Showing posts with label this blog will hopefully get me fired. Show all posts
Showing posts with label this blog will hopefully get me fired. Show all posts

Thursday, July 25, 2013

A Real Pro

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 30, Verse 20

"There is another thing too: how a prostitute can sin and then say, 'What's wrong with that?'"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I was a budding adolescent, there was a wonderful VHS tape that I was rather smitten with.  It was called "COPS: Too Hot for TV".  I ordered this through the mail.  My parents didn't know.  Parents don't need to know everything.

Right?

Of course right.

"COPS: Too Hot for TV" wasn't exactly like what it sounds.  There was mostly just a lot of obscenity, you know, that is omnipresent on regular "COPS" broadcasts, and is just bleeped out by the very busy censors who censor these types of things and are probably chronic masturbators who drive Philips head screws through their penis heads while strangling themselves with white tube socks, lying underneath the boardwalk drunk on paint-thinner and wearing underwear made of old Time magazines. 

Anyway, what I mostly found enjoyable were the bloopers-- yes, COPS has bloopers.  There's the veteran officer who gets out of his car to initiate a traffic stop and, the second he is about to walk up to the suspect vehicle, an old Cadillac with tail-fins, it backfires loudly causing the officer to scream "HO--LEEEE SHIT!" and then crack up once he realizes he's not about to be killed. 

There's a very old, short clip of two detectives barreling down a city street in an unmarked car and they can't get the blue flashing light on the dashboard to work, and then the siren won't turn on, so the inventive detective riding shotgun grabs the radio mic, turns it to speaker function and yells "EEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR-EEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRR-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!!!!" doing a great impersonation of a siren while his partner cracks up and says, "Unbelievable", shaking his head.

Once I became an EMT and one shift happened to be piloting an ambulance that had a siren that sounded like the noises an elderly basset hound being raped by a cow might make, my mind traveled fondly to that clip from "COPS: Too Hot for TV" and I smiled and said, "Unbelievable" to my partner.

I guess lots of people bought the VHS for the same reason I initially did: they were sure it was gonna have boobies.  And don't get me wrong-- it did.  There were boobies.  Like the oddly triangular, tattooed (blue flames) boobies the toothless crack fiend displayed while impulsively taking off her shirt for two stoic officers who accused her of hiding drugs somewhere on her person.  During the unceremonious striptease, she muttered something absolutely incomprehensible-- even after multiple viewings, I still have no idea.  Teeth are really good to have if you want to be understood in this world.  I have a dentist appointment on August the 27th at 4.

There are better looking boobies in this VHS.  The ones that really stand out belonged to a young prostitute who was caught in a police sting operation in Las Vegas.  The undercover officer was Middle Eastern, and he was playing a wealthy tourist from some Arab country or other, white dress shirt, necktie and headscarf.  Mustache.  Classic.  The prostitute's face was obscured, but you could tell she was no toothless crack fiend.  She was probably a Lady of the Pills.  You know, classy.  She had very tiny nipples, I remember that.  Thinking, God-- they're so tiny.  Like little M&Ms.  Of course, back in the days when I was watching this, I had never seen a woman's nipples in the flesh

PUN INTENDED

and so what the fuck did I know about nipples?  I knew a hell of a lot more about M&Ms.  And Doritos. 

Every time I watched that tape, and, yeah, I watched it, um, a few times, I got sad when they arrested her.  Not because I didn't get to see her do terrible things on that polyester hotel bedspread, but because she had M&M nipples.

They say you can tell a lot about a society by the people whom it imprisons.  If that is true, then America is racist, sexist, idiotic, paranoid, uninformed, irrational, and it is also just, moral, unflinching, righteous and thoroughly insane. 

FREE THE M&M NIPPLE'D ONES!  MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

Prostitution's a funny thing.  You pay someone and they have sex with you and then it's over.  Is that wrong?  I don't know.  I suppose it's wrong if you're in a committed relationship with someone and you do it, or if you're married, or if you don't use a condom, or if you get/give an STD, or if you knock the prostitute up, or if the woman is forced into the profession against her will, or if she's a minor, or if you inflict physical harm on her, of if she's mentally ill, or if she's supporting a drug habit, or if you're doing it near a school and some impressionable minor sees it and gets irreparably damaged for life because of that unfortunate visual, but, barring any or all of those aforementioned qualifiers-- is it wrong? 

I don't know. 

People say pornography and prostitution objectifies women, and I'm not so sure that's true, anymore than slapstick objectifies Moe, Larry and Curly.  It's a service they're getting paid to perform, and you get something out of it.  If anything, it's mutual exploitation.  I don't know if I was objectifying anyone by buying "COPS: Too Hot for TV" back in the day.  It's not something I'm particularly proud of-- I'd much rather brag about how I watched the 1939 film adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" with Laurence Olivier when I was eight (I didn't)-- but we've only got what we've got in this world.  Our stories.  Our M&Ms.  Our bits and our bobs.  Our thoughts and our feelings. 

Unsupported, unsubstantiated, undercooked.

Understood.       

