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there are two types of people in the world – sometimes updated weekdaily

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Cat people…ick.

Cat People

People who do not scare me in some fundamental way

Yesterday, I got an email from a friend that was meant to brighten my day.  These pictures of a cat show definitely did that, but I’m finding, lately, that pictures like these are a bit like pharmaceutical drugs.  A pill might lower your cholesterol, but it may also induce vomiting, blindness, suicidal tendencies, and leprosy.  Pictures like these do brighten my day, but they simultaneously make me wonder if all people are just screwed in the head.  It’s a mixed blessing.

Where’s that right hand?  Was that shirt dug out of an elephant’s butt? [insert cat's thoughts here] CAPTION OVERLOAD!!!!

So obviously, this email got me thinking about cat people in general.  They are pretty simple to describe:

• Female
• BMI at least 20% above ideal
• Wear strange clothing and gold jewelry
• Single
• Have a computer password like “pussypaws” or something to that effect

OK, I’m busted: I’m just describing the picture.  Of course there are exceptions.  There are attractive girls who own cats (WTF?).  There are men who own cats (well, not men, but humans with man parts).  There are even people who are capable of communicating with other people who own cats.  But most of the cat owners fit the above description.

A girl I work with was about a fraction of a misfired neuron from adopting a blind cat.  She is a very nice girl, she is very pretty, and has a great personality, but for some reason this one chromosome has flipped around and she likes cats.  She ended up not getting the cat (who would need eyedrops, several times daily) because the cat maintenance interfered with her social life.  Yes, I used the words cat and social life in the same sentence.  Someone, if you have any idea of how I can have an intervention, please tell me and I’ll do whatever I can to get this fish back into the ocean.

How to increase your net worth 80% today

People who withdraw $10 and pay a $3 ATM fee

People who make massive “rob me” withdraws but get the better end of the deal

Now I realize that there aren’t a slew of economics majors out there, but this one is a pretty easy win, unless you’re scared of being robbed by that 83 year old woman behind you in line.

When you go to the ATM (please don’t ever say “the ATM machine”), you are a moron if you withdraw a small amount of money at an out-of-network machine.  On that note, why in the hell do we put up with out-of-network machines?  This concept of charging people money to get their money is totally absurd, and I think I’m going to kick the next banker I see square in the berries as a result of this micro-rage I have at the moment.

Anyhow, someone gave me this idea last week while we were talking about other, less important things.  Since that talk, I’ve been paying more attention to the amount that people are taking out of ATMs (yes, to an outside observer, it would appear I was planning a robbery), and it’s mind-blowing.  Either 90% of Atlanta has the net worth of your average Rwandan or they’re a few Skittles short of a rainbow, but in either case I can’t understand why someone would pay a 30% fee to re-own money that is already theirs.  I saw one guy go to the ATM 3 times on a single night last week.  Can someone please explain that to me?

Repeat elevator button pushers = humankind

People who hit the elevator button additional times

People who have no arms, no legs, no nose, or any other suitable protrusion, and are in a coma

So this idea has been sent to me from a number of people and stated in a number of different ways, but the gist of it is that people are pissed off when people either hit the elevator button more than once or when they come up and hit the button after someone else has already hit it.

But here’s the problem, folks: you’re all hypocrites.

There is not a single human being on earth who has been exposed to an elevator and not hit the elevator button after it’s already lit up.  Nobody.  You could go pick up a newborn aboriginal, and if there was a way to reach it, he would sit there rapping on the button with his baby boomerang, saying, “how long is this piece of junk going to take?”.  And then crap his loincloth.

This happens because human beings are not inately capable of trust or patience.  If someone else has pushed the button, we cannot trust that person to be as highly intelligent as us: they must not be capable of a proper button press.  This complicated procedure should only be carried out by trained and experienced professionals.  Second, we lack the patience to wait 4 seconds for an elevator to respond.  We are man, this is machine.  We are the superior race, therefore we demand service.

When I took the elevator up to the 6th floor at work (the top floor) this morning, the elevator interacted with 7 people.  First floor, 5 people get on.  The first three people push 3, 5, and 6.  The next two re-push 3 and then 6.  The first person, standing closest to the left bank of buttons, begins jamming “door close”.

Nobody talks.

Ding!  We’re on 3.  Two people exit.  The right-bank button operator begins hitting “door close”, but a hand shoots into the opening, opening the doors.  In a socially-awkward recovery, the man starts now hitting “door open” (the doors are already opening, but thanks for the help).  5 is hit…again…by the new passenger.

