Category Archives: Humor

Creeping Dead Zones

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Has anyone else noticed that there appears to be two very prominent creeping dead zones that surround the weekend? I mean, think about it. Nobody is really conscious Friday after lunch, and when you get to “High Tea” around 3pm, where really civilized countries are napping already, you could strip buck naked and streak through the office and NOBODY WOULD NOTICE. The same fuzzy non-time surrounds the beginning of the week too, that nothing of meaning ever happens between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.

The comical part of me sees this as a creeping problem. First we lose Friday afternoons and Monday mornings. Then as time goes on, people start making allowances for Friday mid-mornings and Monday afternoons. The work week is being effectively gnawed down on both sides by this creeping inertia.

Case in point, a help desk’s ticket throughput during these dead zones. Nobody has problems, principally because they’ve already checked out and can’t be bothered. I swear that sometimes you can hear tumbleweeds dashing along our office during these dead zones, it’s so quiet. So we keep busy. I bet a monumental amount of network traffic is bound for Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and yes, my dear readers, WordPress.

The people who manage productivity should be alarmed. The weekend has sharp pointy teeth and it’s getting bigger! 😉

P.S. This is the first time the WordPress Proofreader didn’t have piss OR vinegar for me. YAY!

Family

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As a general rule there are some things you don’t discuss because they are inappropriate, bad form, tacky and or tasteless. Pinless grenades dangling from a flak jacket. Don’t discuss politics, religion, the weather (which always kind of mystified me, I mean, it’s right out there, but whatever) and I today was a clear call for the last thing that really shouldn’t come up in pleasant conversation and that is airing family laundry. Especially when family happens to be reading! Saying something you feel in the moment just sits there and expands and before you know it you have (or are) Godzilla facing an island full of screaming fleeing citizenry. Does Godzilla ever feel awkward? Hmmm… (the real question should be, does Godzilla call his mother? NO HE DOES NOT. He sets Tokyo on fire. I suspect it’s all about the guilt.)

It’s not that the issues that come up are wrong, but the medium isn’t right. So there are some things that I won’t ever bring up in this blog again. “Dear, we don’t talk about those sorts of things…” mostly because no matter how you try to explain what you feel the written word never really works well. It always comes out as an excuse or a cop-out or any one of a million other miswritten things. Some of these things are best reserved for highly paid therapists who have easy access to recreational pharmaceuticals. And before anyone throws a fit, all pharmaceuticals are recreational. So there…

So I pledge to keep things all light and fuzzy around here from now on. I’m quite a number of things, mostly related to being one or many aspects of monstrous, as anyone who meets me for the first time can immediately attest, just ask any of our foreign students, if you can keep them from squeaking and trying to flee at the merest mention of my name. If you are going to aspect Kali, you might as well go all out is what I say!

Family will keep to itself and life will go on. Love them, or hate them, chat them up incessantly or check-in sparingly, no proclamation ever really is lasting or serious and no, nobody really feels that badly about someone else in their family. Unless they happen to be conservatives, in that case, they are dead to us. Yes, us. Sybil, Sybil, *twitch twitch* 😉

And this will be the last time I use the F word on this blog! So there!

Say Goodbye Gracie

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Got this little marvel in the mail:

Employees using University owned cell phone/PDAs will be taxed on the fair market value, (in this case the cost to WMU), of the phone and plan.  All applicable payroll taxes will be applied.  For phones and devices already in use, we will tax the value of the plan only.  In order to properly account for University monies used to pay for dual use cell phones and ensure the fringe benefits are taxed properly, the voucher given to accounts payable to pay for such phone service must include or have attached a detail of the names and employee numbers of the employees and the respective amounts being paid for their phone/device.  For plans where the cost isn’t already broken down by phone, you will need to allocate the total cost to the phones if you are not already doing so for general ledger posting purposes.  Accounts payable will submit the cost information to the payroll department after they review to make sure all the cost is being accounted for.    Departments that are paying for University owned cell phones with a procurement card should submit the same information to the payroll department on a monthly basis.  No department should be paying for a non-University owned cell phone plan with a procurement card.

