Believe it or not

True story, I know the Green Party candidate in the current TN gubernatorial election. 

Her name is Isa Infante and I met her through some Theatre Central buddies in the mid 1990's. She gave me a lift one night to the improv show in Knoxville and then she up and left after the show and I had to bum a ride home. She called me the next day to apologize for leaving me and I accepted her apology. I told her it wasn't a problem and that I got a ride home easily. The next day she called me back and said she didn't think her apology was sincere enough so she wanted to apologize to me again and she wanted to loan me her car. Again I accepted her apology and she drove over and let me borrow her car for a few days.

Stupid stuff that people have said to me #3

Back when I used to work for Myers, they would periodically make us go to company HQ for more training and to introduce us to new products that the company had taken on. While on one of these trips I had to room with a sales guy from the Charlotte branch who was a real jack ass. He was, and probably still is, the stereotypical self aggrandizing sales jerk who thinks only of himself and loves to brag about what a great person and salesman he is. If you looked up the word narcissist in the dictionary, his picture would be beside it.

In an effort to make himself seem even greater than he already was in his own mind he decided he needed some self improvement so he told everyone that he was reading this book:
The one thing he had learned that he wanted to share with every was the love was a verb. In his tiny mind that meant that the word 'love' and the word 'verb' were interchangeable and that they meant the same thing. He couldn't grasp that what the author meant was that verbs denote action and that you can't just say you love something, you have to put action behind that word to make it real.

So for the entire three days we were in Akron he would tell anyone who made eye contact with him about the book he was reading and that he really 'verbed' things. He'd take a bite of steak and say, "Man, I really verb this steak." If he saw someone who he hadn't told about the whole love=verb thing then he'd say, "Oh, you probably don't know what I'm talking about do you? See, I'm reading this book about what successful people do and the guy who wrote it says love is a verb. So when I say I 'verb' something, that means I love it. It's what successful people do."

By Saturday night I had had enough of him and his asshole ways. When he came into our hotel room and woke me from a sound sleep to tell me how much he verbed drinking, I told him to shut the hell up so I could go back to sleep. Of course it didn't register that he had pissed me off because he cared only for himself. So he grabbed his cell phone and he made a call to whatever woman with cripplingly low self esteem he was dating that time. I overheard him say to her that he was reading the seven habits book and that he had learned that love was a verb. Then he said that he verbed the poached salmon he had made for her the other night and that he thought he was in verb with her.

I shouted at him to shut the fuck up because he was keeping me up. So of course he began talking louder and telling the wretch he was dating that he did not verb me because I was mean to him.

I calmly got out of bed, put on a pair of shorts and a T shirt, packed my suitcase, and I told him to go fuck himself as I walked out of the room. I went downstairs and checked into another room and I went right to sleep. The next morning I saw one of the Myers executives who was in charge of the arrangements for the weekend and I told him that I had to get a room of my own that last night because the roomie they stuck me with was such an ass. He said I'd have to pay for it myself but then he asked me who I was rooming with. When I told him who it had been he said that the company would pay for the room and that I wouldn't be charged for it. I shook his hand and I said, "Dude, I verb you so much right now it hurts."

Pop culture is wasted on the young

While at a birthday party the other day I was horsing around with a young, he's ten years old, friend of mine. We were sword fighting with some cheap plastic light sabers.
As soon as he got the upper hand on me, I said in my best Darth Vader voice, "Noah, stop."

"Why?," he asked.

I said, "Because I'm your father."

He recoiled in horror and said, "No! No, you're not! You're not my dad!"

I almost explained the whole Star Wars thing to him so he would get the joke but it was like 90 degrees with 125% humidity so I let it go and went inside to drink some sangria.

And now, here's a tale from my misspent youth:

Click to enlarge.

Sorry about the last panel, I'm still experimenting with adding text in the boxes.

All illustrations are copyrighted by the original artists.

I hate Cheech and while I'm at it, I'm not too fond of Chong either

I used to be a huge pothead. I loved getting high and I loved smoking pot. I loved most everything about stoner culture with the possible exception of having to have had hang out with some really seedy types who I would never in a million years have hung out with if not for my desire to either get high or buy weed. (I'm not referring to anyone who I went to college with when I say that don't think I'm talking about you if I went to college with you.)

I not only smoked pot, technically I dealt it as well. Now, hold on, I wasn't some drug kingpin or anything. I had friends who smoked it but would not go buy it so I'd go buy it for them so that made me a drug dealer. I never thought about it like that but in the eyes of the law I was drug dealer, but during much of the time I smoked pot, from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's, pot smoking was not a big offense on the radar screen of the local law enforcement types in the towns I lived in.

So, if I smoked pot and sold pot, why then do I hate two of the top pot comedians of all time? Well, I don't really hate them, I just can't stand to watch any of their movies anymore because of one hot summer day back in 1991.

I was in the last stage of my pot smoking life, although I didn't not know it then, on that day in 1991 and I had ridden with an acquaintance to a guy's trailer to buy some pot and to get stoned. I was buying it for a married couple who loved to get high but who did not ever want to be seen with the unsavory types who sold weed back in those days. I also did not drive back in those days so I was at the mercy of the guy who drove over to the dealer's trailer.

Anyway, after confirming with the dealer that he had weed and that he would be there when we got there me and the other guy took off. It was about a 20 mile ride over back country roads to get to the trailer where the pot dealer lived with this family, which consisted of him and his wife, and their three kids, one of whom was a teenage boy who knew all about their father's dealings. So we get there and we find out the dealer and his wife had taken off to go buy more weed and his son tells us that they'll be right back. So we all sit down and smoke a joint.

I'm a pretty laid back guy but I like to hang out in places that are mostly clean and don't reek of old farts, frozen pizza, and small animal piss, which that trailer did. Added to that trailer funk was the fact that it was 95 degrees with 115% humidity outside and you can imagine how uncomfortable I was. But I kept my mouth shut because I was going to get a free buzz, skim a joint or two off my friends bag, and add ten bucks to the price of the bag of pot before I finally sold it to them.

Well, a few minutes turned into a half an hour and his son could see I was getting antsy. So he suggested we watch a movie and he popped Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke in their VCR. I had seen it when it first came out in the late '70's and laughed my ass off so I was okay with watching it again, it wasn't like he was going to subject us to Howard the Duck or some Judge Reinhold movie after all, so I settled in to enjoy my buzz and to have a few laughs. The guy was going to be home soon anyway I thought, so fine, let's watch this sucker.

By the time it finished the dealer was not back. So we smoked a joint of some vile weed the kid had stashed away and we laughed about the movie we had just seen. We all agreed it was the pinnacle of cinematic comedy and that no one would ever top it. The dealers kid kept raving about how good it was and then he got the bright idea to watch it again. So he rewound it and he pressed play.

At first I thought the kid was just playing a joke on us but he sat there watching it with rapt attention. You would have thought he had never seen it before the way his beady eyes stayed fixated on that TV screen. I began to get anxious. There was no way in hell I wanted to sit through that movie again. Hell, I didn't want to sit in that smelly trailer one more second but I had come for a bag of weed and by god I wasn't going to leave empty handed. So I sat there clenching my teeth, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and wishing that a meteor would drop from the sky and fall on their TV and VCR, and if it hit the dealer's kid, well that would have been an act of a god that I would have gladly worshiped.

But a meteor did not fall and we had to sit through Up In Smoke for a second time. I was convinced there for a moment that I had died and gone to hell and was only then realizing it. Things got hazy there for a while, people came and went and the temperature in the trailer kept creeping up. Desperation sweat became the dominant aroma in the living room until I managed to rip a good fart that made everyone gag and giggle like 5 year olds. Someone brought beer and it ran right through me which meant that I had to use their bathroom, which oddly enough, was the cleanest room in that trailer.

Then the movie ended once again and before the kid could play it again I dove for the VCR and got it out of the machine. I told him that I loved that movie so much that I wanted to borrow it and I ran out of the house with it and I stashed it in the car I rode over there in. When I went back inside the kid had put in another Cheech and Chong movie. I prayed to any god who was listening for the power to go out or for the kid's drug dealing dad to drive up.

