's Target security for Christ sakes. I don't trust them to secure anything.

So, basically what I'm saying is, be warned, that psycho little shit might show up at work on Monday with intentions other than to just talk to you. And he was there 3am sharp this morning, so he was trying to catch you before you got in. As it is, I myself am incredibly hesitant to go in on Monday, considering I'm the one that alerted everybody to him, and while he doesn't know who knows other than me, I'm sure he could figure it out himself that I'd tell someone.

--Matt
-----


While Nick never returned and shot up the joint, he did call three or four times threatening to kick Ed and Judd's ass, and here's another quote-- "Straight up start some shit." When asked exactly what he meant by "starting some shit", Nick replied icily, "You know what I mean."

...And guess what? Nick just moved into my apartment complex a couple weeks ago. I see him about once a week. For joy!

Time I worked for MCI

In January-- in fact, the first week of January-- I quit my job at Target. I miss the people that I worked with but my supervisor that I got along with great had just left a few weeks before me, and even though I liked the new guy, there was talk of changes, and this time, with Christmas time finally over, they were in a place to impliment those changes. My coworkers, by now, are all mostly gone, so I left at a good time.

I work at MCI now. It's slightly frustrating, because when I mention to people that I work there, they assume I mean telemarketting. It seems that everyone I know has either worked there or know someone who has worked there, and their faces fill with dread and pity when I tell them. "I used to work there", they tell me. "I lasted two weeks. I hated it there." It's an understandable response, because MCI is one of the largest employers of out-of-high-schoolers in Chandler, and out of every 150 people hired at MCI, 10 of them are for my department, and the others are for telemarketting. I explain to them that we don't like telemarketers either, that we don't really speak to them, wish they would go away. Then I tell them that I work for telerelay, and they give me a blank face, probably like the one you have as you're reading this.

Let me explain. Relay service is a free, FCC mandated, public service for the deaf. A deaf person has a special phone, as you may be aware where they type to one another instead of talk. Well, if they want to call a hearing person, they dial me and tell me the number they'd like to call. I call that number and say everything the person types, and I type everything the hearing person says. All of the relay operators in Arizona are required to type 70 words per minute, which is way more than it actually sounds. You might think, 70 wpm? I can do that with my eyes closed. The problem is 70 words off the top of your head is nothing, but actually typing dicated words tested at 70 wpm is a much different story.

Because of the fact that there are people's personal phone calls, I can't discuss the content of any calls for any reason. We're supposed to be a human phone line, and I can't become personally involved in conversation, I can't talk about them when off calls, it's supposed to be like they never happened, like I was never there. I can interject to control the pace of calls, ie, I can tell them to slow down or repeat words that were unclear, but if someone asks me a direct question or tries to talk to me, I can't do it.

It's a really interesting job. At Target, my life felt so futile. My job was the backbone of the store, but, as is true of any job like that, we were treated with the attitude that we were completely disposable. In ten minutes time we could go through and make it show that nothing was in the warehouse and make it so that you couldn't fix it in several months' time, and all of us had knowledge of how to do it. It wasn't a secret-- and we could make so that no one would know, yet we were treated with total disdain. As a job, everything we did would be undone the next day. It was a vicious cycle that never seemed to have an end in sight. Everything we did seemed completely futile, yet doing nothing or working in any way at a slower or sloppier pace would just make things worse.

So I've not got a job where I help deaf people all day. And it feels good helping people. It's certainly not the most important job in the world, but to know that I'm helping deaf people live their lives comfortably with a mode of communication that you and I take for granted, it definitely has its rewards. I'm making 20 dollars an hour, which isn't bad-- if I'd've been promoted to supervisor level at Target back in 2001 and stayed there I'd just now be making more than 20 dollars. Plus, I get an attendance bonus if I'm not late, so so far I've made a consistent 21 dollars an hour, which is nice. But what's more is I'm not just doing it for the paycheck like I would have been at Target. When I call up a doctor's office and make an appointment to see the doctor for something potentially life threatening (and when you take how many deaf people are previously hearing elderly people, this happens a lot), you feel good about yourself. But you feel even better when you make a call for someone who just misses mom and wants to check in with her for an hour, or when two young lovers just sit and chat about how much they love one another, that's when you just get all warm inside and you say to yourself, god, sometimes I just love this job.

