Today in Stupid Emails

An unfortunate consequence of my job is that I'm often tasked with writing business requirements for hapless business users whose pretty little world isn't pretty enough.  Basically, someone at a client will have a need for something new or an upgrade to whatever shitty system they rely on.  I'll need to sit down with this someone and write up what they need in excruciating detail.  After this is done, I think have to get this someone to approve my write up so it can go to a different set of people who will examine the document and make a decision as to how feasible the changes are.  Point is, there is a lot of run around and wasted time and face to face meetings with the particular cretins usually found in backrooms of financial institutions.  On the bright side, the particular brand of stupidity and irrationally that surrounds me is captured via email.  So welcome to a new feature presented to you by the demented individuals at my client: stupid emails of the day.

In today’s installment, we’ll review a particular incident involving my pseudo-boss at the firm.  I wrote up a document and got it reviewed a week ago and then forwarded the approval from the business user as a way to close out the assignment.  So imagine my surprise when I see the following message in my inbox:

What the hell is this person talking about?  I responded in kind alerting Pseudo Boss that I had in fact sent the approval of this particular document a week ago.  Now, a normal coherent individual with limited head trauma would confer from this response that a meeting had been had with the user which led to an approval of the document.  But alas, humanity stupid knows no bounds which leads to a reply:

*Holds head in hands* What am I supposed to do with this?  I replied nicely even though its quite clear that Pseudo Boss is convinced I don't know the meaning of “ETA” even though they are very clearly using it incorrectly.  I replied nicely because that's what I'm supposed to do.  I reiterated by stance on the matter and prayed to baby Jesus that it would end there.  Had I any stones or not liked receiving a bi-weekly check, I might have replied as follows:

"Dear Future Darwinism Victim,

I feel it is time to address the various issues which protrude from your email like a foul porcupine.  You see, in my occupation we are drilled never to assume things.  We are told to find truth by asking questions and make sure we have the facts and only the facts.  As a caveat however, we are also trusted to use our reading comprehension and logic to arrive at certain answers.  From your emails, I can only conclude, using my reading comprehension and logic, that you are missing both skills as well as a chromosome somewhere.  So please let me restate – I sent you the approval last week AFTER the review – because you see, that’s how these things usually work.  Humanity, in all it’s wonders, has this wonder thing where things happen in sequence sometimes like say a rainbow after a rainfall (you liked that didn’t you, you little shitface?).

Further, I feel the need to comment on your erroneous usage of the term “ETA.”  As you know, it means “estimated time of arrival.”  However, as you may not know, it is only really applicable to things which are real, meaning things which have mass.  Now I don’t mean to over saturate your wee chromosome missing brain with too many big concepts suffice it to say that “reviews” don’t have mass because they are ideas and not physical things.  So you see when you ask me for an “ETA” on a review, my only recourse of action is to wonder whether you ate paint chips as a kid (I assume you did).  As a rule of thumb, next time just ask when the due date is for something.

Worst Regards,

Me"

Disney Princess Total Dirtiness Quotient - Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty

 Cinderella

Viewing Cinderella’s tale now, I can clearly see it was some evil ploy by overbearing fathers to make sure girls abided by curfew and didn’t stay out that late.  Thanks assholes, for ruining many potential hook ups for me and my brethren.  Nonetheless, she stands here for judgment and here’s how it shakes out:

Employment: 3

Habitats of Friends: 1

Physical Activity: 2

Co-Habitants: 1

Mate: 1

Total TD: 8

Case for Dirtiness: Once again we are presented with a young lady who is basically a slave (seeing the pattern here?  Maybe Disney suffered from Slave-owner guilt…).  Fortunately, Cinderella is only a slave to her step family.  She lives a pretty comfortable life in a cottage and unlike Snow White, her family isn’t a bunch of roughneck miners.  And other then her making googly eyes at her mouse friend turned horse, there’s nothing to be alarmed about. 

