The Return of the Nigerian Prince

Well hey there.

How many of you know about the Nigerian Prince scam? You know, the one where you get an email from a Nigerian prince who is trapped somewhere and can't move his money, and needs your help to get out of danger, for which he will share a percentage of his wealth with you for your help. And all he needs is your bank account number to begin the process. For those of you still waiting to hear back from Prince Chetachukwu, I would advise you to make a call to the credit bureaus when you get a chance. 

    <-------- this guy did not email you.

For everyone else, there is apparently an updated version of this for the current events going on. Apparently, a new scam involves using the same idea but in the scope of relief funds to be redistributed, or a small business that needs to make financial maneuvers in order to avoid a crippling bankruptcy, that kind of thing. If you want to read anymore about it, here's a link.

I, like many of you, have been forced to stay indoors and not work, and it has pushed my perspective and focus onto subjects it might not have been previously. Under normal circumstances, I would be engrossed in sports right now, because we would have just finished an NCAA tournament and the NBA playoffs would be fast approaching. The NFL draft would loom larger than it already does, since they are going out of their way to ensure that it can still occur in some form. Still, it is tough to focus on things like sports the same way, even with the early release of a 10-part documentary about the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, called the Last Dance. If you haven't seen the first two episodes yet, stop reading this and go watch those right now. Seriously, this is not as important as that, you need to see it. It's awesome. And I need all the episodes to drop so I can watch the whole thing back to back in one sitting.

But alas, here I am, trying to stay busy, and for the most part doing alright. I've been reading more, I've been working out every day, brushing up on a few types of coding, I've been drinking...less than before. Also, been playing a larger amount of video games online, can't deny that. Oh, and I finally have time to tinker with some more tech-related things I used to study. For example, I was playing around with a virtual machine version of Kali Linux, and I started trying out different exploitation tools on our home wireless network to see what kind of vulnerabilities we've left open on our devices. This one program, Spartan, lets you scan all IP addresses on a network within a certain range and then will give you a rundown of all the different ports that may be vulnerable for each IP address. Another, Wireshark, is a well known packet analyzer that can break down the traffic of every single bit that passes through, detailing where it came from, its destination, what protocol it deals with, which computer port, and what was being delivered. Am I saying I'm becoming paranoid or willing to use these tools for more nefarious motivations?

Anyway, I've been reading and listening to podcasts about cyber security. It's interesting to get perspective, from people that used to exploit for bad or questionable reasons to those who spend all day defending against that first group, people that work in HR of these groups, people that do ethical hacking, all sorts of groups. There's also a ton of stuff on YouTube that either discusses what you're interested in, or actually demonstrates it for those of us that want to become familiar. And they all seem to hit on one idea in one way or another: the most important part of starting a career in this field is persistence. 

Regardless of background, age, initial aptitude, ect., there's a ton of information. And the ones that every group seemed to want to work with were the individuals who never got discouraged, who kept churning and kept trying to learn and would not give up on whatever task they were working on. I suppose there are a lot of fields where a formal education is just as important, but obviously persistence will win out against educated and informed but lazy. At least sometimes. Maybe. Eventually.

I know all about needing to stick with something to get real traction with it, and trying and trying and getting basically nowhere and trying again, and still not getting anywhere, and then getting better, but then still not getting to enjoy it because everyone else around you got better than you. I know all about that. You see, I used to play basketball. Used to.

Well, the honest truth is, I used to be a scrub at basketball.

Picture a goofy, 5'3 kid with long arms and not much coordination trying to run back and forth, dribbling and shooting terribly, usually forgetting whatever plays were called, that had hills and valleys of confidence in what he was doing. All through elementary and middle school, I tried and tried to get better as a skill player who could shoot from all over and could handle the ball well enough to shred defenses and get to the basket at will. I tried to watch enough basketball so I could understand the game and be able to see things happening while the games were happening in real time. I tried to will myself to grow so I wasn't so disproportionate to everyone I had to guard against. 

Didn't work so well.

I was never a very good shooter, for one. It didn't seem to matter how many shots I would take at practice, in the park, or at home on our own hoop. Sometimes it would be consistently close, other times it wasn't. Which is why I think it was always a matter of confidence, which I struggled with all through middle and high school. I used to go to all of these summer camps for basketball and I would work on shooting and ball handling drills , and eventually I became better, not great, at ball handling. But I was always one of the smaller kids on the court anytime I was playing in those days. And in basketball, being tall comes in handy. And, worst of all, no matter how much I worked at it, I always found myself getting too caught up in the moment when the games came down to the wire. I could never slow down and remember what the plan was. Every damn time I was in at the last moments of a game, I found myself watching instead of keeping focused on what needed to be done.

The only real reason I kept making the teams were because of the kind of shape I was in. I could run up and down the court with the other kids and have a lot more energy than they did most of the time. I could defend most kids that were bigger and more developed than me, I could jump with a lot of the taller kids and still come away with rebounds, and I always fed off of the other team's players when they got frustrated. So if I could make a play or two, and it made a difference, then I would get motivated and try to feed off of that.

So, somewhere in between 7th and 8th grade, I was playing a game in the gym and a guy on the other team stole the ball from me. We were right near half court, and I tried to fake him out or something, and he picked the ball right away and was going for a breakaway. So out of frustration, I run after him, and I figured I was too far back to do anything, he was going to get the layup easily, so I was thinking I would just jump up and try to touch the backboard, just kind of to see if I could even get up that high. And the next thing I know, my hand hits something large and I lose my balance as I push against it, and have to kind of twist around to land on my feet. And I realize that the ball is in my hand somehow. 

I later found out that I didn't technically goaltend the other kid's shot, because I touched it before it touched the backboard, so technically it was a legal block. But the thing that stood out in my mind was not that I had made a good basketball move. I was surprised I could get up that high. I had never really focused on it before, but one of our coaches mentioned that I should come out to track and field that spring when basketball was over that year. So I did. I tried long and high jump and ran sprints, eventually doing triple jump too. And you know what? I was a scrub at that too for a while. Among the kids who really knew what they were doing, I was nothing special when I first started.

But I liked it, it was fun to be faster or a better jumper than other kids. So I kept working at it, learned some technique, and kept going, and I grew a little, and got stronger, and eventually I got really good at a few events in track. And so that's what I focused on after my freshman year of high school and ultimately college. I played basketball for two more years because I have always enjoyed basketball, between playing it and watching it. That's ultimately why any of this happened in the first place. I found something I liked doing and wanted to do it better. And I was willing to keep trying to get better even when I clearly wasn't getting better and was embarrassing myself over and over. Maybe that's the best reason that any of us do anything.

Persistence really does matter, even if it doesn't work out for the reason you think it will. Keep pushing yourself, and adjust your approach when necessary. The evolution of the Nigerian Prince scam can attest to that. They say, "find something you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life." My version goes, "find something that you'll keep doing while you suck at it."

See ya later.

Trust Me?

I had this neighbor who moved into the apartment below ours in Madison some years ago, and I got really pissed off at him when he decided to (technically) break into our house one night. Twice. On the same night.

I know, I know, there's way more serious things going on right now. There's a global pandemic that is pushing its way into every part of our lives. Concerts are cancelled, sports seasons are postponed, travel is restricted. Schools are closed, workers are getting laid off, stocks are plummeting and then soaring and then plummeting. And apparently every single mother fucking roll of toilet paper is getting bought up like there is no tomorrow because SHIT IS HITTING THE FAN.

It's important to talk about these things, and we should talk about them, but here's a blog post that isn't about any of that.

Welcome back, by the way.

So the house we lived in downtown was a duplex apartment type place. The ground floor had 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a common room, and it had a front and back door to the outside. It also had a staircase down, which took you to a short tunnel that let you get to where the laundry and some other storage space sat in the basement, and there was a staircase up the the attic, a front balcony, and the door to one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor, where my friends and I stayed. We had our own kitchen, we had the 4 bedrooms and a bathroom, and we had another main door to the alleyway on the side of the house. And we had our own way down to the basement to get to the laundry and storage, which connected with the path that the ground floor apartments had access to. So, even though there were two different places, you could get from one apartment to the other without leaving the house, and we were friends with the group that was one the first floor for the first year that we lived in this building. So this set up made a lot of sense.