Finally the guy pulled in outside the trailer and he walked in with a big Ziploc bag full of skunky smelling weed. I told him we were pressed for time and that we had been waiting over four hours for him and that we had to run so could he please put our weed in a small baggie so we could go please. He dawdled for a moment but my twitching and incessant badgering convinced him to do as I asked and he gave us our weed and we left.

After giving the couple their weed, after I skimmed a few joints worth that is, and after they did bong hits with us, me and the driver split. On the way back to my house I grabbed the tape I had taken from the trailer and I asked the driver to stop at the first set of dumpsters we drove by. When we stopped I smashed that tape and then tossed it in the dumpster. And as I did so, I vowed to never watch another Cheech and Chong movie as long as I lived and I'm glad to say I have kept that vow.

I'm also glad to say that I quit smoking weed in 1994.

Adventures in retail

The other day I went to Virginia to buy a Mega Millions lotto ticket and there was a female store clerk standing on the counter hanging up some Christmas decorations. Another female clerk behind the counter said, "I'm at this register sir, I'll ring you up here." The register she was referring to was the one clerk #1 was standing in front of, with her butt facing me.

I smiled at the clerk behind the counter as I stepped over closer to the lotto machine and I said as I pointed to clerk #1, "I'll let you ring me up over there because I don't know her well enough yet to go sticking my face in her butt." Clerk #2 laughed and said she understood. Clerk #1 turned around and gave me a little smile.

A Thanksgiving Day memory

It was Thanksgiving day 1976 and Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery were taking the first few tentative steps on the road to their messy divorce. Tension was high all around because they were fighting tooth and nail and it inevitably rubbed off on us kids, some of us more than others.

My older brother Charlie was above the fray and he did his best to ignore everything and anything until it directly affected him. Cousin Smart Ass and his younger brother Cousin Psycho were jockeying for the Alpha male position among us kids so they were butting heads just like their mom and dad. The young females, my sister Sandy and Cousin Skank, stayed out of the way during most of the fighting and jockeying. I was not interested at all in doing any fighting or chest thumping so I mostly just watched and made wisecracks when things got crazy or I would hang out with my younger cousin, Sam who is now deceased, and you'll learn more about him in another post one of these days.

Anyway, on this particular Thanksgiving we were to go to dinner at a local minister's house. I forget his name but he was part of a cabal of evangelicals who came down from Minnesota. He ministered to about 3 or 4 small churches in the areas, he'd preach at one church one Sunday and another the next and so on and so on. He was a big affable guy who was actually very nice despite the fact that he was a minister in a christian sect whose members had religion shoved so far up their asses that it came out of their mouths whenever they drew a breath.

We were supposed to go to his house and have dinner with him and his wife and their daughter, all of them were big ol' corn fed people, if you know what I mean, around five in the evening so we had all day to kill. I tried to kill the time by reading and watching football. I remember quite clearly that I wanted desperately to watch the Redskins/Cowboys game that day but I was not allowed to because no one else watched liked football and most all my cousins made fun of me for liking sports and they usually taunted me when they knew it was on and I was not being allowed to watch it.

I was moping around about not being able to see my beloved Redskins play when I decided that I had had enough, I decided to march into the trailer where we lived at the time and I was going to turn on the game and see whatever I could of it. But as I opened the door Cousin Smart Ass and Cousin Psycho came rolling out in a flurry of punches, kicks, and grunts. Their mom and dad's verbal sparring had caused their sons to fight one another. I watched with more than a little glee as my would be tormentors turned on themselves for a change. I took a great amount of satisfaction in seeing them get into trouble for fighting and for dirtying up their clothes before our trip to the minister's house. Their dad broke them up and he told them to go get cleaned up and after they did we left for our dinner out.

Things simmered between them and between their parents but they were all able to put their bad feelings aside and act like decent people while we ate. The minister found out I was a football fan like he was so he conspired to leave the game on while we ate. He assured me it would stay on and that I could watch it with no interruption.

