Damn donut people.

When I lived in Arlington the donut selection was pretty basic.  Some of the places were getting into the fancy donut craze but everybody had my favorite donut:  the devils food.  For those of you that don't know the goodness that is the devils food donut, I pity you.  As a refresher, it's a chocolate donut filled with chocolate pudding stuff and occasionally dipped in chocolate but more commonly glazed.  Simplicity in itself and in chocolate form.

Here in this small town the fancy donut craze has gone crazy.  You can find donuts with all sorts of things on them.  Maple syrup and bacon are very popular apparently.  The craze has even spread to the kolaches, one place near me has brisket kolaches.  They are awesome though.

I find a new place today and I think to myself that I haven't had a donut in awhile so I'll check it out.  I swear the lady behind the counter was smirking when she saw the look of despair on my face when I realized that they also didn't have any devils food donuts.  My hearing isn't the best (thank the nightclubs) but I think she even muttered that my fat ass doesn't need a devils food donut when I can have a maple syrup and bacon éclair.

Highlighters.

I don't miss highlighters but I don't use them as much as I used to.  In the clubs you would use the highlighter for a variety of reasons.  Mark on the schedule who showed up to work, mark on your dance list the names so you could read it in the near dark, and to write on people.

I think that was my favorite thing.  At one club the other managers and I had a contest to see who could "brand" the most employees with a highlighter.  I won that contest.  If a customer needed to leave the club I would write on them with a highlighter so it wouldn't be as noticeable as a sharpie when they got home.  Sometimes the highlighter was just a way to have fun.

One lady told me that if she could sell a bottle of champagne would I put a smiley face on my nose?  Sure.  She sold it and I had a smiley face on the tip of my nose for the rest of the evening.  The next night was a day off and my buddy talked me into going out to a topless bar.  We walk in and he tells me to look at my nose.  I cross my eyes and tell him to grab a table, I go to the restroom and scrub my nose until the ink is gone.

I don't miss highlighters because I have kids that write on themselves all the time.  Not as much fun when they willingly let me write on them.

Doctors.

I have a lot of respect for doctors.  I really do, but I do wonder about them at times.  Whenever I go into a business I can't help but look for things to improve.  I know that some of my ideas wouldn't fly because I don't know anything about the business but some I wonder why it's not being done.

For those of you that say that if there was a better way then it would be done that way, maybe.  Wine is sold in glass bottles with natural corks.  Every vineyard in the world would love to go to a screw top on a plastic bottle but the traditional consumers would prefer to pay more for crap in a glass bottle instead of buying a box of better wine.  To paraphrase one engineer:  Form follow failure, unless people don't want it better.

That said; we love our children's pediatrician and if she and her family were to knock on our door at o'dark thirty and need a place to crash we would let them with no questions asked.  But I wonder how she and other doctors run a business. 

It seems that a way to majorly increase business would be to open on the weekends.  Hire a new doctor right out of college and let them know that they will work on weekends and they are only getting the "easy" patients.  Basic check-ups and the like.  Three days out of the week they work with the experienced doctor to learn things and to make sure that the fng can be trusted.

I don't know enough about the doctor field so maybe I'm missing something.  I don't think so though.

Less ouches.

The weekend is over so the garage sale is over.  I'm still typing up a storm, and unlike Fran I can spell, so I'm still sore.

I've been kicking around a few ideas for different posts, for my more serious one I prefer to think a little about them before I start banging away on the keyboard.  Some of the ideas require research; it's very sad that sometimes I thought I knew something and tried to clarify it before I started writing and found out that I was wrong.

I've seen professional writers and journalists write something that I know is false and it does color the rest of my opinion of what they're writing.  As a case in point, a journalists wrote a piece about gun control and her belief that if guns weren't allowed then children couldn't be killed in school.  She actually said that Sandy Hook was the worst mass murder in a school because of guns.  Not quite, the Bath disaster (1927) killed more people and he didn't use guns; explosives were his thing.  That statement was in the first paragraph, if she had that bad of a mistake in the very beginning then what other mistakes does she have? 

