Wake Up Call!

I was in a new clients offices and kind finding my way around and man did I get a surprise! I swore I checked the door and it said "Men's Room" but frankly I did not pay that much attention to it. So I go in and round the corner and I come face to face with...



What the heck? A quick scan and I see there are no urinals either (as if I needed more confirmation!) OH CRAP! My first day on the job and I am in the Women's restroom! Of great, tagged a pervert on the first day! I back out quickly looking around to see who might have caught me. No one is in sight so it seems like I am safe! So I am in the hallway outside the restroom ever so casually getting a drink of water, playing it cool ya know? I am looking for the real men's room now and what the heck? The door I just backed out of in a near panic is clearly labeled "Men's Room". Is someone pulling a prank on the new guy? Hanging a men's room sign over the real sign?





Well after talking to a few people it turns out the former occupant of this building was an insurance company. They almost exclusively hired women 'clerks'. The only men were mangers, so there were many women's rooms and few men's rooms. So when this tenant with a male/female ratio more in line with society as a whole moved into the building they were very short on men's rooms and converted several women's rooms into men's room. When I say "converted" I really mean they just taped a "men's room" sign on the door. :) (nice touch using logo watermarked stationary to print the men's room sign on. I mean it is important to know WHO'S mens room it really is, right? )

Ok, so surprisingly enough I have not spent a lot of time in women's rest rooms before. Man those stalls are just full of stuff! You got the BIG TP roll, the used "napkin" box (I assume), the seat cover dispenser, the pipes coming out of the wall...Man it looks like the engineering spaces on a WWII submarine in there! I keep waiting to hear the klaxon go off while someone yells "Dive! Dive! Dive!" over the intercom!

Wont get fooled again!

Oh man they got me! Being a man I really don't pay that much attention to toilet paper. I generally grab whatever and am OK with it. Last time I bought TP though I got this stuff that was real thick and fluffy and just barely fit on the roll it was so big. I liked it. So the next time I bought TP I was looking for the same stuff again, (although I had no idea of the "make and model") so I was looking for the big thick rolls again. Aha found it!

Took it home and yeah, it's so big it barely fits on the roll alright but it is NOT soft and fluffy! This stuff is worse than what hiway rest stops usually provide. It's truly John Wayne TP (it's rough and tough and it won't take shit off of anybody) I mean you can actually see little flakes of bark embedded in it. This is clearly orphanage grade TP.

I'm too cheap to throw it away so I'll just be walking funny for a few weeks. Mmmmm, maybe I can use I use it to polish chrome or buff some scratches out of the car? It's about the right texture.

Speaking of No Pants...

See, as big a redneck as I think I am I am NOT the redneckiest! At least I wear pants in public, ummm and NO, pajama pants do not count! I am sure that is a rule written down somewhere.

Home Alone

Erika is gone on Vacation and the other room mate moved out today. Whelp, we won't be needing these pants for awhile! Ahhhhhhh!

:)

Redneck Roots

In this weeks reader mail Amanda asks, "I am interested to know what makes you call yourself a redneck. Will u tell me?"


Well sure I will tell you! I call myself a redneck because I grew up on a farm 10 miles outside of a town of 480 people. So in many ways I am a very simple man of very simple pleasures from a very simple way of life. From a place where everybody knew everybody (damn it, you *can't* hide anything) and the best place to pick up girls was family reunions. (kidding) :)

Our phone book was about 20 pages total including ads. I remember being a kid and seeing a commercial on TV for a variety show (who remembers those?) where they said, "See the worlds strongest man tear a phone book in half!" I remember being quite confused and thinking, "I am only 10 years old and I can tear a phone book in half. Why would they make a bid deal about that?