Case Against Dirtiness: She cleaned and was subservient to her family but again, they weren’t that dirty to begin with.  They were just cunts, clean cunts but cunts nonetheless.  And while she was friends with the animals like birds and mice, it must be noted that these animals lived in her cottage so they weren’t feral.  And she did end up (probably) banging out a prince so there’s that.

Verdict:  Really, Cinderella is too vanilla to be considered an impact TD quotient player, but nothing like our next contestant.

Sleepy Beauty

Sleeping Beauty aka Aurora is the first actual princess.  There’s no fucking around here, she was born straight up after King Stefan plundered his Queen’s goodies.  Even better, her parents were freaks as evidenced that while she’s an infant, they are already renting out space in her vagajay for Prince Philip.

Employment: 1

Habitats of Friends: 1

Physical Activity: 1

Co-Habitants: 1

Mate: 1

Total TD: 5

Case for Dirtiness: There is almost no case to be made for Aurora as she really doesn’t do much of anything.  She’s born then we see her as a 16 yr old pricking her finger then she falls into a deep sleep and then is saved.  It could be argued that Aurora is incidental to the story as Prince Philip is the real driver.  Aurora is just the vessel by which the story needs to be told.  The only inherent dirtiness is that Aurora’s spell is broken when she’s 16 at which point we can only assume she and the prince went to some hidden quarters behind a shed to have awkward teenager sex. 

Case Against Dirtiness: Most. Boring. Princess. EVER.  This girl didn’t do much of anything. Her stats are depressingly undirty.

Verdict:  Blah.

Tomorrow we'll tackle the holy trifecta: a fishy Ariel, beastiality connoisseur Belle, and the first minority Jasmine.

Determining the Disney Princess Total Dirtiness Quotient - Part 1

A mouse lives here...

Nostalgia distorts our memories of a past time.  It allows us to look past the unseemly parts (like say racism, sexism, idiotism) and be content with “those-were-the-days” boners.  Fortunately, mathematics and statistics help us make sense of past and present times without the nostalgia hang over.  We can use our minds (as well as our trusty TI-89 calculators) to calculate accurate and ruthlessly efficient numbers that give us a good base for comparing things.  No longer do I have to listen to some strung out hippie tell me the 60’s were really the best decade and how I missed out.  I can instead define criteria for measurement and apply weighted factors to determine if this is indeed the case.  But really, I’d be wasting my time because this isn’t inherently important to me.  So what is?  Glad you asked really.  I’m determined once and for all, to dig deep and find out which Disney princess was the dirtiest. Using sabermetrics developed by MIT engineers as well as common sense, I will present the case for dirtiness and against dirtiness for each princess in the Disney canon in order of when their movies came out.  The factors I will include in my analysis are:

Employment: What was the princess doing during the day?  Was she cleaning or being an actual “princess”?

Habitats of Friends: We all know each princess is friendly with animals but I’m more interested in where these animals originate from.  Are they forest creatures or lagoon creatures?  Are they from the jungle or are they domesticated?

Physical Activity:  Was the princess running around for a large portion of the movie or stationary?*  

This factor will also include a climate variable as moving about in hot weather obviously causes an increase in dirtiness.

Co-Habitants: Who did the princess live with for the majority of the movie?

Mate:  Who did the princess end up with?  Was it a prince or a pauper type?

Each factor will be graded from 1-5 with 5 being the dirtiest possible unachievement.  The final grade for each factor will be summed to get a Total Dirtiness (TD) quotient which is infallible and scientific.

Without further ado, let’s study our first contestant.

