He Tapped His Temple Thrice

Not really much on tap for Friday, as my brain is still somewhat jumbled from the adventure of paying the house tax on Monday, having to do tedious but necessary research on Wednesday, grocery shopping on Tuesday and trying my hand at Fussbudgeting on Thursday.

See? See? See? If I can't even get the days of the week in the proper sequential order for this post, what makes you think I'm gonna get the proper p.s.i for today's post?

Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft.

And here it is, George Phblat's new movie, "Benji Saves The Universe!"*

Anyways, I got to think about things over the weekend, and after thinking and thinking and thinking, I thunk some more and came up with this little gem:

Why do you need 3,000 friends on Facebook? I mean, really, WTF? I can understand if you're doing the network thing because you're a writer, a business professional, or someone who is trying to build a brand, but if you're retired or just an average person, what the hell are you gonna do with 3,000 friends on Facebook? For those of you who can't quite understand what I'm saying, let me put it in blog terms: it's the equivalent of having 2,000 followers to your blog. If you've hit that plateau, chances are that you're a professional blogger making some kind of schwag and what not from your blog.

Working with the opposite sex can be dangerous to your health. I'm not sure if I've made this clear over the past three years, but about 95% of my co-workers in my unit are female. Which means that for better or worse, I have to tiptoe through multiple cliques in order to do my job properly. Over the past few weeks, I've stepped out of my cubicle, either to head home or to ask a question of my supervisor, and inadvertently walked into couple of, for lack of a cleaner phrase, "shitstorms". Mind you, none of this was directly related to me, thus I became major collateral damage for each incident. I'm just about recovered, but man oh man, us guys don't have nothing on the womenfolks when it comes to playing mean.

Being told to do one thing and then finding out something completely different when you get there. I mentioned at the top of the post that on Monday I had to pay the house tax. Technically, I pay about half every January and July, and this time was no exception. I got $1000 (because I was told that this was my share) out of two bank accounts, came in on Monday and told my boss that I had to go to the town hall to pay my taxes. I get to the town hall, go to the window, and find out, "Oh Mr. G, the remaining balance isn't $1000. The remaining balance is $1080.07."

My friends, you can probably guess what my internal response was to this statement. However, being as I was dealing with a guv'ment agency that I really, really, really, really, really needed to stay on the good side of, I paid the K, called the wife and had her write me check for the remainder, which I drove home to pick up and go back to the town hall and pay the remaining balance with.

The more I learn about my union, the more I hate it. In a nutshell, I consider myself an anti-union union member (had someone actually shake my hand on this). However, what the state agency SEBAC (yes, you read correctly) has done to the union rank and file is pretty despicable. In order to get the outcome that they and the guv'nor wants, they made a blatant power play and disenfranchised the rank and file. This was after they made a complaint to the State Attorney General's office about a conservative think tank breaking into the state e-mail system to persuade the rank and file to vote no (the A.G. determined that the complaint had no merit) on the concession agreement. Now they're doing their damnedest to get this thing to pass by any means necessary, be it hijacking the bylaws after the guv'nor suggested quid pro quo or holding a revote WHILE THE RANK AND FILE WERE/ARE ON VACATION. In a nutshell, they're doing what labor has always accused businesss of doing for the past fifty years: lying, cheating, threatening, and intimidation.

I bet you thought I had one more thing to whine about, didn't you?

Well, you were wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Boy were you wrong. You couldn't be more wrong if you said that the President will be reelected in 2012.

Instead, I got this nifty little explanation of the asterisk.

*George Phblat was a movie director from the Bloom County comic strip that Opus wrote a review about his stunningly bad film called "Benji Saves The Universe.":

George Phblat's new film 'Benji Saves The Universe', has brought the word "BAD" to new levels of badness. Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This bad film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene...simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness."