Moving :(

I'm sure this might come as a shock to some, but I'm about to actually use my blog in the way that Blogger intended: as a blog! This might set the world on the way to destruction, I know, but it needs to be done. Here's why:

1. I have a job.
2. I have to move out west in order to do said job.
3. My only internal reference point for moving out to the west is The Oregon Trail.

The first two points are fine. It's the third that has me tossing and turning in my sleep and generally wondering how in the world I'm going to handle this. I'm sure someone managed to do a solo run of the Oregon Trail game, but I'm also quite as certain that anyone who tried it back when people actually used the Oregon Trail either went mad or stiff, likely the latter. Heck, even the Lewis and Clark expedition, despite it's two-person naming convention, had 33 people to its name. All I've got is a father who will go with me on the condition that we stop in Arizona to see the Meteor Crater as featured in Starman and a car my mother not-so-lovingly refers to as "the garbage scow." Needless to say, the journey will be long and perilous...

According to the Internet's calculations, the journey would take about 36 hours total if I went straight from Pittsburgh to Lomita. Adding in the requisite trips to St. Louis and the Meteor Crater increases that number to about 45. Thus, it would be possible, though unwise, to make the trip in three 15 hour days. While this would likely give me a good inkling of what work will be like, considering the possibilities of madness, sleepiness at the wheel, and death by dysentery associated with driving for a lot longer than one should in a given day, the driving is a lot more likely to be split into 4 days of 12, 12, 12, and 9 hours.

Frankly, I'm not looking forward to it. The employment is great. The not living at home and finding my own place in California near friends is great. The 45 hours in the car is not so great, and if it wasn't the best, cheapest option available to me for moving there's probably no way on earth I'd consider it. There's every chance that all my portable entertainment electronics will burn out trying to keep us sane, including my computer, which has a go at itself every time I watch any sort of video. I can't even find out why Billy Mays is hitting himself with a hammer without the computer trying to melt into slag, and frankly, it worries me. Alas, the die is cast and my fate is sealed. Starting this Wen... Wedsne... that day in the middle the week that no one likes, I'll be on the road. Any ideas for how to make the time pass more quickly are more than appreciated, as are visitors once I get my own place!

The Ten Subway Commandments

Imagine that you’re watching House M.D. In this episode, a random woman is walking in to Subway to get her lunch. Since she’s the first person on screen and the camera is following her, you expect that this is the person who will soon fall victim to a terrible and likely disgusting illness or condition. As the seconds pass by, she waits in line. The camera pans and flies by and then finally zooms in on her eyes. Where is the blood? What orifice is unpleasantry about to erupt from? As the music builds to a fevered pitch, the woman we are tracking reaches for her cell phone and dials 911! The obese woman in front of her has collapsed beneath a pile of 13 foot long Subway Sandwiches. Cue the title theme. To make a long story short, it’s not lupus, nor is it any disease that House or any other fictional doctor has ever heard of. Heck, there isn’t a real doctor alive who could figure this one out. It’s because this woman has been stricken by an affliction that most don’t even consider to be an affliction: she’s a douchebag.

While I consider it an affliction, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to agree. Some even revel in the fact that they make life worse for other people by being unreasonable, unruly, and generally unlikeable. The thing that’s really set me off as of late, however, is the fact that I can’t even walk into Subway without encountering a terminal case of douchebaggery. I say terminal, because one of these days they’re going to be in line in front of a bona fide gangster, who will proceed to lodge a bullet into their skull by means of a metallic projectile delivery system. It’s not that hard to be a decent person in the Subway line. It really isn’t. That’s why when I see these people and their 13 sandwiches and their quadruple portions of 7 toppings that take a full half an hour to prepare, it makes me angry. As a guide for those who think they may be afflicted by terminal douchebaggery and hope to avoid becoming a corpse or a case for a fictional genius curmudgeon, I’m afraid the best I can offer is these Ten Subway Commandments. Why Ten Commandments? Because they need something better than the “5$ Footlong” commercials to play during Charlton Heston’s 6 hour stint on national television every Easter.

I. Thou shalt not order more sandwhiches than thou possess limbs to carry them.

This one seems pretty straightforward to me. You’ve got two hands. Each hand in an ideal world carries one sandwich. Thus, unless you’re one of the X-Men or a fugitive on the run from the Men in Black, you’ll be ordering at most 2 sandwiches. If you’re there with a group, the entire groups sandwich count shouldn’t exceed the number of hands amongst you. Really, it’s not that difficult. If the rest of the folks at the office want a sandwich, they can come get it themselves. If you really need to feed the entire office, phone it in! There’s a reason they offer that service. It’s so that you don’t piss me off by standing in front of me and ordering enough sandwiches to feed a small army.