His wife however had other ideas, she made him turn off the TV while we ate. I was sad about not being able to see the end of the game and my cousins picked up on it and they taunted me about having to miss the ending of the game. I laughed it off because my team was ahead and I did my best to ignore them. But being the baying jackals they were they kept on making fun of me, but in a flash I saw there on the table my instrument of revenge, and it was a big bowl of pinto beans. There are two things in this world that give me the foulest smelling gas that a human being can emit and those two things are buckwheat flour and pinto beans. The more they made fun of me for not being able to watch the game, the more beans I ate. I shoveled those beans in my face as fast as my teen age arm would let me. I passed on having seconds of turkey and dressing so that I could have more and more beans. I ate practically the whole bowl of those brown little gas bombs and then I sat back and waited for the beans of mass destruction to take effect.

I began squeezing off smelly volleys of gas about an hour after dinner and I managed to let them loose while sitting or standing next to my cousins. My evil plan began paying benefits almost as soon as my noxious emissions hit the atmosphere. But I knew the best was yet to come.

We said our goodbye's to the minister and his family and we all packed into the big Chevy Suburban that we used to have and we began our journey home. Once everyone was in the vehicle I could let my farts wreak their full havoc. The gas roiled around in me and I did my dead level best to let it out. I was the king of 'silent but deadly' on that ride home. Everyone bitched and moaned about the stench but to me it was the smell of victory. I laughed my teenage ass off when we finally got home and everyone scrambled to get out of the car. I smiled sweetly and said, "I guess I ate too many beans." As they gasped for fresh air I laughed some more.

But it turned out that the Cowboys had the last laugh in the whole matter because a little known quarterback named Clint Longley came off the bench and led his team to a last second win over my Redskins. When I saw that in the paper the next day I turned and faced the general direction of Dallas, Texas and I cut the cheese once more.

True Employment Tales

In the early and mid '90's I lived in Knoxville, TN and one of the jobs I had there was working for the alternative weekly newspaper there. I was the assistant to the woman who was in charge of the classified ads department. She and I got along about as well as the Serbs and Croats were getting along during that time. I think she thought I was gunning for her job and so she tried to keep me at busy doing crap stuff for her but part of my job was also to sell ads. She gave me a file full of "leads" for ads but the leads were crap. The leads were all phone numbers to companies that wanted to advertise their phone sex lines but the publisher of our paper didn't want to take those type of ads because he thought they made his paper look sleazy.

Not one to turn down a challenge I began calling some of these phone sex companies and I pitched them on our paper. Invariably I'd get some person at the companies excited about advertising with us but then I'd lose them when I told them the list of words that they could not use in their ads in our paper. The list included the following words: hot, wet, wild, woman, sexy, and horny. Most would hang up on me after they found out they could not use any of those "overly descriptive" words in their ads. One guy at one of the phone sex companies told me to give him an example of what he could say in place of "Hot Wild Wet Women Want to Get You Off!" I calmly told him we could run, "Excited Moist Feral Females Would Like to Talk to You Now!" He said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

One day I finally struck pay dirt. The company in question was an advertising agency in Boston that bought ads for a bunch of different phone sex companies. My contact was a jaded sounding woman who I'd say was in her early 30's, she was nice and quite understanding of my predicament and when she found out some of her clients would have a virtual monopoly in our paper if we could come up with acceptable wording she jumped at my offer. We talked back and forth and we finally came up with a winner, it read "Super Models Want to Chat With You NOW!" We also ran "Pretty girls are waiting for your call!" She must have been pretty pleased with the results because after the ads ran for a couple of weeks she called me one day and said she wanted to run those ads in our paper indefinitely. When her company sent us a check for 6 months worth of ads I made a copy of it and I put in on my boss's desk along with a note that read, "Thanks for the great phone sex company leads! They really pay off if you're smart enough to stick with them!"

True Employment Tales

I finally saw this movie the other night:
Yeah, I know. Sometimes I'm a bit behind the curve on things.