It was not quite as advantageous, however, when that group moved out and the random group of guys that took their spot moved in. I'm not saying they were bad guys, just that I didn't know any of these guys and they could have been psychopaths or meth dealers or Spurs fans, I don't know.

Anyway, about a week or two after they moved in, these guys met two of the guys in our apartment, and they hit it off. They had a mini party and got familiar, and I'm told that they gave them the OK to stop by our place anytime that they needed something.

I was not a part of this conversation. I was out of town until the next evening, I don't remember why. But I had no idea who any of these guys were, and at this point we had more random people over than I would have preferred. I had had a previous apartment of mine robbed and wasn't in the mood to invite a similar situation. So I at least had my antenna up for sketchy people hanging around under weird circumstances, especially when no one else was home.

Enter "Woody".

...now that I think of it, I think that really might have been his nickname. I was just going to make one up, but...why?

Woody had been at our place the night before and had learned about the two different ways to get from upstairs to the downstairs side, where he now lived. He was a big dude, like 6'3 or so, muscular with a Robin Thicke-like haircut. I met him for the first time at about 11:30pm on a Friday night because he woke me up while stumbling around our apartment when no one else was there. I had gotten back from wherever I was a few hours prior, and had been tired enough to try to go to sleep. At the time I got back, there was no one home. I assumed they had only left recently, because all of the lights were on, the front door was unlocked, some reggae music was still playing fairly loudly, and the oven was still on since god knows when. You know, the typical way our house looked when I got home. So I shrugged it off, turned stuff off and cleaned up a moderate amount, and quickly went to bed. Well, that was probably around 9:30, 10ish, we'll say.

A while later, I drifted out of a weird sleep to someone stumbling back and forth in the hallway. I tried to let it go for a bit but they just kept bumping into either the wall or the banister next to the stairs. So at the time I figured they were one of my roommates, drunk out of their minds, who just needed help getting the last few feet to whichever bed, or to where they could stand over the toilet or have their head hanging out of the window until their body had properly rejected the proper amount of previously chugged cheap liquor. And I didn't want any of them to fall back down the steps to their possible death, so I lean out of the door to find this big ass goof standing there, looking confused that I'M there, as I try to figure out who the hell he is. And he kind of gives me a half-baked attempt to explain that he's my neighbor and he was at the house last night and a bunch of other shit you might say if you got caught trying to break into someone's house.

So I did my best to play it cool, and I told him it was cool and that he should try to get in through the passage where the laundry machine is, and I lead him down that way and close the door behind him. I didn't lock it, I remembered later, but I just figured he'd get through there and he'd be home. Well, about 10 minutes later, I hear the same stumbling in the hallway, and it's Woody again. And I'm like "Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you already doing back up here?" and it wasn't clear if the door on his apartment's side was locked or if he just couldn't figure out how to get through to his side. Or if he didn't even try. Regardless, he was back up there and it was like he forgot that I was still there. He even got indignant with me, "C'mon man, I was just here last night!" like I'm going to just shrug it off that a stranger is in my house again on such a quick interval. After a quick and spirited debate on why I wasn't comfortable with him yet, I finally reasoned to get him through the other way, through my roommate's side door. I then locked it behind him, and locked the front door so he wouldn't just walk around and repeat this a third time. And so that I wouldn't pummel him to death out of sleep-deprived frustration.

It would later turn out that Woody was telling the truth and was just drunk out of his mind after all, but I never really got past that image of Woody that I started with. I'm not saying it's fair either, but honestly, it just felt that the basis for any real trust was eroded before it even began. Trust, among other things, is very much based on a feeling more than anything really factual. Oh sure, we use facts to justify whether or not we trust something, but we don't honestly need to. Trust can come from truly nowhere, despite evidence to the contrary and tons of people saying they trust the opposite, and you can choose to just believe something that you want to, and that trust can just endure on its own power. It's kind of a crazy concept. It's part faith, part expectation, and part experience.

I'm sure if you think right now, you can find something or someone that has crossed you more than a few times, and you still keep coming back to them, thinking next time will be better. Maybe a friend or family member that is not reliable,  but likable so much that you can't help but give them another chance. Maybe a sports team, that has never won the big championship but will continue to get close over and over again, and you just keep rooting for them because maybe next time they'll not break your heart. You might even believe in certain institutions like banks, political parties, or food suppliers that have had numerous scandals that they never seem to fully reform from, but you just keep giving them your money because you want to believe in them regardless. I get it. I really do.

I think we want to be able to trust in most cases. We want to believe things that we are shown, sounds and voices we hear, smells we smell, and feelings that we get, but those feelings are not always necessarily telling us what we think or want them to. Actually, smell is usually pretty accurate, there aren't many things that have deceptive smells. Usually when you smell bullshit, you know to watch your feet closely. But plenty of things are built or designed to look like one thing yet serve as another. Sounds don't always communicate the full danger that is impending our way, and people go out of their way to show one feeling or emotion with their voices when they truly feel another. And feelings. Oh, feelings and their habit of leading us astray. How do you even trust your own feelings? On one hand, they're always there and you have no choice but to at least consider them, and on the other, there are way too many times that the way we feel about something has absolutely no reason behind it, and we trust it anyway, usually to our own detriment.

I'll say this: a guy I was told about by a friend from college said something to him, and I always thought it was an interesting quote to have. The saying was, "Trust everyone until they give you a reason not to. And then never trust them again." And if that sounds quite ominous and a bit scary, well, it should, because the guy who that quote is from was the head of a teamsters union and, frankly, known to be connected with organizations that I would rather not disparage on record. But the phrase itself makes a lot of sense. Trust is not easily acquired, very quickly can be lost, and may take a lifetime to get back once it has been broken. And then, when trust is lost in one place, it becomes easier to distrust everyone around you, until everyone you meet looks something like this:



For example:

I've mentioned before that I used to work at a car rental company. We got a lot of interesting characters at my location, also in downtown Madison. The majority of the people that rented there were great people, very friendly if not eccentric characters. I had a regular that would always rent a full size vehicle and would freak out if the car was white, but otherwise she was always very nice and talkative. I even met Kurtwood Smith, the dude from That 70's Show, while he was campaigning during Obama's re-election bid. Before you ask, no, he did not threaten to put his foot up my ass, no matter how many times I asked him to.

The thing is, there would also be, mixed in with the good crowd, a much more shady level of customers. There was a good mix but it was still a little glaring when you stop and think about it. You would get these normal folks with families and it would be very straightforward, and then you would get high school kids looking to see if you would "loan them a car for 25 minutes right quick." I had a guy I'm sure was too high to realize which state he was in, a woman who put loose change into the cd player of the car, a guy who paid with check every time just because he could, and oh yeah, a guy who rented one of our Mustang's, only to fill his address out as the post office, keep the car longer than he said he would, and then try to get me to return it in the system before giving the keys back to him so he 'could fill up the tank and run a few other errands'.

I know I'm a bit naive even at my current age, but I definitely have had to keep my guard up at work to not trust too much, because working there I genuinely did want to help people. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get in and out, no muss no fuss. Moving is stressful enough without anything going wrong. But I usually was given some sort of warning before someone was going to do something shady.

Which brings me to an elderly man that came in to rent a moving truck. Let's call him Wendell. Short, small frame but with a bit of a belly. Balding white hair, thick glasses, had a white, buttoned short-sleeve shirt and khakis. This dude had the look of someone's beloved grandfather. Frankly, he looked even older than a Wendell should. Wendell came in without a reservation to rent a small truck, since we usually had a truck on site to advertise that we offered them too. It was a nice quick conversation, he mentioned he just needed to move a few things across town that were too big for his car, and he could probably bring it back after a weekend, and it wouldn't be a problem if he had to come back later to get it. I explained that the truck would be available right then and there for a fairly low daily rate plus a certain mileage charge over 200 miles that he wouldn't even need, and its next reservation wasn't until the following week, so he could get it right then and there if he had a way to come back and get his car, which he said he did. So he got the truck, I got credit for getting a walk-in rental, the company got more revenue. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not really.