Monday, June 10, 2013

Pass and Review

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 21

"Those who love to talk will suffer the consequences.  Men have died for saying the wrong thing!"
 
---
 
CHIPPED WISDOM:
 
An annual performance review is a terrifying thing, created by Human Resource departments which are, by and large, staffed with and by terrifying people.  People like to joke about how sadistic high heels are ("and, of course, they were invented by MEN!") and, of course, the annual performance review was created specificially to torture the desk-tethered working class chimpanzpolyees of the world, and, what's more to the point, the annual performance review was most likely created by people who probably never had to have one.
 
For most people, I guess, the annual performance review is kind of a big deal because it lets you know how much money you're going to make, or not, in the coming year.  When, however, your life's occupational efforts for the last 365 days come down to forty or fifty cents, the annual performance review comes down to something a lot more meaningful:
 
Somebody's going to sit down across from you and tell you what they think of you.  They're going to talk about your strengths.
 
AND YOUR FAULTS!
 
They'll call them "weaknesses", because that's "nice".  Maybe they'll call them "targeted areas of performance improvement".  They might say that "we just need to make a few tweaks".  
 
Make.
 
A few.
 
Tweaks.
 
TWEAK!
 
T
 
    w
 
             e
 
                         a
 
                                       
                                          k
 
That's a funny word.  It's a drug thing.  Drugs are funny!!!!
 
No supervisor I've ever had has told me that they're gonna tweak me up or whatever, in fact, most of my annual performance reviews have been quite nice.  Effortless.  Pain-free.  The very quintesscence of tweak-less. 
 
There was one, however.... 
 
Back when I was young and stupid(er) I got this job working in a non-profit.  They rented an ass-donkey expensive office out in some officeburb and I had my own office.  Four walls and a closed door.  WITH MY TWEAKIN' NAME ON IT.  The door closed, and it didn't have glass or frosted glass-- I could have been attaching car batteries to my nipples while watching a poodle do tricks on my desk during my lunch hour in there and nobody would have known.  Unless the poodle narced on me.  Not that he'd dare cross me, what with that car battery right there.
 
So, little skinny Jewish Donald Trump had his desk and his office and his phone with lots of buttons and lights, just like he'd dreamed of.  He wore a dress shirt and tie and "church pants" to work every day, he nodded to the ice-queen rent-a-ceptionist as he walked past her and secretly thought about what she looked like naked every morning and he went to work and pretended like he knew what he was doing.
 
After around four months, he found he actually did know what he was doing.  Those first few months don't actually count, dummy-- that's why it's called a probationary period.
 
Anyway, it was a very small organization-- just the executive director, a program head, and this glasses-wearing asshole in the tie with the car battery, tweakin'.  A year went by, and all of a sudden it was ANNUAL REVIEW TIME! 
 
His notes were impeccable.
 
The summaries of applications to the board were succinct and yet full of detail.
 
His files were orderly.
 
He communicated with applicants in a courteous, efficient, capable way.
 
He was never late.
 
EVER.
 
All work was completed in a timely fashion. 
 
He had learned to ask for help when he needed it.
 
He worked well independently and as part of a team.
 
---
 
But.
 
---
 
"You know, I really feel," said the Executive Director, "that you don't make enough small-talk.  You know my birthday was two months ago, and you didn't even say anything."
 
I stared at her, blankly.  Numb.  Tweakin'.
 
Are you serious?
 
I didn't say that, but that's evidently what my face said, because she, without missing a beat, said,
 
"I'm serious-- you know office culture really thrives on people feeling AT HOME with one another, comfortable.  Like family.  And you just don't engage in that office chit-chat."
 
..........
 
"But... I'm working.  I'm here to work," was my reply.  I was amazed that, at twenty-three, I could summon the balls to say that to a narcissistic fifty-six-year-old.
 
(Oops.  Fifty-seven.  Sorry.)
 
"Yes," she said, "but, you know-- work's not all work!"
 
---
 
And I get it now.  I get it.  But it's not easy for me.  Small-talk.  Chit-chat.  Chatterboxin'.  Water coolering (I also, apparently, wasn't very good about calling the water cooler company when we were running out of bottles) and chin-waggin'.  There has to be a certain amount of that.  But I find my way with the spoken word so inept, so fumbling, so fussy, so fraught with petrifying consequences that I avoid it.  I throw myself into meaningless paperwork or keyboard clattering so I won't have to say boo to anyone, because, let's face it, "boo" is scary.  And I don't want to scare you.  What you read on here is probably scary enough.  But at least you know I'm thinking it over before I press "Publish" (well, I'm thinking a little bit) but my mouth is frightening, and sometimes it moves faster than my brain does.  Ironically, it's my writing that's gotten me in the most trouble in my life, professionally and personally, but I still feel that it's my safe place.  So don't be offended if I can't look you in the eye and talk joyfully about my kids, or yours, or the weather, or politics, or the Weathermen, or which way the wind's blowing.  I'll just be over here, with my face buried in a binder, or a computer screen, or behind this here door. 
 
Nevermind the barking.