I liked this movie for a couple of reasons.

First, I liked it because the suspense built slowly and they scared you, or in this case me, without resorting to showing any actual violence. It was kind of like a Pinter play in that regard, the menace and violence were heightened by only alluding to them and the threat of violence was more scary than the act itself.

Secondly, I liked it because the gal in it was a cutie, yeah, I know, I'm shallow. I could watch her in anything because she had that girl next store freshness and cuteness to her and she had a nice butt to boot.

And finally I liked it because the filmmakers broke the mold when they did their marketing campaign. They built such a buzz around this film back when it came out that by the time it came out everyone was talking about it. Which brings me to the True Employment Tale portion of this post.

When the video of this movie hit the stores people were renting it and buying it in droves. I was still working for Myers Tire Supply back then and as you can imagine a lot of people who worked for the places I sold to were the ideal target customer for this film. Guys in the tire and retread shops were going on about it almost everywhere I went in the week or so after it's release on video and the gals who worked the desks in the offices that issued me purchase order numbers also were chattering about it.

One of my main customers back in those days was a retread shop in Hariman, TN called Tim's Tire. Tim's was one of the few independant truck tire retread shops in the USA and to look at the place you'd think it was the biggest dump you ever saw. But you'd be wrong. Tim and his family, which consisted of him, his brothers, and all their familes, made millions off that truck tire retread shop. But the thing about them was they enjoyed working so every day they'd go in and work in one of the dirtiest, noisest, most labor intensive industries there is today. The other thing about Tim and his family was they were all nice people but they were all devoted evangelical Christians. So it surprised me one day when the young gal in the office asked me if I had seen The Blair Witch Project yet. Being nice, yeah I know, it was a stretch for me to be nice to one of those fundies but back then Tim's was my biggest customer so I had to be nice to everyone in there, I said I had not seen it but that I had heard alot about it and I asked her if she liked it. The gal, who was every bit of 18 years old, nodded yes and she breathlessly told me that every bit of the movie was true and the people who died in it got what they had coming to them because they messed around with witchcraft. I rolled my eyes and I told her that it was just a movie and that no one really died. Well, the young thing did not take lightly to me contradicting her and she insisted it was true and they people really died. I gave her a patronizing smile and I told her that she was mistaken. She gave me the evil eye and she snatched my invoice out of my hand and then she swiveled her seat away from me and back to her computer screen. For the next two years after that she never smiled at me or said a word to me when she saw me there.

In another tire shop in Kingsport, TN a guy who I spoke to every week and who did most of the ordering for his store told me he had just seen Blair Witch and that it was so cool and that it was so sad that those poor kids had to die like that and how wild it was that it was all caught on video. Despite the reception I got from the last person I corrected I had to tell him the truth as well. He scolded me and said that indeed those kids died and that it was all true.

The next week I went in that Kingsport shop and my guy walked up with a sheepish grin. He said, "You were right man, that movie wasn't real after all. I seen that girl on Conan O'Brien the other night." He and I got along great after that and he always tried to give me the biggest order he possibly could.

Ah the power of movies, it affects us all differently.

True employment tales

When I worked for White's Truck Tires I had to buy tires from wholesalers from time to time. One of our wholesalers employed a guy they nicknamed "Crowbar." One day I asked why they called him that. "Is it because he's tough like a crowbar?," I asked innocently. The guy I was talking to shook his head no, "We call him Crowbar because on his first day here someone asked him how they separated the men from the boys where he came from and he said, 'With a crowbar.'" From then on I preferred using them over any of our other wholesalers.

True Employment Tales

Back when I worked for Myers Tire Supply, and the name is actually a misnomer because Myers does not sell tires, they sell tools, supplies, and equipment for tire and under car service, I had a truck (and by truck I mean 18 wheelers not pickups) repair shop that was a long time customer. The people who ran this shop were complete and total assholes. They took forever to pay their invoices, they gave me a hard time every time I stepped into their shop, and they loved to make me wait forever before they would commit to an order. I was probably the last sales rep in that business who would put up with their shit so they felt like they could dump all over me and waste my time.


