As many of you may or may not know (or know but simply don’t care), I work for a company that creates ads for phone books all across the country. All of the ad sheets come to us in California, trained helper monkeys like me sort them out and from here they get distributed to various departments within the company. Some of the ads–not shockingly–get sent to India or elsewhere to be built. Go figure.

During my few months on the job I’ve come across many ads that have had misspellings, grammatical errors, or just looked like they were put together at 5 o’clock by someone who just put in his two-week notice. In other words, shitty. And because I can be a pompous ass when it comes to spelling errors (except on my blog but especially on billboards), it’s become a hobby of mine to take phone-cam pictures of the ads and send them to friends for laughs and while I thought about posting a few here after reader Kimberly left a comment about the grammar on the sign in this post, I would be exposing the advertisers at the same time. I probably don’t want to be doing that, especially if I’m going to rag on their ads–or want to keep my job.

So I decided to do the next best thing and post only the text of some of my faves, seen below. My comments, if any, are in italics following each and keep in mind that these ads have already run this way and in most cases, there were no indications to make corrections to these painfully obvious mistakes. And thanks again to Kimberly for inspiring this post!

Quick, Eagle Eye Cherry! Spot the errors!

• “Over 25 years of serving the citizen’s of Anytown, USA” Serving the citizen’s what?
• “Your Onsite PC Tecnicians”
• “Serving L.A. and Ventura Countys”
• “Exsterior Stone Specialists” Exselsior!
• “Helping the Wrongfully Insured Injured” (text to be corrected on ad)
• “Helping Those That Have Been Injured Since 1970″ What if I was injured before 1970?
• “New Patient’s Welcome”

Then there are the written directions from our sales reps, which are usually good for some laughs. The following are examples of actual written directions from a sales reps, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody that’s ever dealt with one:

• “Very Proffesional” Um, yeah…
• “Add SuperGuarrentte logo” Aaaand these people make more money than I do?
• “Use picture of spider not tarranchewla” Wow, just wow.

Yeah. Yup, that’s what I deal with.

On the health front, I have been refraining from riding my bike to work until I get better. I’m still coughing like a smoker at times and want to make sure I have enough air in my lungs before I ride my 8 miles a day, because dying on the way to work would really, really suck.

That’s all I gots for the night. And again, I still have a few post ideas but I’m waiting until I’m better and can stay up longer. For now, I need my rest. See ya!

Watching @ work. Damn near cried after his daughter spoke. Very moving.

My company is one of the sponsors for Bess the Book Bus, a small organization that promotes literacy by seeking book donations for underprivileged children. For about the past month, we’ve been collecting books for the kiddies while Bess made her circuitous path from Florida to her final destination, sunny southern California. Our incentive to donate: those that gave at least 10 books received a yellow SuperGuarantee cape, suitable for…something, most likely office bragging rights by hanging outside your cubicle (if you are lucky enough to have one).

I had told The Kid the last time we cleaned his room that if there were any books he didn’t want to let me know so that I could give them to the kids that couldn’t afford any. The Kid came through with a bagful of books, and I’m proud of him for being so willing to donate them.

Well, today Bess finally arrived at work to collect the books. Here are a few phone-cam shots:

Bess gets loaded--with books.

The back of the bus. Note the Florida license plate.

The pigeon finally drove the bus!

That last picture is what really got me laughing. You see, there’s this series of books by Mo Willems that center around a pigeon and his adventures that include wanting a puppy, finding a hot dog and as seen here, driving a bus. The books are genuinely funny in that the pigeon does everything he can to convince (the child) reader to let him get his way, a funny way of giving kids a taste of their own medicine.

At any rate, The Kid loves the books and I thought he would get a kick out seeing the pigeon finally “driving” the bus. Oh boy, did he ever.

It was great to see Bess finally arrive at work gather the books up, knowing that they will end up in the hands of children that most definitely need them more than we did. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I earned my cape with what The Kid had generously donated for the cause.

And no, I’m not wearing it when I start riding my bike to work again

Yeah, yeah, so you got a break from me for about a week. For what it’s worth, I had what I believed to be a mild case of pinkeye and what I thought was a sinus infection (complete with headache), which turned out to be a cold of some kind.

That, or this weather is just totally farking with me. I didn’t even ride my bike to work once this week so that gives you an indication of what I really felt like. The good thing (if this can be considered good): I lost a few pounds.