So on February 1st I will be surrendering my line at 269-599-7798. This will conclude my mobile telephony reach as well. I will most likely not be having any other phone as I cannot afford one. As a practical upshot to this, after February 1st I will be unavailable to telephone traffic for quite some time. There won’t be a replacement number as I don’t have the funds available to afford to replace such technology. If I am not at my office, I won’t be reachable. In the case of emergencies, they will have to be queued and held for me until I reach a place where I can access telephony equipment. Likewise, if I have an emergency I will be unable to call 911. Lets hope we don’t run into any of that sort of thing. This is 21st Century progress at it’s finest, folks. Let us rejoice.

As for our business mobile infrastructure?

Say Goodbye Gracie.

Proof of Life

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Here is some email back and forth between me and a fellow at Google Apps who doesn’t believe that I’m who I say I am. Oh how to prove WMU.

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Email From Google:
On Jan 13, 2011, at 6:26 PM, The Google Team wrote:

Hello Andy,

Thanks for your message.

Before we can continue processing your application for an Apps for
Education Upgrade, please clarify the purpose of the specific domain you
have requested for upgrade.

In addition, can you please provide the following information:

What are the ages of the students you teach?
Do you offer degrees to students who complete the program?
Have you received accreditation from an accepted accrediting body?

Please reply to this email with your responses so we may continue to
process your request. If you are a certified 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization please send us your EIN, as you may qualify for an upgrade to
Education Edition for non-profits.

If you do not feel you meet these requirements, we invite you to continue
to manage your account with our free Google Apps, which offers many of the
same features and services.

Sincerely,

Suchit
The Google Apps Team

My Response:

Hello,

We teach students from 18 to in their 80’s… This might help:

Western Michigan University (WMU) is a public universityestablished in 1903 by Dwight B. Waldo. When the school first opened, it was known as the Western State Normal School, but was renamed Western State Teachers College in 1927 and Western Michigan College of Education in 1941. On February 26, 1957 Governor G. Mennen Williams signed into law a bill making Western Michigan College the state’s fourth public university. In its annual ranking of the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, U.S. News & World Report consistently lists WMU as one of the nation’s top 100 public universities. (Hooray Wikipedia!)

We offer many degrees, Everything from Bachelors all the way up to PhD’s. We’ve got about 117,000 alumni who we’ve graced with degrees. We’ve got 278,000 living constituents… I’m just saying.

And once again…

Western Michigan University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, 30 North LaSalle Street, Suite 2400, Chicago, Illinois 60602-2504; Web site www.ncahigherlearningcommission.org.

Feel free to give me a call, 269-387-8719 and we can discuss Western Michigan University in detail. I’m the system administrator for WMU Development and Alumni Relations, my office is in Walwood Hall room 133E. I’m sure we could likely also find a few of our graduates who WORK AT GOOGLE and have degrees from our COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING. Oye!

Thanks for the laughs, I hope some of this works for you guys…

Andy McHugh
269-216-4597

Literary Cupboard

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As I sit here contemplating how to properly murder and dispose of a hated literary character, Karrin Murphy in the Jim Butcher series “The Dresden Files” it struck me how comic it would be if there was a funky bedroom cupboard or closet that had an odd Poltergeist/Neverending Story spatial rift in it connecting the fantastical worlds the central character reads with the real space in his room. So when he’s reading a book and hates a particular character, he gets to read about all the ways he’s tried to attack her in the book series. “Oh Harry, every time I open that closet I get attacked! First it was knives, then what had to be the business end of a flamethrower. Just last week I narrowly missed a bucket of bleach followed by a bucket of ammonia – I had to evacuate the house for three days to let the Chlorine gas escape. Harry, I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Yes Karrin, someone is. Next I’ll move on to rusty farm implements that I’ve stolen from the local Cracker Barrel. Try to escape those bits of flair ye harridan!