One day they told me they had found a lease company that would back them in a big purchase of a truck tire changer, a passenger and light truck tire changer, a truck tire balancer, and a passenger and light truck wheel balancer. I was kind of shocked because they had such poor credit but when I found out the lease company was for real I quickly found all the equipment they wanted and I made them an offer. They accepted and we made the deal.


It turned out I had sold them the wrong type of truck tire changer. The one I sold them looked like this:


The problem was this changer took three phase electric power and they had single phase power at their shop. They refused to buy a phase converter which we offered to sell the at our cost and they insisted we get them a different changer.


We agreed to pick up the wrong changer and to send them one that kind of looked like this one instead (and no, you smart asses, the guy did not come with the machine):


The original truck tire changer that they had agreed to buy was $12,000 plus. The one they ended up buying I sold to them for $9000. At first they were over joyed I was saving them $3000 off the original price, but when they found out my cost was about $5000 on the second changer they got steamed. I figured that $4000 profit on the second tire changer was about equal to the shit they gave me for three years. They bitched and moaned about paying so much for the second changer but since they signed the lease there was nothing they could do about it.

********

Yeah, I know. Sometimes I'm a bad monkey. And you know what? My badness caught up to me because a few months after that deal I flipped my almost brand new Toyota truck over three times in the middle of a rain storm and my brand new to me truck was totalled. Thank goodness I suffered only a scratch near my left eye, my seat belt saved my life.

True employment tales!

Way back when I lived in Roanoke, VA in the late 80's I worked for a bit for Revco Drugs, which later became CVS Drugs here in the Tri Cities area. It was the Saturday before Easter and I was working until closing that day. We had long since sold out of stuff to make Easter baskets with unless you wanted to fill a basket with newspaper, cold medicine, Boone's Farm wine, and E-Lax, which now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad. Anyway, at about 6 PM a woman came running in the store and asked me if we had any Easter grass left. I looked her straight in the eye and I said, "No ma'am, we've smoked it all." She nodded and then she turned and left. I laughed like a madman after she walked out.

True employment tales

Way back in the early 90's when I worked for the alternative weekly newspaper in Knoxville, TN, I sold ads and was the assistant to the psycho bitch who was in charge of the classified ad department, I was given a folder by my boss. I was still new so I had no idea what the folder was, it turned out it was full of leads on businesses that she had pissed off or who had said they'd rather roll around naked in ground glass than ever advertise with us. Ms. Psycho told me to go see as many of those businesses in that file as I could and to try to sell them some advertising.

So off I went. Most of the businesses turned me down and told me to get the hell out but I struck gold at one business that day. It was a consignment shop run by a good looking brunette woman. I gave her my spiel and she listened patiently. I finally showed her ad sizes and prices and she said, "You got lucky today bud."

I said, "Oh yeah? How so?"

She gave me a knowing smile and said, "I got me a little last night and I'm still in a good mood. I'll take the 1/8 page ad and I want ya'll to run it for two months." When she broke out in an ear to ear grin, I did as well. I then asked her to go ahead and pay us for the ad. She hummed to herself as she wrote out the check.

I knew my psycho boss was expecting me to fail miserably, I could tell by the smirk she had on her face when I got back to the office. She said sarcastically, "How'd you do? You've come back empty handed I bet."

"Not so much," I said with more than a little swagger in my voice. "I sold ABC Consignment an 1/8th page ad that's going to run for two months straight."

Psycho said, "She stiffed us last time, you'll have to pay back that commission when she stiff us again."

I pulled the check the store owner had given me out of my pocket and I tossed it on Psycho's desk. "No worries, I made sure she paid us in advance."

Not too long after that Ms. Psycho got her van impounded for not paying her many parking tickets. I laughed like crazy as they towed her van off. I quit that job a month and a half after that.

I make quite the impression

The National Storytelling Festival is going on this weekend in Jonesborough, TN, which is about eight miles to the southwest of us. It's wildly over priced and they try to sell you books or CD's every time you take a breath but it's till a neat event.

