That they liked the store in the mall that was next door to the store that I had almost bought my clothes from.

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

Well you just got back from a hard day at work
your feet are so tired and your boss is a jerk
you laugh because you notice that any ryme
about work pairs up boss with jerk every time
you tear off your clothes and you jump into bed
forget sugarplums, dollars and cents signs dance through your head
you clear out your mind and you consider a shower
but fuck it, you have to go to work in four hours!

you don’t get much sleep, you toss and you turn
you cant close your eyes, but when you open them they burn
you jump out of bed and throw on some socks
you fiddle through feedback on your universal inbox
you mosey to the restroom, then slug down a coke
then muse about the universe and how life is a joke
then another trip to the restroom because you have to pee
and the hours till work have been reduced down to three

you scroll through subscriptions only really half awake
then you find one you disagree with and you stop and you shake
you start up a flame war you know will last for four days
with some renegade conservative stuck on the Obama craze
you read over a blog or two just for the laughs
and you wonder why you picked that word because nothing good rhymes with laughs
you turn to the featured section and plea “will you feature mine?”
but you still must go to work in just two hour’s time

you had a long day, you worked 12 hours on the clock
you gave up your blood and your strength and your stock
you hold on to fading hope that you will move on from this
this day in and day out routine so far from bliss
you know you have ten more hours to give, in the day yet to come
before you have monday off and finally have fun
but with each drip of sanity lost, you pray for a gun
to save you from the one-hour-away work that is to come

so you round up your clothes and again it begins
you wet down your hair to look clean by pretend
you snap on your badge and rummage for you smile
it’s been hiding under these stacks of papers for quite a while
you go back to your blog for one last refresh
and swear to yourself to fight the Obamanator to death
then you lace up your shoes and brush up your teeth
and blame xanga for keeping you from getting any sleep

until next time, good luck with life.

ASCOTT’S INFERNO

 Ascott was a lonely video game character born into a lonely world.  It was a world of unending violence, massive amounts of blood, and a depressingly small number of viable human life forms.  Oh, and absolutely no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Ascott appeared to be doomed to the ill-fated task of mindlessly meandering amongst murky marshes mashed with mutated monsters.  There was nothing really to gain except massive quantities of gold which could only be used for the sole purpose of attaining more equipment with which to brutally bestow bashings upon beaucoup beasties.  Always lonely, and always hungry, yet seeing no end in sight, he acquiescently went about his chores and proceeded to spew more blood than he knew existed.
    Such was his life, until he suddenly met somebody at the local town’s monthly monster mash bash.  He was chatting with one of the local girls who complimented the occasional drab of the universe he inhabited by offering little words except for another quest for him to partake for the purpose of continuing his unexplained crusade against a million or more malicious monstrosities, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a frail girl standing in the corner by herself.  She wasn’t very talkative but after approaching the girl, they established an unspoken sense of companionship, for they both had an unabashed hunger for PB&J sandwiches and both appeared locked in this unending world with no food.  They then mutually decided that together they would set out to give purpose to their quest.  They would search out the demon who had created this universe and condemn it harshly for failing to alot them any sort of rations for their tireless journey.  They would set out to defeat the architect.
    It wasn’t long before they realized the fool-hearty nature of their mission.  This demon clearly had control over the world that they were surrounded by and horrible tragedies befell them.  They were mercilessly taunted with traps and spells that came from oddly placed objects that truly seemed to provide no real purpose except further obstacles in their paths.

    Even their own house fell victim to the architect’s sinister motives.

    But just when Ascott thought that he had had his fair share of abuse on an empty stomach, the ultimate tragedy befell him:  The death of his beloved companion.  He was clearly in a universe of no remorse that shook him to his very core.  And so it was the he began his quest for revenge, vengance, avengefullness, re-avengancefullocity, and peanut-butter sandwhiches.  Though he fought through thick and thin, he sensed that this was only the beginning.

 

Yes, Xangans, I, Nori (AvenueToTheReal), have used my incredible hacking skills to break into Eadie’s account and cause general chaos. Now, you’ll notice nothing on Eadie’s page has changed. There’s a reason for this. I fear Eadie. I think if I was to filled Eadie’s homepage with pornographic images, he would respond by throwing a ninja star into my left shoulder.

