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You Don't Know What I'm Up Against

Well, the good news is I didn't have to wait until Wednesday. This email was waiting for me in my inbox last night. Thank you for your interest in an opportunity with Apple retail. At this time we have chosen to move ahead with candidates who better meet the business needs today. We wish you the best in your future endeavors. Thank you again for your time and interest in Apple Inc. So that's it. I'm boned. I did really good Friday, I know I did. I mean, I would have bought something from me. But it wasn't good enough. They tell you that you don't have to pressure customers and selling isn't a big deal because people come in four times before they buy something, but they're full of shit. All they care about is if you can get someone to buy their overpriced crap. Clearly having an extensive...

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Mulligan!

I got to take that Apple hiring seminar thing again on Friday. I won't here back from them until Wednesday, but I feel a lot better about my chances this time. If I don't get hired, I'm going to have to start thinking about selling body parts. Anyone need a healthy liver...

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Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Labor Day weekend may have been the greatest couple of days in my sad, sorry little life. Of course, then I got the hiccups for nearly five days, had to get a chest x-ray and a blood test, took prescription antacids and finally had the hiccups supplanted by constant, horrible coughing. And the pills made my crap turn black and spherical, like little bowling balls. Not to mention the constant job search, and getting turned down for a crap job AT THE MALL by people who are too stupid to use a PC. If Apple's share of the personal computer market is growing by leaps and bounds, then how come half the online applications for retail stores I tried...

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Ever See An Apple That Could Take A Bite Outta You?

I don't have the hiccups anymore. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice. Unfortunately, I've spent every waking hour the past couple of months filling out applications for part time jobs and not one callback. It's the holiday season. Everyone is hiring, how hard can it be to get a job, right? I don't know how many of you have every taken that 30-page personality test that accompanies nearly every online application, but if you have, and then went on to actually get the job, I ask you, what kind of crazy magic voodoo did you use to pass that thing? I've taken it for Best Buy, Borders, AMC Movie Theaters, Petco, Staples, Home Depot...always...

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Please Kill Me

I had just about the best Labor Day weekend ever. But none of that matters now, because I've been hiccuping on and off since yesterday afternoon. I don't know how to make it stop! It'll go away in a few minutes and then start up again in an hour. What the hell is going on? ...

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I Miss Meg Ryan

It's funny, I don't really like Meg Ryan. I mean, I don't hate her. I wouldn't name a bunch of kittens after her and then drown them or anything. But I don't think I've ever said, "Ooh! A Meg Ryan movie! Let's go see it right now!" Still, I miss looking out the window and seeing Meg Ryan. The film crew were only shooting on Newbury Street Monday and Tuesday, and they've long since packed up and moved on. Now it's boring around here. Last year, we could at least peer out the window whenever the Yankees were in town, since a lot of them stayed across the street at the Ritz. But ever since the hotel changed ownership and names to The Taj, the Yankee...

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Plagiarism is the Sincerest form of Flattery

What's more pathetic than trying to microwave powdered cappuccino for four minutes? Oh, I don't know, maybe copying and pasting a story about trying to microwave powdered cappuccino and pretending it happened to you? Oh, and forgetting to remove a link so the person you stole from can easily find out about it. On Technorati yesterday, I noticed a MySpace blog post called "Kimmy Vs. Microwave," that looked an awful lot like a post I did last month called "Man Vs. Microwave." I mean, to be fair, it could have just been an amazing coincidence. Sure, she used the exact same wording as I did, but there are some subtle differences. For example, nowhere in my title does the name Kimmy appear, but it's clearly visible as the first word in hers. Also, I assumed the mug of indeterminate origin belonged...

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And Kathy Griffin as Olga

They're filming a movie outside my window. Not just any movie, but a Meg Ryan-Eva Mendez-Annette Bening movie, possibly the chickiest chick flick ever. It's called The Women and it's a remake/update of a comedy by the same name from 1939. The original boasted a cast comprised entirely of women, even the extras. This one seems to be taking the same approach, since the street is filled with female extras walking back and forth with shopping bags. Other than them, so far all I see are catering trucks and orange traffic cones. Ah, here we go. They've started filming. Are you ready for some steamy pictures of Eva Mendez? Well, she filmed her...

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Why I'm Afraid of Clowns

Earlier this week, Amy was looking at her boyfriend's Myspace page, and someone had left him the cryptic message: "Happy birthday! You are worse than Michael Jackson." Well that's...open to interpretation. Worse than him at what? Scrabble™? Cutting back on the Jesus Juice? Mini golf? In the name of science, I decided to do a search for "You are worse than Michael Jackson." and curiously enough, came up with almost 250 results. It seems "You are worse than Michael Jackson" isn't just a passive-aggressive non-sequitur, it's a biting accusation straight from the mouth of curly-booted 80's wrestling icon and Cyndi Lauper video extra The...

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A Short Story

Every once in a while, Schprock will pop his head in the office to say Jason Evans is having another short story contest. The deadline for this contest is 11 PM tonight. The deal is, you write a story of no more than 250 words inspired by a photo he provides. I've done a couple of them, even tried to do something similar here. So I thought I'd give this new one a try. Here's the image. The story's called "Vision Quest." Vision Quest A guy could learn a lot about himself out in the woods. Legend says the Wampanoag sent their young out here on vision quests, alone to fend for themselves for weeks. Armed with only your wits and a sleeping bag,...

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My Girl

I've never read any of the Harry Potter books, and I don't intend to. But that doesn't stop me from reading the spoilers. I've gone to websites with detailed character histories, plot outlines and summaries, timelines...and I'm not even sure why. When the last book came out, I got up at seven in the morning and read the Wikipedia entry about it, and found out everything I needed to know. They even have a neat little chart diagramming who dies, who kills them and how. Like Clue. I just need to know things. I always snuck downstairs and peaked at my presents before Christmas. Sometimes I go online and read the endings of movies I've never seen. The other day I read the summary for Heathers. I go to a website for Lost spoilers, which coughs up pieces of information throughout the week until...

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Talking in Circles, eh?

Good Morning, good morning everyone, in the news this morning, good morning. A follow up to our top story, Trina is not dead. Ms. Smith, however, still is. In other news, John Mooney, the coyote guy, has been moonlighting on the weekends as a security guard at a swanky apartment complex. I think it's an apartment complex. It's festooned with swank, whatever it is. He's also trying to learn French for an upcoming trip to Canada. But he's having trouble finding time to listen to the French CD, and he can't listen to it when he's stressed. I would have thought that he could listen to it at his security guard job, all he has to do is sit at a desk...

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Morbid Etiquette

A few months ago, I got a cryptic email from Trina with the subject line "mishap." It read "Can't blog. Had an accident. want exclusive?" followed by her phone number to get more details. I was a little worried. What could have happened that she couldn't write in an email? Maybe she was just a head in a jar, using what little power she had left to type with her tongue. Concern and curiosity (and much prodding by Michele) prevailed over my hatred of talking on the phone, and that Sunday I called and got the story. This is all old news now, of course, how she went up in the attic at work to fix a leak, lost her balance and fell through the ceiling, landed on the copier eight feet below, broke all kinds of body parts and was laid out for weeks. Since she wouldn't be able to post, my job was...

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Unfortunate Product Placement Theater

It's kind of weird that some of Boston's homeless have achieved levels of fame reserved for heads of state, and a select few have even shot through the stratosphere to stand shoulder to shoulder with coked-up celebutantes and reality show contestants in terms of name recognition. But of all the homeless people in the area that I've heard of, Mr. Butch wasn't one of them. He may not have had a roof over his head, but he's got his own Wikipedia entry, so he's one up on me. Despite my ignorance, Mr. Butch was an icon in the Kenmore area for three decades. He even had a following in the local music scene and played a few clubs in the 80s. Sadly,...

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Nothing But Net

This morning I was scanning the headlines on Yahoo News when my eyes stopped on one that left me shocked and puzzled. "Holy crap! Larry Bird died?! When did that happen? And why is Laura Bush going to his funeral?" In my defense, it was early in the morning. What kind of name is Lady Bird anyway? Just to review: Larry Bird Lady Bird ...

