Fake People

I’ve spent my fair share of time surrounded by people who I consider to be pretentious.  I have gotten in many of argument with my friend Ben who apparently thinks that everyone is just acting how they “are” and that nobody is really “pretentious”.  Maybe I am in the wrong.  Maybe I am the one who is not giving humanity the credit it deserves for all of our individual differences. But anyone who knows me knows that I have a hard time with being wrong.   So I will let you read my below examples of what I have found to be pretentious behavior in my friends and you can make your own judgments. 

A lot of my friends will purposely order expensive, disgusting food items at expensive restaurants and act like they enjoy eating them:  I’m often looked down upon by my friends when I order a filet and they have ordered something like “sweet breads” (Sheep Brain) or a whole pigs head for dinner.  Now I find these situations hilarious.  Because someone with a steaming, severed pigs head sitting in front of them is actually giving me shit for ordering what has been widely agreed upon as the best piece of meat on any market.  I mean, entire religions have denounced pork in general, let alone eating the god damn things head for dinner.  Or how about a guy sitting there smearing a sheep’s brain onto a cracker who actually thinks they have a more sophisticated pallet then I.  Why? Because I get to go to sleep tonight having paid less money, for better food, while not risking a staph infection?   For the life of me, I cannot understand why my friends do this.  How can you justify paying over a hundred dollars for a meal consisting of things that a goat would refuse to eat?  And all the while, fancy yourself as some kind of sophisticated individual?  I might be over-simplifying the situation, but I don’t see a sophisticated person sitting across from me, I see a desperately pretentious person who enjoys wasting money on horrendous food.  Does anyone really enjoy eating a pig’s head?  And even if they say that they do, isn’t that kind of a problem in and of itself?

 Here is what I think is going on with them, and of course I could be completely wrong.  Somewhere along the line with them, what they enjoy eating took a back seat to… “What can I order that will impress my friends?”  So it’s not about what they WANT to eat, more so, what can I order that will make me look creative and free-spirited and sophisticated?  I’ll bet that if some chef came out with an entree that consisted of people snorting ants off of a popsicle stick, some of my friends would be lined up to sample just such a dish. 

How come everyone at any wine bar knows so much about art?  The answer is simple, they don’t.   However, the atmosphere within any wine bar is generally artsy and peoples incessant need to constantly be speaking to one another about anything that they can muster, leads to them discussing art with each other.   You can have one guy who works in a machine shop and a woman who works as a debt collector talking to each other as though they curate Picasso’s in their basements in their spare time.  To me, people who are “artsy” and who are not artists are some of the most pretentious people you can find.  Now they will generally say things like “You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate fine art”.  And I agree, but if you could do it, or have ever even tried to do it, then your opinion would be of value to me.  But the vast majority of my friends have never painted anything short of a wall or two in their apartments, nor do they work in any sort of a capacity that involves art in any way.  Am I to believe, that in their spare time, they took it upon themselves to study fine art to a point where they have enough knowledge of it to carry on a two hour conversation about it, at a wine bar?  You’re really not just talking out your ass about art to each other?    The answer is simple, they don’t know shit about art, but the atmosphere with which they have found themselves in encourages a more sophisticated level of conversation.  It’s not cool to talk about football at a wine bar.  God forbid someone overhears you speaking of something where you know what the hell you’re talking about. 

Men in a wine bar are a farce to begin with.  I smile when I see a guy struggle to order a glass of wine off of an enormous list, of wines with names that he can’t pronounce.  Because at least that guy isn’t acting like he has heard of any of them.  At least he isn’t pretending to know the difference between Razor’s Edge Charraz and Porte Blac le Canfior dry.  You know that that guy isn’t going to try to strike up a conversation about art with you later.  It’s the guys who walk into a wine bar, look at the list, order something, and act like they are completely within their element that concern me.   Gay guys are excluded because gay guys know wine.  The problem is, there really are some straight guys who know a lot about wine.  And they are the ones who ruin it for everyone.  Because for every one of them, there are a about a thousand pretentious assholes who wouldn’t know Merlot from Grape Faygo showing up at wine bars and trying to start conversations with people about art.

Pretentious people are some of the most close minded individuals on Earth:   Now this is counterintuitive to hear, but in my opinion absolutely true.  By nature, a pretentious person will usually be artsy and maybe make his or her own clothes, and act free-spirited and accepting of others.  However, this is not the case.  From my experience, pretentious folks want nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t share their own pretentious opinions.  If you don’t believe me, ask an “artsy” person, in as friendly a manner as you possibly can, what they thought of the game last night.  And see what kind of response you get out of that person.  99 times out of 100 they will bite your head off about how they not only didn’t watch the game but could care less about any sport because of how artsy and pretentious they are.  If you’re extra lucky, they will even take the time to let you know the underlying reasons for their sports hatred.  To me, this is strange, on the outside they seem like they would be such outgoing, accepting folks. They seem like they would be open minded enough to see someone trying to strike up a friendly conversation with them and at the very least, respectfully decline.  But on the inside, there is a storm a-brewin.   No pretentious person has ever respectfully declined a conversation that they aren’t interested in, after all that would be the sensible route.  Instead they must crush the person in front of them for asking such a ridiculous question about a sport that millions of people watch every day. They must, at any cost prove to this stranger that they aren’t interested in anything normal or main-stream.  And they generally accomplish this by acting like a complete asshole to you. 

Sometimes they will even take it to a point where they laugh at you when you talk about your opinion of music that they disagree with.  Usually the pretentious crowd will refuse to acknowledge any sort of music that could possibly have ever made it onto any sort of a radio station.  What they like is generally some combination of Indian music, trance, and industrial.  Now to most people, this music is horse shit, plain and simple.  But to them, it is all that is, and ever has been, in the world of music.  And they are passionate about it to a point where they will laugh out loud at you when you tell them you like The Doors or Korn or Nirvana.  Because, they, in their own heads, have made themselves so sophisticated, that they couldn’t even fathom listening to anything but what they believe to be good music.  These people take this attitude towards just about everything in their lives.  They are basically just dead to everything outside of their box.  And this is our problem, because we just aren’t advanced enough in our lives to possibly understand the level of sophistication that they have reached in theirs. 