I don't want to write badly, nor do I want to look the fool when I try to state facts.  Hence me double checking what I think I know instead of just banging away.

Ouch. 3.

Still sunny and still getting tanned.  I asked my wife to get some aloe today for the sunburn coming up and she had an alternate idea.  She suggested taking a really hot shower to burn the sunburn away.  Thanks hon; I love you, but I don't trust that idea.

Whilst doing this garage sale I had lots and lots of time to think about what I'll put in this blog tonight.  The sun burned all of the ideas away.  Sorry.  It's bath time for me.

Ouch. 2.

This Anglo-Saxon/Norman boy is getting a tan.  On a related note, my brother is a little crazy.  He's in town and went to an auction; what do you do at auctions?  You buy stuff.  The auction was a closed down jewelry (costume) store and he spent $900 on boxes of stuff.  I was talking to him and mentioned that our neighborhood is doing a big community wide garage sale.  He volunteered me to do the garage sale for him while he's doing a garage sale at my sister's house.

It was in the 80's and not a cloud in the sky.  I've been doing typing tests so my hands and forearms are aching.  I'm hot and I feel icky from being outside all day.  Yepper, it's shower time soon to be followed by bedtime.

Ouch.

I type a fair amount.  Yesterday I would have said that I type a lot, but then today I took a typing test that spanked my butt.  I've taken numerous typing tests in the past few weeks and I've always scored in the 40-45 wpm area.  Then I took this test today and I did 39 wpm.  Instead of it being a one or three minute test this was a five minute test.  It was also old, from the late 60's, the grammar and syntax just felt wrong.  Two tests the lower score was thrown out.  After the first five minutes my wrists and forearms hurt.  A few minutes to relax and then the test again. 

I'm giving myself the weekend to practice and see if I can get it any higher.  I've been typing for the past I don't know how long and I hurt.  Again.

Next few days might be real quick posts.  Or pictures.

Those people.

In the poker world there is a saying:  If you don't know who the sucker is in the first five minutes of the game then you're the sucker.

Here in Texas lawns are a competitive sport.  I'm not inclined to do yard work but I want the grass to be green, thick, lush, and dare I say it...decadent.

At our last house the neighbor's brother was a landscape guy and he about half of the houses in the neighborhood; I think that he accidentally did ours right before a party because they didn't want their "area" to look bad because our grass wasn't as trimmed as theirs.  At this house the yard was going to be done in the late afternoon; a neighbor asked if we wanted him to do our yard. 

I looked around at the other houses in the area and I had an epiphany:  We are those people that always has the yard just not as nice as the others.  Ours is greener but theirs is neater.  My mother would approve of the lush green color but she would sigh because of the unkempt look of it.  We might have to buy a lawn mower now.

I want to audit this class.

My wife went to a class today about identifying bombs and the materials used to make them.  When I first heard about the class I wanted to audit it. 

I flipped through the materials (I haven't had time to do more yet) and was somewhat surprised.  To make an IED the list of things available are also going to be in the car of anyone that's going to manufacture their own meth.  It also didn't list some things that I know can be used for a simple IED, I don't know if it didn't have it listed because it's not as lethal as some of the other materials (huge amounts of fertilizer) or because it's just that under the radar.

I still want to go to it next time.  My wife's only complaint about the class was they didn't get to blow up anything.

The good of fb.

An officer in a department my wife used to work at died recently.  Today I got a message telling me how if I need anything this friend will do whatever I need.  There was more to the message but I had no clue what he was talking about.

He sent me a new message when he figured out that the lady that died was not my wife.  I heard about this from my wife who heard about it on facebook.  I believe that my buddy heard about it on facebook also.

Son of a bitch.  Facebook is good for something.  You have some crappy news and you don't have to say the same thing to dozens of people.  You can post it on fb and let everyone else tell everyone else.  When my parents died we called people and told them the details of the viewing and funeral (or party in my father's case), that was one of the hardest things I've ever done.  I think the worst part was when someone said the wrong thing.  You never know what the wrong thing is, so be careful with that.