I vaguely remember looking at the truck rental part of the system the next week, I saw that we were down a truck somehow and needed to get one from another location. Okay, no big deal. It didn't even occur to me until later to look up and try to figure out why we suddenly needed another truck. Did we get more rentals? No. Did a truck get in a wreck or need maintenance. Nope.

Then I look at existing rentals and I see that the rental from the last week, with Wendell, was still going. And that looks weird, like it could be a mistake somewhere, but isn't the end of the world, we have other resources. And plus I'm still getting credit for an unplanned rental in the system. I'm sure he'll get the truck back to us sometime this week.

So then an entire week passes. Then 2. Then a month. 6 weeks. 2 months. And this rental is still going. During this time, we called to check on the guy, trying to remind him that his daily rate (which was around $30 a day, I think) is still going. Tried emailing him. No response. My manager asked about it a few times, if there was anything off about it. I told him no, because I didn't think it the least bit of a suspicious based on how I met Wendell. He exuded someone you wouldn't need to doubt, for any reason. It didn't even occur to me that I should have looked twice at the rental, and the guy had all of the proper identification, and his credit card worked. So I'm still convinced this is all a big misunderstanding.

And then I received a let from Independence, Missouri.

Which was weird because it's the only letter I had ever received at work for that location. It arrived and just kind of sat on the back desk that we had set up, so I missed that it had arrived for a day or two. The thing is, it wasn't addressed to me, Victor Dupuy. It was addressed to "the very nice man that helped me on [whatever date he rented the truck] who I'm hoping will do me a huge favor..."

So for whatever reason, I finally see this letter and it just kind of clicks who that could be referring to. So of course I open it, and it's from Wendell. I don't remember exactly what it said, but I'm pretty sure I still have this letter somewhere just because of the sheer disbelief I was in for a full day after I read it. The gist of it is, this guy wrote me a letter apologizing for stealing this moving truck. He had no intention of ever returning it back to us after the weekend of when he rented it from me. He needed a moving truck that could take his stuff to where he was moving in Missouri, and he knew it would cost way more to arrange the truck as a one way rental. So he said it was going to be a daily rental (which by the way have both a daily charge and a mileage restriction) and after he was done moving he tried to return the truck in Missouri, which caused confusion on several levels. The place in Missouri figured out where he had driven from and was able to calculate the one-way rate that he actually owed, not to mention the additional fees for doing something different than previously agreed upon. You could easily make the argument that this guy thought he would pull a fast one on us, and it did not work even a little bit.

He went on in the letter to really try to tug on the heart strings. He mentioned he had recently also had a heart attack, then he said he had tapped all the money that he could to try to pay down his debt. Friends and family could not help him, and he was all alone in Missouri and had no one else to turn to, and could tell when he met me that I was a genuinely good person, and would I please do him this favor and honor the return price that I had given him anyway.

Now, there was a split second where I felt bad for the guy as I was reading the letter. I could picture this frail little guy just barely able to scrape by and make this long drive, and doing it in marginal health and at an older age that maybe he got confused with the agreement and blah blah, I tried to at least play devil's advocate for a moment to consider that everything he was saying was true.

And then I remembered that he was a stranger who had lied to my face, stolen rental property from my company that we had planned to use a few times over the past few weeks by then, had tried to return it to a different company for a lower price than he actually owed given the services he had used, and now wanted a favor. And he couldn't remember my name (it was printed on the rental contract).

I'm not saying he was a scam artist or anything, necessarily. But he didn't do things the way he was supposed to and, realistically, trying to help him out of the mess he was in would have constituted fraud. Fraud that would be easily verifiable and would only screw me over too, while not actually helping him. If I closed his rental on site, which was the only thing I could have done for him, then it would look like we had the truck on hand again to be rented. Which we didn't. So that would probably come up, and when it did, the end of the story would be impossible to justify. Everything else was not in my court, and would have to be worked out with wherever the truck actually was. I told my manager about it, and he had a pretty good laugh before fixing it in the system. That's the last I heard of it, since I couldn't help Wendell even if his sob story had worked.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do people favors even when you don't have to. I'm not saying you can't trust your instincts about people, and I'm definitely not saying that you should become jaded and distrusting about old white people that look like they're named Wendell. I'm saying two things:

1. People show you who they are. Believe them when they do. Even if they show you one thing face-to-face and write a letter that's completely different, you still have to take all sides at face value and understand who you're really dealing with. Whether or not you trust people from the start, always acknowledge those that show that they don't deserve it, and always factor that into them as a person moving forward.

2. I've been to Independence, Missouri. It sucks. Serves you right, Wendell, you senile bastard.

Later.

"You're Just a Man"

Supposedly, we are defined by two things in life: our patience when we have nothing, and our humility when we have everything.

This is restated a ton of different ways, I found out. Some are old-timey maxims from grandparents, while others are rap lyrics. "Same people you misuse on your way up, you might meet on your way down" to "Started from the bottom, now we're here" kind of stuff. And keep in mind, having nothing or having everything are very relative terms. But the general point still stands. What we do with what we have (or don't have) matters.

Plenty of people know about the movie, Gladiator. It did win Best Picture in 2001, so, yeah, go figure. Surprisingly less people know that it had some actual characters from history. But I don't want to talk about Russel Crowe's character, Maximus Decimus Meridus (I should though, people would read a blog post about a vengeful gladiator). No, I want to mention the guy played by Richard Harris. The character was Marcus Aurelius, who in real life was the Roman emperor from the years 161-180. The whole thing from before about what how we react to having nothing or everything, that's attributed to him. There's a story about him, that he had a servant follow him around, everywhere he went, for a particular reason. Anytime someone gave praise to Marcus, for whatever huge or small thing, this servant would lean in and whisper to Marcus Aurelius, "You're just a man." First of all, awesome job to have. I wonder what the application for that must have been like. But second, such an important thing to be humble with that level of power.

Here's a sculpture of Mr. Aurelius, looking like his bad self:



Funny thing about it, we're usually very interested in humbling the man at the top, who has everything. In my opinion, we're much more accustomed to shrugging off those of us that have nothing. Those of us that, some might even say, are nothing. Despite the fact that there are way more of us out there who are and/or have nothing, that could be infinitely higher and may bring more to the world. Those of us in squalor, in filth, on the very bottom, with little to fight for and even less to fight with, those are the people who need to hear it just as much: you're just a man. You are not an animal, you are not a monster, you are not a screw-up, a waste, an obligation, a douchebag with no future of non-douchebagery. You are just a man, or woman.

And don't get me wrong, maybe you are, and maybe you aren't all of those things, because frankly, we're probably all those things at individual moments, but we don't have to be for our entire lives. It doesn't have to define us... necessarily. I should put an asterisk here, because some us are capable of great things, and we should definitely get credit for them. Others will do terrible, really awful shit that we shouldn't get to just brush off because it's inconvenient to us.

But perhaps the great majority of us should have someone who always is in our ear, reminding us that we are just human. You snag the winning touchdown in a backyard game a football? "You're just a man." But then you drop out of college and get a dead end job at a factory? "You're just a man." But you work your way up and become the best supervisor they've ever had? "You're just a man." Ooh, but you dropped your coffee in the car and knocked down a telephone pole. "You're just a man." But then you saved a family of Korean immigrants in the next car who were about to all be killed from an explosion? "You're just a man". The cops found weed and cocaine in the car you were driving? "You're just a man. Whose under arrest for felony possession." But it comes out the drugs were planted on you, and you take down a bunch of corrupt cops and get a key to the city from the mayor and... I don't know why I'm still going with this, sorry.

As per usual, I have a story to back up my theme of this post. But for once, not my own. I'm going to tell you a quick story about someone who I don't think would tell their own story quite this way. And I don't have to worry about not saying his name, because I didn't actually meet the guy, but I was present for what I have to believe was both a huge high and a sequence of lows that followed. Here's what happened:

A few years ago, Tara and I were coming back from Greece where we spent our Honeymoon. It was an amazing 2 weeks at 2 different islands, and had amazing pictures, and all these fun trips we'd taken, and we had tour guides in a few spots, and the food was outstanding everywhere. But at 2 weeks, it was time to come home and we were ready to be done traveling. And getting back from Greece is, to put it mildly, a huge pain in the ass.