Generally pretentious people will hide behind the “you just can’t understand me” excuse.  “You just can’t understand me” is a very convenient explanation for someone who has no fucking idea what they are trying to talk to you about.  Who couldn’t understand you is more like it.  What’s to understand?   You love art; you’re extremely hostile towards people who don’t, yet you have no practical art experience and you work in a factory.  You love a certain kind of music that most people think sounds like an Indian version of daft punk remaking Nine Inch Nails songs, and you like to eat food that the FDA likens to medical waste.   Is that about the half of it?   Are there any more layers to this complex onion that is you?  Maybe you’re not as original as you fancy yourself?  Maybe you’re just a bitter, pretentious weirdo?  

Or maybe I’m just a close minded boob.  Either way it’s funny.

It’s the End of The World??

Every time a tree falls down in the park someone thinks it is the end of the world.  I disagree with these people but there are some strange things going on, I will admit.  I don’t understand their motivation.  Even if they are right, and there was nothing any of us could do about it, what is the point in harping on the fact?  How could that be productive? 

And the notion that the “World” could be coming to an end is about as arrogant a statement as anyone could make.  I am no scientist, but read my lips; The World (Earth) isn’t going anywhere.  Not for billions of years when the sun swells up and engulfs us along with Mercury, Venus and probably Mars.  One way or the other, no matter what we do, this rock is going to be floating around space for a long, long time after we have either left or terminated each other. 

According to non-Christian people, much smarter than me, our world has been around for about 4.55 billion years.  Humans have been around for somewhere around 195 thousand of those years.  Most of those 195 thousand years were spent, by our knuckle dragging ancestors walking around, trying not to freeze to death.  So you can really only count about the past 6 or 7 thousand years of history as being anything we should pay attention to.  And this is being generous.  Most of that 6 or 7 thousand years was spent by people, running around desserts, chopping one another’s heads off.   Not exactly a progressive society.  Only in the past 5 or 6 hundred years, have we really begun to grasp Earth Science and the laws of physics that are at work all around us every day.  

The average human being on Earth lives for 78 years.  That’s 78 years against 4.55 billion of which we have only been self aware of how things work for about 600.  There have always been people so paranoid and crazy, yet arrogant in their beliefs, that they think that our planet is going to end within the miniscule amount of time they are walking around on it.  

Our cosmos has a much slower Swatch.  As far as our Earth and Solar System and Galaxy and Universe are concerned, 78 years isn’t enough time to microwave a hot pocket.  Our planet couldn’t blow its nose in 78 years.  Mowing your lawn, takes thousands of years on a planetary level.  For this reason, and many others, there is no F’ing way that the world is going to come to an end within our lifetimes.  The probability of that happening is so infinitesimally remote that I am comfortable with calling it, impossible. 

There have always been earthquakes, there have always been floods, and there have always been hurricanes.  The difference between these events now and when they happened a few hundred years ago are the amount of people affected by these events.  Katrina would not have been a problem, if New Orleans hadn’t gotten in its way.  Japan is so insanely populated, that of course something like this earthquake is going to be a major humanitarian disaster.  Birds and fish die.  I don’t know why they are deciding to die in huge numbers, all at the same time, but it’s not because the world is ending, I will guarantee you that. 

We don’t do ourselves a whole lot of favors within our own human nature.  Human beings, no matter where they are on the planet, love to live around the oceans.  As we have industrialized and built up ports and traded with each other over the years, the major population centers have had to be built along the coasts. This is right where most of the horrific shit happens on our planet, which turns something like a flood, running 6 miles inland, into a catastrophic calamity of biblical proportions.  Nearly every coastline on our planet has human being after human being, literally stacked up on top of each other to the point where they can barely move.  But we can’t seem to understand why a flood would take so many of us out.

Now, the planet aside, is it possible for life on Earth to end within our lifetimes?  Again, no, life on this planet isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.  The quality of our life could suck a lot more as the years go by but it isn’t going to kill us all off.  Human beings would have starved to death if they didn’t learn how to stand on their back legs and reach for leaves to eat. They survived ice ages and famine, and predators trying to eat them.  Some crazy assholes even believe that we survived a planetary flood on a big wooden boat, that one dude named Noah built, and put two of every animal on the planet onto.   If we can pull that shit off, we can stomach a flood or an earthquake or a hurricane or a few dead birds every once in a while. 

I am a lot more worried about the progressive dumbification of our species that seems to be doing nothing but accelerating as the years go by.  To me, this is what’s going to ruin all of our lives.  I am a lot more worried about the collective IQ of our voting population then I am about a volcano or tidal wave.  Democracy only works if you have people who can understand what it is that they are voting for.  As soon as you don’t, like we have now in this country, you can just tell people that they will get free bacon if they vote ‘NO’ on issue 6… and then they will.  And then the schools won’t get funded and then our country gets even stupider.  Eventually, you end up with a country of illiterate people, living under bridges, drooling on each other. 

But still, this won’t kill us.  We will still be “alive”, the planet will still be spinning around the sun.  If anything, the dumber we get, the better off the planet will be.  Eventually, we will all be so stupid, that nobody will remember how to run the coal plant or how to release the chemicals into the river.  Nobody will be able to build the cars that spew the exhaust into the atmosphere.  We will all just be sleeping in huge piles, trying not to freeze to death while drawing pictures of penis’s on each other’s foreheads, and laughing our asses off.  

At which point, the planet will recover, and we will either have to re-evolve of just finally die off completely.  At which point, who really cares which way this, goes?  We won’t be smart enough to even understand what the hell is happening around us anyway.  

Either way, the world is still going to be here, and there will still be plenty of time for some other bag of jelly to crawl out of the ocean and learn how to eat leaves and eventually evolve into the next great species.  Who will again, build up the planet to the point where it starts to affect the weather.  And who will eventually become arrogant enough to tell people that the world is coming to an end. 

I think the Earth has a way of keeping our numbers at a level that it can handle.  And I am not sure 7 billion of us rats with credit cards and cell phones, is in that range.  It certainly doesn’t seem so.  How this works, is beyond me. 