Ding! We’re on 5.  Two more exit.  One more person gets on.  My fellow passenger says “this one’s going up”, which is actually two statements in one: 1) “If you’re meaning to go down, this elevator is not for you”, and 2) “If you’re riding the elevator up one floor, fuck you.”

New passenger: “Oh, no.  I’m going up, but thanks.”  6 pushed, then door close pushed.  A double.

We get up to 6, everyone disembarks, and it’s over.

So thanks for the idea, but try to give me two types of people next time.  What’s next, “Guys who look at porn and guys who don’t?”

You can do better.

Filet-O-Fish is one of the top-5 foods on earth

People who have eaten a filet-o-fish

People who are yet to experience communion at the Church of Ronald

Most people like food.  Most of those people like good food, even great food, but so few people have eaten one of the finest items served on any menu in this great nation of ours.  Yes, I am speaking of the Filet-O-Fish.

A first-timer’s face says “expectations are low”, but this is the dawn of a lifelong relationship

Now, I don’t normally eat anything that has an “O”-modifier, which pretty much knocks half of any chincy Irish pub’s menu off of my list, but I have always been more than willing to make an exception for this hallmark of American achievement.

The ingredients involved in the filet-o-fish are simple and gag reflex inducing: a square fish patty, a square piece of american cheese, a dollop of tartar sauce, sandwiched between a bun so perfectly made from indigestible white flour it makes Wonderbread look like whole wheat.  For most people, that slice of american cheese is the outlier in the group, but I promise it is the secret ingredient in this handful of success so elegantly presented to you in its own sandwich coffin.  Nobody puts baby in a wrapper.

Everyone get out there and celebrate this great nation of excess by grabbing yourself a f-o-f this week.  You’ll thank me.

There is a reason your shirt has that many buttons

People who button their shirt to the correct level

People who unbutton the top 2-4 buttons of their dress shirt

Let me start off by saying this: there are few exceptions to the hard and fast rule of buttoning a shirt up to the penultimate button.  These exceptions are known as “hot women”.  No others exist.

Disapproved:

Approved:

Approved:

I wonder how long Google Analytics will tell me how long you hover on that image…

Anyhow, I am pretty fortunate to live in a city where the guys are pretty conservative with their buttoned shirts.  Most people understand that these buttons were invented for the specific reason of vomit-in-mouth prevention, and they work almost flawlessly when used properly.  But occasionally, guys will open the neck hatch a few more clicks, a practice I do not appreciate one bit.  In and around Atlanta, this usually happens in the spring and fall: used as a substitute technique to pissing on trees during our prime cougar hunting months.  But unless your name is Emilio, there is no excuse for this.

I am going to start carrying flypaper around and pay/dare drunk college kids to assault these people’s chest hair.  I’m thinking this can be done somewhere in the $20 – $50 range, which gives me a very high entertainment ROI.  I haven’t figured out what to do about the guys who shave their chest, but maybe their own brain is the punishment they are forced to live with their whole lives, and that might be enough.

In writing this, I have found that blog articles that people might classify as “not safe for work” or NSFW, might also be considered NSFGW, or “not safe for Great Wraps”, which is where I’m sitting as people are troubling themselves to figure out why I’m searching the internet for both men with exposed chests and women with enormous cleavage.  Maybe I’m just an awkwardness vampire, feeding on nervous tension rather than blood.  I’m feeling very strong right now.

Let’s meet to plan our planning meeting

People who have meetings to accomplish something

People who have meetings where they meet to plan a meeting where there will be planning to meet to devise a planning strategy for strategic meeting plans.

This morning, I woke up very early for a meeting.  At the conclusion of the meeting, we decided that the “next steps” were to have another meeting.  It is likely that this new meeting’s “next steps” will be to have yet another meeting.  ’Round she goes.

“As you see in this chart, the more meetings we have, the more money we spend paying the people in this room to listen to themselves speak.  I propose that we have breakout meetings to plan a discussion where we’ll bring more people in to understand this issue.  Then we’ll all come back and meet to discuss a plan for meetings.”

“AYE!!!”

It’s not that the meeting this morning didn’t have a purpose.  Actually, the meeting was to discuss how to produce some educational collateral.  All of the people that were needed to produce this were in the room.  But that didn’t mean that anything got done.