At any rate, I had a few ideas brewing and I will exercise my right to post at least one tonight. And it would have been really smart of me to jot those ideas down on my iPod so I could remember them but instead, I have to rely on my ever-fading 40-year-old memory to try and recall those fantastic ideas I had. What a freaking moron.

Stay tuned…

A screengrab from iTunes a few minutes ago. That’s unreal.

There are very few times in history that you’ll remember so vividly. This is one of them.

Anybody that says they’ve never grooved to one of Michael Jackson’s songs or that they weren’t moved by him in some way or another is a freaking liar. Admit it, tough guy: you know several dance moves from one of his videos, probably Thriller or Captain EO. You may have even done them at a wedding or when really, really drunk.

Either way, his music knew no race, no boundaries, no anything. And that’s what music should truly be: universal.

It’s still rather difficult to believe, but the legend we knew as Michael Jackson is gone, and so is a huge part of my younger years. It’s hard not to listen to his music and be taken back to my teenage years when those “Michael Jackson jackets” were en vogue, along with parachute pants (neither of which I ever owned, although I did have a fake Member’s Only jacket). My brother was working at KIIS FM at the time Thriller dropped and man, it was just madness. MJ was in heavy rotation but because the album was so chock full o’ hits, you never heard the same one twice in an hour. Highly unusual with pop artists these days, and a feat the I think will never happen again.

Then you have the dance moves. There was and will be no equal. You can try to simulate them but even the best dancer’s version couldn’t hold a candle to the master himself. They were almost to the point of  being physically impossible, but he made them look easy.

His music is his legacy and we can be thankful we were around to experience it firsthand. Go ahead and say what you want, but there will never be another performer like him–ever.

When I was still manatee-esque, I tried to unsuccessfully for years to grow a goatee. No matter what I did, the thing just never took off but then again, my face was still round and rather fat. In fact I could go at least two to three days without shaving and you’d never notice much a difference.

Some 100 lbs. later, I’m having to shave daily. This got me thinking: Now that I’m a lot thinner and trying to change my self-image a bit, was it now finally time to try and grow the goatee?

I gave it some thought and, with a little urging by Ann, gave in and started to let the facial hair grow out around my mouth. For comparison purposes, here I am before the goatee:

And here is how I appear now (or at least a few weeks ago):

Is it making much of a difference? Am I not quite as dorky as I used to be without it? Ann says she likes my new look and I’ll be honest, I think I do, too. I did, however, have my reservations about it at first because for the most part, goatees seem to be worn by fat dudes trying to look cool and dickheads with tribal tattoos, but once in a while some facial hair works wonders and makes a dude look pretty bad-ass. I mean, what it did for Dave Grohl:

Facial hair or not, Grohl’s bad-ass in his own right. Unfortunately, I (or my goatee or a tattoo or earring or piercing or any other body modification) won’t ever make me as cool as he. Le sigh…

With all of that goatee madness out of the way, I gotta add this. What in the hell did Disneyland do to beef up their fireworks show? Jesus Tapdancing Christ, my windows rattle when the first ones go off at about 9:30 pm. And while I consider myself conveniently located to the place, I’m still pretty far away. Check out the [Google Earth] map below and you’ll see what I mean:

Click to embiggen

So as you can see, The Magic Kingdom isn’t exactly next door to me, but those damn fireworks are motherfarking loud even at that distance.

That’s all I got for tonight. We’re working overtime all week and possibly on Saturday so I gotta get my lazy ass to bed early each night. Not that the current time of 11 pm is early or anything…

I’ve gotten into the habit of walking during my lunch lately because, let’s face it, The People’s Court hasn’t been the same since Judge Wapner and Rusty left. That’s what I’d usually watch that after consuming my lunch but this week I’ve gotten fitness on the brain and can’t seem to sit still during lunch, so I had to do something about it.

Through the magic of Google Earth I was able to determine that three laps around the parking lot equals a little over one mile. That’s not one hell of a lot when compared to what I used to do at my last job but when you combine that with my daily bike ride to work, it definitely helps.

At any rate, I was coming around the bend on my last lap when I saw my buddy Barney Rubble enter the parking lot in his Hyundai Crapmobile. (Note: Barney’s seen me drive to work in the Escape, the Lincoln, and obviously knows about the bike.) He turned well in front of me and eventually found a space as close to the building as he could possibly get. You know, since that lot is so full and so big…

As he exited his Korean beer can, he saw me approaching. I noticed he had a bag in his hand and he was heading over to the trash to throw it away. Barney spoke up.