Snow White

Ah Snow White, the original, the pater familias of the Disney princess.  Her story, modeled after an old German fairy tale, exploded onto the national consciousness in the 30’s and signaled the beginning of women setting far too high standards of love and men.  Here is how her stats checked out:

Employment: 4

Habitats of Friends: 3

Physical Activity: 2

Co-Habitants: 4

Mate: 1

Total TD: 14

Case for Dirtiness: The case for her dirtiness stems from the fact that she lives in the woods…with dwarfs…who were also mine workers.  As anyone can attest, dwarfs have a unique odor which tickles the olfactory nerves much like old people stench, but shorter.  In addition, she served as an indentured servant for these dwarfs, cleaning their soot, messy house and doing whatever else was needed.  Who can really say with any measure of certitude that the princess didn’t get down with handies and hummers in appreciation for the dwarfs’ hospitality?  Animals were also a fan of hers, running around and being all friendly.  Was this because she smelled like an animal and they weren’t afraid?

Case Against Dirtiness: Sure she lived with the dwarfs and cleaned and all, but wouldn’t the cleanliness of her work extend to herself as well?  It might be a stretch but I’d like to believe that she would take care of herself much like she took care of the shitty cottage where the 7 dwarfs lived.  She wasn’t running around for any part of the movie really and seemed not to exert too much energy.  Plus it wasn’t like she was living in some hot arid place therefore one is only left to assume that her sweating was kept in check. Further, her animal friends were forest dwelling creatures which we all know are much cleaner then jungle or swamp creatures.  In addition, she did manage to attract a prince who kissed her while she was presumed dead, even with knowledge that she probably had some kicking morning breath and might be a corpse – no small feat.

Verdict:  Based on the presented facts and calculated TD quotient, Snow White runs in the middle of the pact.  A TD of 14 suggests Mister Disney might have been cognizant of not storming out of the gate with an outright clean or dirty princess.  He must be commended for his long view of the matter.

Tomorrow: cleaning after step sisters with Cinderella and forgetting to set an alarm with Sleep Beauty.

The Monty Python Presidency

Breaking one of my general rules, let’s discuss politics briefly.  I recently saw presidential hopeful Michelle “My Husband isn’t Gay but Certainly Likes Anal Play” Bachmann state that were she to win the presidency, she would return the country to $2 per gallon of gas.  I’d like to thank her for ticking my ridiculous bone with this statement and allow me to discuss a presidential race that is shaping up as a lost Monty Python sketch.  We have a seemingly endless cadre of ridiculous Republican nominees on one side.  From the swaggering Texas governor who decided going for leisurely runs while carrying a firearm wasn’t enough to satisfy the stir crazies in his constituency so instead decided to embrace radical evangelism by decrying evolution (which makes sense since Texans as we know, have yet to evolve) to Bachmann’s amazing ability of saying nothing consequential while being factually wrong on everything and never losing credibility with her believers to Stepford husband Mitt Romney who’s so boring, stiff and borderline creepy that I wonder if he actually didn’t die some time ago and what we are witnessing is the first reanimation of a once cryogenically frozen Mormon.  I’m not even including the endless parade of sycophants and press whores circling the GOP like blood thirsty vultures such as Gingrich, Ron Paul, etc.

For the Democrats the picture is slightly brighter yet still obfuscated by a smearing of shit on the lens.  There’s Mr. President Obama, a nice guy really.  Unfortunately he’s acted during his short tenure as president like a 13 year old boy afraid his mom will bust in on him while he’s masturbating.  He’s been too tentative, meek too quick to satisfy as many people as possible.  Some will point out that this has been the result of bipartisanism on Capitol Hill in the form of kicking/screaming GOPers unwilling to yield anything to a black dude with big ears or the state of the country he inherited due to mistakes of those before him, but the fact remains that he’s been sort of a pussy.  Fine, I’ll concede that under his watch, Osama Bin Laden was finally killed.  But really, give me a solid economy and jobs report over a decrepit, dialysis-dependent jackal any day of the week.