We kicked the meeting off with some highly-paid people carefully explaining a mix of half-truths and illogical concepts that accurately reflected their complete lack of understanding of what they do every day at work.  People like this, who spend every waking moment in meetings, only have brief collisions with reality throughout the day and therefore know very little about what’s going on.  That’s okay.  It happens.  Just shut the hell up.

Then one highly-paid person asks the group a question.  As an aside, every time an executive asks a group a question, I picture that executive promptly putting their fingers in their ears and screaming “LA LA LA LA LA…..I DON’T HEAR YOU…..LA LA LA LA!”, like kids did in 4th grade.  Anyhow, the question was asked, and right as the subject matter expert started explaining, another highly-paid jumps in and says “what so-and-so is trying to say is that the earth is more of a square than a circle and this table is made of grilled cheese sandwiches.”

The subject expert, now emasculated by the executive, has to figure out how to explain that the earth is, in fact, round and the table is made of wood, but he’s now in the dragon’s den: the highly-paid is watching and you’d better not directly contradict him.  It’s a delicate and highly-entertaining balance act to witness.  And now that everyone’s confused, we decide that another meeting is the right thing to do.

Gotta go.  You know why…

Lord, show me a sign

People who have keen awareness of things, in general

People who have zero awareness of things, in general

There are some days that I know exactly what I’m going to write here.  I’m thinking about it on my way to work, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I’m skipping breakfast, etc.  And then there are other days when I really don’t know what to talk about and I hope something will come to me.  I hope that there will be a proverbial sign.

Well, today there was a sign, indeed.  As I walked in to work this morning, one of those gypsy lobby salespeople was setting up shop, with the below sign.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I just started shamelessly taking pictures as she was curiously watching me.  Several pictures.  I made sure to stay there taking enough pictures from enough angles, taking chuckle breaks (yes, I did say “chuckle breaks”), that she would have to surmise something was up.  I love causing this sort of wonder and confusion.  The tension is palpable.

Sorry, folks.  If you were hoping to be a d’bag too, the name’s taken: she’s incorporated.

It’s mornings like these that I’m genuinely happy to be alive.  I love stupid signs not because of the entertainment of the sign itself, but because of the knowledge that someone out there made this sign and is absolutely unaware of what they’ve done.  This type of person is the fruit of America.  Think about it: the crazy lady in the red sweatshirt calling Obama a muslim.  The person who thinks that our climate is changing because of daylight savings (they think we’re losing an hour of sunlight when we change our clocks, no I’m not kidding, click the friggin’ link).  People like this make life worth living.

I leave you with some more handiwork I’ve seen over the last few months:

Not the most helpful directory

Philly Style Italian Ice!  Way to go!  I’m going to go get some Birmingham Style Dim Sum now.

The name wasn’t clear enough, so they added the gray, erect, um…plane?

I don’t know what to say. It was Savannah…they’re into this sort of stuff there.

Pricy.

There is no funny caption for this.  It’s just sort of a stupid place to put your sign…outside of a sandwich shop.

“2″ is code for “make everyone hate me”

People who take the elevator to go 1 floor

People who take the stairs

The other people on the elevator were NOT happy when I was taking this picture.

America has a major obesity problem.  What a person weighs is related to two things, and two things only: how much crap you stuff in your face, and how much you use your body.  So I think it’s safe to say that taking the elevator 1 floor is one of the top two direct causes of obesity in America.  You can’t fight facts.

Americans have invented countless things to help them avoid expelling any effort throughout the day.  Chairs have wheels on them.  Email and phone allow you to talk to people without leaving your chair.  People drive their cars 1 block to get coffee at Starbucks.  And don’t even get me started on the Segway – the two-wheeled douche roller that will make us yearn for the days when knees and elbows were still visible and not covered by fat rolls.

I work on the second floor of a building and thus face this temptation every day.  When I was in college, taking an elevator one floor could get you killed.  Actually, if you took the elevator 2 or 3 floors, that was even considered a criminal act that would earn you some very bold stares, and very occasionally someone would speak up. The speaking was either passive: “unbelievable…”, or active: “are you kidding me?”.  But most of the time, the communication of disgust was nonverbal; especially when a particularly overweight individual would join you on the lobby level – you just knew they were going to hit 2.

These days, however, it’s not socially acceptable to confront this laziness with words.  The nonverbal element is there, but mostly reserved for when the perp has exited the elevator and the doors are just about closed.  It’s much more passive aggressive, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t think you’re a complete moron for taking the elevator one floor.  Rest assured, you’ve been labeled and we all hate you.

