November 2002

From the “I Guess It Depends on Your Point of View Department”:
This morning a dj on KROQ said, “And there’s some good news to report on traffic: The fatal accident that was blocking the 210 has been cleared from lanes.”

Last night I dreamt that I was on the phone with person A. While I was talking with person A, person B called my cell phone. I tried to disable the ringer on my cell and could not. I became very frustrated. I smashed my cell phone and it would not stop ringing. At one point, I was on my hands and knees on the phone with person A and repeatedly whacking my cell phone - which by this point had transformed into a cross between a train set I had when I was about 10 and a 1950s-era telephone - with the sole of one of my old, battered Doc Marten’s. The cell phone-slash-train-telephone was in bits and pieces and yet would not stop ringing.

Finally person A got tired of hearing me make loud banging noises and asked to call me later. So I answered my cell phone by holding a miniscule particle of speaker to my ear and it was my mom on the other end, telling me that my grandfather had finally died. I was surprised because I had watched my grandfather die of a heart attack when I was about 12 and hadn’t realized that he was, in fact, living in a retirement community in Naples. It was very sad because, she said, he had bed sores and bad skin and was neglected by the evil caretakers at the home. During this entire conversation, though, the cell phone was still ringing.

I woke up and realized that my alarm had been ringing for about ten minutes.

I never said it was an interesting story.

Shut Up - Bloodhound Gang

Men’s Fashion: Part 1, Suits
Unfortunately the majority of suits you see look awful. This isn’t necessary. Even if you work ten hours with your jacket on, being mindful of your clothing will keep you ready for cocktails after work. Too many men either don’t care or don’t know how to wear a suit, and, suitably, look like shit. This is worth avoiding.

Please put in your vote to help Albert the Aligator win the Capital One - National Mascot of the Year award. He deserves it.

I used to work for a paging company about 600 years ago. InterLink Paging. This was back in the dark ages, when mobile phones were still the size of shoe boxes and it actually made sense to own (or lease) a “beeper”.

Anyway. We used to have a policy that a phone number had to be out of service for at least 6 months before we were allowed to give that number to a new customer. It made sense to me. Sure, every now and then if we were “low” on numbers - usually an order hadn’t been fulfilled by Southern Bell in time - we might assign someone a number that had only been out of commission for five months or something wacky like that.

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