II. Thou shalt not place a salad atop thy sandwiches.

Alright, perhaps a little vague here, but certainly not as vague as “honor thy father and they mother.” The point here is that the toppings are just that, toppings. Not separate meals. If you want a salad order a salad. Your sandwich should not look like the side of a geological dig in which you can clearly tell which era each block of toppings was placed in. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Sandwich artists hate putting toppings on your sandwich. They especially hate doing it for two minutes because you need to make sure the topping distribution is perfectly vertically symmetrical.

III. Know what thou desirest.

There’s nothing worse than seeing someone walk up to take their turn at the counter and then freeze for five minutes while they figure out what they want, especially if they’ve been waiting more than that amount of time. I mean, what are you doing while you’re in line if not deciding what you want to eat? The New York Times Crossword? The Jumble, perhaps? Lord help me if I see you filling in a Cryptoquip instead of deciding what you want to eat I’ll force feed that paper to you before you can claim to have great “Fort-itude.”

IV. Thou shalt not screw it up.

Let’s say that you do know exactly what you want. It’s your responsibility as a human being to get the words out of your mouth in a manner which another human being can understand and act upon. They’ll definitely do their best to confirm with you what you want before they go racing to finish your sandwich. If your words are perfectly clear, except the words you use aren’t the words one would need to hear in order to create the sandwich to your specifications, it is your fault, not theirs. Yes, they’ll fix it to you, but it’ll also drive them one step closer to axe-crazy.

V. Thou shalt not change thy mind.

No real explanation required here. There’s no excuse for waiting until your sandwich is all but completed and then deciding you actually wanted a totally different sandwich. Jerk.

VI. Thou shalt keep the details of thy personal life personal.

I think the thing that gets me the most when I’m at the Subway waiting behind a douchebag is when they’ve got their little earpiece on and they’re screaming into it as if they need to drown out the noise of a passing train. Two things. First, it makes you look like you’re a lunatic screaming at nothing and no one in particular. Second, I don’t want to hear about what and who you did last night. I really, really don’t. I don’t even know you, so what makes you think for even one second that I want to hear about the fantastic sex you had last night. Trust me, I don’t. My worst Subway experience involving the details of someone else’s personal life was the one where I had to put up with the guy in front of me flipping out at his girlfriend over the phone because she had called to tell him she’s pregnant. Unlike Argus Filch, I don’t miss the screaming.

VII. Thou shalt not get it on in line.

No, really. You’re there to order a sandwich, not play tonsil hockey. Hands definitely shouldn’t be beneath clothes and really shouldn’t be grabbing, stroking, or poking anyone’s naughty bits. If you can’t keep your clothes fully on in Subway, you might have a problem. Who am I kidding, you do have a problem. Get a room and let me order my damn sandwich.

VIII. Thou shalt not criticize the sandwiches of others.

Maybe you think you’re being friendly or helpful, but you aren’t. There’s a reason that I get my sandwiches the way I do. It’s because I like them that way. Not the way that you think I should have it, but the way that I do have it. That’s the one I like. Your opinion is about as useful to me as a condom dispenser in a monastery.

IX. Thou shalt not talk to me.

This is different than VIII in that VIII tells us that we should all respect the sandwich preferences of our fellow men and women. This tells you not to talk to me. Sure, I might make an exception of you’re a beautiful girl that just has to give me her phone number, but there’s a good chance that doesn’t even require a full-blown conversation, which is the thing IX is trying to prevent. I don’t go to Subway to talk about the weather or the recession or the most reliable way to out a female spy. (PROTIP: Get her pregnant and check which language she screams in during childbirth.) I go to Subway because I would like a sandwich.

X. Thou shalt not go to Subway in the first place.

Like abstinence, the only safe way not to appear to be a douchebag in Subway is to not go to Subway. Also like abstinence, it’s not very fun. If you don’t think you can follow Commandments I through IX, try taking X for a spin for a while. Who knows? You might enjoy it! No one will notice the jerk-shaped hole in the surroundings.

Quiz Show

If your Facebook Friendz™ are anything like mine, then they’ve no doubt been inundating you with requests to take some of the many personality quizzes available on the popular social networking site. There’s not an hour in the day that I can’t get online and find out that if Friend A was a Pokemon, he’d be Jigglypuff or that if Friend B had a celebrity best friend, it would be Kim Cattrall. While I personally find the entire thing silly, I find it quite interesting that people find such a need to find out how they identify in a category totally unrelated to their life and, in many cases, reality. Maybe they’re doing it for fun, or maybe they have a deep-seated need to learn about themselves from the comfort of their own homes and without any introspection or social interaction whatsoever, but there are people out there who have clearly become addicted to personality quizzes. I use the word addicted because there’s no other possible reason I can think of why someone would want to find out which HIV+ celebrity they are.