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Man Vs. Microwave

Yesterday I thought I'd make a cup of instant coffee, or to be more accurate, microwave up some water and powdered French Vanilla cappuccino mix. The instructions say to heat 3/4 cup (6 fl. oz) of cold water in a measuring cup on HIGH for 1 1/2 minutes or until hot. Then empty the contents of the envelope into a mug and slowly pour the water over it. Easy enough. But what if you don't have a measuring cup? Or even a second cup just to heat the water in? All I've got is a "Weymouth MRI" mug of indeterminate origin. I think it might have been Joe's; he's probably had a few CT scans in his day. I could have heated the water in the mug and then...

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Unsolicited Information: Things I Did Not Know

July 9th. This is only my 19th post of 2007. I should probably pick up the slack a little bit, huh? Still, that averages out to almost 3 a month, which is better that some people. If you haven't read Schprock's blog, you're probably still wondering what happened with good ol' "Open Casket" Joe and his latest whopper. Well tough clams, I haven't gotten to that yet. Instead, here's an informative yet unsolicited glimpse into a series of trivial matters I only just recently discovered. Until about a week ago, I thought that show was called Sex in the City. Then I played a trivia game where the show was the answer to one of the questions and I got...

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Eight Things in a Duffle Bag

Hey it's the middle of June. What happened to May? And April? I must have been really busy at work, because I sure wasn't posting my crazy theories on a Lost message board. That'd just be silly. Why would you even think that? Two pretty major events happened last week. If you've read Schprock's latest post, you know the first one, which I'll go into a bit more detail on later. The other thing that happened was I was tagged by Trinamick, and you don't mess with someone who can survive a fall trough a ceiling. It only makes them mad. So here are eight things about me, specifically, eight things that I should probably tell a doctor but never do. It's nothing major, but on the other hand, we all know what happens when you take the wait-and-see approach. 1. Sometimes when I chew or even if I'm...

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By Your Powers Combined...

Before I had a blog, I used to whittle away the hours on a message board, conversing with all manner of nerds, geeks and shut-ins interesting people from all walks of life. The interaction with all these characters is what made it fun and kept me coming back, but it's a little harder to reproduce that kind of dynamic on a blog unless there's an active comments section. As it is, some people don't even read the comments. It's true! Because of this, and because fermicat gave me the idea, I'm just going to copy and paste my last comment and count it as a new post, but make just enough subtle changes that you'll have to read it all over again. Yes, I've been lagging lately. Ever since I moved at the end of last sumer, time hasn't been my friend. It's not that I haven't done or seen anything...

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Local Man Hit By Bus

Crap. I spent the last hour, and most likely the next one, trying to print an A6 envelope on the color printer. The multi-purpose tray has markings to show where an A6 envelope should go, but that size is inexplicably absent from the preset options for envelopes. It has A7, but not A6. Why did they bother marking it on the tray then?! There is a "custom" option, so I entered the A6 size in there, but it was positioned wrong and cut off most of the type. Oh, and it created big black imprints of the folds on the other side of the envelope all over the front. I haven't been lucky enough to need to print on a pre-made non-number 10 envelope on this printer until now, but others in the office who've had to deal with it in the past said the best way to do it is to resize the document to 8.5 x...

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For Real This Time

Ok. There's going to be a new post tomorrow morning, or may God strike me down with a Fung Wah bus. And by morning I mean before noon. Ish. Eastern Standard Ti...

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Don't Read This

18 days ago, I mentioned something about doing a Joe post. Then work got busy again so any hopes of hearing new Joe-isms were crashed. And now for the past few days I've had a cold. Nothing too bad, just a little coughing, lots of sneezing (at least 1 in 5 with gross, mucusy projectiles), and a constant nose drip. I mean literally CONSTANT. It refuses to stop running. How much more can possibly be in there? I'm starting to fear that eventually, my nose and, maybe even my entire head, will just dry up, shrivel and fall off. I tore through a box of Kleenex yesterday, but all I have to show for it is a trash barrel filled with hardened, crumpled up tissues and the assurance that in a couple of days, I'm going to have those gross sores all under my nose. But I've just made a medical breakthrough....

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