Easter.

It's a Texan thing.

Today is Easter, you know what that means?  The nicer restaurants were going crazy today (I'm not in F&B anymore, it's awesome), churches were busy, and people were putting their kids in fields to take pictures of them.

I live in the country so I see bluebonnets all over the place.  I'm not a big fan of the color blue but I do like bluebonnets for some reason.  There is something...wholesome about a kid in a field of bluebonnets in their prettiest clothes.

All of the bluebonnets in this area are off the highway and the idea of taking a beautiful picture with cars zipping by in the background is a bit off, therefore we didn't take any pictures of the minions in the field of bluebonnets.  Took pictures of them in a pretty field but oddly enough there wasn't one bluebonnet in sight.

My wife is thinking about spreading seed around the area for next year.

An introduction.

Years ago when I was working in topless bars I decided that I wanted to write a book about the business.  Mine wouldn't be a soul searching piece about how I was an innocent person before I went into the business and then a year later I know enough to write a book that gets on the best seller charts.  You know the book I mean.

Mine would be about the business side of dealing with alcohol and fantasies.  How this social misfit was so inured to topless women that when I saw someone accidentally flashing skin in public all I thought about was if she wanted a job.  The little tools and tricks of the trade of dealing with a party that only looks like a party to the outsider.  To those of us on the inside it was work, and sometimes it was a hell of a lot of work.

I miss the business.  That's not quite true; I miss the rush.  Running over here and putting out a fire then going over there and making an employee laugh, rushing over there and glaring at an employee until she puts out her cigarette whilst on stage.  Always constantly doing something and knowing that you're good at it.  It really was quite a rush.

Back when I was a gamer the hardest part of character creation was naming the character; you don't want a character to have a lame name.  The name needs to evoke something more than just an association to this concept you've created that goes with these certain stats.  I've found the name for this book; it will be called "Shady".

Milk and marketing.

I don't understand this mindset.

Our family friend came over for dinner tonight and a comment she made is the inspiration for tonight's post.

She is involved with the La Leche League and that reminded me of something from my time at Applebee's.  Some idiot saw a lady was breastfeeding at the restaurant so they complained to the manager and the manager told the lady to stop or leave or something equally ridiculous. 

I heard about it because the lady and her friends were going to protest all of the Applebee's in the area, or so we were told.  My Area Manager came by and told all of us (in addition to the email) what we should do when the protesters show up in the morning.  He said the protest was by the La Leche League so I called my friend in the League and she told me the truth; it wasn't them. 

The corporate policy was to ignore the protesters and refer any questions to the corporate office.  I wasn't going to do that.  I had my strategy all planned out.  I was going to turn it into a marketing ploy. 

If the weather was cold (this is Texas and it wasn't summer therefore it could be cold) I was going to go out with coffee (regular and decaf) and hot chocolate or water and iced tea if warm and offer it to the ladies.  Let them know that my wife breastfed all three of our children (even had the last one at a birthing center) and I think that the manager that caused the issue was a moron.  Let the ladies know that not all of us managers are idiots, maybe we could get some good word of mouth advertising out of it.  All of this planning and the ladies never showed.

I would do this because breast milk is insanely healthy for babies.  I'm all for breastfeeding and would like it if it could be encouraged more, I have no idea how to do this though. 

Mumsy Dearest.

I had a lot of healthy respect for my mother.  And more fear.  When I was 16 my mother smacked me up the back of my head for saying crap.  That's the word I said:  "Crap".  She didn't think it was appropriate. 

Everyone thought she was super nice and sweet and she was...unless you angered her.  My wife never believed me when I said don't make her angry...until that ire was directed at her.  Then she became a believer; that ire was over the telephone also so it was blunted by not having a visual.