Sparky used to live in Jonesborough and when they put on the Storytelling Festival we would sit in her backyard and listen to the ghost stories for free. When we first started dating she invited her Mom and her sister over to listen along with us in her backyard. I had met her sister before then and we hit it off right away so I was not worried there, but this was the first time I was going to meet her mother in the context of being "The New Boyfriend."


Everything was going fine through most of the evening, we all sat and talked and listened. We all sat in Sparky's back yard under a walnut tree that was heavy with walnuts. They'd periodically fall and we'd laugh and go on with our business. One big walnut fell and it nearly hit Sparky's mom in the head. She laughed and said, "That nearly hit in right on top of my head." I piped up and said, "Well, maybe it would have knocked some sense into you." A deathly silence fell over everyone at the table, then her mother gave a weak laugh and Sparky quickly changed the subject.

To this day her mother reminds me of that night and my comment almost every time we get together. And they say elephants have long memories.

True Employment Tales

Back when I sold tools, supplies, and equipment to do under car and truck service for Myers Tire Supply I had a customer named AJ. AJ was probably the world's only Jewish heavy duty deisel mechanic. He was originally from NYC and I met him when he worked for a deadbeat truck company in Greeneville, TN. Around 2001 when chat rooms were exploding into the public consciousness AJ became a chat room junkie. He'd tell me about his "adventures" when I stopped by to see him.

One day he told me that he was having a sexy hot chat with some gal in Maine. He said, "I had her totally convinced I was a lesbian."

I said, "Oh yeah? What happened next?"

He said with a sheepish look on his face, "She busted me."

"Oh yeah? How'd she do that?"

Still sheepish he said, "In da middle of our hot chat she pops up and asks me what size panty hose I wore."

"What'd you tell her?"

"I told her I wore medium. Den she shut da chat down and she left. Dat bitch."

Hardly able to contain my laughter I said, "So that wasn't the answer she was looking for?"

He said with a perfectly straight face, "How da hell am I supposed to know what size panty hose I wear?"

Finally I started laughing out loud and I said, "Dude, if you were a lesbian you'd know shit like that."

I saw the light bulb go on over his head. He said, "Oh, yeah, uh, well, I guess you're right."

True Employment Tales

For about 4 months in the early 90's I sold cancer insurance. I cold called door to door in a few of the counties around east Tennessee. It was a pretty good insurance policy that I sold because it paid the cancer patient directly and if the policyholder never got cancer over the life of the policy, usually 20 years, they'd get all their premiums back.


One day while in Greene county, or as we refer to it here, the sweaty stinky arm pit of east Tennessee, I drove up to a trailer park. I got out of my car and I walked up to the first trailer and I knocked on the door. A woman answered the door and she asked what I wanted.

I told her who I was and what I was doing and she said, "Hang on." Then she shouted to someone else and pretty soon two other women appeared at her side. They were big beefy looking women who looked like the last class room they'd seen was their fourth grade homeroom.

The first woman made me tell them who I was and what I was doing there.

After I did so one of the large women said, "So you got a cancer policy for sale huh." I could see a light bulb go on above her head when she said, "You ought to go see my momma, she needs some of that cancer insurance, she's done eat up with cancer and she sure could use the money."


I thought for a second about explaining the way insurance worked but then I just closed my presentation book and I walked away.


The large woman shouted after me, "You want her address?"


I got in my car and drove off laughing to myself. I quit that job a month later.

True Employment Tales

Back when I worked for Myers Tire Supply they sent out a memo to us sales guys to tell us to make sure we called Meineke shops in our territory. I had three of them in Knoxville so one day soon after getting the memo I stopped at one on Kingston Pike. I asked to see the owner and this guy who looked like James Coco but with a bigger belly came out of the office. He said in a thick New York accent, "I'm da owna. I'm Sal. Who da fuck are you?" I told him who I was and who I was with and I started showing him what all Myers had for sale. He was one of those people I took to right off. He was a funny guy but he had a great head for his business. He didn't buy anything from me that first time I called on him and he kept putting me off for after four or five sales calls but one day he finally broke down and bought something from me.


