Puff Daddy
Hello World,
Greetings again! For all of you "oldsters" among us (and don't think I don't know who you are!) we find ourselves poised on the very brink of Veteran's Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, and also formerly celebrated on November 11th, back in the day when all of us cave people and dinosaurs really used to understand how to observe real holidays. Alas and alack for those good old days, when prehistoric reptiles roamed the vast unformed land masses, and the primordial ooze used to squish up between our toes. Those were the days, indeed. In any event, nowadays no one knows what an armistice is, and poor Veteran's Day has been unceremoniously relegated to the "also-ran" category of non-occasions, along the lines of Arbor Day and United Nations Day, except without all of the parking tickets. (Oh, hit that easy target!) Anyway, that's what tomorrow would bring us, if there were any standards any more, which as we all know, there aren't. It's true there are a few concessions to the memory of the holiday, notably a disruption of the garbage schedule and a few desultory business closings on Friday or Monday, but you can tell that their hearts are not in it. Alas, poor Armistice Day! I knew him, Horatio.
Tomorrow is also Bill's birthday, and you can believe that plans are afoot to treat him to a special day in honor of the occasion. Speaking of the birthday boy, Bill would never forgive me if I neglected to relay his favorite part of the hospital's mandatory evacuation training for employees, which is that it was held in the auditorium, where the emergency exit has been blocked for years, and in a wildly flagrant way, by an enormous and outmoded hulk of decommissioned medical equipment that most likely dates back to the Year of the Flood, and has been sitting in the same place probably since the Taft administration. For the fellow presenting the evacuation information, and stressing the importance of keeping emergency exits clear, you would have to agree that this looked very bad indeed. Not to mention the graffiti on the equipment that said "Taft is daft!"
Meanwhile, this is one of my favorite headlines in recent memory, as it appeared in the sports section of our local newspaper, the Journal News. (Their motto: "We Could Tell You Our Motto, But Then We'd Have To Kill You.") For those of you not familiar with the lower Hudson Valley, one of our neighboring towns is scenic and lovely Rye, much beloved by the locals, and home to the famous Rye Playland amusement park of lore and legend. For a story about a football game between high school teams in two different towns, this is exactly how the headline appeared in print:
TOP-SEEDED
RYE ROLLS
OVER ARDSLEY
I just love that part about the top-seeded rye rolls! I thought that was so funny. While we're on the topic of curiously worded subjects, Bill loves these two survey questions that stop just short of making any sense. The first is from our friends at www.zoomerang.com about luxury cars:
Which of the following statements best describes your current status in terms of car ownership?
* Next month
* 2-3 months
* 4-6 months
* 7-12 months
* 2-3 years
* 4 years+
Well, alrighty then! We might need to send that question back to the drawing board, or perhaps the Board of Education, for a comprehension review. This next one came from the friendly folks at www.surveys.ipsos-or.com and really got our attention:
Which of the following household products have you personally used in the PAST SIX MONTHS? (Please select all that apply.)
* Wipes
* Disposable plates or cups
* Paper napkins
* Facial tissue
* Paper cups
* Paper towels
* Food
* Paper plates.
How's that again? Here I'm thinking that anyone who hasn't personally used any food in the past six months is most likely not filling out this questionnaire to start with! Could things possibly get any sillier in the realm of questions and answers?
You bet! Of course, we all remember that the hospital requires all employees to complete mandatory educational courses each year that cover a wide range of important topics, such as fire safety, emergency preparedness and infection control. Recently, the director of the department that monitors staff education sent us all a report showing completion rates for our employees who had or had not completed these courses for 2006. For the Purchasing department, they listed 3 people, and only one of me (I mean, only one of us) had completed the courses so far for this year. Naturally, according to the report, this amounted to a completion rate of 25% overall. Excuse me??? If this is the New Math that we all keep hearing so much about, I can't say that I care for it all that much.
Speaking of New Math, a few weeks ago I was compiling the month-end payroll reports for the departments in my purview, and for one of the employees who had 150 hours of sick time, I added in an additional 3 hours, and somehow came up with 180 hours. Hmmmm. Seems to be a little bit of pronoun trouble, as Daffy Duck would say, and he ought to know.
People without pets may not realize that if you have cats that are ill or old, and have lost their appetites, one thing that will almost always entice them to eat is baby food. They go wild for those little jars of ham, chicken, lamb or turkey, and although they're not a complete and balanced diet for cats (not to mention that they're too expensive by far as a regular diet) they will do the trick when everything else fails. We found ourselves having this problem sequentially with a series of our cats, so there was Bill at the supermarket buying jars of baby food week in and week out, and for a much longer period than is usually necessary. Finally, he noticed that the register coupons he was getting from the store were for discounts on the second stage of strained meals for older tots. I guess even the cash register recognized that our "babies" should have graduated to more advanced foods by now, instead of the infant foods we kept buying.
And speaking of our cats, we can't forget to mention that we have a celebrity in our family, and in a most unexpected turn of events, it's one of the invisible cats, to boot. Anyone reading the September/October issue of American Motoring, the official magazine of the American Motors Owners Association (and by all means, please feel free to visit their web site at www.amonational.com and see for yourself) would find a blurry picture of our large orange Puffin at the bottom of Page 4. I had to send them that picture because Puffin was sprawled out on top of a copy of The Classified American (where people can buy and sell used cars, auto parts, literature or memorabilia) and looked like he was engrossed in perusing its offerings for just the right American Motors merchandise for the Cat About Town. If he wasn't invisible, that is. Of course, you can get away with a lot of stuff when you're invisible, heaven knows, and no one the wiser. Say! Who spray painted "Taft is daft!" on the credenza?
