How To Waste Time: Part 7425

I’m sure you’ve all gotten those emails with the weird questions in them. The ones that ask stuff like why do they call them French Fries if they weren’t invented there? Or, why do people say it’s colder than hell outside when everything is obviously colder than hell to start with? Well, a friend of mine sent me a link to a website that’s like those emails to the extreme. There are pages and pages of these things. If you’re looking for something to do to avoid work, or to pass the time between posts over here, go there and try to get through reading all that stuff without your head starting to spin trying to answer it.
Crazy Thoughts.com, it’s stupidly good fun.

Comments Are Broken

Ok, like the title says, the comments are broken. It seems that the provider won’t allow us to continue to use the service unless we pay them $31.36 Canadian to get their pro version. Not sure yet what we’re going to do about it but if anybody knows of a cheaper option, or if the service we use is worth paying for,
please let me know.

By the way, if
Karine
is reading this, what if anything did you pay for your commenting system? I like yours a lot better than ours.

So until we sort all of this out, all of you with comments on anything should email them to us.

Steve
Matt.

More on this as we figure out what we’re gonna do.

To Hell With Canadian Tire

So the other day I’m at Canadian Tire. For our not-so-Canadian friends its basically a hardware/sporting goods/home supplies combination store that you can usually find what you’re looking for in. On this particular day, it is absolutely packed. There are about 7 counters, only 2 of which are opened and no less than 35 people lined up at each one. So, I get talked to the guy ahead of me and he’s just as frustrated as I am. He is purchasing a $1.99 set of picture frame clips to hold them to the wall. I am buying a $3.99 set of specialty batteries and we will both wait at least 20 minutes for these small, yet important purchases.

At that moment, another counter opens and there is a mass stampede towards it. I end up third in line, the guy I was talking to me is second and there is one woman ahead of him, obviously first and we’re in much higher spirits as we’re going to get out in a decent time. This woman is purchasing a $269.00 ceiling fan. And she’s doing it with…. Canadian Tire Money…. NNNOOOO!!!!

Again, for our non-Canadian friends. This is basically a coupon system specific to the Canadian Tire stores. Problem is, the donominations are 5 cents, 10 cents and 25 cents. Basically, you can’t have a $50 bill in Canadian Tire money. They’re small coupons. Back to the story.

This means that this woman is going to count out $269.00 in Canadian Tire money. Needless to say that there is a sizeable grown from the crowd behind her which, of course, she does not acknowledge. She whips out this encyclopedia of Canadian Tire money and begins counting outloud as she lays it down on the counter.

Had this been a good day for me, the woman behind the counter would have allowed a few of us with the under $5.00 items to pass through as she counted… or at the very least been counting along with the woman. But no, not on this day. On this day she allows the woman to count out over $250.00 in 10 cent donominations and THEN picks up the pile and counts it herself to make sure that it is correct. The guy ahead of me and I begin to wonder how badly we need to hang pictures and power unimportant objects… or if the Canadian Tire corperation would really miss our combined 7 dollars after the parade of coupons they were getting back.

We did eventually get through the line. Ironically,the 35 people ahead of us in the other line left well before we ever did. What a royal piss-off.

good-day and PUT YOUR FUCKING COUPONS AWAY WHEN MAKING MAJOR HOME PURCHASES!

A Tale Of Adversity

Gather around, all, as I will pass on to you an inspiring tale of adversity.

This past weekend in Guelph a hockey tournament for boys ages 10-12 was held. It was open to teams from all over Ontario. One of the teams that decided to attend was from Peterborough. The tournament was to start on Friday evening with a game between Peterborough and London.

On Friday afternoon there was a terrible accident on Hwy 401. (the main East/West Hiway through the area for those who don’t know). It kept traffic backed up for hours. Since the Peterborough team did not travel together on a bus, there were parents and players trying desperately to get to Guelph in time for the game. One father went north and decided to take a different Hiway until he got by the accident. He went north to the next Hiway and as he turned on to it he was side swiped by a transport. Both the 12 year old Peterborough goaltender and his father were killed instantly.