Unlike many other types of addicts, however, the quiz junkies show that they still retain at least some sense of shame, dignity, patriotism, or all of the above by absolutely refusing to take specific quizzes offered to them. The numbers are few, but the fact that the quizzes I am about to show you have zero results posted indicates that somewhere, deep inside every “quizzie” exists a level of self-respect that will one day make them look in the mirror and ask “who am I, really?” Whether you interpret that as their salvation or their final damnation is up to you, but rest assured that your quizzie friend, whoever they may really be, was never willing to associate with the results of any of the following quizzes.

Which Assassinated Dictator Are You?

Leading the charge against freedom, justice, and defining one’s personality through interpersonal interactions, it’s “Which Assassinated Dictator Are You?” Seeing this quiz gives you a real insight into the mind of whoever they pay to write this stuff, and I’m pretty darn sure that they do pay someone to write this stuff. In my mind, there’s this young upstart programmer sitting in the basement of a small software development company whose job it is to come up with new and exciting applications for Facebook. Except he’s really bad at it. All he learned in school was how to prompt the user to make a choice, have that choice convert into a point value stored in a different variable for each possible result, and then at the end, return the name of the variable with the highest stored value. How does he keep his job? He’s his own creative team. I imagine the conversation went a little something like this:

Boss: “So, Programmer Guy, have you got any ideas for our Facebook Application Campaign?”
Guy: “Yes, sir. I propose we deliver a series of personality quizzes based on a gender-neutral, cross-cultural analysis of hot trends in the teen world.”

Boss: “What… what does that even mean?”

Guy: “Don’t worry, sir, it’ll be more popular than underage drinking, and a lot more legal!”

Boss: “Well, I guess that sounds good… I’ll go ahead and send you a creative guy…”

Guy: “That’s not necessary, sir. I can take care of the creative myself. Just let me do my thing and our applications installed number will skyrocket.”
Boss: “Well, alright, but you aren’t getting a raise for this.”

As if he even needs a raise. This hypothetical programmer is getting paid to piss me off. Take a look at a sample question from “Which Assassinated Dictator Are You?”

2. Which of these weapons are you most vulnerable against?

- RPG-7 Anti-Tank Grenade Launchers

- Guns

- Knives

- Leaf Shield

These answers, of course, refer to the possible quiz results of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Julius Caesar, and Air Man. I could feel my brain atrophying while writing that last bit, so allow me to refresh myself and enrich your mind by telling you something quite interesting about Julius Caesar. Despite what William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar might have you believe, the man’s last words were not “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!” It varies depending on what sort of publication of the play you read, but many of them even have a footnote to this effect. The version that I read back in high school did not. In fact, the actual last words of the emperor are hotly contested as is the question of whether or not he even spoke any. The only thing that people tend to agree on regarding this subject are that Shakespeare was a damn good playwright and that the line as written was never spoken by Caesar himself. High-school students tend to disagree with the former. Moving on to yet another quiz that’s likely to make you lose all faith in humanity, it’s…

Which Blight on American History Are You?

Who wouldn’t want to know whether they more closely resemble the War on Terror or McCarthyism? I wouldn’t. You probably wouldn’t either. Whoever comes up with these quizzes disagrees, and thinks we should jump right in to answer such exhilarating questions as…

4. Do you care about black people?

- Yes.

- As long as they aren’t Communists

- As long as they aren’t terrorists.

- As long as they aren’t crooks.

- No.

Taking a look at the code reveals that each of the answers corresponds to, in reverse order, the Katrina Fiasco, Watergate, the War on Terror, McCarthyism, and Kanye West’s Career. It seems our programmer friend is not a fan of Kanye West or his music. Everyone’s favorite school children from South Park, Colorado had some choice words regarding Kanye West, and while the episode certainly isn’t one of the best, it’s a lot funnier than an internet personality quiz. Let’s talk about something more interesting instead. Who would you say is most responsible for what we call McCarthyism? If you said Joseph McCarthy, you probably didn’t hit up Wikipedia beforehand. Check out the article if you’re interested in a bit of American history that I hope we never repeat, or continue on to the grand finale…

Which Horribly Disfiguring Disease Are You?

I give up. I really do. If you really want to know which horribly disfiguring disease you most closely resemble, then you’ve got some problems, the least of which is that you’re the guy who designed these quizzes and thought that actual human beings would like to take them. Hopefully between the time when I started writing this thing and the time it was posted (weeks) someone, anyone realized that there is a “bottom of the barrel” when it comes to internet personality quizzes and this is it. I’ll spare you the truly unpleasant details of a sample question and just tell you that the possible horribly disfiguring diseases are lymphatic filariasis, xerodoma pigmentosa, leishmaniasis, and yaws. Here’s an interesting fact regarding what all of these diseases have in common, other than being horribly disfiguring: they will all make you sad if you Google them. My advice is to not Google them.