After my mother died the priest that did the funeral wanted to know about her so he could do an accurate eulogy.  I summed it up for him with four words.  Don't make her mad.  She's been gone for almost two years and I still follow those words of wisdom.

You can't go back.

When I was growing up we had a Hoosier cabinet (it was a kitchen prep area before houses had kitchens), we used it for general storage and because it was a nice piece of furniture.  My sister is trying to get her siblings inheritance out of the house now.

Not mine but it's the same style.

I was thinking that this thing was six or eight feet long and about seven feet tall.  It was in that house when I was born and it was there when I moved out.  Much like my parents it was larger than life.  A brother helped move it today.

I saw it and I was shocked because it's about four or five feet wide.  I could almost carry it by myself.  Now I'm wondering what else has is different from my memory.

It's a beautiful century old piece and it even has the Hoosier label on it.

Bullies.

I don't like bullies and that's partly because of my special needs brother.  And then when I was in high school the city decided to put the special needs kids into the main stream schools.

I was the social misfit with long hair, sunglasses, jeans, and a t-shirt.  And I had a lot of muscle under my fat so I acted like a bully when some other bully decided to bully a special needs kid.  I know that two wrongs don't make a right but occasionally might does make right.  Sometimes to their champion I would do some things that the school wouldn't approve of and I wasn't really concerned even though I did understand the hypocrisy of my actions.

Nowadays I see bullies have gotten more subtle.  On facebook you'll see a lot of posts about whatever and it'll end with "I know that 99% won't share this...If you care you will."  Subtle and apparently emotional also.  Sneaky bastards.  Whenever I see that kind of message I don't share the post even if I feel a connection because of the subject.  I've done my bit of bullying and I don't want any more.

The Play. Act 5. Scene 2.

MRS.  BLANCO:   Oh, I couldn't hurt someone...

REVEREND:  Oh Sweetie, I didn't say hurt him.  I said kill him.  Even if you don't have a knife or any weapon then you kick and punch and bite and claw and scream your head off.  You let this boy know that he better run away before it gets worse.  By the way, you start off at lethal and then you get nasty.  You're familiar with the Old Testament right?

MRS.  BLANCO:  A little, it just seems so...

REVEREND:  I understand, if someone ever touches you like that then you get lethal and you go "Old Testament" on his ass...

MRS.  BLANCO hand covering her mouth:  ::gasp::

REVERND:  I know, you're not used to a man of God swearing but if I'm dealing with someone that wants to rape someone in my flock then there will be a whole lot more than swearing.  You know what?  We have that space for the cafeteria that's empty at night... let's find a martial arts instructor that can teach the basics of rape prevention.  I think I want you to lead that group.  Do you think you can do it for me?

MRS.  BLANCO:  Well, I don't know...

REVEREND:  And for Christ?  You know he would much prefer it if none of the congregation were ever to be raped.

MRS.  BLANCO:  Well, if it's for Christ...

END SCENE AS THEY DISCUSS SOME MATTERS.


I didn't think that yesterdays post was enough so I added this on. 

The Play. Act 5.

The Setting:  Living room.  Two characters are seated at a dinner table.

REVEREND:  At the last Bible study I heard something disturbing and I need your help to address it.

MRS.  BLANCO:  Of course Reverend, anything that the church needs I will help with. 

REVEREND:  I heard you mention that if you're ever raped then it's because it's God's will.

MRS.  BLANCO Nodding her head:  Well of course, if God wants me to be raped then He must think that the rapist needs to learn something or maybe I need to learn something.  God does move in mysterious ways after all. 

REVEREND:  I looked in the Bible for some scripture that might further my point, I found some passages that looked pretty good but really I think that I'll paraphrase what my papa told my niece once; my uncle wasn't around to tell her himself.  Some guy wants to rape you then that's God's way of telling you that He wants to meet that scumbag and would you please help him meet Me?  (Starting to get a little worked up)  My niece was pretty young at the time and didn't understand so my papa explained it a little differently.  Some guy touches you anywhere you have a bathing suit covering you, then you kill him.  You go out jogging with your friends then you carry a knife, if some guy grabs at you then you gut him. 