In Guelph, the rest of the team assembled in their locker room and wondered where their goalie and his father was. The father had been very involved with the team through his son’s 3 years on the team and it was not like him to not be there. So, they assumed that the two had gotten stuck in the gridlock on the 401 and would not make the game and would be there for their second game later that night. This father was so involved with the team, he had their game jerseys in his car with him so the team as also left without them. They were forced to play the first game in a local Guelph teams practise jerseys as league rules prevent a team from playing without distinguishing jerseys.

They played their first game with their backup goaltender and lost rather convincingly. At game-time for the second game, still no sign of the goaltender or his father so they played their second and last game for the evening without him and lost again, this time not so bad. The kids returned to their hotel after a tough night while the coach did what he could to find out where his missing team member and volunteer were.

The next morning the young boys grandfather got a phone call asking if he knew this name. He of course said yes and was told that the two had been in a bad accident and asked him to come down and identify the body. This was at about 4:45am. He drove the one hour from Peterborough to Toronto and identified the bodies to be his son and grand-son. He then got back in his car and drove another hour to Guelph to the arena where his grand-sons team was to play at 8:30am. As he walked in to the teams locker room as the boys were suiting up for their first of four games on the Saturday having already lost their first two and knowing that they wre all but out of the playoff picture.

The man told the coach what had happened and asked if he could speak to the team. He started by telling these 10, 11 and 12 year olds exactly what had happened in no uncertain terms. They were, of course, shocked. The coach suggested that the team tell the officials that they would not compete in this game as they were not emotionally prepared to do so. The Grandfather cut him off and continued to talk and said that he knew his son and grand-son would want the team, if they were able, to continue on and compete. The entire locker room sat perfectly quiet not knowing what to say. The grandfather said that he would leave it up to them and would understand either way and began to leave.

The 11 year back up goaltender that had played so poorly the night before in the absense of the starter stood up and said “Let’s win this for him guys.”. The boys all turned to him and did not let up with a cheer, but simply knodded in agreement and took to the ice to play their game. The Grandfather was later quoted as saying “I’ve never heard such devotion and confidence from a child as I did when this boy said that he was going to play.”

In something that seemed to be more of a movie than real life, the boys went out and competed with heavy hearts for the four games that they had to play that day. Amazingly, the unskilled, back-up goaltender put up 3 shut-outs and a one-goal against effort in the teams four games carrying them to 2nd in their pool and getting them in to the Sunday playoffs despite the two losses Friday night and the emotional burden they played with.

On Sunday Morning they beat their semi-final opponents in overtime by a score of 1-0 giving the team another shutout and launching them directly in to the final.

So there they stood on Sunday afternoon, with a second-rate goaltender in another teams practise jersey without one of their team mates ready to take on the tournament favourite, Toronto. The game proved to be uneventful as this Peterborough team rolled over Toronto quite easily winning the game marking the first time they scored more than 3 goals in a game during this tournament. Somehow these kids had done something impossible and you couldn’t help but be happy for them. However, even at 10, 11, and 12 years old they had no interest in celebrating. Following the buzzer to end the game, they shook hands with toronto and left the ice and went home. They simply had no interest in celebrating as what they had done was easily the most emotionally draining thing that had ever happend in their short lives and they simply wanted to be with each other, not with the cheering crowd. They saw nothing to cheer about.

While that sounds like something from a Hollywood movie or cheesey Disney production, it’s all very true. It really puts things in perspective when you think about. Even as kids, they understood the tremendous weight of what had happened and responded to it with maturity far beyond their years. A man I know was a parent at the tournament for the Oshawa team and he said you couldn’t help but cheer for them… and shed a teer as they left the ice after the championship game.

I just thought I’d share that with out as it touched me.

Be Safe

Unions Scare Me

If any of you happen to work somewhere that is unionized, you should be a little bit frightened after reading this.

There’s a story in the news about a guy named George Pavlovszky who works for the city of Moncton New Brunswick here in Canada. He was fired, and quite rightly so I might add, after showing up to work drunk, armed with a shotgun and demanding to speak to his supervisors. Well, the Canadian Union Of Public Employees, or CUPE for short, has decided to file a grievance against the city to get him his job back. The city has said that they’re going to fight the case, thank God. A union representative said that even though the union has no legal obligation to fight for the man’s job, he paid the ultimate price in the workplace by having been fired.