Annoyances within the world of Pro Sports

Professional Sports: 

Here are a few, of the hundreds of thousands of things that annoy me about professional sports…

Why is there still an umpire calling balls and strikes in baseball?  We have had the “pitch tracker” technology for nearly a decade.  A computer can easily call balls and strikes with perfect accuracy, on every pitch, based on the real dimensions of the strike zone.  Instead, in 2011, we choose to still have fat, middle-aged men literally humping the catchers back, arbitrarily calling balls and strikes from what is probably the worst point of view in the entire park to do so.  Our pitchers are forced to adjust their game to whatever blue-haired clown they have behind the plate on any given night.  Half of them take 3 or 4 seconds to make the difficult decision of ball or strike which prolongs what is already a ridiculously time consuming game that is professional baseball.  The guy can still be back there to call people safe or out at home, but take away their ball/strike calling power already.

Why is there not a “pitch clock” in baseball?   In basketball, you have 24 seconds to hit the rim with a shot.  In football you have 40 seconds to run your next play.  In baseball, the pitcher can literally go to the dentist in between pitches.  I watch a lot of professional baseball and at least 3 or 4 times per game, I find myself yelling “throw the god damned pitch!”  at my television.  I don’t want to be that guy anymore, I just don’t.  Just impose a time limit in between pitches.  If they fail to throw a pitch in that time limit, then you add a ball to the batters count, it’s that simple. 

Let the referee in the booth, at the game, handle the reviews:  I think that NFL reviews have their place in the game now.  It is impossible for these old, white guys to keep up and be in good enough position to make every call correctly, on a field that size, surrounded by world class athletes. However, do we need these guys to have to run to the sidelines and stick their head in a box for 5 minutes every time they have to review a play?  Why can’t we just have the “upstairs” referee, who is already at every game, watch it on a monitor and then make the call?  

If you aren’t going to have a salary cap in baseball, then why have so many teams/games?  Over the years, I have watched baseball dissolve its fan base in the smaller markets to the point where it is about as popular as cricket in most of this country.  The lack of a salary cap in baseball has created this environment.  Larger market teams get larger sums of money from their TV contracts, allowing them to buy all of the A+ baseball talent.  Baseball has a revenue sharing system, but when players’ salaries and operational costs go up by an average of 10% every year and you keep getting the same amount of revenue sharing money, it is useless.  Team this with teams that can’t get more than a couple thousand fans to come to each game and you basically just have the XFL in those cities.  However, as apathetic as most baseball fans have become, other larger markets are still extremely passionate about it.  The NBA is quickly getting to this point as well.  To me, it would make good business sense for MLB to contract, a lot of the smaller market teams and just keep having baseball in the larger markets where people actually care about it and go to the games.  This would also allow them to not have to play 162 regular season games as they would not need to play so many teams.  If you have to play 162 regular season games just to figure out which 8 teams make the playoffs, then your system is broken.

Why does any professional athlete get paid, while injured?  NFL Football is the only league that has figured this out.  In the NFL, your contract is written in such a way, that if you don’t play and produce, you don’t make as much money.  In the NBA and the MLB your money is considered “guaranteed”.  This means, the NBA’s Greg Oden is still going to make all of the money he inked on his rookie contract despite playing 82 out of 328 possible games, when this season ends. Professional Sport Teams are the only business model in the world that would allow its employees to honor less then ¼ of their contractual agreements while still paying the entirety of the money.  The blame can be put on both sides.  The owners are dumb for allowing these sorts of contracts to even be written let alone signed by someone.  And the players and their unions are guilty for demanding and taking advantage of such agreements.  In many cases, the player doesn’t even have to be injured, he just has to be pissed off, or in jail, or under some kind of league investigation etc, but he still gets paid, millions, in most cases.  It is completely insane.

Could there possibly be any more propaganda around Professional Sports?  While watching an NFL game, it is increasingly difficult to tell where the game ends and the beer commercials begin. It’s just the same Coors, Miller or Budweiser commercial, making the average football watching guy look like some sort of brain-damaged, alcoholic, who gets so excited over terrible beer that he can barely keep his pants on.  I have met some less then reputable characters in my life, by I have never seen a man, or group of men, even get mildly excited over a refrigerator full of Miller Light.  If anything I would feel sorry for my friend(s) for having such poor taste and an obvious lack of money and nutritional diversification.

You can’t even hear yourself think at an NBA game anymore with all of the sound effects and Hip Hop/80’s Metal/Pop music playing, dancing strippers at half court, people shooting off tee-shirt guns into the stands, shit on parachutes failing from the ceiling, midgets on stilts, people dancing in the aisles and begging for people to throw them wadded up, garbage quality tee-shirts and somewhere in between this extravaganza, is a basketball game.  Someone had a seizure in my section the last time I went to an NBA game and I can’t blame them.  They have pigs pushing shopping carts around the court at halftime, guys trying to fit their bodies inside of balloons, people jumping dirt bikes, teams of people break dancing, people giving away pizzas and taco-bell products, people trying to get you to fill out credit card applications, dancing robots in the concourse, contests for huge sections of fans, the always safe, indoor explosions and fireworks displays, all wrapped around what is usually a really shitty basketball game.

To me, baseball does a decent job of limiting the propaganda within the park.  You can still sit and watch the game you came to see without being bombarded with distractions and propaganda.  The NHL also does a great job. 

Do we really need to force athletes to go to college?  Who does this really benefit?  Sure it keeps some college teams able to compete while forcing the best players to play on those teams however, these people are also forced into GOING TO COLLEGE.  And let’s face facts; the average, professional athletic prospect is not college material.  Colleges also get screwed, having to create classes and programs to put the athletes into, that they can grasp mentally so as to keep their athletes eligible.  This is time, money, resources that could be put towards, I don’t know, educating people, who want to better the Earth. So while these kids may benefit a sports program, they waste a lot of people’s time and money and smarter well deserving kids opportunities by being there for one or two years and then going pro.  Just let them go pro out of high school and let the people who know how to read things other than defensive schemes go to the colleges.  

Professional Athletes Calling themselves “Business Men” and referring to the sport as “A Business” and getting away with crimes:   Is there anything more insulting then listening to a professional athlete refer to himself as a “business man”?   It must be really insulting if you were a real business man.  Why doesn’t anyone ever try to refute them?   Technically these men are about as much of a business man as, the guy who cleans the urinals or the lady selling popcorn for the same company.   I think players should be fined when they make statements that make themselves and their collective leagues sound even dumber than they are. They could site “language detrimental to the league” as the reason for the fines. 

