Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

Are You Forcing that Enthusiasm, or Are You Just Clinically Insane?

Caffeine. I love it. I hate it. I need it. For most of my life from the time I was 3, I have consumed at least one glass of Coca-Cola a day. Today, most informed parents might think twice about giving a 3-year-old a sugary, caffeinated beverage, but in 1977 it wasn’t much of a concern.

In high school, a friend introduced me to the wonders of Mountain Dew. Truly the best thing to come out of Appalachia besides I-85. It’s a magical beverage. I think the secret is the brominated vegetable oil.

Oh, who am I kidding? It’s the caffeine and sugar! (And, OK, maybe the yellow no. 5.)

In college, I discovered an even more sinister mistress… coffee. Forget the sugar… that’s kids’ stuff. The pure caffeine jolt of a bracing cup of coffee is for mature audiences only. (Try double-brewing coffee sometime. It’s quite a kick: Brew a pot of coffee, then dump the grounds, add more fresh grounds, pour the brewed coffee back into the pot and brew again. Ah, that’s pure Def Leppard-style adrenalyzed goodness! You won’t need sleep for about 67 hours.)

Yes, coffee. Black gold from the rainforests of South America, or the jungles of Sumatra, or the veldts of Kenya. (OK, I don’t know much about the climate and topography of Kenya; I just know they produce coffee, and somewhere in Africa they have “veldts,” which I know about from some educational film I saw in seventh grade. That’ll have to do for now.)

Sweet, sweet coffee! OK, bitter, bitter coffee! But it is a bitterness that is oh-so-sweet.

Most mornings, I grind my own beans and brew a fresh pot to take to work in my handy-dandy Thermos. But sometimes I am running late and the contrary-to-all-known-forms-of-logic thought pops into my head that it will take me less time to hit the Starbucks drive-thru on Roswell Road than to brew my own. This, of course, is never the case, and it runs me 3 bucks a pop to boot! (Enough with the colloquialsms, already!) But I go there anyway.

Chances are, if you’re reading this and you live anywhere within the known universe, you have either been to a Starbucks, or you’ve driven by a Starbucks, or you have a Starbucks within approximately 4 feet of your present location. (OK, Starbucks ubiquity jokes are getting old, but everyone deserves to pick some low-hanging fruit now and again.)

But chances also are that you’ve never been to a Starbucks quite like the one on Roswell Road.

The guy who works the drive-thru at this particular Starbucks is the most insanely enthusiastic person on the planet. When you approach the microphone to place your order, he comes over the speaker with a maniacal “GOOD MORNING!!!!! WELCOME TO STARBUCKS!!!!!!!!!!” that will curl your hair (if it’s straight) or straighten it (if it’s curly) or grow it back (if you’re bald).

Then the most bizarre thing of all. Each day, he writes a message on your cup holder with a Sharpie. I imagine he gets in at 4 AM so he can write his message on 1000 cup holders, and I just pray that he picks a single message for the day and writes the same one on each. If he actually thought up something unique for every individual customer, it would prove he is the anti-Christ. I have (thankfully, I think) forgotten most of the messages I’ve gotten on my cup holders, but here are a few that come to mind:

Sleep Is Overrated!

I mainly remember this one because it was on my cup today, and the full memory-splintering effects of the venti latte I ordered haven’t yet taken over. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Starbucks’ twisted cup sizing, “tall” is the smallest, “grande” is medium, and “venti” is the largest. I think “venti” means either “55 gallon drum” or “too obscenely big for anyone but a gluttonous American” in Italian.) This is a fairly straightforward message, and one entirely appropriate for a customer ordering a venti latte, also known as a guy who has to work for the next 48 hours straight directing air traffic, or me. I have no excuse, other than that I like to perform mild forms of self-torture.

We All Shine On!

I really, honestly, don’t even have a clue about this one. It was just so bizarre that it stuck in my brain and forced most of his other messages out. I really wish it would go away.

Too Many Secrets!

I got this one a couple weeks ago, and it was truly the most disturbing. I mean, how did he know???

If, by chance, you enjoyed this rant, be sure to check out Part II for the ongoing log….

What’s that Smell?

Today has been an interesting day. I arrived at work this morning to notice that the strange smell some of us perceived yesterday in the office was even stronger today, and generally was of the natural gas variety. We called the gas company and they sent someone out to inspect our equipment. He found no gas leaks, and informed us that it was his “educated guess” that there was a dead animal somewhere in the building.

Sure enough… I moved aside a panel of drop-ceiling tile and looked inside, and about 2 feet from my face was a huge dead rat.