So what about the people that Pavlovszky was trying to hunt down? Couldn’t they have paid the ultimate price in the workplace by being killed by a drunken union member? I guess that doesn’t seem to matter to these people. I know unions are all about protecting workers who have no business being protected from anything, let alone employed half the time but come on, this is going a little too far. This guy is potentially a danger to everybody there, and CUPE, which is one of the biggest unions in the country, still feels the need to fight for him. By the way, I should also mention that Pavlovszky is currently in jail after being convicted on weapons charges following the incident.

The story never mentioned where this guy worked, but for some reason, I’m betting on the post office.

Guest Rant

This was emailed to me by our friend Carin for me to post. She makes some really good points about the way universities opperate. It’s a really good read. By the way, if you’ve got something to say that you think the world needs to hear, feel free to
send it to me.
Just make sure it somewhat resembles the English language or it either won’t get posted, or it will and we’ll make fun of you for a world wide audience to see. But we here at Vomit Comet World Headquarters are all about giving the people a voice, and since you are the people, we’re offering it to you. Against our better judgment in some cases, but what can I say, sometimes we’re just too nice. Anyway, take it away, Carin.

university? deals? What’s this?

The other day, I had to print some stupid paper from some stupid class. Yeah, so? Well, my printer was broken, so I had to use the public printers up at the university, and I saw something that summed up the whole philosophy that universities and colleges seem to have nowadays. Ok, now you think I’m crazy. How could a printer make me philosophize? I guess it’s a sign that my nose has been too deep in the books. Well, let me explain. I had to buy one of those print cards that lets you have the privilege of buying your own paper on which the printer happily prints your essay, note, piles of research, or printed material for whatever dreary purpose dragged you to the library anyway, all for the low low price of 10 cents a sheet. but the print card lets you print mass quantities with relative ease, sort of like the way you pay for cell phone minutes in advance.

Anyway, when you buy your new fangled print card, the price is $2 and you get 10 sheets, supposedly, for free! I know what they want us to think. “Well Yippee hoo! The university is giving something to me for free! That’s sooo coool!” But think about this for a second. I’m no expert in the cost of plastic, but there’s no way that thin piece of crap plastic is worth $2. No way in hell. Maybe it’s worth $1. You are paying outright for every single sheet you get. They’re just making sure you buy at least 10 sheets so they don’t get ripped off, god forbid, if you only use one sheet.

But then you say, “If you’re going to print out scads and scads of pages, wouldn’t you be happy to already have 10 on your card?” Well, if you’re printing that much, guess what? You’re going to have to give them more money anyway, and you already paid for it. They’re not saving you anything, except maybe the two seconds it would take to find that extra luny to pay for those 10 sheets.

Ok, now you think that maybe I should seek therapy for getting worked up over printer paper. But it’s more than that. This whole supposed deals thing is just their clever way of taking your money and swearing to you that they’re offering you a deal, so you won’t feel like they fucked you so badly in the ass.

It’s everywhere. They tell you it’s cheaper to pay up front for a meal plan, and then you find out that first off, it’s fucking expensive, so you wonder what it would have been like to pay meal by meal. Next you notice that they’ve given, er, ahem, made you pay for more meal points in this plan than you’ll ever spend, that you can’t use them in certain places at certain times, and if you don’t use them by April, well, tough. They get the money anyway, ha ha. On top of that, they’ve made two different meal plans, designed to suit your ass-fucking needs. There’s the on-campus one that I described, and then there’s the off-campus one. Oh yes, now that you don’t live on campus, thus eating there is not compulsory, you can use it wherever you like whenever you like, and you can top it up with oh so easy to pay payments of $200 during the semester, but if you let the semester end, you have to pay $575 to revive your now dead meal card. Ooo! Which plan of fucktitude will I choose? So many options!

And to add insult to injury, if at some point you realize that you have no chance of using all your remaining meal points, you can sell them, but only to those who are on the same plan as you. So if you’re on the on-campus plan, your only hope is to find an unbelievably gluttonous pig who empties out the cafeterias daily and just can’t keep the points in his account, because more than likely, everyone else is, well, probably in the same boat as you. And then there’s the ridiculous $50 that is incorporated into your meal plan solely to cover stolen and broken dishes! God damn it, does anyone actually believe that a university cafeteria is feeding us on their
finest china? Do they actually expect us to believe that from all the money they rake in from the student body, they’re just too damn poor to replace the odd smashed plate and missing glass? It almost makes me want to steal or break something so I can feel like I’m getting my money’s worth!