MRS.  BLANCO Startled surprise:  Oh, my...

REVEREND calming down:  Yes, don't just cut him a little, gut him like a deer for slaughter.  Just like the animal he is.  God doesn't want you raped, maybe he wants the other son of a bitch to go to jail to learn a lesson.  Maybe this rapists is part of Satan's flock, don't know, I just know that God doesn't want you to be raped.

Sadly enough, this act was inspired by an actual quote I heard about from a bible study group.

Busy day.

Years ago my wife said that she found some pallets that some company was throwing away.  She wanted us to build a fort for our kids in the backyard.  No sweat, I figure that the pallets are 4x4 so we would have to keep it small but that's not a problem.  Then she tells me that she'll have to borrow a trailer to haul the pallets.  How many pallets is she getting? 

There were three 4x4 pallets and the others were 5x10, 4x8, and I think one was 6x12.  We built the fort (three walls and a roof) and it was sturdy; sturdy enough for my 240 pound self to get on top of it without a problem.  Years later with rain and weather it's leaning but still sturdy.  I'm unscrewing everything I can and it still won't go down the rest of the way.  We finally let gravity help us; we rock it back and forth until it's off the ground enough to use it's own weight to break it apart.

Once that is finished we head over to a restaurant for a little lunch and then shower and change.  Why a shower and change you ask?  Now we're going to a birthday party for a family friend, this kid is turning four so it's at a park and we bring our kids.  Happy birthday X. 

Drop off the kids and we go to a wedding reception, it was a nice reception.  A little smaller, about 50 people.  Pretty cake and good food.  Congratulations K and K, may you have many happy years.

Sideways.

What if the superheroes from the comic books decided to change villains?  I know this has probably been written about before but I don't read fanboy crap so deal with it.

Batman and Superman.  Picture this:  The Riddler or the Joker is going to do whatever terrible thing they are going to do and Supes uses his hearing and vision to find the villains, swoops in and grabs them before major bad things happened.  You say that Bats isn't tough enough to deal with Supes villains?  True, but Supes has something that Bats doesn't, remorse.  Oddly enough, whenever I think of Batman I always think of the old school psychopath that would kill yet when I think of Catwoman I think of Julie Newmar.  Lex Luthor is causing problems?  Not when his spine is broken right before Batman shoots him.  Even the more powerful villains that Supes dealt with don't hold a candle to the ruthlessness and deviousness of Batman.  Batman is probably the only person in their universe that wanders around with a piece of kryptonite encased in lead in his utility belt, just in case Supes goes rogue and must be put down.

The Fantastic Four and the Avengers.  The FF deal with Ultron by encasing him in a force bubble while Mr. Fantastic makes a slingshot and the Thing uses him to sling him into space.  Torch uses some generic starship (I bet money they had one, I never really cared for the Four) to use a tractor beam to keep Ultron moving towards the sun or a convenient black hole.  The Avengers get to play with Dr. Doom, I don't think that Victor Von Doom can handle Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America plus whoever else is hanging around at the time.  Doom is tough and smart, I give him that, but Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk pack a whole crap load of power.  Even Galactus might have problems with that, or Iron Man could download Windows Vista into his operating system, he would so crash. 

Arrrrgg.

I was going to write a bit about how various super heroes should switch villains.  And then my computer went wonky, second time today.

I have this weird relationship with computers.  For some things they are awesome:  spreadsheets, email, simple things like that.  And then they seem to suck at the other stuff.

I spent over 45 minutes today doing an application and towards the end (not even finished at 45 minutes) my internet connection went out.  I had to start over with the application.  Screw that, it wasn't that great of a fit anyway.

I'm annoyed and I don't have any pizza either, sleepy time now.

Carrots and Sticks.

Someone had a question on facebook yesterday about how to handle an employee.  I gave him various ideas and things to watch out for and then I went to bed.

