Abridged Print Edition for 04/01/11- No foolin'

First off, let me ask a favor of you. If you’re the praying type, please put my good friend Sylvester Carr in your prayers. He lost his wife, Diane, in a car wreck last weekend and was critically injured himself. If you aren’t the praying type, how about some good thoughts? Either way, he could use the support…


From the Fox SportsSouth Facebook feed came this gem Monday: “Tonight’s Braves vs. Nationals game has been cancelled due to weather.”
Really? Isn’t “sunny” a type of weather, too? I guess it would be too much to ask for them to add three fucking letters to the goddamned post where it reads “bad weather” and God forbid they seem the least bit erudite and describe it as “inclement weather.”
Of course, this is Fox we’re talking about- the same network that continues to employ the fucktarded duo of McCarver and Buck- so I really shouldn’t be surprised…


Know what else I shouldn’t be surprised by? Getting to work Monday morning and having to make my way around a ginormous pile of crap left right in the middle of the fucking walkway.
Or a riding lawnmower right in front of the door to my work area.
Or the pallet of aluminum left right out in the middle of my other work area’s floor- after I’d specifically told pretty much everyone that the material didn’t go to me, and please don’t put it in the goddamned router room. Because, obviously, driving 25’ into the router room was much easier than moving it five feet to the goddamned left- where it wouldn’t have been right in the middle of a fucking walkway…


Know what else I shouldn’t be surprised by? The big-assed puddle of water in the middle of the floor in the router room- courtesy of a leaky roof. A leaky roof that I’ve been suggesting be repaired for at least two years now. 
This time around.
See, when I started this job around five years ago, the roof leaked then, too. I know because one of my first questions was “what’s that bucket in the middle of the floor for?”
After months and months of my pointing out that a leaky roof over a $50,000 piece of electronic machinery might be a bad idea, the powers that be got off their ass and forked over the dough to get the roof fixed. 
It lasted all of about a year before it started leaking again. That time, it didn’t take as long to get it repaired.
This time, however- well, as I said, I’ve been suggesting it be repaired for two years now. So last week, our two crane truck guys were on the roof banging around, trying to fix the leak. I was told “that should do it” (not by either of the crane truck guys, though- they were still on the roof).
Knowing my coworkers like I do, though, I said I’d reserve my judgment until it rained. Which it did this weekend. A lot.
And, of course, led to about a two gallon puddle of water on the floor. What had once been just a slow drip was now more like a leaky faucet that won’t quite turn off.
Not that I blame the crane truck guys. We do signs. Not roof repair. It’s the dumbasses who are “in charge” who are to blame for not having a professional do the goddamned job in the first place…


So, Kenshin Krapakami’s line from Sunday was four innings, three runs and five hits, which Chip Caray deemed “not bad”- and reminded us of two things.
A) Krapakami should not be on the Braves’ roster and 2) Chip Caray is a fucking idiot.
If you work that line out to nine innings, it pegs Krapakami’s ERA at 6.33.
Rumor is Krapakami will start the year at AA Rome. In my opinion, even that league’s gonna pound him like he was an all-you-can-eat buffet surrounded by fat guys…


Another joy Monday morning came when I tried to boot up my other work computer. After a number of “file not found” types of errors, I determined it just wasn’t going to play nice.
And, of course, the place where we bought it doesn’t open until 9:00 AM.
Now, I’d be all for a custom built machine if it weren’t for the fact that this particular piece of shit has already been back to the place it came from on two other occasions due to hard disk problems.
See, the same geniuses who wouldn’t spend five or six hundred bucks to protect a $50,000 machine by having a roof repaired are the same ones who insisted on spending something like $1200 on a fucking computer when I insisted that we could buy an off the shelf model for about $600 less and beef up the RAM and still not spend as much. And it probably wouldn’t be broken…


I’ve been refilling my Netflix queue ahead of the two weeks of down time I’m about to be facing. And, I love their streaming feature.
I’d actually resisted buying a DVD Blu-Ray because I didn’t want to have to replace movies yet again, but- once Vizio (maker of my ginormous TV) came out with one that was only $120 and had Wi-Fi and would stream Netflix, I bought.
And I liked the Netflix streaming feature so much, I went and got another for the bedroom- where I’m sure to spending a lot of time post-surgery.
So, like I said- I’m refilling my queue. Any suggestions?