And then there are the compulsory fees that you pay with your tuition. Hey, I like the idea that I’m paying to have access to the athletic centre, counseling services in case I snap over these crazy fees, or the tons of other services on campus, if I *truly* had free access to them. Wanna know the truth? You only get a few free counselling sessions, and then they ration them out unless you’re willing to pay more. Way to help out someone who’s so stressed out they’ve come for counseling!

If you want to take a course at the athletic centre, you have to pay more! I just don’t get it.

Maybe I’d understand if I could take a long hard look at the bills everybody has to pay, but there has to be some huge profits being gained at our expense. There’s no way that thousands and thousands of students, plus how ever many alumni they manage to railroad into donating money each year, can’t adequately finance a university as it is, and the tuition rates and donation requests are almost always going up! Why do we keep having to pay more for shit we should have already paid for?

And then there are the little things. Like when the old man who only seems to show up when graduates are parading past him so he can shake their hands has a birthday, and the university goes all out and buys a huge cake. Ooo!
Free cake! Nope. Like I said on the day I saw them do that, “I paid for that cake.” It especially angers me when I see that, and then step outside and see that my friend in a wheelchair cannot get to class because they haven’t cleared the snow from the ramp leading to his lecture hall, or can’t open a door because the button has been broken for the past month, and nobody’s gotten around to fixing it. How about paying the snow clearing guys or the maintenance men instead of wasting our money on a god damn cake. Maybe they can make a bridge with it when it’s rock hard and he can wheel over it to get past the snow. Or it can serve as a door stop and keep the broken door permanently open. Until then, it has no use at all.

Yup, this all started out with a stupid print card. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I expect stuff to make sense. Logic? What’s that? All I know is I’m being fucked in the ass by my education, and all I can do is bend over and take it. I don’t know if I feel better now, but there, I’ve said it.
——–
Check out my website!
right here!

If you have any feedback for Carin, her address is on her site, or you can send your thoughts to me and I’ll pass them on to her.

People At Work

Reading Matt’s little rant about the people he works with kind of got me thinking about some of the things that piss me off regularly in my own experience. I’m not sure why some people are so annoying especially when they should know better but hey, there they are.

As most of you know, I do a show at a local radio station. I love working there and for the most part, everybody there is pretty nice to me and I can’t think of a single one of them that I can say I don’t like. But having said that, I can’t think of a single one of them who I haven’t wanted to smack at some point for breaking the number 1 rule of radio, that being don’t piss off the guy on air. Maybe that should be don’t distract the guy on air, but one generally leads to the other so bare with me here.

It never fails that at some point during every show I do, people will feel the need to do 1 of 2 things. Either congregate outside of the studio and talk loudly to each other or come into the studio when I’m on the air doing a segment and start fiddling with stuff. This could mean anything from trying to find something on the shelf full of tapes on the other side of the room to opening a package of something behind my head. The worst though is when they try to tell me something when I’m reading to the listeners. I’m not sure what they’re expecting me to do since it’s not like I can just say to the entire listening audience, “hang on a second, something far more important than you people has just come up and I’m no longer worried about the flow of what you’re listening to nor how good it sounds.” And generally what they have to tell me is something along the lines of, “I’ve got a really funny story related to what you’re talking about right now.” Ok, tell me when I put the music back on, it can wait.

It’s not even like I can cut any of them some slack either since each and every one of them work there in some form or another and most of them get involved with the on air stuff. If they were people coming in off the street it would still be aggravating, but it would be a little easier to understand. It’s not that way when you’re dealing with people who should know better and most of whom have more experience than you do.

And it doesn’t end there. To fill up some more of my time I do some volunteer work for a telephone service that takes calls from people in distress. We get calls about everything from people wanting to kill themselves to people who are upset because their VCR didn’t record Friends. You never know what you’re going to get when you pick up the phone and you have to be ready for pretty much anything at a moment’s notice.