Okay, so anyhow, now, for the fun part, where I reveal all of Eadie’s closely-guarded personal secrets:

1. He owns a pink stuffed unicorn.
2. He is friends with Barack Obama on Myspace.
3. Eadie has three testicles.
4. He once ate a baby for the lolz.
5. Eadie only eats green vegetables.
6. He knows ballet.
7. Eadie can stick his own fist in his mouth.
8. Eadie is so manly that he has to inject a hefty dosage of estrogen into his ass every morning just to counter-act it.
9. Eadie’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries.
10. He once asked a lady-man out and didn’t know that the lady-man had a penis and balls until much later.
11. Eadie tastes like strawberries.
12. Osama bin Laden is hiding under Eadie’s bed.
13. Eadie throws scraps under the bed for bin Laden to eat.
14. Eadie can clap with one hand.
15. He once experimented with drugs, but the drugs went to rehab to quit him.
16. Eadie can make a deadly sandwich. If you eat it, you die.
17. John Travolta is gay.
18. Who would win if a pirate and a ninja fought? Eadie would.
19. Eadie has a pair of pink underwear.
20. He once was arrested for scaling Mount Rushmore and attempting to carve his face into it.
21. Eadie has gills and is part dolphin.
22. He once received a parking ticket for accidentally parking is his car in Paris Hilton’s vagina.
23. Eadie knows where Jimmy Hoffa is… in his stomach. MM, OM NOM NOM NOM.
24. He once watched “Howard The Duck” and DIDN’T immediately destroy the video tape, as is required by law.
25. Eadie once had a threesome with himself.
26. Eadie loves watching water polo.
27. He once won a Bowling Trophy for “worst player ever”
28. Revelife is the devil.
29. Eadie once got drunk and wore a lamp shade over his head.
30. Eadie sleeps in a pink Carebears jumpsuit and under that, wears a tuxedo.


There, now you know all his deep, dark secrets. I warned him that if he didn’t play enough Starcraft with me, that I would do this, but he refused to listen.

fin

This man is Barak Obama:

This word is fun to say:

 

The only way I can say this word:

And get away with it, is if I vote for:

    I can walk up to my black friends and say “What’s up nigger?”  When they immediately reach for their concealed handguns I can just calmly look at them and say, oh, it’s okay, I’m not racist, I voted for Obama!  They will then relax, lower their arms from their sides, and say “HEY!!! YOU DA NIGGA!”  and I will say, “Yup, I’m the nigger.”  Then they will say “No, it’s nigg-AH!”  And I will say, “Yeah, I’m the nigger.”  And they will shake their heads and walk away.
    

    Okay, now to get a little more serious.  I am legitimately worried about the direction this country is going to go on civil rights following this election.  But let’s make one thing clear, we should not vote for Obama just because he is black and it will make America finally look like good guys again in the international public.  I personally, have found no real reason for him to get my vote.  Sure, he doesn’t sound like a sleazy political scumbag like we are used to politicians sounding like, but really, McCain doesn’t either.  This is the first election in a while where I can safely say that the two candidates both seem to be decent human beings.  However, I just have this peculiar feeling in my stomach, that if Obama does not get voted in as president, a large part of the black population will feel that the reason Obama didn’t make the president is for no other reason than that he is black.
    Really, it’s not our fault if we just don’t like the guy as much as McCain.  The color of the skin should have nothing to do with it, but the amount of pressure the media is putting upon the fact that he is black is going to make every American citizen look like a no-good lyncher in the eyes of most of our African American peers.  Therefor, it is my firm belief that the progress of “civil rights” is going to dramatically change in one of two directions following the outcome of this election.  Either every white person in American will instantly be transformed into a racist, or MLK Jr. will finally sleep peacefully in his grave believing that his dream has been fulfilled.
     Either way, us crackers are still the only race that has been to the moon.

    So if you want to be able to say this:

    Without getting this:

    Vote for this:

    Until next time, good luck with this:

    Just the word “shopping” alone (unless “Home” and “Depot” don’t follow shortly after) is enough to make a guy instantly become tired, uninterested in anything, and a total pain in the ass.  But when you combine the words “shopping” and “sale”, we start to have some serious problems.  Amber wakes me up extra early today so we can go to Old Navy because all their jeans are on sale for 12$ each.  We get to the store and when we walk inside, I feel the testosterone slowly seep from my body.  The line for the register was, I kid you not, one hour long.  One hour to buy 5 pairs of jeans.  I overhear a woman in line behind me who was talking to another woman about how excited she had been about the sale.  The woman behind her said she didn’t even know about the sale and had just arrived to exchange a shirt, she was basically fucked.  The woman who had been excited about it told her a story about how she was trying to get there earlier but her husband had insisted on going to the hardware store first.
    After we escaped that death trap, it was off to round two.  This time, the headache was in the form of searching for bras for her at Ross.  I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to look for bras at Ross, but it ain’t no Victoria’s Secret.  The two way-longer-then-they-should-have-been racks had no order to them at all.  We had to hunt and peck her bra size out of piles of hundreds of these bras.  Basically checking every single bra there to see if it was the right size.  After about thirty minutes of this, after having found the only 5 bras there that actually fit her, only two of them were ones she was comfortable with.  A truly meaningful experience.
    To quote Arnold from “The Magic School Bus”:  I knew I should have stayed home today.