It makes me sad that day after day I have to turn off my news feeds to various individuals to avoid being spammed by their incessant desire to learn about themselves through goofy internet personality quizzes, but like smoking, it’s a personal choice. People can define themselves to their heart’s content from the comfort of their Facebook applications tab. I’ll keep doing it the old fashioned way.

Job Hunt

I’m pretty much sick of job hunting at this point. What I’ve learned as I browsed through the surprisingly large number of job postings that my degree would be useful for is that my degree is useless because it isn’t backed up by a near perfect GPA, 5 years of experience working for a rival, and/or a contract with the Devil. In fact, with the kind of requirements I’m seeing for some of these “entry level” positions, it’s a wonder that they hire anyone… Or maybe they just don’t hire anyone, double the workloads of their current employees and fire anyone who keels over from exhaustion or dies in-office. Just take a look at the description and requirements for one of the more ludicrous job vacancies I won’t be filling.

Administrative Aide:
Begin your career in the dynamic nuclear power industry by joining the worldwide, motivated team of employees at *company deleted*, the global leader in nuclear operations, experience, and technology. *company deleted* is seeking an experienced Administrative Aide at our *address deleted* in *place deleted* - eventually relocating to *other place deleted*.

The Administrative Aide's responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:
Perform various assignments and related office administrative/technical duties within section or department. Kidnap high-ranking diplomats and hold them for ransom. Run successful smear campaigns. Job duties for this position reflect specific nature of department involved. Ability to apply acceptable computer skills in at least two software packages over and above word processing is required: such as gaphics, database management, spreadsheets, etc., using currently applied office software programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, Access, etc.

SPECIFIC DESIRED SKILLS:High school graduate or recognized equivalent with specific knowledge and training in business technical practices. Hearty laugh and ability to yell for long periods of time are a plus. Must be able to type 50 words per minute. Must be able to Photoshop the faces of rival executives on to embarrassing photos for later release. Green Beret training is preferable.

EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENT: Two years in an administrative assistant function where a knowledge of administrative/office procedures business practices and appropriate software packages have been learned or an equivalent amount of experience in covert operations. Clearly demonstrate application of current software programs, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Photoshop, etc. Proficiency is determined by successfully completing an administrative office software applications exercise/evaluation administered through Human Resources or delivering the head of Superman on a silver platter. Substitution of platter material will not be accepted.

PRIMARY FUNCTION: Perform various “assignments” and related office administrative/technical duties within section or department. Job duties for this position reflect specific nature of department involved. Ability to apply acceptable computer skills in at least two software packages over and above word processing is required: such as graphics, database management, spreadsheets, etc., using currently applied office software programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Photoshop, Access, etc. WORKING PROCEDURE AND/OR RESPONSIBILITY ASSIGNED: THE FOLLOWING ARE THE USUAL MAJOR JOB DUTIES BUT THIS JOB DESCRIPTION DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE PERFORMANCE OF OTHER DUTIES BY THE INCUMBENT. 1. Prepare correspondence, reports and forms. Compose basic routine correspondence and prepare letters. Determine informational sources, weaponry stockpiles, and enemy encampments, accumulate and compile information from general instructions for non-routine detailed reports. Follow-up correspondence; keep appropriate personnel informed of status completion. 2. Use job-related equipment and appropriate software packages to complete memos and eliminate threats as identified by the Supreme Council. 3. Impersonate Billy Mays on command for the amusement of your Overlord. 4. Violate all applicable local, federal, international, and intergalactic laws with impunity as required in the line of duty. 5. Testify before Congress and take the fall for any failed deceptive business practices including but not limited to: price gouging, ridiculous executive bonuses, corporate espionage, regular espionage, and silent bids to create a New World Order to unite the ignorant masses under the fist of our mighty ruler. 6. Kneel before *name deleted*… (it goes on, but I think this is enough to get my point across)

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The point is, there’s not a man or woman alive who can live up to these unreasonable expectations. Let’s say that you’re a black ops agent with a tenuous grasp on reality and place little to no value on human life. You’ve even got some serious experience in all relevant software packages. Looking good, right? Can you kill a dude and then immediately deliver a hearty endorsement for Oxy-Clean? No? Well then you aren’t qualified, bucko! Billy is the skill that can’t be taught. Its job descriptions like these that really demoralize job searchers by setting standards that there’s no way they’d be able to reach without already having the job that they’re applying to for the past 2 years. Sometimes I wonder if people even know what “entry level” is supposed to mean…