We had to fly into Athens at like 11PM and stay overnight, because there was not going to be another flight into Athens in time for our 6AM flight to Amsterdam. So, we camped out in a hallway in the airport in Athens. I think Tara got a few hours of rest, whereas I didn't sleep at all. Then we get on the flight to Amsterdam, in which I did my best to rest but didn't, and had a slight layover there before flying to Atlanta. Now, I definitely got a few hours of rest going to Atlanta, but I got kind of jostled a few times from the guy sitting behind me on the flight. I got clocked in the head a few times by his elbow or something else, so I kept waiting for him to do it again, and I was now not only exhausted from traveling but much more irritable than I might otherwise be.

With that in mind, we get into Atlanta, and our flight out gets delayed. There was this huge nasty storm that had just come through the are, but we were flying in the direction that the storm was traveling, so we had to wait for it to clear out. And we were in a terminal that was under construction, and the flight was overbooked, and there was a huge crowd of people in the same boat, all trying to get on this flight, all crammed in the same area, and all seemingly just pissed off from having been in transit for hours and hours with little sleep or food.

With that in mind, Tara and I are just standing there in the middle of this crowd. And it just so happens there is this large group of about 20-30 Irish nursing students trying to get on the flight with us. They are all really cute, they are all petite or petite-ish, and stylishly dressed, and there are a bunch of little groups of them but it's apparent that they're all there together. Also in the immediate vicinity is an incredibly goofy looking individual that I'm going to call Marvin for the purpose of this story. I don't know what his name actually is, but damn if he didn't look like Marvin.

So Marvin, to set the picture up right, is about 5'6, husky but not fat, with the Chili Bowl haircut, wearing a conspicuously strange t shirt, it had some item on it like 'television' or 'radio', something that you would never expect needed to make a t-shirt for in the first place. Almost like the only reason you would wear it was because you didn't know what t-shirts usually had on them, and you chose the weirdest possible one but no one ever said anything about it. He had rainbow colored tube socks and painfully white shoes as well. And you're probably wondering why I remember all of this, and honestly, I kinda wonder that too. I'm telling you, this guy just stuck out that much, I had to take a mental image that I can't just delete after all this time. It was like the 80's were in the seat next to him on the previous flight and threw up on him when the vomit bag wasn't there.

Now, again, I'm sleep deprived, I'm hungry, and I'm annoyed at the travel delay. So I'm not in a great mood, and neither is Tara, so we're both just standing there, waiting for our tickets, not really listening but just kind of hearing things around us. And we both hear what I was sure is the absolute worst pickup line of all time:

"Hey, can I ask you guys a question? Do you think I should get my eyebrows waxed?"

...

So I could tell from the voice that it was Marvin, and Tara knew I heard the same thing she did, so she gives me a light slap on my shoulder as she says, "Don't look." Because I was totally going to look. I was going to give one of those, "The fuck you just say?" type looks. And I basically did anyway a few seconds later. But I'm sorry, did he just fucking say that? All the ice breakers in the world, all the way you can start a conversation, and THAT was your top choice? What didn't make the cut? Inquiring about which anal lubricant is best for giving colonics? But that was what Marvin went with, that was what he decided to use to start a conversation with two very attractive 20-something sporty Irishwomen. Imagine the cajones that must have taken.

So you could imagine my surprise when the aforementioned crater of a pickup attempt netted an actual conversation. Not just a quick response of something like "uhhh, sure I guess." No, these two actually engaged what he said, and mentioned a few male friends they had that did something similar. And they mentioned some trends in fashion that supported him thinking of his body and his style in a different way. It was a surprisingly compelling conversation, and he had a decent thing going. I was impressed, and so was Tara. We sat there and listened to a good 5 minutes of this guy pull a damn clutch move.

And then, it seems that time caught up with him. Because the conversation ended. There was just a lull in the interaction, and any normal man would have understood that they needed to either have a normal kind of next step, or to just accept that the moment had passed, and to move on. And that was almost what Marvin did, because he did make real attempts at making a normal conversation happen, but it went a little bit like this:

Marvin: So what kind of work do you guys do?
Irish student: We are all in the same nursing class, we have a trip for the next month and a half  for the end of our program (it was something like that, I don't remember that part anymore)
Marvin: Oh, that's cool. You should let me develop a website for your group so you can get good exposure. I would just need your contact information.

I got another shoulder slap not to turn around when that one came out, because it was the worst of a few real attempts for him to turn a hell of a ice breaker conversion into what I can only assume he thought would be a sex filled summer fling with way too many slutty nurses. And I'm not calling them slutty, because none of them necessarily gave off that vibe, but I somehow think the concept of what Marvin was pushing toward involved copious amounts of no-strings-attached sex for this random of all random dudes. I know, I know, I totally judged Marvin in this way. Get past it.

Also, we were not the only ones to notice this conversation go south. Other passengers in ear shot made eye contact with me when I started giving off the looks of, "I'm uncomfortable, and this shit isn't even happening to me". I came close to turning around again, and trying to put a verbal stop to it. Just, literally waving my hand in the air and saying something like, "Dude, it's over. You have to stop this. Please don't creep them out anymore than they already are, this is not going to get any better."

There was no real climactic end to this. I didn't look to see if he actually walked away on his own accord or if the girls found a way to slink away or even other nurses helped them find another spot to stand for what ended up being another 30 minutes. But that was about as uncomfortable as you can think to just sit there and try to replay what you've done. It's not even like I would have known what to say to someone that experienced such a range of success and failure in a small amount of time. But maybe he didn't need anyone to give him a proper recap of this experience. Maybe he only truly needed someone there to say that they understood what he was trying to do, and they still were rooting for him in his never-ending quest to overcome those damn socks (for real, it was a PROBLEM). He could have used pointers, he could have used encouragement, he could have really benefited from just a hug and a different shirt with some sweat pants to cover most of what was going on there. Or perhaps, the best thing to give him, in the depths he had found in the Atlanta airport, was just a dude, who could lean over and whisper in his ear, "You're just a man....

"You are just a man...

"Now get your shit together, dude, you look like the smaller kid from Stranger Things."

Bye Bye.

Life Is Not A Disney Movie

Well hi there.

I had a random thought this morning: my cat is kind of an asshole. Here he is:

Yes, I know this is a bad picture to reinforce my cat as an asshole. Stay with me here. 

Tara and I have had a cat for just over a full year now. Harold, our resident feline, has gotten quite used to his routine. The routine of a cat, which includes (but is not limited to) tapping on our door at 5:30AM every morning until we feed him, whining incessantly after his breakfast like we didn't actually feed him, sleeping for the majority of the day, semi-stealthily swiping at our food while we're cooking dinner, and staying up all night deciding whether or not to knock things off of the walls and shelves. Occasionally he'll do extra things, like chew on a cord or a vegetable that I used to be able to leave out because I forgot those days were over. Extra things like lay on the keyboard of this computer, right now as I'm trying to type on it. Oh, look at that, he just messed up the brightness and I have to restart my fucking laptop.You know, cat stuff. It's a busy schedule and I don't know how he fits it all in.

I feel like a lot of people have this kind of issue with their own cats. Cats seem to give a lot less of a damn in general about what you want them to do. Cats don't do a number of things dogs do. Petting a dog is a lot easier to keep going. Dogs love that attention. You try petting a cat for more than 2 minutes straight? The vast majority of them get a bit sick of it, as I imagine I would in their position. You can play all sorts of things with dogs, like fetch. Your cat, though? They'll look at you like you're an asshole if you throw their toy more than once, and good luck getting them to bring it back to you. Some cats like to follow around a laser pointer, and that can be fun for a while. I just feel like there's a disdainful look that follows, like they have to remember each time that it wasn't some pest to capture, it was literally just you, messing with them deliberately. Cats are not quite as prone to training and obedience as a dog might be, and that's fine. Not many people take their cats out for a walk. I say not many, because this is definitely another point of contention on the internet, as seen here: Is it weird to walk your cat?