It’s not all the time that I’m so suffused with the raw urge to root for the monster to eat what I’m sure was originally planned to be one of the protagonists. But Light, what I wouldn’t give to watch Godzilla pop up out of Lake Michigan (the book setting is Chicago) rampage through the city, tear the roof off Karrin Murphys home and eat her, then burn the house to the ground and then stomp on it until it was flat.

All I can hope for is she develops some sort of new thing that puts her back in a coma. She was a much more pleasant character when she was in a coma.

New Years Resolutions

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Everyone makes them and everyone breaks them. The classic ones over the year have been to lose weight or get out of debt, these aren’t things I can simply check-off my list in a year, they are long-term things. So I have to start small. One thing that I can definitely get a handle on and work on is to not be so very angry in the coming new year.

To cease being so angry I also have to bury a lot of zombies that are shambling about. The zombies take the form of the past. Previous coworkers, previous problems, previous angers. I visualize that I’ve got them in a giant earthen pit and I’m laughing with a shovel in one hand and a molotov cocktail in the other hand, looking at the zombies shambling  around the pit sloshing around in gasoline. I light the cocktail, lob it in, and watch as all the past issues and annoyances and bugbears burn like so much straw men. Once the screaming and shuffling is over I get down off the tower platform I’m standing on and get busy shoveling all this nasty into the shallow grave it so richly deserves.

So my goal for 2011 is to not let the past bother me, to not get so angry, and to not let myself get caught up in vortexes of rage so that all I can think about is revenge and destruction. The shortcut is with psychotropic medications, I think the more honest path is with plain old willpower and determination. We’ll see how 2011 stacks up.

Chainfire

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It all started with a comic exchange about the fetish that some southerners have to mowing their lawn. That they do so in conditions that make sitting on a rain-soaked lump of steel during an electrical storm appear to be exclamations to evolution to come and weed them out of the gene pool. It struck me that these people could be riding along, get hit by lightning and then the tractor they are sitting on could explode and shoot a gout of flaming gasoline onto their house setting that on fire.

That started the idea that I’ve had for a long time. That there exists situations where the worst possible thing could actually ignite a chain of comically bad consequences. One of my favorites starts with a teeny Earthquake and then proceeds to lead to one path for the Apocalypse. It all starts with a 9.5 Earthquake under New Madrid, Missouri. That of course annihilates New Madrid (see ya) and the energy released causes the San Andreas to finally let go, which would of course need to be more than a 10 on the Richter scale. That pushes the western ridge of California into the Pacific, and pretty much all of California is annihilated (oops, bye bye) and of course the lateral shift would push a huge mass of water out and that would initiate a real Tsunami, so Midway and Hawaii would see maybe a little rise in water level, but Japan… oh… bye bye. The energy released for both faults going off so close together causes Mt. Hood to erupt (bye Oregon) and the differential in magma + the earth ringing like a bell from both events sets off the Yellowstone supervolcano. It’s 600,000 year store of pressure is released, perhaps 15 on the Richter scale opens up something fantastic right under Yellowstone. So immediately we’ve lost California, Missouri, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Hawaii might be under seawater, and Japan would definitely also be lost. The supervolcano rages for maybe a month, shooting millions of tons of ash and pyroclastic material high into the atmosphere. The Jet Stream takes all this fine particulate material and pushes it all the way out to Newfoundland. The dimming of sunlight causes an epic crop failure, the pyroclastic grit causes all dwellings in the precipitation path to collapse from the weight and then as people drive around with the grit in the air they destroy all the mechanical modes of conveyance through abrasion and failure leaving us in scattered communities only bridged by people willing to walk outside. Without a rebreather-kit the grit would likely lead to widespread development of Mesothelioma in anything that breathed the air. The United States practically starves to death, the US Economy collapses, which then sets off China as their currency collapses (debt based on the full faith of  a place that no longer exists, really) and that would affect every other world economy, leading to an extinction-level event. Practically the only really safe people would be aboard the ISS. As of today, that would be six people left.

Dear Dr. Hawking, it’s a damn shame nobody is listening to you. I hope the people up in the ISS have a woman and a way back down, up there. 🙂