The Life and Times of Florence Knitingale

Saturday, November 11, 2006

There Must Be A Sale on Crazy

Try though I might, I cannot convince all of my brain cells to work as one cohesive unit this evening (some sort of turf war, I imagine) so I will have to offer my thoughts in a somewhat jumbled manner. You may want to try reading it all mixed up….see if that helps.

1. Mr. K and I went out to lunch today and then out to buy new cell phones and renew our cell contract. Since we chose not to have a landline, this was a bit pressing. Now, I tend to think that a store that sells cell phones should probably be efficient at it. This idea, however, may be a fanciful one. It took over an hour and a half, fully an hour of which took place AFTER we chose the phones. I’m not sure what Mr. Serious Hair Gel salesman was doing back there….maybe making another hair gel run. It seemed obvious once I looked around that there was a minimum allowed level of hair gel for all sales people. If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space”, you’ll know what I mean when I say that for these salesfolk, hair gel is apparently a form of personal flair.
2. I am apparently quite old. I cannot understand why I would want or need my telephone to do anything other than allow me to make calls, and to ring when someone calls me. Our new phones can take pictures (Mr. K took a very handsome shot of the dashboard on the way home), calculate tips, tell me the time in any country, convert measures, download music……I’m not totally sure it actually makes phone calls, although I do hope so. I would not be surprised to go in next time and have them ask me if I want it toploading or frontloading because they do laundry now.
3. There are some cinnamon rolls that do not, apparently, wish to be made. I was going to make them last week when I started craving them desperately, like a beached fish, if the ocean was spiked with cinnamon and frosting……(once again, I cannot be trusted with a metaphor). However, a catering emergency put those plans on the back burner—the barbecue place and my hubby miscommunicated and they did not give us the planned cornbread. I was already making assorted cookies and stuff, so I gave up the cinnamon rolls in order to make the cornbread. So I was going to make them last night (make the dough last night, make the rolls this morning). But I had a bit of a headache so I decided to make them tonight. Which was when I discovered that I had no yeast. (I know that I do….but the house has mysteriously eaten it. There can be no other explanation for this. Unless there’s a black hole in the pantry, which you can be sure I'll investigate.). So I trudged back out to the store in the rain, located the yeast, stood in line for about 12 years behind some guy who was apparently writing his check with single drops of ink carried by hand one at a time from Timbuktu, and it was then that I noticed this sign: “20% off wine when you buy 6 or more bottles.” Yeah, yeah—holiday entertaining, I guess. I’m not really all that social and, when I am, I rarely mark the occasion with six bottles of discount, grocery store wine. Call me crazy.
4. Speaking of crazy, I read in the paper that a man in England decided to celebrate Guy Fawkes night by inserting a firecracker….uh….in a place better used for sitting, shall we say, and LIGHTING it. He suffered fairly impressive burns and internal injuries. I suspect that a 20% discount on bulk purchases of alcohol could be in some way related to this. That said, and with all due apologies for being crude, just how much alcohol would you have to ingest before sticking a firecracker up your ass and lighting it would seem like a good idea? I’m not a drinker, I admit, but I have to say that I have not consumed that much alcohol so far in my entire lifetime, and really don’t expect to. I’ve tried and tried….but I cannot picture any circumstances wherein I would be holding a firecracker, dropping my pants, and saying “Hey, you know what would be fun…..?” And what about this guy’s friends? ‘Cause, you just know that there was a whole bunch of assorted testosterone in the room that day. And you know there was discussion. You just KNOW there was. Half the fun for young 20-something inebriates is discussing the stupid ideas at length before doing them. But it never occurred to any of them that firecracker + fire + ass might possibly equal something kind of….not so good? I can almost hear the slurred conversation:

First mental giant: “Wait, wait…..something…..um….firecracker….ass… .maybe….uh….”
Second mental giant: “What is it, Bob? What’s wrong?”
First mental giant: “Uh…huh. Can’t remember…probably nothing. Go ahead—light him up.”

I’m baffled people. Maybe I’ll go consult my new phone. It knows everything.

6 Comments:

  • At 12:24 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Jeez ..he had to be a citizen of my home-town where binging is the biggest entertainment around next to letting of fireworks fom Nov.Ist to Jan 1st the following year .I is supposed to be for November 5th only and was in my childhood. The weird thing is they are really expensive too so how do they afford it ?
    Most of the ghastly littele "gits" at mobile phone shops have hair like English footballers i.e at some point they were plugged into the mains . They are snivelling little wrteches who go cold when you want the cheapest.I have a landline still so only use my mobile in an emergency when out . I hate nothing more than to see kids seemingly stuck to them or the ring-tones driving you mad at the mall. The headsets can make it look like the street is full of loonies. The best uses seem to have been the ability to take photos during the London bombings ,not to ogle but for the inteelligence service to study and the passer-by who caught an L.A policeman thinking he was Vic Mackie ......if you never watched "The Shield" you were lucky.The first series was very break-through but it just got really sick.

     
  • At 12:25 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Lots of typos due to being kept up until the wee hours by...fireworks .I apologise.

     
  • At 9:11 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Funny! snortin' away over here.
    I'm waiting for the front-loaders myself.
    DH has a cell phone, has had one for years (business) then 3 years ago decided I should have one...so my plan? 1000 minutes a month...the statement would come in, I'd have as little as 10 minutes, the average is around 30 minutes, but it seems to me I've had as many as 150 minutes total on month, so after 3 years he decides to change the plan (uhh, yeah!) I now have 300 minutes to my name for a month. Nothing fancy, but get this, you'd think the price would go down accordingly, right? wrong.
    Dude, firecracker up the old bunghole....and then lit! Seriously, though if I'd heard their conversation I'd fear for my life just a bit, laughing myself to the end. Wonder how fast he sobered up.

     
  • At 10:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I wonder why it just has an 'm' there?
    Oh yeah, cause I can be an idiot...

     
  • At 11:14 AM, Blogger Jo at Celtic Memory Yarns said…

    I know those phone salesmen! I wanted something really really simple, like upgrading the old clunky cellphone that had died for something that would enable me to keep in touch with the world. This shiny sleek toddler, barely out of nappies, kept pouring out tidal waves of snappy info about emails and images and pixels and double overdrive twin camshaft engineering. Then he got on to the billing options - did I want to pay ten million a month and get FREE phone calls or fifty million a month and get FREE texting FOR EVER (somebody should really get these guys to assess their use of words like 'fifty million' and 'free' in the same sentence). In the end I went to another shop where the salesman was all grown up and could sell me what I wanted. Can't always find one of those shops, though.

     
  • At 4:13 PM, Blogger Lynn said…

    Laughing out loud in TX.
    Those "Firecracker Bob" types pass me all the time on the way to and from work, in their dually pickups with the bass blasting, weaving in and out of the lines as we slow to make our way around the accidents caused by ... more Firecracker Bob types.
    One can only hope that the incessant thumping of the bass notes eventually renders them incapable of reproducing themselves.
    This past spring and summer, my upstairs neighbors were the worst sort of Katrina refugees who let the good times roll 24/7 and dropped a lifetime's worth of F-bombs off the balcony at 2:30am.
    Testosterone poisoning is a sad, sad thing.

     

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