Cats don't really do things like rollover, or speak, or play dead. Or rather, they do every one of those things, but not once when you actually ask them to. It's always at the most inopportune time that your cat probably wants to bring you something you are trying to throw away, or lays down in the middle of something you had arranged just the way you were hoping to keep it, or tries to have a conversation with you at the best possible time of day, 2:37AM on a Tuesday morning. Honestly, there was only one expectation I had from my cat, other than using his litter box correctly (which he's done) and the occasional kitty snuggles (which we're working on still).

The only thing I hoped to get from having a cat was to never have to worry about mice in our apartment. That's it. It seemed like a completely reasonable request to me. So, low and behold, one day last year I was working from home at my previous job, and I was actually on the phone with Tara when I see something out of the corner of my eye creep out from behind the TV stand, near the living room window. And I look over, and it's a mouse. Very small, with relatively large ears, moving somewhat cautiously across the carpet toward the couches. And it goes under the very couch that Harold is laying across, not asleep but very relaxed, almost bored looking. And I watched him as he saw the mouse go under the couch, and then he just put his head back down and went back to sleep.

I just sat there staring at the cat for a minute or two, incredulous. I mean, YOU HAD ONE JOB. And you didn't even try to chase the mouse? You didn't even create the idea in the mouse's head that "maybe I shouldn't go near the cat that's right there, because that might end well"! And look, I'm not saying I thought it was going to be exactly like the Tom and Jerry cartoons, but I also expected there to be some sort of tension, something to watch here. I didn't think my cat was going to look at the mouse and be like, "Oh, that's just Marvin, he's fine. We've worked it out, there's no reason to worry about him or his friends." I was so disappointed that I had to get glue traps to get the mouse, who did kind of look like a Marvin to me.

It was a moment that reaffirmed what I already should have known but forgot that I knew: Life is not a god damn movie.

It's not a cartoon, it's not theatrical, it doesn't have to have the three acts and a resolution. There's no comic relief, the bad guy doesn't get his/her comeuppance, the will they-won't they couple doesn't always end up together (or they do, for a while, and then they don't afterward). Shit, sometimes the movie just doesn't end. It just keeps going, which makes it unbearable, even when things are going well. Like, picture your favorite movie, and picture that it was 8 hours long to watch the whole thing. Not as great of a movie anymore, is it? Yeah, thought so.

I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, PBS, I was all over the board with the stuff coming on TV. And I watched all the movies that were animated too, which probably drove my parents crazy over time because my younger brother and sister in turn also obsessed about anything and everything cartoons for the same years of their lives. And we watched a lot of the movies too. Especially all the classic Disney movies. You remember old school Disney? I'm talking the Lion King, Aladdin, Cinderella, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Little Mermaid. Those movies gave kids watching them a lot back in those days, including an appreciation for breaking into song from conversation. I used to think people actually started singing in life around places like the grocery store and the DMV. I thought that the old grouchy teacher just needed to have her prince charming show up, finally. I legitimately thought when the bad guy fell off of a cliff, he just kept falling forever and we never had to see them smack into the ground (even when I was watching Die Hard, you still never see Hans at the end actually hit the ground. You just hear it.)

Disney gave me unrealistic expectations for the world and everything in it just working out the way it's supposed to. Just in general, happy endings are supposed to happen for everyone good, the bad guys always gets it in the end, the right people all fall in love, the story line gets fully resolved and everyone is satisfied with the end and the lessons learned along the way. So basically, Disney had me walking around completely unprepared for the life on this planet. Disney created this bright-eyed optimistic child that would need to be crushed over and over and over again throughout his adolescence and early adulthood.

For example, I was unprepared for dating. Particularly for the reality that I was not anyone's knight in shining armor. You see, Disney always makes movies about some young hot shot who has everything going for him but has one glaring flaw. Or maybe a bunch of flaws even, but they still have something about them that's so good it redeems all the bad stuff and makes them capable of being great. Aladdin was a diamond in the rough. Simba was a king in the making that had to come back and reclaim his throne. Even Quasimodo had to emerge from the shadows to save Esmeralda and take down Frollo. That's right, I watched Disney movies enough to know all the bad guys by name. Deal with it.

What can I say about myself, though? I was a scrub for a while. I had no money, I had shitty clothes, I lived in a broke ass house downtown, probably drank too much, probably partied too much, I thought I was smarter than I was, like most 20 year olds, and just was not comfortable in my own skin at the time. I was trying really hard to be cool and damn it, that's a bad way to go about being cool. It wasn't just me, though, I had an interesting group around me and had not been exposed to the kind of women I was now trying to woo and, no, you know what, there's no excuses here, it didn't go well and I didn't get to have some chance encounter with a rich oligarch that turned me around. I didn't meet a mute mermaid that had traded in her magical voice for legs just so she could come holler at me. It didn't go like that. It really didn't go anywhere for a while there, but I'll get back to that.

I'll tell you something else that didn't just randomly happen. Jobs. Jobs did not just fall out of the sky in some amazing happenstance. I didn't find my dream job in the wanted section, and they didn't seek me out of some run-in at the local bar where they liked something I said without knowing anything about me. I didn't get the internship where I could show I was the diamond in the rough or some Savant with a heart of gold and all the right ambitions and experiences. I got out of college and was broke. Broke like working at a gas station broke. Broke like taking part in research studies for former athletes so new students can see what a hamstring looks like after several tears over 5 years. Broke like giving blood plasma and then going to the bar next door afterwards with the money earned because you want to economize but also you want to get shitfaced for cheap too. It was not the days of champagne living with Bud light pockets. It was Bud Light living with Natty Ice pockets. I'm glad I could afford pockets.

I'll never forget this one morning in that house, in downtown Madison. It was the morning after one of our more informal get-togethers that involved cheap beer, ganja, loud reggae, 3AM spontaneous concerts among roommates, NFL Blitz on N64, getting neighbors pissed off, someone pissing off of the roof, possibly someone slipping on of the piss and falling off the roof, you know, a normal Thursday kind of night. And I wake up around 7 or so that Friday morning, I can hear the trash getting rumbled around in the alley, which is not far from my window. And it goes for 10  minutes straight before I decide to get out of my bed and figure out what the hell is going on. I'm picturing one of the roommates or one of our close friends has lost something that happens to be valuable. Maybe even something like a lottery ticket or a family heirloom worth millions, who knows? I can dream, right?

No one is awake outside of my room, and no one is moving around in their own rooms. The lights are off, the TV is on but it's just a blue screen which means the video games that were being played ended long ago. The place is a mess, like usual, but nothing suggests that the rustling outside is anyone connected with our household. So now I'm really curious. So I put on my robe and some slippers, being the class act that I am in this hovel with 4 bedrooms and kind of a bathroom, and I walk to the door and I open it, quietly. The rustling through the garbage has not stopped.

I look through the crack of the door, and there's this guy going through our trash in the alley. Quite diligently. And he seems to be looking for aluminum cans in particular, but really he was pulling other things out too, like an empty Tide detergent container and I feel like he snagged a used toothbrush (or whatever looked like a toothbrush).

I mean, the dude didn't look that much different than a regular ass college kid like any of us. He looked a bit older than me, I thought, slightly overweight, had a hoodie and sweats on with the weather being slightly colder than ideal for that attire. He was not necessarily homeless. I mean he could have just been some grad student who had been at the library until 4am, except for what he was doing when he and I met. And again, I'm just waking up, so I still feel like I'm missing something, or I'm not recognizing a longtime friend of one of the roommates or regular visitors, since a ton of people were always coming to that apartment. But no, as I watched for a few more moments, he had been putting all aluminum cans in one bag, and the more random stuff on another side. And he kind of half notices me and doesn't even say anything, doesn't acknowledge that I'm there until I said the only thing I could think to say in that moment, which was,

"Dude...can I help you find something?"