And really those are our choices.  The greatest country in the world will rely on its citizenry to shift through the fetid toilet bowl and pick the prettiest turd in the bunch.  But what do we want?  Everyone wants to be heard and have their needs met.  Everyone wants a scapegoat to blame and pay for the “crimes” committed.  This fervent anger has alarmingly mutated into anti-intellectualism, which permeates from any political convention held in Middle America.  It’s dangerous to be educated and have ideas that don’t clearly fall in line into right and wrong.  Being educated and/or not holding the Bible as the guiding force in your life is viewed as Un-American, an affront to the very sensibilities of those leading the charge.  I don’t mean to attack those who view the Bible in such light but the question must be asked by someone:  What in the Bible points to effective leadership of Government? 

The question stands however: what do we want?  Personally, I’m tired of pie in the sky idealism.  A candidate coming out swinging with promises offends my intellect.  Stop with the bullshit already.  It might be cynical but it’s apparent that our country is too fractured for any one President to accomplish anything grand while in office.  Small victories will always be there but small amounts to shit when the country is on the verge of offering blow jobs in exchange for debt forgiveness.  I want a candidate to stand up on a podium and simply state that he/she will do their best to not fuck shit up worse then it already is.

Spanishness

I’ve noticed a recent trend among friends and acquaintances where-in they want to start speaking Spanish.  For some insane reason, it has become the “in” thing as if being Spanish makes one somehow more exotic.  I suppose you can argue learning Spanish might be necessary for one’s work or school or whatever unimportant thing decomposing your life.  Fine, whatever, but learning Spanish won’t ameliorate your effective Spanishness.  With this in mind, I’ve decided to present a few simple steps to increase your overall Spanishness:

Hmmm I wish I could drink you, you temptress

Fabulouso – For many growing up in a Spanish household, Fabulouso was at once the most delicious-looking liquid that could possibly kill you and also the most aromatically potent.  Nothing could fill your nostrils quite like the scientifically designed, spic approved berry smell.  Developed over centuries and passed down from the Incan gods, this purple liquid (I’ll concede that it does come in other colors however it is scientifically proven that purple is more sanitary) is the defacto cleaner of everything in the household.  It is also so potent that it requires dilution, such as a teaspoon for every gallon of water.  Sure, you can have your Lysol with its 99.9% killing of germs, I’ll take my Fabulouso with its unknown % killing of germs and possibly die of contamination – but it’ll be with a smile.

Please use for a 2% increase in Spanishness.

If you're a female on his show, chances are you had his baby as well.

Sabado Gigante – For the uninitiated, Sabado Gigante (GIANT SATURDAY) is the tent pole of Spanish media.  Hosted by Chilean born noted illegitimate children conceiver Don Francisco, it is equal parts game show, talk show, soft-soft core porn, musical variety show, and sketch show.  Growing up, it was my

Sesame Street

, where life lessons were imparted. 

For many of my Spanish associates, Sabado Gigante is how we spent family time bonding, laughing as the venerable host made creepy advances on the smoking hot women working on the show in various capacities.  It’s how many of us learned that sexual harassment is not an evil thing but rather a necessary thing, loved by young Spanish women in skimpy outfits.  It’s the show that taught us that breaking into dance during random times was expected and necessary.

Start watching this show for an immediate 5% increase in Spanishness. 

Tucking Shirts In – This is more of a special for the fellas out there.  We all know that tucking dress shirts in jeans is an acceptable fashion action.  We Spanish take it a step further by tucking in every shirt - we don’t discriminate.  T-Shirt? Tuck it in.  Sleeveless shirt?  Tuck it in.  Bowling shirt?  Tuck it in.  We like clean lines, even if those lines are obscured by our hanging bellies. 

Besides adding 3.5% Spanishness, this action will also result in an invaluable increase in animalistic sexiness.

So take heed and use these small steps in moderation as an overload can cause extreme Spanishness which is usually highlighted by an irrational fear of Immigration and the chupacabra.  In time, you’ll increase your overall Spanishness quotient.  So while you may feel silly ordering a Margarita in Spanish due to an overall lack of rolling Rs, just remind the bartender that you’re much more Spanish in other areas.