Or how about the taste you get in your mouth when, you hear a professional athlete say something like…  “I understand that the sport is a business, I am just trying to do what’s best for me and my family.”   Well thank god for you being so smart!  Your, dumbass, dysfunctional family can finally be comfortable by you being such a savvy business man.  You making 120 million instead of 118 million is really what your family needed to bring it all together.   Again, professional athletes saying things like this should be met with fines.

Ben Roethlisberger raped two women, that we know of, Ray Lewis was directly linked to a man’s murder, Jamal Lewis sold a shitload of cocaine out of Colombia, everyone in baseball who hit a home run in the late 90’s, early 2000’s was involved with trafficking steroids, Michael Vick killed a ton of dogs and funded a massive dog fighting ring. Yet, very few of them ever get in any sort of real trouble or jail time.  Why is this?  If I were to be in any way involved with any of these things, I would be in prison for 20+ years.   If anything, professional athletes should go to jail for longer than everyone else, for being dumb enough to risk such an awesome lifestyle. 

Stop letting ESPN and other media outlets influence professional sports:  ESPN and other media institutions, thanks to their 24/7/365 format, have to fill a ton of time, without much news.  For this reason, and because they are on TV, it makes sense for ESPN to go after the largest markets, after all, more TV’s, more money for ESPN.  This is why, the network, uses every influence it can to produce good teams in the major markets.  After all, good teams in those markets create more reasons to have them on TV which will get ESPN on the most TV’s possible, in the largest markets, making them the most money.   So handing the big market teams, the biggest checks, from having them on TV the most, completes the circular farce that is the relationship of large market professional sports and ESPN.  You can tell this is a culture within ESPN as every employee will not miss an opportunity to bash or bad mouth an entire American City over something that one of its sports teams has done.  Of course the athletes hear this which makes them want to go to the places where ESPN won’t bad mouth them, which makes the larger market teams even stronger, which gives ESPN more reasons to broadcast their games, which puts ESPN on more TV’s, in the largest markets, making ESPN more money.

Ask yourself, is this collusion?  Sure it is. But it is such a broad systemic failure within the system, that it is tough to do anything about. Teams would have to no longer be allowed to accept any sort of kick backs from television networks.   Teams should also have a choice of which media outlets are covering their teams.  If a team doesn’t want ESPN covering them, they should be allowed to request this.  I don’t know exactly what you do about any of this, it would require a lot of terrible, greedy people to all have to accept some kind of a deal, that included less money for them, for the betterment of a sport....  Good luck.  

I love professional sports.  Until, all professional sports teams can again compete for championships, I don't have to listen to 40 something, talking heads on ESPN, bad mouthing vast regions of my country, professional athletes are no longer allowed to speak in public, and we stop treating one of the dumbest demographics of people as gods, and some of the more common sense rules are cleaned up,  I will love professional sports a little less every day. 

International Travel Nightmares:

Over the years, I have been all over and have dealt with just about every kind of pain in the ass that an International Traveler has to deal with.  Here are a few highlights. 

The Lufthansa vs. Continental stalemate:  If you fly on a Continental Airplane into Frankfurt Airport and are then, per your itinerary that you paid for, expected to catch a Lufthansa flight out of that airport, just run out in the street and let a car hit you because it’s not happening.  Not once, not twice, but three times I have been a victim of this fiasco within the Frankfurt Airport.  You get off the first plane, go through immigration and security which in Germany is about as organized as a monkey shit fight at the zoo, then you have to go get your luggage because Continental won’t transfer to Lufthansa, for some reason.  After this pride swallowing marathon of a journey through the Frankfurt airport, you can go to your gate, where the ticket that was issued to you 8 hours earlier will not be accepted by the Lufthansa people.  You are then asked to go to the “Continental Counter” and sort it out.  Unfortunately, the Continental Counter is about a mile away, walking, from Lufthansa.   So you get stuck, having to walk miles around an airport and you will eventually miss your flight. 

In an amazing turn of events, the last time I went there, my Lufthansa ticket was accepted however, the flight, which the ticket was issued for, didn’t exist.  It was just never a flight that was ever going to happen according to the attendant.  I’m not sure how my company paid for it or booked a non-existent flight, but it happened.   Therefore, I had to take the train from Frankfurt to Nurnberg for a fourth time. Now, the train station is technically part of the Frankfurt Airport but it is nowhere near the airport part of the Frankfurt Airport.  It is halfway to France, walking.  Then you get a good 5 hour train ride, not something you want to endure after a 6 hour flight and 4 hours wandering around a foreign airport, but it must be done in the name of business and progress! 

To top it all off, you end up in Nurnberg, but nowhere near the Nurnberg Airport where your car rental has been waiting for you for the last 8 hours.  So you must facilitate some sort of transportation across town to the Nurnberg Airport on your own, surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t speak English, without a working phone and nothing but an American Express Corporate Credit Card that nobody accepts.  The last time, I made the mistake of hitching a ride with some dude I met on the train.  Only, I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying to me, and I ended up hitching a ride with him and his parents.  So there I was, in the back seat of an Opel Station Wagon, cruising around Nurnberg Germany, with a strange German family, after 10 hours of travel and their 37 year old son, who I now believe to be criminally insane, showing me digital photo after digital photo of his recent trip to the United Arab Emirates on his camera.  It also quickly became apparent, that these people had absolutely no fucking idea how to get to the airport from the train station.  So the ride took a good hour and a half and only traversed about 14 miles on a map.  Finally, I end up at the Nurnberg airport and am presented the unique opportunity of walking into an airport solely to use their rental car service all with some jackass trying to get me to look at more of his vacation photo’s and asking me to become his Facebook friend.  I would rather fly through Kabul next time I connect to anywhere in Europe then ever have to see the Frankfurt Airport again as long as I live. 

Cultural Differences:   If you ever find yourself in Manchester England, at the “Hewley’s” suites next to the Manchester City Soccer Stadium; don’t go to Burger King while they are in the middle of playing Celtic Glasgow. 

I was there for weeks for work.  I couldn’t deal with room service anymore.  So I took to the streets in search for food, after all this is England, these people are our friends, what’s the worst that could happen?  I spot a Burger King across the street and head over.  All the while I can hear singing and cheering and glass breaking from the massive Soccer Stadium that I am walking around. 