I'm not sure what I was actually offering here. I could tell he was looking for cans, especially when he found a used 18 pack box that was filled with used cans, and he set the whole thing aside with the rest of his discoveries. But I still wasn't in "Get the hell out of here" mode, but more "what is the meaning of this while I stand here in my robe and slippers on a weekday morning with a splitting hangover" mode. Or maybe it was that I thought he had been over previously and was looking for a lost item in the garbage. If my thinking was more in depth, then I forgot that part of it by now.

I'll never forget what he said, once he truly turned and looked back at me, standing there looking at him incredulously.

"Nope, I got everything I need. I've been here before you, and I'll be here after you." Then he turned back around, condensed his collection, and started off down the back of the alley, away from me. He wasn't startled by me, and he didn't seem in any rush to walk off when he was done. And I just sat there until I couldn't see him anymore, kind of just to make sure he'd gone. I was just a bit stunned by what he said.

I didn't know how to reconcile that idea. Everything he needed? Had he figured out something I hadn't? Was I still missing some huge piece of the explanation here? Or was this exactly what I thought I was looking at, and this guy needs me to say something more than what I did? And what was the second part, about him being here before and after I leave? Was he a ghost, was he some sort immortal that subsisted on collected beer cans to get by? And what did his appearance mean? Was this my moment to be a savior? Or rather, was he my savior, coming to show me a better way? Again, I was mostly broke, and though I was working at this time, it was not surprising that I had slept in on a weekday after a late, boozy evening.  Should I have offered to take him in and give him some breakfast and hear about his life story? At the very least, I know we had more cans upstairs, it could have been a big haul for him if he needed some help. What could have changed in the world if I had at least gotten to learn his name and where he was from?

Real talk though, he might have stabbed the shit out of me the moment we got any closer. He may have killed me and all of my roommates and used everything in our house to buy and smoke crack. He may have conned us into setting up a Ponzi scheme for him and he got rich and we were still broke as all hell. Or maybe he was alright, but his parents would have turned out to have been evil geniuses that had cursed him and everyone that every tried to help him, and we would get caught up in their scheme as collateral damage. Maybe the CIA and the NSA were both looking for this guy because of some chemical compound he created that will end the need for fossil fuels overnight, and they were watching our house on the off chance that he made contact with us.

But see? That's not how it went, because, again, life is not a god damn movie.

This was not some turning point that made me want to live a better life. It stuck with me for a while, but it's not like I was transformed in that moment. I know for sure we didn't start drinking any less at that house, and I was still a slob for a few more years, even though I soon after met the woman who would eventually become my wife, and she actually would help all of us in that house get our shit moving in the right direction. But this guy, in the morning rummaging in a dumpster? This didn't have the same significance that it might have in something on Netflix.

I never saw the guy again, nor did I hear rumbling down there and think to go look to see if it was him. That apartment building isn't there anymore, so I don't think he's still collecting cans in the same spot. But as I do with so many other things, I keep playing out all the scenarios of who he was and how he must be now. Maybe, just maybe, he was just a guy. Just a man who was down on his luck and was willing to salvage cans and knew where he could get some. And I was a guy who noticed him doing it, who will always wonder if I could have done something more than I did. Because that's the world we actually live in.

Bye now.

Don't Have A S****y Day

"Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays!"

Has anyone actually ever said that to you? I hope not. If they have, I am in full agreement with the dude from Office Space. I think you reserve the right to whoop someone's ass for saying something like that, it's just the epitome of 'why are you talking then' phrases. Sometimes, nothing needs to be said. Sometimes, just don't even say anything, because anything you say is just going to make a negative contribution to the conversation.

Do you get tired of hearing the same phrases over and over, and you start to look at them really closely to try to understand what they even mean? I can't stop myself from doing this lately. A guy at the grocery store in front of me the other day told his wife and kids that they could 'kill two birds with one stone'. And for whatever reason, I pictured what it actually looks like when you kill even one bird with a stone. And it's actually a bit screwed up.

It's like, dude, why did you kill that bird? That bird did nothing to deserve that, what are you doing? You want to kill another one after that? And do it with the same stone? So you're possibly psychotic and lazy at the same time? Or does that mean you kill the first bird, walk over, pick up the same stone, and then kill another one? Somehow that's less impressive. Maybe you're killing more than one bird because of the size of the stone. If I lob a meteor the size of a football stadium at a wooded forest, I'll probably hit a few things, birds, squirrels, might even get a deer or two. But no one is going to turn to me and say "Good shot" over it.

So I guess details like that matter a bit.

Here's something that I think we overuse all the time:

"Have a great day!"

Again, I know I'm really turning up the microscope on this one, but what does that actually, like ACTUALLY mean? Because a lot of us have really great lives in the first place. We have jobs, we have loving families, or families that aren't plagued with violence and incest that we can deal with most of the time. We live in a part of the world that currently has all the basic resources needed to sustain life. We have things that entertain us that we don't even need, and yet we can allow them to bring us stress and interrupt otherwise boring great sufficient happiness. If you've recently felt angry or disappointed because of the result of a sports competition, or you were let down by a musical performance or musical album, or you are currently feeling unfulfilled because you finished a binge of a tv show and don't have a new one yet, then yeah, maybe life sucks, but on a much more basic level maybe life is going great and you are able to focus and dwell on details like that. If you didn't have to kill your own food to feed yourself and seven others using a spear and a rope, clothed only with the hide of the last thing you killed with that same spear and rope, you just might have more going in the right direction than you realize.

So when you say 'Have a great day", how are you saying it? Are you saying, continue having a mostly great life without interruption? Have an average day of excellence? Or are you trying to say, even for the great life you're living with no real problems and a ton to be envied by people in your own life, you need to go out there and just kill that standard by having whatever a great day is to YOU. Go out and finish first in a marathon, and learn Cantonese Chinese, and write an award winning screenplay, and foil a terrorist attack, and cook a perfect souffle, and then travel to Paris and have people excited to take pictures of you while you're the visitor in Paris, and then come back and have lunch and then keep going after that. Just get out there and kill it, have a great day to what is already a great life! Go, go now! Why aren't you having a great day life in this moment?! You're disobeying my enthusiasm and I won't have it!

What if your normal days are amazing and this great day that you're supposed to have is for normal people? You know, like you're used to mansions and cruises and champagne lifestyle and you have a great day for a blue collar dude with a trailer, a pickup and a case of Bud light? If you have one standard and the other comes at you, well, can you definitively say that ISN'T a shitty day? And I'm not talking shit about the case of beer. Bud light days can be awesome. Bud light days can bring great perspective. The mornings after Bud light days can also bring a requiem for why you move on from Bud light days at some point. Just like the day or so after the champagne lifestyle might not be great when you get the bill for all that shit and realize, 'Now I'm broke and have to go back to Bud light days for the rest of my stupid but still basically good life'.

I got the idea after listening to Ice Cube's "It was a Good Day". For those of you unfamiliar, it's a 90's gangsta rap song about a guy in South Central LA who takes you through what is considered in his world a good day. And he mentions things like how he played basketball and did well, had some good food with his family, won money in a card game, went on a date and got laid, his favorite sports teams won, more good food, got some drinks, ect., things that are relatable to many people out there, regardless of background. But then he mentions other things in his world that didn't happen, that also contributed to a good day. Like the fact that he didn't have to shoot anyone, and he didn't get shot or shot at. At one point he notes that he had to stop at a red light, and no one was waiting at that red light to try and rob him. Cool. To many of us, it's not just that "yeah it's good that no attempted robbery occurred", but more, "Holy shit, do you have to worry about that kind of thing regularly?" But to Ice Cube in the song, it's like, "Hey, nobody I know got killed today. Thumbs up."

Maybe the amount of focus we put on mundane things is way too much. Maybe we're using words like great too much. We call our days great. We call our jobs great. We have great cars, great families, great weekends, great grandmothers, great escapes, great walls, great balls of fire. Please, spare me your balls of fire, they are usually quite shoddy and ordinary. You gotta really dig deep to impress me with your balls of fire. If you don't have massive balls that are completely engulfed in flames that are burning everything that they touch, then I challenge your definition of what it means to have great balls of fire. I have now gone on this point for too long and will move on.