“You ride your bike to work and go for a walk during lunch?” he said incredulously. While the fork-tongued lil’ demon inside of me wanted to unleash some very naughty words to my most favoritest person at work, I held my composure as I strolled by.

“Yep, because nobody is going to do it for me,” I said with a smile, like a Cheshire cat that just swallowed a huge mouse–or like Garfield after a plate of lasagna.

“I guess not,” said Barney as he chucked his crumpled-up McDonald’s bag into the dumpster and rolled his globular body past me.

Two cars, one bike, not a lazy motherfarker like he is.

Check and mate, Barney. Check-and-effing-mate.

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Like many businesses, my office has music being piped throughout the entire building. It wouldn’t be so bad but their choice of station leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s KOST 103.5, Southern California’s Soft Rock with Less Talk, and it’s the reason I wear my iPod pretty much all the time while at work. Remember that weird girl you dated with the crazy eyes and the Thomas Kincade, Wyland, and Anne Geddes prints all over her apartment? This is the station she listened to while she read her romance novels. (And no, I’m so not speaking from experience there…)

To put it quite plainy, their playlist sucks. I mean, really sucks. There are only so many times any sane person can listen to this song before they go crazy and yell, “Blind or not, musical genius or not–fuck you, fuckin’ Stevie Wonder!” They also tend to trim the songs if they sound to “edgy” for the station’s format. Screw you, I say. I like my Journey songs with full guitar solos, not completely removed as they shamelessly did to “Lights,” making it at least 30 seconds shorter and only a shell of its former self. Might as well not even play the fucking song if you’re going to do that. I also like Santana, not Carlos Santana featuring some Top 40 Douchey McDouchenozzle, which barely even qualifies as a Santana song.

At present, I take my 8GB iPod Touch to work because I use many of its apps on a daily basis and the battery on my 30GB iPod is almost dead. And up until yesterday, I was beginning to think that the capacity was a bit on the small side–until I hit Shuffle. That makes me happy because the chances of me hearing the same song two days in a row are definitely lower than the chances of KOST torturing the office with another gem from their vast music library.

Ahem. Sorry about all that. Here’s some earwash, or at least something that will get that Celine Dion out of your head.

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After that little hiatus I think it’s time to return to whatever it is I do here, hence the “hack” moniker. So let’s get to the reason I chose to take some time off, okay? Okay.

In my last post, I had mentioned that I wanted to concentrate on doing some screenwriting. As was the case the last time I took time off from blogging, I got nothing done. But ah, I did do some research of sorts because we signed up for NetFlix and had a free preview weekend for some cable movie stations. I watched the following in part or whole:

• I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a fairly amusing little movie in which two straight guys pretend to be a gay couple in order to get health benefits.
• Baby Mama was so incredibly dreadful that it wasn’t worth watching in its entirety even for free.
• Paul Blart, Mall Cop was everything I expected it to be–silly and cartoonish, but funny.
• Superbad, which was just as its title implies.

Meh, it’s a start. And I realized that by not blogging, which is my main form of expression/writing these days, I definitely wasn’t helping my cause. I was itching to write stuff from the day I chose to walk away for a bit and have some posts in the works.

Speaking of writing, I think that after all these years I finally found my voice. A blogger named Harna has left a few comments on some of my posts and when I went over to read her blog, I really enjoyed the cut of her jib: it’s irreverent, in-your-face, and sometimes profane–but always entertaining. It’s earned a spot in my Google Reader for those exact reasons, and has inspired me to let loose even more. You’ll see in the next (edgier) post.

I also did some stuff behind the scenes here at ye olde blogge. For one, I added the Gamer Stuff page which contains my gamer information for Xbox and Wii. Not a big improvement but it’s something.

The second thing I did was change the template only because I needed something else. As usual, it may subject to change at any moment so don’t get too used to the new look.

I’m also growing a goatee and will blog about that later.

And I finally got an e-mail address with my domain which can be seen in the Contact section. I couldn’t do it for the longest time because Google Apps had some kind of fucked-up procedure that never worked with WordPress, but apparently that has been fixed and I’m now the proud owner of an address with my domain. And it’s about freaking time.

It’s good to be back. New posts coming soon!

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