The line at the Burger King is at least 25 people long but I deal with it.  You would be amazed how great Burger King sounds after weeks of eating boiled meat and rye bread and just general hotel garbage.  I get my food and leave, just as the game ends and the “fans” begin to file out of the soccer stadium.   Now when people in the United States exit a football stadium, sure they are drunk and kind of rowdy but they generally walk in some kind of orderly fashion to their vehicles and leave.  This is not the case after an English/Scottish soccer match.  Everyone run’s out of the stadium, in all directions, like it’s their last day of high school; half are engaged in some sort of an active fight or brawl, they all have glass bottles and they are all absolutely shit faced.  Needless to say, some guy in a 3 foot top-hat, that said “Bring it to Glasgow” (will never forget that)  fell down drunk and knocked my Burger King out of my hands and it was immediately trampled.  I then ended up having to physically grapple my way back to the hotel, where I sat on the corner of my uncomfortable bed, and ate more boiled, hotel, meat wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. 

Japanese guys can’t handle bourbon:  I love Japan; I would go back to Tokyo in a heartbeat.  That said, those guys, while friendly and fun-loving party goers, cannot handle Bourbon. 

I had been working with these guys for weeks.  We had established a wonderful level of trust and respect for each other.   It was to the point where they were all calling me “Matthew-San”.   We went out to the Ropongi Hills section of Tokyo.   Each one bought a different kind of Sochi, some hot, some room temperature, some chilled and we all enjoyed it and were having a great time.  I couldn’t understand what the hell any of them were talking about, but the language of drunken fun is universal.   Finally, we end up at this place literally called “The Tokyo Sports Café” , it was a sports bar and incredibly, they were playing a rerun of the Cleveland Cavaliers game from the day before.  I remember thinking how crazy awesome it was to be watching my home town team, in a sports bar, on the other side of the International Date Line. 

Now I was already drunk and I felt that I had to return the favor to these guys for buying all that Sochi earlier.  I quickly spotted a bottle of Jack Daniels hidden behind the bar.  It looked like it had not been touched since the Reagan era.   I ordered 6 shots and brought them back to our table.  I did a quick cheers that only I could understand and we all downed the shots.  Two of the men immediately vomited on the floor under the table.  A third managed to run about three steps before vomiting on the wall where he must have thought there was a door to something or somewhere. The other two managed to keep it under control, but did not look happy.   I have never in my life seen such a spectacle, before or after. In Japan, when you vomit in a bar, it is considered a dishonor and you have to clean it up yourself.  The bar tender provided us with a mop and a bucket and we all cleaned up puke and then said an awkward goodbye and went our separate ways.    I never spoke to any of those men again.

Food that would make a Billy Goat Vomit:   It is important to not offend anyone by showing them how offensive you find their food.   In Japan, I had dinner with the CEO of a major retailer at a ridiculously nice restaurant on the 58^th floor of a skyscraper.  I was forced to share ala-cart sashimi with our table.  Sashimi is just a big uncooked filet of recently dead fish.   I can’t eat this, I just can’t cant.  I don’t even eat sushi which is at least dressed up with everything to mask the flavor of the raw dead animal that you’re eating.   In an incredible sleight of hand display, that David Copperfield would have been impressed by, I managed to cut my sashimi into small enough pieces to either throw under the table or hide under my rice, without anyone noticing.  I left hungry, but I left happy and without risking mercury poisoning. 

The German’s eat sausage and sauerkraut.  I know it is prejudice but this is really what they eat.  They eat these items in such mass amounts that it is truly incredible. There is not a pork product, known to man, that the German’s don’t absolutely love.  Pigs, literally stand no chance of survival anywhere near that country.  Every little burg in Germany has their own “special” type of sausage that doesn’t taste any different from Jimmy Dean or Pepperidge Farm sausage.  It is so weird to listen to someone talk up sausage.  As though we are expected to believe that sausage is some sort of a difficult, complex food item.  I could see a country of people, who all took pride in filet minion tooting their own horn but sausage, really?  It would be like if everyone in some country took pride in Chicken Tenders and everyone had their own kind, and they all tasted the same as Swanson’s.   Then everything comes with a ridiculous amount of Sour Kraut.  Whether you like it or not, you’re getting a shitload of it with anything that you order.  

Germans also eat something called Blood-worst.   This is exactly what it sounds like.  A disgusting sausage casing filled with animal blood.  I think the guy who ordered it in our party, only ordered it in an attempt to gross me out.  It didn’t work, I wasn’t eating it afterall. I don’t even think he liked eating it.  So he just had to sit there, looking like some kind of shit-head vampire, eating a tube full of blood, while getting absolutely no reaction from me. 

Dealing with phones and currency:  Your phone doesn’t work when you’re in Europe or Asia.  I don’t care what your phone company tells you, it won’t work.  We even had company cell phones that were labeled “International Cell Phones”, purchased specifically for the purpose of working in Europe, that didn’t work in Europe.  So, when you get off the plane, you’re on your own, until you find your way to your hotel or find a way to make your phone work. This is a tough proposition in a foreign country where you can’t read anything or talk to anyone.

Team this inconvenience with the financial fiasco that will quickly ensue.  American Express has a veritable monopoly on the US Corporate Credit Card business.  The only problem is that nobody outside of America accepts American Express.   So you wind up having to use it at ATM machines, at foreign banks to take out foreign cash, if you can find one. You then, have to somehow get this to all tie-out on an American Expense Report when you get back.  This usually requires something like; help from 5 different people, three separate pieces of software and a scientific calculator.

Generally, when you get off of a foreign flight, there is a 2 or 3 hour period of time, where you have no money, no way to buy anything and no way of communicating with anyone.   You feel like a bum and everyone looks at you like some sort of poor vagrant. 

The Traveling Smoker:  I have recently quit smoking after a lot of years, which is nice.  However, all of my international travels took place while I was a smoker.  Sitting on 6, 8, 16, 18 hour flights is tough for a pack a day smoker.  So you get creative, you chew tobacco you find where you can smoke in airports; you get as many cigarettes in whenever you can while traveling. 

This leads to some interesting situations.  On the way to Australia, I had a two hour layover at LAX.  I decided to use this layover to get as drunk as humanly possible.  When I am drunk, I make poor decisions.  About 30 minutes before my flight was to board, I decided, that I was going to go back out through security and have a smoke outside. No way was I not going to be able to make it back through security and the concourse before my flight left.   I didn’t make it. 