Let's Get Away

Recently, I’ve become aware of a new traveling series being written in the New York Times by Bruce Weber.  In this ongoing series, the writer will be zigzagging his way across our country, from sea to shining (not really) sea on a bicycle.  His voyage, by his own estimates, will take 3 months and lead him back to his apartment in New York City.  This got me thinking about similar flights of fancy.  We often trade in these outsized romantic visions of running away to a foreign land for short or long periods or dropping everything and going on an extended adventure.  Most recently, and more famously, we see it in stories like “Eat, Pray, Love” where our protagonist (I use that lightly since the definition of protagonist in this example fully lays in the readers’ appetite and patience for a self-indulgent, annoyingly self-pitying narrator) has adventures and crazy times (“OMG read how she TOTES drinks that tequila sunrise!”) in foreign lands to ultimately discover the woman with-in.

And yet I don’t know of anyone who has undertaken a similar adventure.  How come?  Let’s set aside the obvious logistical barriers such as money and time.  When pressed on why they couldn’t just pick up and leave somewhere for a short period of time, most people would answer that they have too much “stuff” that they are tethered to in their current life.  This “stuff” usually includes family, work, friends, partners, etc.  Well, let’s break down this “stuff” into manageable bits to see if they couldn’t be put on hold for a little while:

·        Family – I’m going to assume that for most of my readers (read: 4 people) their family shares some sort of interest in their well being.  I’ll even go out on a limb and say that I’m sure most families if not outright love, then at least have a tolerance for the Neanderthals in their bloodline.  Family will always be there (in some cases, unfortunately so).

·        Work – I can only speak on behalf of my own experience at my employer but since I’m a self-absorbed, megalomaniac Gen-Yer, I’m going to assume my experience is shared equally by everyone worldwide.  My employer offers unpaid sabbaticals or leave, which I’m sure other places will offer (and if you have to do something “unseemly” for it, well then suck it up cream puff).

·        Friends – to be fair, I can really only barely tolerate most of my friends and I really don’t see them that often.  In fact, seeing them often would probably lead me to questioning why I’m friends with most of the people I’m friends with which I’m sure reflects poorly on me but then, you can do suck a donkey dick.  If you like your friends (and I’ll assume you’re a mental defective) well, we live in a plugged-in worldwide community where you could keep track of and communicate with your wee buddies.

·        Partners – oh Love.  Listen, don’t let me trample on your philosophies and all, but given the choice between a life changing experience and love, I’m most likely choosing a life changing experience and taking my chances. Or you could be more pragmatic and invite your partner on your adventure to which I say bollocks on you good sir.

·        Kids – so you don’t want to leave your adorable little shits behind huh?  Trust me on this; you’ll only serve to fuck them up even more should you stay.  If you stay, you’ll only resent them later on when they are getting pregnant at 16 and attempting to put you in an old folks home when you are 50.

So what is it then? Are we that afraid of the unknown, of failing at a task that really can only be measured in successes?  God forbid we get lost in some unknown place!  What will happen to us if we don’t instantly recognize any fast food joints?  What happened to the spirit that guided prospectors in the 1800s to the west coast through untamed lands?  Maybe our generation and technology has washed us of our adventurous spirit.  We’re no longer able to accept the unknown or have any desire to feel uncomfortable. 

Maybe it’s also the expectations heaped on young adults to achieve greatness early.  It’s depressing in a way to think of someone in their 20’s or 30’s so slogged down by “responsibilities” or expectations from those around them that they wouldn’t be able to pick up and leave and experience something immeasurable.  I’m not sure what the solution is then.  For now I suppose we’ll have to be content with reading about other peoples’ wonderful adventures and pretending our cubicles or office rooms are actually secluded rooms somewhere in the African jungle rather then neutral-colored soul suckers.