    Until next time, good luck with life.

    So it was another damp sunday morning and I had just come inside from picking up the weekly paper.  I love getting the weekly paper because it is always filled with more knowledge then I could ever possibly need for the week.  Seriously, I never have to watch the news, listen to the radio, or go to church as long as I have a Sunday paper to do those things for me.  However, as I mentioned, today was a damp sunday, and our crummy paper boy had managed to score a field goal directly into one of our rose bushes with his killer accuracy.  So at great cost to my arm, I was able to fetch it out of the roses, but after I wiped all of the blood off of the cellophane wrapper, I realized that the numerous holes caused by the rose’s thorns had allowed all the rain and moisture in the air to cause my paper to get soggy.  Anybody who has EVER attempted to read a damp newspaper knows that this simply doesn’t work.  A myriad of very important problems arises from this dilemma.

    >  You can’t look all cool and slick by leaning back in your chair and covering your face up with the paper because it will just flop over.
    >  You can’t make that annoying flipping sound that is a staple of sunday paper reading, instead you get a stomach-wrenching slosh that would make Oscar the Grouch puke his gizzards.
    >  You can’t actually read the paper because the pages become so transparent, the images and text from the back of the page bleed through and makes everything all garbled.
    >  When you finally stand up after not being able to tolerate the previous three issues any longer, you notice that it looks as though you have peed your pants due to the puddle caused by the dripping parchment.
    >  You burn your house down.

    How does a damp paper cause you to burn your house down?  That’s very simple, how do you dry your damp papers?  You put them in the oven of course.  Every does this from time to time.  Your paper is a little soggy so you just toss it in the trusty Magic Chef and wait a few minutes, and presto, dry paper!
    What!!! You’ve never done this?  Really?  I thought everybody thinks of doing this when their newspaper is wet?  Really?  Then please tell me why there is a direct advisory against doing this on the owners manual:

    Can you really believe they would think to include this in the operations manual for the oven?  I can just see the editor’s meeting now: 

    Hardly, I’m sure.  It just seems to me that this is one of those ideas that they wouldn’t have really felt the need to include if it weren’t that somebody had already burnt down their house because they left their newspaper in the oven.  Besides, do you think the kind of people that would normally do such a thing would really read their user guides anyway?

    Recipe for Burnt House
      (serving size = 1 family + pets)

ingredients:  Newspaper, water, house, oven.

1.     Preheat oven to 460 degrees fahrenheit.
2.     Dampen one (1) newspaper.
3.     Bake at 460 degrees.
4.     Forget about newspaper.
5.     Serve EXTRA HOT!!!!!

    Until next time, good luck with life.

   
p.s.  the first story was actually fictional.

    Disclosure:  This post will be written not even taking into account the argument of inflation.  Additionally, it will focus entirely on one perspective.

    Here’s a complete breakdown of how minimum wage increases cause more problems than they solve as seen through the eyes of a fast food manager.

    The problem all starts off with this notion by the employees that all of a sudden they are going to be getting more money, because sadly, this isn’t true.  The amount of money that the hourly employees who were affected by minimum wage receive in their paychecks will effectively remain the same.  In fact, employees who were already above the new minimum wage increase are actually now receiving less money than they did in the first place.  In layman’s terms, I will give you my prognosis as to why.
    First of all, the amount of money that the employees gets depends entirely on how much money our store earns in a shift.  Seeing as how their money comes off of our store’s earnings for that shift, if we aren’t making money, we can’t afford to have them clocked in.  There is a number that I have to keep track of on a minute-by-minute basis that is called “labor”.  This number is a percentage of how much of our incoming profit will be going directly to the employees who are working that hour’s paychecks.  If that number is above 18, meaning that more than 18% of the money we are making is going to the hourlies, I have to send people home.  Just because minimum wage is going up doesn’t mean more people are going to come and buy our food, therefor, since we are paying the employees more now than we were before, the labor number is more likley to go up, which means the employees are more likely to go home.  This of course means, they are getting less hours.
    That is just the first problem.  The second problem is a direct result of the first.  Since the employees are getting less hours, that means we have fewer employees on the clock at a time than we did before the minimum wage.  We used to have 8-9 employees clocked in at a time, and now that number has been reduced to 6 if barely.  However, the number of customers we get remains fairly constant, we still receive just  as many orders per shift.  This means that the people on the shift have to actually work harder than they did before.  The short of this is that THE EMPLOYEES ARE WORKING HARDER AND ACTUALLY GETTING LESS MONEY.  To say that this hurts morale is un understatement.  Six employees have walked out (that’s walked out not quit) in the short one month that has passed since minimum wage went up.
    This brings us to the third problem, which is actually a direct result of the second problem (see how this all kind of snowballs).  The fact that the workers are having to work harder, get less money, and not be as enthusiastic about working for a company that doesn’t seem to care about them has a direct impact on quality of service.  Even if the employees were all balls-to-the-wall about getting their work done, the fact that there are less employees simply means the food won’t be getting out as quickly.  When the food doesn’t get out as quickly, and even when it does get out, it appears to have been made sloppily, we begin to lose customers.  When we begin to lose customers, the store begins to lose money, because if there aren’t as many customers per shift, then we don’t make as much per shift.  I’m sure you have probably guessed what comes next.  If we start making less money per shift, then that pesky labor number is going to start to climb again, and we start our whole problem back over.
    In conclusion, minimum wage has begun a downward spiral that may cause problems for many businesses.