Another coworker, much bolder than myself, grabbed a plastic bag, and using the bag as both glove and receptacle, picked up the dead and now partially decomposed rodent, and took it out to the dumpster.

The most disturbing part, of course, is that it’s highly unlikely that this rat was working solo.

I Am a Lazy Bastard

I am a lazy bastard. My laziness naturally leaves me inclined to stop right here, but I will fight it, because the only thing I cherish more than my laziness is the untold fame and glory showered upon me for my brilliant rants. (The fame and glory are untold because they don’t exist, of course, but please allow me my pipe dreams.)

Now where was I? Ah yes, my laziness, and my, uh, bastardness.

I have moments when I am, briefly, not lazy. And in those amazing and rare moments, I frantically bounce among my countless incomplete projects, hoping to push one of them far enough toward completion that I can coast to the finish line when I return to my inevitable state of lazy-librium.

Such is the case tonight. Wired on coffee and deluded about my own creative capabilities after skimming the latest copy of Print magazine at Borders, I returned home with grand visions (or at least murky hallucinations) of what wondrous new graphical overhauls I would undertake on this very web site.

Then I made the mistake of looking at what I already have.

Hmm… that’s not so bad, I thought. And maybe those grand murky hallucino-visions wouldn’t really work anyway. And besides, well, this one is already done. How can I argue with that? (Or could I, if only I were suffering a split-personality disorder?)

So instead, I took the usual lazy route… writing a rambling, incohesive, boring rant.

At least there’s one thing I’ll never be too lazy about, and that’s unnecessary parenthetical asides (like this one) and excessive use of italics!

Am I TOO Detail-Obsessed?

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

I was riding in the car with some coworkers, returning from lunch. We were stopped in gridlock traffic (which seems to be the case more often than not on Roswell Rd.), and as my eyes (as usual) flitted from side to side, taking in the colors, shapes, fonts, states of decay, and other assorted minutiae of the storefronts and signs in the supersaturated commercial district, I happened to notice a sign on a nearby Chinese restaurant. It said:

GIANT CHINESE B.BQ.

Now your average person, even your average detail-oriented person, may have glanced at that sign and not given it a second thought. But I was immediately consumed with perplexity over the liberties taken by the sign maker with respect to the use of periods. Why, I wondered, did the first “B” warrant a period while the second did not?

Or take another example: Tonight when I got home from work, I found a new MacMall catalog had arrived, and I perused it with passive interest while SLP was on the phone. I was mildly irritated to see yet another use of the annoying stock photos of perfect people in black mock turtlenecks with their arms folded atop some invisible barrier, which have become staples for use in stupid photo illustrations in these catalogs, where the perfect people are made to look as if they are leaning against a steroid-enhanced 5-foot-tall software package.

You’re probably thinking that my awareness of these stock photos of perfect people in stupid poses is the focus of my detail-obsessed attention in this story, but you’re wrong.

In fact, I noticed something even more stimulating to my detail obsession: On one page I saw a photo of a young woman with long blonde hair, and on the next, a distinctly different young woman with short, curly red hair. And that was when it hit me. I noticed that the hands of the two women were in exactly the same position. In fact, the arms in the picture belonged to the same person and were from one single photograph, but the heads were different. What’s more, the skin of the hands in the photo was color-corrected to match the facial complexion of the woman in each photo.

Clearly, if I notice something like this on passing glance, I have a problem.

Damn Cords!

I love technology. Someone could call me a technophile and I would accept it as a compliment. But despite my love for all varieties of electronic gadgetry, you may be surprised to discover that I hate cords! In fact, I DESPISE them. They are always getting in the way, they always get tangled together, and if you leave a cord to its own devices (ha ha), it will, I guarantee, find a way to tie itself in a knot.

Not just any ordinary kind of knot, mind you, but a knot of such terrible complexity as to make the Gordian knot unravel itself in fear of a competing knot of such incomprehensible madness.

Solutions are on the way. The technology Apple markets as “AirPort” (and Apple’s name for it is all I care about) promises wireless networking anywhere in the home, and the new “Bluetooth” technology promises to allow us one day soon to connect peripheral devices to a computer merely by placing them in its vicinity.

That’s all well and good, but at the moment I still sit at my desk nervously, wondering if today is the day that the mad cord monster will animate and eat my legs. Today I still have several hundred feet worth of Cat-5 Ethernet cable strung all around my house, tucked into corners as neatly as it will tolerate, aggressively making its presence known in my living room, bedroom and basement.

DO YOU HEAR ME, CORDOSAURUS?! YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!!!