Subversive Behavior

There has been something of a return to normalcy in the milk delivery world that I inhabit.  Following the snowstorms and the milk-hoarding panic that accompanied them, well, actually... we got more snowstorms and another milk-hoarding panic.  It has been a pretty busy start to the year for me, to say the least.

For the last week or so, however, things have been relatively calm.  That's a start.  So now we can abandon my earlier call for mercy and you folks can start buying plenty of milk again.  In point of fact, I only had one load this past Sunday.  Sundays have almost always been busier for me, but my employer has hired a few more drivers in recent weeks to keep up with the demand from some new business that we've acquired.  In addition to southeastern Michigan and the Toledo area, we now cover a pretty good chunk of northern Ohio as well.

I was in Ohio for that one run on Sunday.  I had three stores in Toledo, one in Holland, one in Waterville, and one in Bowling Green.  That's six stores on one trailer, if you're keeping score.  That's a royal pain in the ass as well, in case you care to know.  By the time you get done with the first few stores, you end up with half a trailer full of empties and half a trailer full of milk.  I caught a break when the Holland store hadn't received its grocery shipment yet.  This left me with enough extra space in the stock room to rotate my empties to the nose of the trailer and put the milk for my last two stops on the tailgate.  Good deal.

By the time I got home late at night, I was a little tired and a lot thirsty.  I knew I had a few beers left in the fridge, so into the kitchen I went.  After spending eight hours delivering milk to Kroger stores, I opened the door and saw that my brother had done some shopping.

That subversive little shithead apparently buys his milk at Meijer, not Kroger. Just another case of The Man tryin' to keep a brother down.

Oddly enough, as I was wrapping up this post, I received a phone call with my travel plans for tomorrow.  My last stop will be Store #442 in Northville.  At least someone is still buying milk at Haggerty & Six Mile rather than Haggerty & Eight Mile.

Funniest Story I've Heard In A Long Time

I had the day off from work today.  Aside from the few tedious things that I needed to handle, I didn't have a whole lot of obligations.  So, when my youngest brother mentioned that my mother had invited everyone over for dinner, I was free to join the festivities.  My sister was working, but my other little brother and his wife were able to make it.  So we had a little unscheduled get-together for some pizza and breadsticks.

Quite a bit of the conversation surrounded the fact that my brother Jake, along with the entire fire department where he works, received a 30-day layoff notice today.  Apparently the story had been on Fox News and everything.  I had seen the story on Drudge myself, although it appears to have been bumped off the headlines by Charlie Sheen and Gaddafi (or Qaddafi or Khadaffi or whatever the hell his name is).

Heartless union-busting firefighter-hating politicians and their hopeless red ink are not the funny part of the story though.  My father was the funny one.

For a little background, my father has never used a computer.  I don't mean this in a hyperbolic sense.  I mean that he has actually never used a computer.  I could plop him in front of any given machine and tell him to turn it on.  He wouldn't know what to do.  So, naturally, his understanding of the internet is rather limited.  He has some vague notion regarding people who send messages and order things from the internet, but that's about it.

For a little more background, around a year ago my parents got rid of their home phone line.  Mom has her cell phone and Dad has his.  Nobody has any trouble reaching either of them, so the arrangement seems to work well enough.  It's one of those family plan arrangements, so my father's phone can send and receive text messages even though he's not much of a texter.  Mom, on the other hand, is like the rest of you degenerates - just texting away.

Now for the story:  Apparently someone posted some naked pictures on the internet and included a phone number with the pictures - my father's phone number.  Whether it was a typo, a random act of goofiness, or an intentional prank against Dad, nobody really knows.  What I do know is that I was treated to a good fifteen minutes of him talking about the various people from around the country who kept calling his phone last Saturday night.  The phone would ring, some random guy would say that he had the wrong number, and my father would get incrementally more pissed as the night wore on.  Adding to the hilarity, he received a handful of text messages of the 'I wanna fuck you' variety.  (Those picures must have been pretty nice or something.)  My father, as I've already noted, is not well versed in the ways of the text message, so these random hits were rather confusing to him.

By the time Dad finished telling the story, he was awfully agitated.  It was as if he was reliving the frustration of the event itself.  As for the rest of us, we were nearly in tears.  I don't think any of us had laughed so hard in quite some time.  Of all the people to fall victim to the wiles of the internet, of course it would have to be the one guy who has quite literally no idea how the whole thing works.  Absolutely hilarious.

Efficiency

I can't for the life of me figure out why the Post Office has such a hard time making ends meet...

Setting aside the fact that it took a week for the forwarding process to begin, you and I might look at a package needing to go from Taylor to Northville and envision something like the following:

A fairly basic 28-mile trip, right?  We're not the experts though.  Clearly a parcel needing to make that brief journey should be routed via the Pittsburgh suburbs.  The 531-mile voyage makes it more... I don't know... meaningful, or whatever.

And then it gets to Allen Park a couple of days ago (for God knows what reason) and it's missent?  What in the hell does that mean?  I don't know man.  I got my damned cigars eventually, but I still can't figure out why these geniuses aren't making money hand-over-fist.

The Most Brilliant Thing I've Ever Done

This blog contains somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 posts.  Even though the daily updates don't continue, given that each day seems to be quite a bit like each other day now that I'm off the road, there is still one aspect of the blog that should be clear.  Hundreds of the posts involve me telling you - friends and strangers alike - about some stupid decision that I make.  Some are embarrassing and some are amusing, but it should be easy for anyone to see that I do dumb things all the time.

Not this time though.  This time I find myself worthy of the results of my IQ tests.  And you're gonna hear about it...

I've moved recently into a nice condo in a nice area.  It's close to work, close to my gym, and centrally located among various shopping and entertainment destinations.  This has been a pleasant change from my previous dwelling arrangement, to say the least.  What hasn't been pleasant is the process of getting everything moved.  I'm settled in now, for the most part, but there are still occasional trips back to Taylor in order to work on what's left.  I tend to bring one or two things back to the condo with me each time.  I also tend to throw away or donate far more than I keep.  I'm not sure that I would be exaggerating if I said that I've unloaded $10,000 worth of belongings in the last two weeks.  All these years of earning a living and buying things that seemed useful for one reason or another, only to find that I wound up with a bunch of shit that I don't really want.  Stupid.

This post isn't about the stupid though.  This one is about the brilliant.  I stopped at Meijer in Livonia after work one day last week.  I needed to grab a case of beer and a few supplies (paper towels, toilet paper, etc.).  While I was there, I decided to pick up a work shirt.  I like to keep fourteen work shirts in my closet, just in case I don't get to my laundry for one reason or another.  I could, in theory, work every day for two weeks straight without having to wash my work shirts.  Pants are another story, of course, but I'm not averse to getting a couple of extra days out of some old jeans.  One of the shirts that dated back to my time at CFI (pre Con-way) had become worn enough recently that I threw it away.  So I only had thirteen work shirts on hand.  One more would get me back to square.

After grabbing my new work shirt and tossing it in my cart, I was struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration.  Right near the Dickies shirts that I like to wear, Meijer keeps the socks and underwear and such.  There were three packages of black Wilson athletic socks hanging on the rack, each containing six pairs.  I bought them all.  Then, on my way home, I stopped at the Meijer in Northville.  Three packages of black Wilson athletic socks were hanging on their rack as well.  I bought them all.  Then I proceeded to throw away every other pair of socks that I owned.  Now I have 72 socks and every one of them is identical.  I'll never again have to match socks after I pull my laundry out of the dryer.

Absolutely brilliant! 

(And I don't even care if I'm tooting my own horn this time around.  I'm right to be proud.)