We definitely use great for things like food constantly. I had a coworker at a previous job go on and on about this 'amazing' burrito he had for lunch that day. He described everything about it, from the meat, to the cheese, and the toppings of guacamole and peppers and chilies and pico de gallo, and the way it was wrapped up and toasted, and the way it smelled, and how satisfying it was for him and how he doesn't think he'll ever have another burrito that good ever again. And just messing around, one of the female coworkers there at the same time said, "So then I guess it's all downhill from here, huh?" And I got a glimpse of the moment his face sank just a little bit. It was quick and subtle, but I think he honestly had a moment of consideration, where he thought maybe that six dollar burrito was the best he was ever gonna do, and everything in life had built him to that moment and now nothing else was going to measure up to it ever again.

But that wasn't quite the end of it. It would turn out later that this same burrito may have made a second appearance. I can't say for certain what else this dude ate, but the bathroom was uninhabitable shortly thereafter for most of the rest of the day after he paid it a visit. And it was definitely him, because I had the misfortune of being in the vicinity when it happened and I saw the look on his face when he left that bathroom. It was one of those faces where you don't yet know how terrible of a thing you just done. It looked kind of like this:



Suffice it to say, the next 10 people to use that bathroom had horrible days, or had their days severely downgraded, thanks to this god damn burrito that caused 10 seconds of euphoria to this admittedly aloof useless hippie type. And yes, I get that this could be taking several things out of context just to support my point here in an unnecessary way. Thousands of other things could have made other people's days shitty, and this guy may have just had his own personal Victor Green moment that he hopes no one ever finds out about, yada yada. And to all that I say-

...meh. I choose to believe it was the burrito that made all of this mayhem happen. And it's likely that this was not a great day for anyone involved. So let's go with that.

Maybe it's not about having great days. Maybe it's just about eliminating the awful ones. So let's try that. Go out there and don't have a shitty day. Let's raise the average rating of your days to where you don't even have to worry about having good or great days, because they already are that. Don't have a shitty day, everybody.

Until next time.

Super Hero: An Ode

My wife is not a super hero.

I try to explain that to her every so often, that she is not an invincible force. She doesn't have unlimited and unparalleled strength, she is not able to leap tall buildings with a single bound. She cannot take on the world all at once, all by herself. I simply mean to say that she shouldn't feel that she has to. It's possible she thinks that I'm setting it as a challenge.

Tara has known for a long time that she wanted to help people. She has studied it, she has practiced it, and she has lived it, both in her family and professional life. She has always been someone that can be relied upon, someone who can be trusted, and someone who can give and accept love in many forms. Someone who will deal with reality in whatever format it comes forward. Someone who will find solace and meaning in things that may shine on a cloudy day, or further brighten a sunny one.

She's probably the most determined person I know. Working in mental health counseling must require the kind of inner will that most of us will never be able to appreciate. It's certainly not easy to push past some of the ugliest parts of the world and of life to make it to the good parts. Doing this is already a lot to ask in our own lives, but to do it for someone besides one's self is beyond admirable. That actually is heroic. For the record, I include myself in with those who will not truly understand selflessness at this level.

But again, my wife is not a super hero.

My wife is fiercely proud of who she is and where she comes from. Her family holds a place in her heart that cannot be rivaled. But please understand, this is not just the family she was born from. Tara has found others, from childhood through her adolescent and young adult life, that have become intertwined with her just as if they had sprouted from the same seed. She knows so well the definition of friendship as 'the family that you choose'. Tara has a knack for putting others before herself. This includes people close to her, but also those that she does not know well and owes nothing to. The trauma, the agony, the pressure, and the relentlessness of a calling like this still baffles me to consider as a daily endeavor.

This woman that I share my life with, whom I love more each day that I know her, does her best to share the best possible side of things, but it is inevitable that some of the darkness comes up at times too. It's only natural to acknowledge that this world of ours is unfair, and fickle, and at times even cruel. Yet I find myself sometimes glad when these dark forms show up, not because I am happy that such terrible things exist but that there also exist the people like her that can fight them tirelessly, and save the world from them, over and over again.

When we are together, I know she usually has a lot on her mind. She does her best to shut off work life at work and live independently of those difficulties and that trauma that is such a common part of the days. She must make sure that she finds time for self care, wherever possible. It is still difficult for me to not try to take on some of the weight of what she does. She would never ask for help in that. Perhaps, it is not Tara that needs to be reminded, but instead myself:

My wife may not be invincible, but I've yet to see a force that can defeat her.
My wife may not have unlimited and unparalleled strength, but it's strength that she still has yet to find the maximum to.
My wife may not leap tall buildings with a single bound, but she will climb every mountain put in front of her for what she believes in.
My wife cannot take the world on all at once, and I hope she never has to because she will try all the same, and the results may be closer than expected.

My wife is not a super hero.

Oh, wait... yes she is.

Help Me Not Help You

I know, it's been a while.

I've had things I thought about writing, and then didn't. Had things I started writing and still am working on, but never posted. Just a lot of stuff going on and not much time to stop and think about them in this way, blah blah, excuses and what not. It's actually one of the things that I like about doing a blog like this. I don't even owe you an explanation, even though I will give portions of one as we go here, for where I've been. But that's not what I came here to talk about.

Sometimes, people convince you to hate them. Or distrust them, or question them, or to just be done with them and forget they ever existed.

There was this cigar bar that was open a few blocks from my apartment when I lived downtown. We walked by it all the time, and it seemed to have a cool vibe going on, but we'd always have somewhere else we were going anyway. But one night, we stopped in, on a relatively cold night in winter, and decided to get some drinks and maybe a cigar(which was a bit over budget considering the financial place we were all in).

The lights were dim, the crowd seemed mellow, the prices weren't so bad, so we decided to check out the drinks at the bar. While we were up there, I noticed there was a DJ in the corner, adjusting his records as he already had something playing. Whatever it was, it was kinda weird, but not bad necessarily. So me, being my curious self after 2-3 cheap beers, I stroll over and ask him what he's playing, what kind of other stuff he's got lined up, just to kinda of chat him up, and the guy seems to take offense for some reason. Like it's weird to want to know what to expect from a new place or something. And I tried to not be taken aback, I just start to say that our group has a lot of new music constantly being thrown around and I like to know what new stuff is out there, and he says something to the effect of:

If you were really a music person, you'd know to just shut the hell up and listen to whatever I put on.

And I don't remember exactly how he worded it, but that was the gist. I walked away at that, and thought about what he said as my friends continued to look at the menu. Because I considered what he said, the idea that I could just be in that space and take whatever came next as a new experience, and maybe learn something new just by listening and not thinking too much.

And then I expressed this to my group by saying, "Fuck this guy and this place, let's find another bar on this street." They agreed, not finding too much they were excited for on the menu and realizing none of us could afford cigars at the time.

On our way out, I looked back at the DJ, and I'll never forget the smug grin on his face as he stood there, arms folded, basking in his accomplishment of having chased out 5 potential bar patrons. Like he'd won something, done what he set out to do. And I just shrugged and shook my head, because all he convinced me to do was NOT hear him out. Even if he felt that way, he seemed to intentionally have shrunk his own audience. And for what? To put a stranger in their place, about something that is no by no means a universal understanding in music? To make himself feel better about some other shit he was dealing with? Did he think he was teaching me an important lesson that would improve my life, too?

Well, in a way he did. I was reminded of the benefits of not being an asshole to the point that people stop being on your side, and start lining up against you. You may not always be able to make someone your friend, but I'm willing to bet you can just about always piss someone off more than they currently are. There's a phrase, "You can't always do right, but you can always do what's left." I think it's lyrics from a song by Queens of the Stone Age as I really think about it, but that doesn't kill my point. When something isn't great, do yourself a favor and remember that it can always get worse. Some situations, I feel, are just dying, just begging to get worse than they already are.

For example:

My last few months have led to me taking a new job in the Madison area. It's a good move for me and my career, but I'm still in touch with a lot of my former coworkers and I'm glad to hear that things are basically still moving along. I said that in that way, because it was a bit dicey over the past year. I'm not going to go into too much detail and I'm certainly not going to bash the company here. The company, for all of its faults, still did a lot of good for me over the past six years, and I could never disparage them for it.