Greetings again! For all of you "oldsters" among us (and don't think I don't know who you are!) we find ourselves poised on the very brink of Veteran's Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, and also formerly celebrated on November 11th, back in the day when all of us cave people and dinosaurs really used to understand how to observe real holidays. Alas and alack for those good old days, when prehistoric reptiles roamed the vast unformed land masses, and the primordial ooze used to squish up between our toes. Those were the days, indeed. In any event, nowadays no one knows what an armistice is, and poor Veteran's Day has been unceremoniously relegated to the "also-ran" category of non-occasions, along the lines of Arbor Day and United Nations Day, except without all of the parking tickets. (Oh, hit that easy target!) Anyway, that's what tomorrow would bring us, if there were any standards any more, which as we all know, there aren't. It's true there are a few concessions to the memory of the holiday, notably a disruption of the garbage schedule and a few desultory business closings on Friday or Monday, but you can tell that their hearts are not in it. Alas, poor Armistice Day! I knew him, Horatio.
Tomorrow is also Bill's birthday, and you can believe that plans are afoot to treat him to a special day in honor of the occasion. Speaking of the birthday boy, Bill would never forgive me if I neglected to relay his favorite part of the hospital's mandatory evacuation training for employees, which is that it was held in the auditorium, where the emergency exit has been blocked for years, and in a wildly flagrant way, by an enormous and outmoded hulk of decommissioned medical equipment that most likely dates back to the Year of the Flood, and has been sitting in the same place probably since the Taft administration. For the fellow presenting the evacuation information, and stressing the importance of keeping emergency exits clear, you would have to agree that this looked very bad indeed. Not to mention the graffiti on the equipment that said "Taft is daft!"
Meanwhile, this is one of my favorite headlines in recent memory, as it appeared in the sports section of our local newspaper, the Journal News. (Their motto: "We Could Tell You Our Motto, But Then We'd Have To Kill You.") For those of you not familiar with the lower Hudson Valley, one of our neighboring towns is scenic and lovely Rye, much beloved by the locals, and home to the famous Rye Playland amusement park of lore and legend. For a story about a football game between high school teams in two different towns, this is exactly how the headline appeared in print:
TOP-SEEDED
RYE ROLLS
OVER ARDSLEY
I just love that part about the top-seeded rye rolls! I thought that was so funny. While we're on the topic of curiously worded subjects, Bill loves these two survey questions that stop just short of making any sense. The first is from our friends at www.zoomerang.com about luxury cars:
Which of the following statements best describes your current status in terms of car ownership?
* Next month
* 2-3 months
* 4-6 months
* 7-12 months
* 2-3 years
* 4 years+
Well, alrighty then! We might need to send that question back to the drawing board, or perhaps the Board of Education, for a comprehension review. This next one came from the friendly folks at www.surveys.ipsos-or.com and really got our attention:
Which of the following household products have you personally used in the PAST SIX MONTHS? (Please select all that apply.)
* Wipes
* Disposable plates or cups
* Paper napkins
* Facial tissue
* Paper cups
* Paper towels
* Food
* Paper plates.
How's that again? Here I'm thinking that anyone who hasn't personally used any food in the past six months is most likely not filling out this questionnaire to start with! Could things possibly get any sillier in the realm of questions and answers?
You bet! Of course, we all remember that the hospital requires all employees to complete mandatory educational courses each year that cover a wide range of important topics, such as fire safety, emergency preparedness and infection control. Recently, the director of the department that monitors staff education sent us all a report showing completion rates for our employees who had or had not completed these courses for 2006. For the Purchasing department, they listed 3 people, and only one of me (I mean, only one of us) had completed the courses so far for this year. Naturally, according to the report, this amounted to a completion rate of 25% overall. Excuse me??? If this is the New Math that we all keep hearing so much about, I can't say that I care for it all that much.
Speaking of New Math, a few weeks ago I was compiling the month-end payroll reports for the departments in my purview, and for one of the employees who had 150 hours of sick time, I added in an additional 3 hours, and somehow came up with 180 hours. Hmmmm. Seems to be a little bit of pronoun trouble, as Daffy Duck would say, and he ought to know.
People without pets may not realize that if you have cats that are ill or old, and have lost their appetites, one thing that will almost always entice them to eat is baby food. They go wild for those little jars of ham, chicken, lamb or turkey, and although they're not a complete and balanced diet for cats (not to mention that they're too expensive by far as a regular diet) they will do the trick when everything else fails. We found ourselves having this problem sequentially with a series of our cats, so there was Bill at the supermarket buying jars of baby food week in and week out, and for a much longer period than is usually necessary. Finally, he noticed that the register coupons he was getting from the store were for discounts on the second stage of strained meals for older tots. I guess even the cash register recognized that our "babies" should have graduated to more advanced foods by now, instead of the infant foods we kept buying.
And speaking of our cats, we can't forget to mention that we have a celebrity in our family, and in a most unexpected turn of events, it's one of the invisible cats, to boot. Anyone reading the September/October issue of American Motoring, the official magazine of the American Motors Owners Association (and by all means, please feel free to visit their web site at www.amonational.com and see for yourself) would find a blurry picture of our large orange Puffin at the bottom of Page 4. I had to send them that picture because Puffin was sprawled out on top of a copy of The Classified American (where people can buy and sell used cars, auto parts, literature or memorabilia) and looked like he was engrossed in perusing its offerings for just the right American Motors merchandise for the Cat About Town. If he wasn't invisible, that is. Of course, you can get away with a lot of stuff when you're invisible, heaven knows, and no one the wiser. Say! Who spray painted "Taft is daft!" on the credenza?
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 7:29 PM
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