I’d like to get a little more raw on this topic, but I can’t start profiling these single-floor riders without looking like an asshole.  I suppose the anonymity of the comments might be a good forum: what type of person is a single-floor rider?  Talk amongst yourselves.

The faster you cross the street, the less likely you are to die

People who cross the street quickly

People who cross the street slowly (on purpose)

I guarantee that this woman is going 8x as fast as the average Atlantan street crosser

Call me crazy, but I have a healthy fear of objects that can kill me very easily.  In the matchup of flesh and bone vs. steel on wheels, I have concluded that I will lose that fight often enough to avoid it altogether.  Yet every day, I come across people who want to singularly challenge traffic by crossing the street at sub-sloth speeds.

It doesn’t help that Georgia law is pedestrian-oriented.  No matter what the circumstances, cars have to stop for pedestrians.  I don’t care if you’re going 50 miles an hour, if someone’s dumb enough to put a foot in that crosswalk, you have to slam the brakes on and save their lives.  If grandma is in an ambulance and Laqueshia wants to cross the street while she’s on her bluetooth headset, hello inheritance! She aint’ going to let no damn ambulance tell her what to do. 

Something I’ve been wondering is where these people are going at one eighth of a mile per hour?  How far can you travel at these speeds before the sun goes down?  I would feel cheated if I had been walking for an hour and could still see my point of origin.

So, what should I do here?  Is it okay to honk at those who enter a battle of will and tell them to get the hell out of the way, or am I supposed to just take it?  I have tried both, with mixed results.  Mostly, I find that honking just slows people down even more, which is a frustrating outcome to which I have no response.  It’s a lot like getting in an argument with Delta customer service: “I’m sorry you feel that way sir – oops! somehow all of your frequent flyer miles disappeared and all of the rates have doubled on your flight.  I do have an engine-mounted seat next to the broken lavatory door available, though.”

How do we fix this problem plaguing our nation?

Arby’s is one of the best restaurants in Atlanta

People who are professional food critics

People who think they are professional food critics

Culinary genius at work.  Let’s put chocolate chips on pancakes.  How do people come up with this stuff?

Yelp thought they were helping us.  It is a great idea: put the power back in the hands of the people rather than the manipulated and arrogant professionals.  The only problem is that most of the people are idiots.

My wife and I were trying to figure out a good place to eat a few weeks ago, so we fired up the trusty MacBook and sailed on over to yelp, a site that lets amateurs rate restaurants (among other things) on a 5-point scale.

One of the first things you’ll notice on yelp is that every single restaurant in the world has 3.64 stars.  Part of the problem is that people don’t know how to rate restaurants.  Here is a 5-star review of one of the worst restaurants I have ever eaten at in Atlanta:

The dishes are garnished with hand-carved carrots and other vegetables that are stunning and just too pretty to eat.

Clearly, the food was too pretty for you to eat: if you had overcome the beauty of the carrots, you would have put the food in your mouth and puked in your Thai tea.  And here is a negative review of the place:

The utensils tell the story.  No “Thai Spoon,” just a fairly heavy and ornate bronze colored fork sat lonely atop a napkin.

Thank you, sage food guru Dickens.  ”As the dark curry clouds rolled over my rice noodles, the visages of patrons were overcome with duck sauce tears.”  Give me a fucking break.

Between these two reviews, and many others, this restaurant ends up getting almost the same score as one of my favorites in town, Watershed.  The chef at this place won the James Beard Award, which is sort of like an Oscar for these guys.  Here’s an excerpt from Krystal W’s in-depth review:

But honestly speaking when it comes to southern cuisine, the decor and the food (at least for me) go hand-in-hand. In other words, they kind of have to match to create the true ambiance of the south.

I couldn’t agree more.  I only eat southern food served by barefoot, shirtless men in overalls and straw hats.  If I ever get another taco not served in a place where chickens roam the floors, I’ll leave immediately.  If I’m allowed to discuss the government in a Chinese restaurant, the food simply CANNOT be good.  And don’t get me started on traditional Israeli food: the last time I went for some, not a SINGLE person tried to suicide bomb the place.  Unacceptable.

So as we perused the ratings, we strongly considered #22 in Atlanta: IHOP (no, I am not kidding); before deciding on one of our favorites, Tacqueria Del Sol, which was rated lower than the Chick Fil A down the street.

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