Of course, since you're dealing with people and their personal lives, this job has its own unique set of frustrations. When you're in training, they tell you the job is stress free, in that it's a stress you don't go home with. And that's true. I don't worry about how many calls I make, how many sales I get. I don't have to worry about calls being too long or too short. In fact, I've been on a call where the text typer obviously wasn't there but wasn't disconnected, and the hearing person worked at a business where they couldn't hang up on anyone, so we both just sat there for 45 minutes before the hearing person was told by their supervisor to hang up. When I was briefly working telemarketting at another company, if someone put us on hold, it was awesome, because our talk time would go up-- the whole thing was talk time, Matthew, your talk time is too low, Matthew, you need to get your talk time up-- but if we were on a call too long, they'd get mad at us, because they knew we were avoiding calls. At this job I've been put on hold for forty minutes. In our down time, we're not expected to keep busy. We're not given busy work. We talk, read, write, play gameboy, whatever we want. On particularly slow days we even whip out the chess boards. The over night crew plays Risk.

The only thing we have to worry about is typing everything the person says, and to that end we do have things on our side; we can tell them to slow down if needed to type everything word for word. Sometimes you'll be having a bad day and can't type for shit, but that's it. That's the only part of our job we need to worry about.

So, it's kind of stress that you don't take with you, but to say it's stress free is untrue. It's a unique kind of stress you really don't have to deal with at other jobs. Since I can't get into details on what exactly can go wrong, let me give you a hint: try doing a web search on IP RELAY fraud and see what you come up with. Also, keep in mind that you can access relay from the computer, so we get lots of bored, idiot teenagers and college students who think it's frigging hilarious to call themselves up at home and listen to mildly annoyed operators saying the words "nigger" and "fag" repeatedly. Or to call their friends and say swear words over and over until they hang up. Or any other thing you could imagine some idiot would do with a service like that, when he could be using the Internet for productive things, like porn.

However, the most infuriating part of my job has got to be ignorance. I know that most people don't know anything about deaf people, deaf culture, and especially not how they communicate with the hearing world. But if you work at a place of business that should never hang up on anyone-- think of a place that you'd try to call for something very important, urgent, possibly even life threatening, and imagine getting hung up on. Now imagine you call up again and barely get out the words "I'M HANDICAPPED DON'T HANG UP" only to get hung up on. Now imagine calling again and not even getting a "Hello?", just getting the receiver picked up and hung up before any words can be exchanged, and you'll start to see what's stressful about our job. I can't get into too many details, but I can say that we don't volunteer the information that the user is deaf, because if you were handicapped and trying to make a call, there are times when you don't want the person on the other line knowing you are. But once the user instructs me to tell you that they are deaf and you still act nasty and hang up... There's a very special place in hell waiting for you, asshole.

20 bucks for advice

I was reading an article in Esquire by a writer named Tom Chiarello, a frequent writer who I've grown to look forward to reading. This particular month he called himself the 20 Dollar Millionaire, who had a big wad of 20s, and would peel one off for everyone who could possibly give him extra, well, anything. For example, he gave a bell hop at a hotel 20 bucks to fill up his bathtub with ice. Why? "Because I have a friend coming with a lot of fish. A lot of fish." It was a lie, but the point was to see what benefits 20 bucks could get him.

While in Vegas, however, he learned that the 20 was more expected than most place. "What can I get for twenty bucks?" he asked someone, peeling off a 20. "Advice," the guy answered with a shrug. So the 20 Dollar Millionaire went looking for advice.

After reading this story I stopped and thought, if someone handed me twenty bucks for advice, what would I tell him? Something deep and philosophical? Or something practical?

I thought about this long and hard, and I remembered something my friend Lisa once told me a decade ago.

She said that she plays guitar fast because she's no good. When you play really fast it's easy to hide the fact that you're no good.

She didn't mean for it to be, but I loved that as a metaphor for life. So, for 20 bucks, I'd tell him the above story, and my advice would be, "Learn to play well. Not fast."

Bathroom Philosophy

My favorite bit of bathroom philosophy? "If misery were a thing of good fortune, I'd be a millionaire". When I first read that I was in a college bathroom when I was 11. It was written right where the person would be if he was sitting on the toilet. At the time I thought it was amusing, but now that I'm a lot older, I think, "Yeah, I've had those kinds of shits, man..."