I can, however, feel a bit more liberty in bashing some of my least favorite customers now.

You must understand, we worked in the medical device field with a lot of dentists and doctors students that would soon become dentists and doctors, and you have to believe me when i say i fear for the clients of more than a few of these bastards out there. Bruhhh, there are some stupid sun' bitches cleaning and fixing teeth in America. People that are incompetent, people that are entitled, people that are just assholes and assume because I work in this type of role, I must be a slack-jawed neanderthal that couldn't possibly understand how important these people were. And this is by no means a new concept in customer service type jobs, this is very much within the territory. Still, I had people go above and beyond the standard of acting shitty to those that, again, ARE THERE TO HELP YOU.

Something else I will mention about the past year in my now former job: my boss at the time, the manager, took another job within the company. I, the supervisor at the time, inherited a number of his responsibilities but was not interviewed as replacement for his job. Was I happy about this? No, of course not. Did I understand the reasons they gave me for not considering me? Meh...somewhat. But that's not the point here.

The point is that both my (former) boss and I were both overloaded and neither was in a particularly happy mood when this story took place. He was doing his new job while still managing our department where he absolutely needed to, and I was still straddling the line of working on the phones with the rest of my group, as I used to do regularly, while handling new responsibilities as a supervisor while also getting passed things that a manager technically does. I'm not bragging, I'm simply telling you what happened.

So we get a call that's an escalation. Some old dentist in New Jersey (or not) who's unhappy with something and wants to speak to a supervisor. So someone transfers it to me, and I tell them that I won't be able to take the call at that moment, and that they can either have the guy leave a message or they can take it to my boss, if it's that urgent. I didn't like passing things off to him like that often, but I remember I did at first in this case, so I had to have been just that far behind.

Whoever took the call walks into his office (the boss's), and he tells them to send it to me, and they mention that I just said I couldn't do it at the moment. And this guy, who we'll call Allen for this story, leans out of his office, and asks me if I can give whoever a hand with this. And I start to explain why I sent it over and that I need to finish what I have going, and halfway in I pause and I look him right in his eye, and he's got this semi-wide eyed glance that says, "I wasn't actually asking." And this annoying little smile comes across his face as he says, "Can you please take care of this?"

I know that look. It's the look of someone passed his limit who hopes you understand that this will only get less pleasant from here forward. And plus, he was still technically my direct report, and I was holding out hope that if I did a good enough job with these 2 (really 3) roles, maybe I could prove my worth and be given a shot at the manager role a bit later on. So I mustered a similar smile to him, nearly gritting my teeth, and tried to say, "kiss my black ass in as professional a way as possible." But it came out as, "Send him over to me."

I take a couple of deep breaths, reminding myself that the customer did nothing to warrant any retribution. I have to be professional, I have to be patient. This is my job, to take this on and make it better for everyone involved. Woosah.

Yeah, woosah my ass. This guy was a tool from the minute I clicked over. I told him my name and he told me our entire department should be let go, probably with me first. That's how he thought our conversation should start. The problem was that we had sent this guy's product to him in the wrong color, a color he originally requested but then claims to have changed a few days later. Which could have happened, but it didn't. So he wanted to send it back and get a new one with his new color choice. And so far, I had no issues with his request.

The problem, however, was that he was already using his product and didn't want to give it up. He had another of this product and had been using it for a while, but he wouldn't give this one back within his trial period until he had the new one. Which was directly against policy, and when they said they couldn't change it, he flipped out and asked for me. If this had been some little widget for like $20, maybe even $100 or $200, I wouldn't have cared and probably would have just sent it at no cost, don't even bother sending the old one back. But these things were like $3000, and it would take a while to make it between his prescription and all these other factors, and again, he's already lambasted me a ton for no good reason. The guy who was going to fix his problem. So I decided that I couldn't break with the policy.

The one thing I offered, I said we would remake a second one and give him a discount. The standard special discount for repeat customers, but a discount nonetheless. And he asks how much off it is, and I say how much (like $200) and there's a pause on the phone. And then I hear him just start to scoff and almost hyperventilate. And before I can ask him if he's okay, he starts to say, over and over again, "How dare you?! How DARE you?!" I'm not particularly sure what to say in response. I kind of can guess why he's upset, but this is a level I legitimately didn't anticipate.

Next, he says he's going to do his best to ruin our business in the U.S. And I came so close to telling him, "Give it your best shot." I wish I could see where that conversation went, even though the lines are recorded and it ultimately would not have been too professional. And I swear, through all this, I am as polite and courteous as I can be, while still refusing to give into this retail terrorist. This is not the kind of guy that gets what he wants and goes away. I fully expected, if we yielded to him now, he'd be back and would expect we give into his demands next time, too. So, with respect, fuck that. And with less respect, fuck him.

So he starts asking for my manager's name and info, and I tell him who Allen is and that Allen essentially doesn't work in our department anymore, so that for now, I'm the one he wants to talk to. So he asks for Allen's boss, who is a new General Manager that has been with the company for about 3 months at that time and doesn't really know what anything is or how to do anything. Not to mention, when our GM, who we'll call Aaron I guess, will almost certainly come to me to put anything necessary in motion. Again, I tell him, this still has to go through me at the moment.

But screw it, I give him Aaron's name, and this douche canoe of a dentist tells me to tell him to call the next day. And before he hangs up, he says something that made me laugh later. It went like this:

Douchbag: And Trevor, tell me something before I go.
Me: I'm sorry?
Douchebag: Tell me this, Trevor.
Me: (ignoring the wrong name) Yes, sir?
Douchebag: What's your next job going to me?
Me: Umm, I don't know yet.
Douchebag: You should figure it out. You're not going to have this one much longer.
<click>

Yep. This motherfucker was that sure he was going to get me fired. He proceeded to call the Better Business Bureau and complain about our return practices, which are stated pretty clearly on the website. He then stalked me on LinkedIn for the next few weeks, periodically leaving weird direct messages every few days, which, how the hell did he even do that when he was looking for a Trevor? I told Allen what happened, and he didn't believe me until he started getting notices from our marketing department because this guy also blew up the company Facebook page.

So I took it to Aaron, and he said he wanted to help smooth over the situation however he could, but he agreed with the policy and that we had been reasonable with the doctor to that point. He then basically gave the doc exactly what he wanted. Whatever. I was all to happy to was my hands of this assmuncher and the horse he rode in on, and in many ways, New Jersey (or wherever) as a whole.

But I looked up the doctor a bit later, because I was now more curious than ever. It turns out, this is one of the highest rated dentists on the east coast. This imbecile, Dr. Byers we'll call him, is actually highly respected and has won a ton of awards and has a 30 year practice established and blah blah blah, don't use your position and reputation to try to justify being a maniac. There are ways to talk to people to get what you want. This guy talked to several people in our company like he owned them, like he was better than them. Like he was the only one in the equation who mattered.

I know for a fact he called early this year and demanded some more free shit, and Aaron gave it to him. Because it got escalated to him again, because no one else would stoop that low to please him and no one else felt like getting bile spit at them through a phone call like that. So this was the whole concern the whole time for me, that he knows he can go to this length to get acquiesced to, so that's what he did. Asshole.

He had no idea that I had no issue with bending the rules a bit if I thought the customer deserved it. Or if I felt that we screwed up on our end. I am someone who worked in 3 different roles at the same time for that company, averaging 50-60 hours a week for years. I worked projects, trained new employees, helped troubleshoot issues within the building and across departments, went to trade shows on weekends, did after hours drops to UPS to ensure delivery dates, hell, I once cleaned up shit off the god damn carpet in that office. And Dr. Byers found a way to help me not want to help him more than I was obligated to.

Go ahead, tell me that I should have just done what he wanted and been done with it. Remind me the adage that the customer is always right (they really aren't. Customers are wrong about tons of shit on a constant basis, and not being aware of this is just a further detriment).

I maintain: you can't always get someone to smile at you. But if you are bad enough, you can always, always, always get them to flick you off, though.

And no, I can't tell you about the time I cleaned up shit. And NO, it was not my own. It wasn't Victor Green.

Bye now.