By the time print readers get this, I’ll be just a few days away from Operation: Cutthroat (as I’ve decided my tonsillectomy shall be called). Maybe I’ll be nervous, maybe I won’t. What I won’t be, after it happens is at work for at least two weeks.
This seems to be catching many of the dunderheads I work with by surprise. You know, ’cause I’ve only been telling them about it for something like a fucking month now.
And last year, when they revoked our vacation, they revoked sick time, too (it was all lumped together as “personal time”), so I won’t have any income for those two weeks, either.
Despite the fact that I’m losing out financially- and won‘t be compensated- one of the dipshits still had the balls to ask me if I’d be “checking in” to answer “technical questions” and “stuff like that.”
Go fuck yourself is never really an professional way to approach a query of this nature, but it sure seemed like the appropriate response today…

Abridged Print Edition for 03/18/11

First off, congrats to my buddy Mark, who finished second in his class at the Tire Rack SCCA Dixie National Tour this past weekend. 
And an even bigger congrats to Alison.
Way to go, guys (so to speak). 
I know what you’re thinking- racing? Really? You’re right.
Normally racing wouldn’t be a blip on my radar, but a) these are friends of mine; 2) they turn left and right; c) this is one cool car, if I do say so myself (as in, I designed the graphics, printed them, applied them with some help from Mark and that’s my karaoke “brand” on the rear quarter panel).
Also, it’s my column. So- piss off if ya don’t like it! 

My take on the NFL lock-out is thus: They’re idiots. 
The players are idiots and the owners are idiots. Multi-millionaires all, fighting over table scraps. 
Granted, they’re enough table scraps to take care of any of us for the next 20 years or more, but they’re table scraps all the same.
Don’t think for a minute that fans are exempt, though. They’re idiots, too. It’s one thing to watch the games on TV (for free- well, except for the cable bill, anyway), so I don’t mean the casual fan.
I’m talking about the die-hards. The season ticket holders. The ones who buy $300 jerseys with their favorite player’s name on them. The ones that haul their oversized asses in the stadium parking lots six hours before the game to unfurl their freak flag via face painting in team colors, a BBQ grill shaped like their team’s logo and a mural of their team’s all-time greatest players on the side of their customized-with-team-logos-on-every-surface-of-the-interior RV’s. They’re idiots because they keep forking over retardedly large gobs of cash to the NFL machine.
(The NFL isn’t the only sport where the players and owners are insanely out of touch with us “common folk”, but we’ll save our ridicule for the NBA/MLB/NHL for their next journey down stupidity lane. For the NBA, that‘s reported to be coming some time this summer. Which can't get here soon enough.)
And just how out of touch are these jackasses? Well, as I read where one unnamed player was asking his if he’d still get his $178,000 work out bonus. Really? This guy makes more than some people will make for the next five fucking years just going to the gym in the offseason?
I’d go to Georgia Force games, but that’s an NFL-owned league, too- and the ticket prices, while not in the asinine level that the “big league” tickets are, are still way out of proportion to real life.
So now, instead of games this fall- we’ll have morons arguing over how many millions they’re entitled to. And who really suffers? Well, the fans. Will it be enough to turn them against the league? Well, Michael Vick just signed another endorsement deal Monday. What does that tell you?


I’ve probably mentioned this before- so feel free to skip it- but, do you ever just want to punch your co-workers?
There are 17 employees where I work full-time. When I started, I was told I could work one of two shifts: either 7 AM - 3:30 PM or 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM. I chose the earlier start so I could avoid traffic as much as possible. In the almost five years I’ve worked there- including three when I lived downtown (I.e., bad traffic central) I’ve been late exactly once. And that was because I had an early appointment to get my car serviced. And, I let them know ahead of time.
Anyway, out of the other 16 people there, exactly TWO of them are consistently on time for work- and they’ve both been there less than six months.
I mean, I know it’s Atlanta- and there’s bound to be bad traffic, but- come on!
The former shop foreman (who now is… I don’t really know, but all he usually does is wander around, chain smoking- then again, that’s all he really did when he was shop foreman, too) gets there some time around 7:45 every day, The crazy, mumbly redneck guy around 8:00, the “production manager” (sarcastic quotes intentional) around 8:10, the “lead commercial installer” around 8:20 (though this morning, that was 9:20), the painter around 8:50 or so, and the shop’s oxygen thief around 9:30. And these aren’t isolated incidents, I’m talking every. Flipping. Morning.
And, just as I suspected, more than one on them had the old “the time change messed me up” excuse fired up and ready to go Monday morning…


The doctor says I need an EKG before they do my tonsillectomy. When I mentioned it to Shelby, she said it’s S.O.P. at her hospital for surgical patients over 40. When I asked the ENT about, he pretty much said “nope, it’s ’cause you’re fat and have high cholesterol.” (Well, that’s what I heard, anyway…


Cat is, in a word- stubborn. And she didn’t give a rat’s hind end about that time change thing. She wanted me to get up Sunday morning, and played with the blinds in the window over the bed until I did.
As a result, I fell asleep on the couch a few hours later and missed Crystal’s birthday brunch. And, had trouble getting to sleep that night (well, except for the Lunesta I took)…


Thanks to my buddy Charles Bailey, I learned last week that a “mess” of something is defined as “a sufficient quantity for a meal.” He “looked it up in (his) 1952 edition Webster’s.”
Now you know…


I’ve run out of steam. I think I’ll see what’s on TV now.
More stuff next time.