So I had to catch the next flight to Sydney, four hours later.  In the meantime I got drunker at the airport.  It was to the point where I could barely stand in the line to get on the plane.  To this day, I can’t believe I got on that flight.  As soon as I sat down, I put a massive chew in my mouth and then passed out drunk.  I didn’t wake up until we were almost over Australia.  I was passed out drunk, on that plane, for nearly 9 ½ hours.  I missed 3 meals, who even knows how many beverages, and I had a huge lipper of Kodiak Wintergreen in my lip the entire time.  The lady next to me was absolutely terrified when I woke up, she told me that she thought I was dead.  I had to immediately run to the bathroom and take the biggest piss of my life and get that chew out of my mouth. 

If you are lucky enough to locate one of the new aged, smoker death chambers within an airport you are in for treat.  There is no environment, on Earth more unhealthy then the inside of one of these things.   I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a dead body in one someday.  These things are just a glass, gas chamber, chalked full of people trying to smoke as much as they possibly can before they get on airplanes.   The exhaust system is cranking, but it can’t possibly handle the volume of smoke billowing out of these people.  You don’t even have to light your own cigarette in that thing it is so thick.  Someone always has a beer in there.  People always want to have a conversation with you.  They are made out of glass for some reason so that all of the non-smokers can look at you while you smoke, like some kind of zoo animal who’s addicted to nicotine. 

These are just a few examples.  I could go on forever, but this was more than enough complaining for one day.  International travel is fun and sort of exciting but also very inconvenient.  You sacrifice a lot of comforts for that privilege.  I personally think it is worth it. 

Life as an IT Professional

If I had it all to do over again, I don’t think I would work in IT.  It’s too late now. I have a great job, that I love, but what I went through to get it, Jesus-God, never again.  I am finally, as of the last several months working in the sort of IT environment that I knew had to exist at some point but what I have found that IT people have to deal with, everyday of their lives, along my way, nearly drove me into the nuthouse.  Here is an experts view into the ass-backwards world of being an IT Professional. 

Life as an IT Professional is not what it once was.  Hackers and Identity Thieves have really ruined the fun for everyone.   Major financial institutions have taken the approach of "Let’s pass the buck to everyone else to defend themselves from these threats, instead of going after the perpetrators themselves".  Therefore, much of one’s time as an IT Professional is now spent taking preventative measures against such threats and then proving that you are protected to a never-ending parade of auditors and lawyers and business people or else they threaten to shut you down.  To me, this is a backwards system.

Imagine if once per year, a bunch of auditors showed up at your house and inspected your security system, and demanded all sorts of new updates to it that they have decided are necessary this year.  Then if you do not upgrade your security system to their standards within whatever timeframe they impose, they cancel your home owners insurance and site that you are not taking the necessary measures to prevent someone from robbing your house.  This is exactly how IT security works….exactly.
. 
The other issue is that, these auditors need jobs just like everyone else.  Therefore, there doesn't really need to be anything wrong with your security but they will find something wrong with it in order to keep themselves employed and on their "project". No matter how many locks and security systems that you have in place, there is always a way for someone to find a way to break in. This approach in an IT sense, wastes everyone’s time and money. It forces your talented individuals to attend meeting after meeting, forces managers to demand larger IT budgets, delays the completion of real work and just generally pisses everyone off.  IT auditing has become another invented industry. 

People who once were able to copiously sit at their desks and write code that addresses some sort of critical business need that will eventually make everyone’s life easier are now forced to sift through archives and massive file systems to verify that their companies are not keeping any sort of sensitive data.  Network personnel who once were able to work active directory and architect ingenious domain structures to perfectly align companies IT with its business structure now have to sit around and stare at logs within their check-point firewalls to ensure that no outside IP traffic is getting through to their internal network.  System administrators who used to be able to build servers and allocate server resources to match the various groups within a company are now forced to lock resources down to a point where they become borderline unusable.

IT Professionals, in this day and age, are expected to just remember hundreds of complex usernames and passwords for nearly everything they do.  There are even standards in place for these passwords and if they aren't up to the auditors standards, they then must be improved and re-memorized.   So, as an IT person, you end up with a bunch of systems that you can only access by remembering something like "GXB%%adm-TRIDEL$$".  If you have never worked in IT, you would find an IT person’s ability to remember these sorts of things incredible. 

Most IT people end up having to report to what we call "Business People".  By nature, IT people and "Business People" don't coexist well.   To me, this is highlighted by the typical business person preceding whatever question they ask you with "Is it possible for you too....".   Unfortunately, in the world of IT, just about anything is technically "possible".   It may take 8 months and 2 million dollars to make it happen but of course it is "possible".  For this reason, IT people are forced to spend a great deal of time trying to explain these things to business people within emails that the business folks are simply not wired to understand.  Such email threads can go on for days, weeks or months and every time the IT person has to re-explain the problem to the business person, that IT person dies a little more inside. 

“IT” is usually looked at as a “service” for the rest of the employees within a company, which I agree with. IT departments are inherently negative revenue entities so it kind of has to be this way.  However, this system does fuel a culture of ridiculous IT demands, unprofessional emails, phone calls from non-IT employees and completely backwards prioritization tactics imposed by non-IT management.  This is why a network admin often has to stop fixing a major issue within a company’s network to go fix a CEO's personal laptop that he decided to bring in to work that day.  This could all be resolved by allowing the best IT personnel to manage the IT departments instead of typical business people who view IT as a service that they just have to pay for and in turn get a return out of.

Our talents allow companies the ability to do whatever they dream of in their marketing brainstorming sessions and their board meetings and their sales seminars.  Without what we do, they would be little more than a collection of people who know about accounting and finance, staring at each other, and trying not to walk into the walls.  They know this, we know this but the, "IT Nerd" culture still exists in this country.  The people and industries that have come up with every major advancement that our country has had over the past 20 years are still looked down on by a bunch of people who panic and nearly piss their pants when their email doesn't start automatically when their laptop boots up.

There isn't much worse than a non-IT person making assumptions about you when he/she finds out that you work in IT.   Generally, they will say something to you like "Whoa, you work in IT?  You must have a really sweet computer at your house!!"   I often want to reply with something like, "Actually, working for people like you all my life has all but ruined the idea of touching a computer when I don't absolutely have to, in my personal life".  But I usually restrain myself and say something like "yeah". 