As I'm in bed trying to go to sleep I realized that I did him a disservice.  I only gave him options on the stick method of management.  This morning I sent him another message about the carrot side of management.

I was ashamed of myself, I made my reputation by working with my employees instead of just firing them.  Some of my best employees were the ones that I trained, worked with, and explained every little detail of what I needed them to do and why.


Some of them took their loyalty a little too far, one lady offered to smash a glass ashtray upside the head of another dancer.  Sweet of you to offer but assault isn't the best thing to do at work.

Those were some odd days, half-naked women willing to beat another half-naked woman because they weren't as nice as I "deserved".

Just stop talking.

I showed the house to three people today.  One of them came and looked and took an application, I'm not holding my breath for them.  Another came and looked and really wanted it, took the application and wanted to give me the deposit right then.  Then the third one.

She wouldn't stop talking.  I don't mind if you ramble; I sure as hell do it.  But I question you rambling when you're telling me things that you might not want a potential landlord to know. 

Your grandchild was taken away by CPS and you lost your nursing license because of it.  You have an eviction on your record but it isn't your fault because your brother was living there under your name.  Your son has never been involved with drugs but local drug dealers give him things?  If you believe that then Yes, I do have some ocean front property I can sell to you, it's just a little north of Oklahoma.

I'll do the background checks on all of the applications but I'm not holding my breath on some of them.

That one point in time.

Tonight I'm going to tell you about that one point in time when I stopped working at the clubs.  At the time this happened I had been in the clubs for about five years and I was dating a lady that my DC (District Manager, like an area manager) had been hitting on. 

I ask my DC what I needed to do to get promoted and he said "it's never going to happen", the owner promotes guys that drink and party with him.  You would prefer to go to a nice restaurant with your girlfriend instead of going bar hopping with the owner. 

That was about it.  Keep in mind that at all of the clubs I had been to the numbers that we want to go up went up and the numbers that we want to go down went down.  So I had experience running profitable clubs and I wasn't a liability (no drug background or legal troubles); that apparently wasn't enough.

Maybe his judgment was just sour grapes because my girlfriend had turned him down a few times by that time.  I had dinner with my DC's boss to get his opinion on my future.  I told him what was said and he changed the subject. 

Hmmm, changed the subject.  That pretty much told me what my future was with the company.  I still did my job but did I go the extra mile like I used to? 

Nope.  Not after that one point in time.

A pet peeve.

We're trying to rent out a house and I don't know how many people have called and the first thing they say is "Do you speak Spanish?".  Now I answer with "No, do you speak English?". 

So far it's about half and half about what they do, either speak to me in English or pass the phone to someone else.  If I answer the phone in English then stick to English or let the English speaker call in the first place.

If you come to this country and don't learn the language I don't think it's the catastrophe that some do; on the other hand I don't want the government to spend money to get translations on so many things.  If you can't pass your drivers exam in English then you can walk.  You want to vote?  Learn enough English so I don't have to pay for you to get a ballot in your language.

Here in Texas a lot of businesses want the Spanish/English speaker and I don't blame them.  But this diatribe is about the government spending my tax dollars on translating literature.  If someone can vote that means they are a citizen.  If someone is a citizen then that means they can read, write, and speak English.  That's a requirement according to the USCIS.

Does that mean they need to be fluent?  Not to me, enough so they can read the ballot is enough for the spoken part to me.  Is it going to happen anytime soon?  I doubt it, but you never know.

Being a Mensch.

My favorite movie is The Apartment by Billy Wilder starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  It's a great film; it has some great lines and this one wonderful diatribe.

This is a great scene in the film.

CC Baxter's neighbor is Dr. Dreyfuss and he's had enough of what he thinks Mr. Baxter is.  He's telling Mr. Baxter that he needs to be a "mensch", what is a mensch?  It's a human being.  It's beautiful writing and the acting (by Jack Kruschen) was superb. 