In spite of 8 years of higher education, outside of formal settings I still say "aint" quite a bit. In fact, "thatanna" is a word in my personal lexicon, as in "thatanna gonna work!". :)

My mother was not ready to be a mother yet so as a child I spent a lot of time with her parents and her aunts and uncles. So the people I thought of as my aunts and uncles were really my great aunts and uncles. So in many ways I was a generation behind as well being a hick! :) Then to top it off those folks were NOT into the latest and greatest. Case in point, my (great) uncle Frank used horse drawn farm equipment until after World War II. Then he used the hand crank to start his tractor until 1972. "A starter is just one more thing to break" he often told people

I was little but I remember that winter day when he could not get the tractor started. He cranked and cranked that little hand crank and that tractor would not start. It was bitterly cold that morning but I stayed warm just from the endless streak of cussing that burst forth between every bought of cranking. That after noon we went to town and ordered a battery, starter and generator for the tractor.(in a town of 450 people, other than groceries and general supplies you don't just go buy something, you order it)

Can you imagine? Three years after man landed on the moon we still hand started tractors.

Oh, you want to hear "Old School"? The first thing I had to do in the morning when I woke up was to start the fire in the kitchen stove. (that big cast iron stove took time to heat up to cooking temps!) Corn cobs and a little kerosene make good kindling then start feeding in the larger pieces of wood. For regular cooking I only had to stoke the firebox on one end of the stove but if my Aunt(s) were baking then I had to stoke the fireboxes on both end of the stove. The BIGGEST part of being a good baker is fire control!

So where did the fire wood come from you ask? Well, you see they had this long wooden handle with a wedge shaped piece of steel attached to one end. By swinging the steel wedge against a piece of wood enough times you could cut it. No, no! I *am* serious!

Now that the wood is cut to one foot lengths, think you are done? Heh, nope! After you cut it to length then you have to split it. The best firewood for cook stoves is about the same diameter as your wrist. So if you start with a piece of Sycamore one foot in diameter, that is a lot of splitting. I liked splitting better than chopping because with some practice you can split a piece of wood with one blow where as chopping took a while and I am totally into instant gratification!

Now in the summer it did not take long to chop and split enough wood to keep the kitchen stove going. The winter though was a different story. Besides the cook stove there were three other "pot belly" stoves in the house to feed wood to as well. Then I had heaters in three stock tanks as well. You have to keep the stock tanks thawed so the live stock can drink. An adult cow consumes 15 gallons of water per day. You can't have them licking ice! :) So with six fires burning 24 hours and a seventh at mealtimes firewood became a full time job.

No wonder I was such a skinny kid!

It's also no wonder I grew up dreaming of space travel. There is no wood to chop in space!

Is that enough Amanda or shall I go on? :)

Ouch!

This vision of ruin and destruction brought to you courtesy of my boat.

These were transmission gears. A few large expensive parts were converted into many smaller worthless parts in less than a second! I never thought of a transmission in that way before, a sort of a matter converter if you will. :(

{sniff} Yes, I'm feeling quite pouty.

Ah technology!

I finally broke down and bought a fancy smart phone. As a geek I LOVE smart phones but as a redneck I break a lot of things so I tend to shy away from expensive delicate things.

However, I finally reached the critical tipping point where enough people were annoyed at my lack of texting ability that I finally shouted down my inner redneck and bought a phone capable of texting. Never being one to half-ass it as long as I was going to text it was gonna have a real keyboard, I mean none of this hokey press 7 four times for S crap for ME! :)

See it here if you care

So now I can surf the web and play games and all that stuff too. Plus my inner redneck loves how the phone slides two ways. To top it all off this phone is made at least partially out of this mysterious ancient material called met-all. When I was kid they made everything out of this odd substance, lunch boxes, cars, TVs, furniture, almost everything! Nowadays most of that stuff is made with solidified petroleum byproducts.

I like my met-all phone! It's feels quite manly!

And armed with the latest gee-whiz smart phone technology I don't have to wait until I get home and boot up my 'puter to delete my spam. My spam follows me everywhere I go and even politely chimes to get my attention! Ain't technology cool?

twit-ing?

Why are individual posts on twitter called tweets? Wouldn't the singular of twittering be a twit? How is that a tweet?

We will add this to the long list of human behaviors Rob's does not get.