IT personnel are held to a much higher standard than anyone else.  Let’s use a marketing person for examples sake.  If a marketing person comes up with an idea to say, improve visual merchandising within a store and it fails, and the company loses money because of it, they might get a bad review that year or a stern talking to. Then they move on with their lives and are free to come up with their next terrible idea. Conversely, if an IT person misses one phone call, at 3 o'clock in the morning, when they were sleeping, and some random piece of data doesn't get to where it is supposed to be in time, they either get fired, or don't hear the end of it for years of their professional life.  Therefore IT people must keep their work issued phones/blackberry/laptops handy, at all times, in the event of just such an “emergency”.  Having to drag around multiple pieces of media and technical equipment with you, everywhere you go, for years of your life is a terrible existance.

The old adage,” most people aren’t paid to understand IT”, to me, is getting a bit old.  By now, in 2011, everyone has and has had a computer at home for at least the last decade.  Yet, the frequency of IT illiterate persons within our companies remains static.  How can this be?  How do they keep from running themselves over with their cars in the driveway?  How do they get dressed?  How do they not know the difference between a hard drive and a monitor in 2011?  What are they doing here?  What could they possibly be so good at, while knowing so little about such simple concepts that warrants their continued employment?  Now, I don’t expect people to understand routing tables or scripting or how to tune a server or configure a farm of virtual machines but people, by now, should know how to restart a laptop without taking the battery out of it. 

There is a lot of garbage, in our new world that falls under the IT umbrella.  It seems to grow on a daily basis.  I was recently contacted by a recruiter who wanted to know how much I knew about Infrared transistors and Blackberry Support.  What kind of job is that supposed to be?  What poor fool do you have working on that vast swath of trash now?  Every IT person at least once every few months is forced into supporting or building or maintaining some kind of system or environment that they know nothing about.  This is because most business folks view IT personnel as generic entities that can do everything from writing VB scripts to installing phones, to fixing DVD players.  

This is IT as it currently works in this country.  If you are gifted and motivated enough to work for a Google or a Microsoft or a Facebook then you probably know a level of respect for your creativity and motivation that most of us will never know.  But the rest of us, just have to keep plugging away, keep on dealing with what has become the most annoying industry to work in since Al Gore invented the internet. 

Globalization and you...

I don't envy that much from my parents/grandparents lifetimes but one thing I wish I had a chance to experience is their level of financial simplicity compared to the complete macro-economic boondoggle that we have to deal with in my day and age. 

In our parents hay-day, a husband’s job at the mill was enough to comfortably support a family of four. His wife didn't have to work. They had a house.  Everyone was fed and they could even take a vacation every year.  Now, a family of four, trying to live off of one parent, working at any sort of mill, is impossible unless that family likes living in the back seat of a car, not eating and finding the idea of a vacation laughable

When our parents got paid, they put their money in a bank, and that's where their money stayed, literally in that bank.  If they found a good enough bank, that was good enough with their, at the time, well managed, advisable investments, they could yield 8 or 9% interest on their money that they put in.   Basically, their bank was their 401K.   Now, if you can get a bank to give you a quarter every month for your trouble, you're way ahead of the curve.  Most people end up giving the banks money now for the privilege of holding onto our money.

I also use the phrase, "holding onto our money very loosely".  While there are still a few reputable financial institutions out there, most manage your money about as well as a compulsive alcoholic gambler. Within milliseconds of your direct deposit hitting your account that money is immediately thrown into the dark, foreboding world of global trading. 

Back in our parents days, globalization was laughable, as it should be today so their banks invested in local economies, which gained higher yields on their money, which benefited everyone around them.  This drove down costs of living, put more money in everyone’s pocket, increased employment, fed kids, the system worked. 

Now, over the years, as we have "Globalized", our banks, the drunken gamblers that they are, have been gifted a whole world of financial games to play with your money.  The money that would have been invested in small local business's 40 years ago may now be invested in a carrot enterprise in Greece, or a concrete company out of Moscow or even bundled up into packages that Steven Hawking can't decode and sold to other banks.  The end result is delusion of your dollar at a borderline criminal level. You get no interest for your money, your money is worth less, your cost of living increases, both parents have to work, and everyone is pissed off.

Now, most people blame the investment bankers themselves for this fiasco.  This is fine, because it really is their fault however, I also blame the people who empower them, mainly the "World" Banks and the botched up Federal Reserve System, but that is a different story entirely.  Good old fashioned human arrogance is a major player in this disaster.  People, with doctorates in economics, who have studied global markets and trading schemes for decades of their lives, admit that they still don't have a handle on the asinine complexities of our global, macro-economic system.  But for every one of these people who are humbled by this spider-web of revenue streams and market futures, there are a hundred others who think that they have tamed this beast.  They are so, incredibly arrogant and stupid, that they actually believe that they understand a system that interweaves everyone’s money and nearly every company, in the entire world.  This, inevitably, leads to them making terrible decisions with everyone’s money and then you end up eating Ramen Noodles for dinner. 

Globalization helps major corporations as it opens so many more options for them to acquire assets throughout the entire planet instead of in their immediate region.  This is really where the party ends. Defenders of globalization will tell you how "it prevents wars" and "aids the developing world".  How can this be true?  How can diluting the world currencies to a point where everyone has less money help the developing world?  Has it helped the developing world?  Is anything better in the "Developing World" since we have implemented this system?  Should we ask Egypt and Libya how they feel about globalization?  Globalization may prevent wars between two countries, but it is not doing much to prevent wars between governments and their own people.  Any system that costs people money and jobs will harbor this sort of behavior.  Every time, that American's have to take a hit within their 401K because some Eastern European country can't grow enough tomatoes this month, is another step towards this end.  Personally, I would rather just have to have a war with some random country every 20 years then have to worry about the monster that is a planet full of pissed off citizens.

We live in a global economy and it sucks.  It doesn't seem to be benefiting anyone in a positive way with the exception of people who are already extraordinarily rich.  Even when the opportunity was ripe to let it disappear we gave the people who caused it more money than they needed to get it back on track, billions more.  It's as though we are all on steam engine, on a collision course with a mountain and we just keep shoveling coal into the fire even though we are all well aware that we're going to crash and die.