I'm thinking today about various things and I've realized that what he meant was to act like a person that you would be proud to know.  That little rule of thumb applies to work and your personal life.  If the people you work with are scum do you really want to work with them?  If you're scummy at home do you think you'll really act any differently at work? 

Maybe if the entire world followed the rules according to Dr. Dreyfuss then maybe, just maybe we would have less problems in this world.

Brrring.

Our tenant is going to move out soon and the idea of having two mortgages is pretty scary.  We're trying to rent it out real fast so we have a sign out in the yard advertising that fact.

We put two signs in the yard and about 10 minutes later I get the first call.  Brrring.  Then another and another.  Brrring.  Normally I would put a message with all of the house details on my phone and let the voicemail answer.  Brrring.  My cell is also my work phone so I don't want a prospective client listening to that instead of talking to me immediately.  Brrring.

I've had almost 30 calls about that house in less than nine hours.   We've had enough people want to look at it that we're basically going to do an open house for all of the prospective tenants.  Either an open house or an auction, not sure yet.   Brrring.

Bleach.

I woke up a few days ago and noticed something written on the bathroom mirror.  Did my wife write some sexy missive to me?  Was it some crazy note about spies, ninjas, and/or aliens?  Sadly, nope to all of the above.

She wrote on the mirror:  FYI-sometimes soap isn't enough, I think I need to bathe in bleach.

What kind of day did she have at work?  I want to know but I don't think I want that many details.  It made me think of some other bleach worthy moments I've had.  Once I had a customer vomit a weeks worth of food in our restroom, did I tell the 17 year old hostess to clean it up?  Nope, I had her do her job and I cleaned it up. 

The next time your spouse gets home covered in ick don't get grumpy when they don't give you a hug, maybe they are trying to protect you from whatever it was that they had to play with.

Those People.

After years of observation I think I've figured out what's wrong with the human race...it's those people.  You know the ones I mean.  If you've never met one then you are one, think about it.

When I was working in the F&B industry I had to deal with a lot of them.  The customers are just something you have to deal with, the employees you try to manage them into better people, and the managers...well, that's tricky.

If I was working with one of those I had to do a lot of damage control.  I don't know how many managers I worked with that wanted to fire a dancer because she was "bigger" than he preferred or because she wouldn't sleep with him.  Some of the ladies I was protecting were model employees but those managers couldn't see past their beliefs. 

Truly the bane of the world I do think are those people, when I was younger I would have given them a different name but now I have small children so I'll just call them "poopy heads".

Juice.

We try not to buy junk food.  We do at times (one must build up their junk food anti-bodies) but we do really try to limit it. 

We're in a produce co-op* so sometimes the food in our fridge is not something we would buy normally.  A few weeks ago we had pears, apples, oranges, and strawberries that were going to go bad in a day or so; they all got juiced. 

This batch had a strong strawberry flavor and I was really happy with it because I couldn't taste the yucky apples or pears.  I was drinking it and my kids were drinking it and then that one came over.  My eldest offered the juice and I grudgingly shared it.  My eldest asked if they liked it.  The response?  "I've had better."  In the kids defense the parents only buy junk food and the palate is very uneducated.

This batch has all of the same but less strawberries and I threw in a tomato, just because.  I've also decided that if that kid wants some I'll say nope, you've already told me that it won't meet your standards, so I won't waste it on you.

Food co-op:  A group of people buy a large quantity of produce at a discounted price.  Discounted because the grocer had an abundance of it.

Boredom.

A brother and I get together (or try to) weekly and bring our special needs brother to lunch.  We've been going to a locally owned barbecue joint. 

This time our waitress was the owner's daughter and she mentioned how they were trying to figure out a good and inexpensive marketing idea.  Hello, you want me to brainstorm for you? Okay, try and keep up.

Apparently she didn't want us to brainstorm, she just wanted to whine.  We gave her I don't know how many low-cost/no-cost ideas and she was just bored. 

If you didn't want the ideas then don't ask for them.  Or at the very least you could pretend to be interested.