    I hope this is one storm we can weather otherwise these grapes are gonna start to get a little wrath-y.

    Until next time, good luck with life.

    And while we’re at it, what’s wrong with being on a website in which you can say anything you want, get away with anything you want, be anybody you want, and express a few of our civil liberties, and God-given inalienable rights? This is xanga for crying out loud. A blog. A place where I can type whatever is on my mind, and get away with it, because this is my piece of turf. I can say nigger, chink, or wetback if I want. I can also say that anybody who says those things is incredibly immature and stupid if I want.

    The point that I’m trying to make is this: obviously, whoever wrote the racism posts wanted to see other people’s opinions about THEIR opinions of racism, you can’t say they didn’t want this, because they obviously made them public. So feedback has to be expected, but backlash is something entirely different. Bashing somebody for having opinions is rude and wrong. Of course, this in itself is a bash of those people’s bashings.

    Life is truly a cruel and vicious cycle, but until next time, good luck with it.

    Maybe we should all just get over our fucking selves.

    Every professional institution has issues with graffiti or vandalism at some point or another.  At the sonic where I manage, we have problems like this quite frequently, but a few days ago, we received a form of vandalism that we had never experienced before.  In big, bold letters, somebody had tagged our supply shed with the words “Jesus loves you.”  A very simple, yet jarring message for those not expecting it.  The shed is positioned in such a way on our lot that almost any car at a station or just driving by could have a clear shot at seeing it.  Normally we have paint for the purpose of removing the vandalism from our buildings on hand, but at this particular moment, we were actually quite out.  It was two whole days before we were able to get more paint to cover the graffiti up.  It was my task as manager to make sure the graffiti got painted up, I would have delegated it on down the line of course, but we have these wonderful things called liability issues that prevent people like me from doing that.  Little did I realize however, that I was taking on the role of “world’s biggest asshole”.
   See, this little message had been up there for two whole days, and we have quite a few regulars come through where I work, so it’s safe to say that this thing was noticed.  So I’m walking out there on this hot, sweaty day, dressed completely in black slacks and a black button-up, wielding my bucket of paint in one hand, and a brush in the other, and I set out to play devil’s advocate.  I begin going over the colorful graffiti with a message of profound love with the most distasteful color of off-gray you have ever seen in your life.  I can feel about 60 pairs of eyes from the parking lot bearing down on the back of my neck.  I was being a jerk.  Cars drove by, rolled down their windows, honked at me, and a few of them even called me an asshole (because that is definitely what Jesus would have done).  How tempting it would have been to just hurl the bucket of paint through their front windshield – in the name of Satan, of course.
    Sure, it wasn’t the most offensive graffiti in the world, but it was unquestionably vandalism.  Sonic has to be a public place and sure all it says is “Jesus loves you” not “Believe in Jesus or die”, everyone’s opinions have to be respected.  What would have happened if we had left the message up there?  Probably nothing, but it wasn’t so much the result of the act, as it was the principle of it that really mattered.  What if I went up to the dumpster of a church and spray painted the words “Sonic has really good food” on the side of it.  Would that not in essence be the same thing?  But you can bet your ass that there would be volunteers out there the very next day with a few bottles of $2 spray paint covering up my harmless statement.  While at the same time, would I have been considered such a prick if I had been out there at sonic covering up graffiti that read “Tom Cruise loves you”?  I think not.

Obviously, this is not a picture of the graffiti I had to cover up, it’s just an example.

    Until next time, good luck with life.

    ps.  I rock