It could get better; we just need the entire world to have as good of an economy as we do.  That's not unrealistic, right?  I could totally see Afghanistan managing to diversify their opium driven economy or hundreds of years of lazy, transient culture going away because our major companies in the developed world want to keep globalizing. 

No, this will never happen.  But companies want you to keep thinking it will.  They want you to honestly believe that you are going to get more money in your pocket someday because a company in the Balkans sold a few grapes to a French Winery that puts it’s wine in bottles that are made in the US.  When in reality, more often than not, a drought would have hit the company in the Balkans, preventing them from growing grapes, which were then not shipped to the French winery causing them to cancel the order of bottles from the US, putting that company over the edge financially, forcing them to fire your neighbors.  Any system, with this many moving parts, can’t work, ever.

Human Observations within a major corporation

There are a few; unique observations that working for a large company can offer you.  

Listening to a speech from a company "officer":  As a comedian, I find the opportunity to witness a speech from a CEO or a CIO or a COO or a CMO or a CFO of a major corporation almost as hilarious as a waterskiing squirrel. It is truly incredible to watch these people, fill out an hour or two meeting with such an elegant level of meaningless, useless, pointless blathering that it has got to be considered an art form.  These people went to Ivy League schools and got their PHD in Bullshit.  They are first ballot hall of famers in phrases like, "Going Forward", "Moving Forward", "As we ...", "We're projecting too...", "We'll just have to eat that elephant one bite at a time".  They often have slides or a PowerPoint Presentation that could only make sense to the slaves that created it for them while they were trying to work off of the incredibly vague, incoherent idea that was handed down to them by "the officer". 

Witnessing the people around you at a speech by a company officer:  If you are lucky enough to take a look around at your co-workers during a speech by one of the companies officers at a major corporation, take notes, because it is a unique and hilarious time within the human psyche of a crowd of people.  At one point, our companies CEO said, and I quote.... "Boy I sure hope that we left enough time for questions", in somewhat of a sarcastic tone.  Without hesitation, the conference center erupted into laughter as though it was the funniest thing that any of these people had ever heard in their entire lives. You could even see people, trying to "out laugh" the people next to them in some sort of feeble attempt to attract attention from the CEO from within a crowd of hundreds of other idiots. People, in these situations actually think to themselves, maybe that guy up there, will see me laughing harder than anyone else and he will think, "boy that guy really gets my humor" and promote me!  This can also be witnessed by people sitting close to the stage and taking notes like we are in 5th grade and the garbage that falls out of that guys mouth needs to be documented. You also have the people who will nod their head as though personally accepting whatever in the hell that dude is talking about.  There is always the guy or two or three who will come up with some sort of question at the end to ask "the officer".  It's the same few people every time, desperately trying to make themselves look interested in their bosses eyes by asking, what are usually really dumb questions in front of the entire company.  It is incredible how such a massive group of people can sit together for an hour, listening to some guy talk about nothing and act absolutely thrilled to be there.

Listening to people have day to day conversations at work in a major corporation:  The day to day conversations that people have with each other, while at work in one of these places can barely even be considered a form of human communication.  They are packed with questions about one another’s families and the weather and the traffic.  It is like small talk on steroids.  It is a delicate ballet of multiple people, trying as hard as they can to carry on a conversation while making a constant conscience effort to not say anything that could possibly offend anyone else.  Lines like.  “Yeah, like he is ever on time”, or “Can you make the clock go faster?” or “Are you hard at work or hardly working?”, actually pass as jokes in these places.  And for some reason, people do laugh when they hear them.   These conversations are nothing more than some people, saying a bunch of words, while looking at someone else’s face.

Watching how excited people personally get over whatever kind of garbage the corporation announces:  People will nearly piss their pants over the excitement they feel when something new that their company is doing is announced.  It doesn’t matter what that something is or what it does.  Inside of their heads, they completely skip the evaluation and acceptance steps and go right to the being absolutely thrilled about it step.  If it has their companies stamp on it, no matter how ridiculous the world will think it is, they think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I have a hard time determining if this behavior is just a lot of people acting, or if there are actually that many borderline brain-damaged people that have actually stopped deciding for themselves whether or not they think something is good or bad. 

Old people at major corporations:  From my experience, the old people are the ones that are closest to a voice of reason that you can get.  They are too old to dilute themselves anymore like the young people do and will generally be willing to call Bullshit when appropriate.  It is unfortunate that many of them walk a fine line with this behavior so as to not risk their eventual retirement money.   More of them could really do a lot of good amongst the masses of fake, kiss-ass, young people.

Watching the progressive soiling of an otherwise motivated employee:  Over a long enough timeline, if you work in the same place you can all witness this phenomenon.  A young, just out of college kid will be hired.  Generally, over his/her first six months, they will reply to every email, never be late for a meeting, display the appropriate amount of fake enthusiasm towards their work.  Then, around the one year mark, the weight of the collective delusion will begin to grip them.  Suddenly they don't smile as much.  It will take a day or two to get an email back from them, they get a little snippier with you when you ask them a question.  Eventually, after an unknown amount of time, they will devolve into the typical, fake, credit stealing, political game playing animal that most major companies are chalked full of.

Meetings:  in my opinion, major corporations are full of two kinds of people, people who are good at doing the work and people who are good at talking about the work in meetings.  It is rare to have someone who is good at both.  Unfortunately, our society loves the talker; so the people who are good at talking about doing work, but can't actually do it are the ones who are heralded as the best employees while the folks that actually do all the work just accumulate more work until their heads eventually explode. Eventually, groups within the corporation will become so full of people who don't know how to do any work that they will just keep having meetings about the work and the work never gets done by anybody. These sort of stalemates are usually fixed by hiring consultants to do the real work.  It is a vicious, expensive cycle.

Watching everyone leave, exactly at 5 o’clock:  There is something so refreshingly ironic about watching hundreds of people, all of whom have just sat in a building for 8 hours acting like they loved every minute of it, agreed with everything that their manager said all day, pretended to love everyone around them, all file out of a building as soon as the clock strikes 5, as though the place is on fire.  It reminds you that the real world is still out there and life at a major corporation does not operate within the realm of reality and that everyone that works there is acting and whoever honestly believes that they aren't is delusional.