So let me set a scene for you. I’m sitting in the room on the phone listening to a caller. I’m taking in everything they’re telling me trying to process it the best I can and get a bit of an understanding of what their situation is. While I’m doing this I’m also thinking about what direction I should be taking things in. What questions should I ask? How should I ask them? Is there more to this story than I’m getting? Is this person in any immediate danger. Pretty high stress stuff sometimes. Then, while the possibly frantic caller is taking the bulk of my attention as they should, somebody who works there, for pay I might add comes in there and tries to talk to me quietly about there being cookies on the table in the other room or to tell me she’s leaving for the day. Shut up! There is a phone attached to my head, and it’s not there for the hell of it!

The only thing worse than that is the overly helpful pain in the ass fellow volunteer who feels the need to tell me who I’m talking to. The person who breezes in to take over for me and either tries to ask me in a whisper who it is on the phone, or manages to overhear the voice on the other end and then franticly tries to explain to me that it’s Bob and you have to ask him about his flower garden to make him settle down. Of all the people who should know not to do that, shouldn’t it be them who has to work the phones and probably has to put up with the same stupid crap from somebody else there? Trust me, it’s not any less annoying when you do it.

Ok, somebody in here just cut the biggest fart in the universe so I have to leave the room now. Yes, definitely have to exit post haste. More later when my nose hairs grow back.

A Lesson In Randomness

Hello, Vomiteers!
Boy. it’s been a few days so I figured I’d throw some shit up on here for you. Steve’s been doing the bulk of the writing over the last week or so, so much love to him for that. My weekends are generally not real inspiring but I’ll take a stab at getting some more stuff up over the next few days.

Well. today is a rainy bitch of a day. The place I work is a construction company. When you put these two together you get some unpleasantness. Most jobs are shut down for the day and for some reason most of the less intellectual members of the crews decide that they should convulge like buzzards on this nice little office/shop facility. Now. This is not to say that everyone on the crews is completely retarded. Quite the opposite. The ones with half a brain realize it’s a day off and go home and back to bed, or to do something fun. The lesser-lights show up here and BOTHER EVERYONE!!!

We are in an office. The rain does not stop our work. DON’T COME HERE AND TALK TO ME! DON’T COME HERE AND TALK LOUDLY BEHIND ME!! and most importantly… DON’T SIT IN MY CHAIR AND MAKE PERSONAL PHONE CALLS WHEN I GET UP TO DELIVER AN INVOICE!!! Seriously. Some dumb fuck sat down in my chair, in front of my computer and called his wife to tell her all about how he had the day off. GO HOME AND TELL HER ASSHOLE!

I was not shy about letting him see my displeasure as this insanity had already been going on for about an hour in the office. Upon my return, this idiot could see me, here me setting things down on my desk and most certaily read the enraged look in my eye and DIDN’T MOVE!!! There was a fucking empty chair right beside my desk. No no. Couldn’t move over there and continue talking which would have, while still being annoying, at least allowed me to continue working. No. He sat there like a fucking prick for another 15 minutes before standing up and walking by me without so much as a “sorry ’bout that,pal.” Some people’s fucking children.

So that pretty much sums up how my day has gone… and to an extent my week. I’ve been off and on sick all week and it’s got me pissed off. I’m feeling a bit better today and I’m sure with the ammount of sleep I generally get on a weekend, I’ll be good as new by Monday.

Ah, yes. The continued pounding has started up again improving my day tremendously and doing wonders for my headache. Right above where I work they are installing now heaters. Now I’m not sure how much pounding and cutting and just general noise it takes to do this job… but I KNOW it doesn’t take 9 hours. Yet, that’s how long they’ve been doing this right above my head. Even if the job itself takes that long, I hardly think that ONE heater above my head should take that long. I’ve been up there, I’ve seen what they’re doing… it’s pretty clear that they just suck at it and I’m not in the mood to shrug it off as a “well, it had to be done.”

Wow, this has been nothing but a big bitchy rant. I feel like such a chick. this is great! Anywho. That will probably be enough for now. Maybe I’ll pop back a little later with something significant to say… or at least something a littleSTOPFUCKINGHAMMERINGDICKHEAD!more pleasant to say. No promises though.

Try and Have a good day, at least a better one than me. Except for Steve who should have a terrible day. I know none of you like him, but try to be nice. He’s one of those special kids.