He and I were out in the shop area and he asked me if we carried accessories for a brake washing machine that he had. I told him we did and he said, "Youse guys got the donkey dicks too?" I gave him a funny look and he said, "Ain't you eva seen a donkey dick?" "Nope, I never have Sal," I said.

He grabbed me by the hand and led me to his machine and he pulled out what he was calling a donkey dick. It turned out it was a long tubular filter that was about as big around and twice as long as a roll of cookie dough.

I looked in my product catalog and I found the filter/donkey dick right away. He said, "How much? And don't bust my balls or break my bank either." I went out and looked up the price and I wallked back in and told him. He thought for a minute and then he gave me a sly smile. "Ok, I'll take it. In fact, send me three, one for each one of my shops." I smiled, thanked him for the order, and I shook his big beefy hand. I turned to walk out and he called after me. He said, "You know what? From now on I'm gonna get all my donkey dick from you." I started to laugh and so did his employees, it took him a second to realize what he said but then he started laughing too. He said, "Yep, I'm gonna like gettin' dat big fat donkey dick from you." Then he blew me a kiss before I left and I blew him one back. He was one of my all time favorite customers.

A True Employment Tale!

Back when I worked for Myers Tire Supply I used to call on a tire and under car service shop that was in downtown Knoxville. This shop hired the worst knuckle dragging slack jawed yokels they could find and then they worked them to death for next to nothing. They could get away with that because they had lots of government contracts so they did not have to worry about dissatisfied customers, the government agencies had to bring them their vehicles no matter what.


Anyway, I stopped in one day and I was asking the tire jockeys and mechanics if they needed anything and one guy walked up to me. He said handed me a socket that I had sold them a few weeks previous. He said, "That's got a lifetime guarantee, right?"


"Yep," I said.


"Well I need a new one. Cos' as you can see that one's broke and it ain't defeating the purpose no more."


I did a double take and I said, "You don't want something to defeat the purpose."


He gave me a look like I was the crazy one. "Yes, you do. If it don't defeat the purpose then what good is it?'


I opened my mouth to explain what that expression meant but then I remembered the saying about why you should never try to teach a pig to sing (Teaching a pig to sing only makes you mad when it doesn't learn and it annoys the pig when you keep on trying.) So I said, "Ok, you're right. I'll send you a free socket."


I walked away shaking my head and laughing inside but some part of me was kind of glad he tried to learn something new even if he did get it wrong.

I am a genius

I apologize for the negative tone of some of my recent posts. Unless I'm ranting about the rich white ass hats in power then I honestly don't want to be so negative. So in an effort to change that I now present three short stories about me that illustrate why I am such a genius.

1) I had digital cable for almost a year before I discovered all the music channels and at first I thought I was getting them free by mistake.

2) My girlfriend once accused me of not being open minded. I turned to her in a huff and I said, "I am open minded. In fact, I refuse to believe that I'm not open minded."

3) We bought a gas grill once and on the box it said that one could assemble the grill in three easy steps. I began to assemble it and my girlfriend left me alone while I put it together. About an hour later she came outside to check on me. I still had not gotten the grill together and I was sweating, cursing, huffing, puffing, and fuming. She shook her head and she said, "Which of the three easy steps are you stuck on?" She watched me struggle for a moment with the grill and then she clamly took the part out of my hand and she turned it right side up. After she did that I put the grill together in 2 minutes.

Consider yourself lucky you don't live with me and my genius.

A true shopping tale!

I saw this lunchbox on Boing Boing and it made me remember the time the gf and I were in a liquor store here in Johnson City. We perused the wine section and ended up picking out a Merlot and a Pinot of some sort and we were at the register paying for our bottles of vino. I looked behind the counter and I saw all the little airline sized bottles of liquor and I said to my gf, "Look honey, they're making lunchbox sized bottles of liquor now!" She gave me the usual dirty look she gives me when I say stupid shit in public but I kept right on, mainly because there was a uniformed cop chatting with the cashier. "I bet the kids would love a bottle or two in their lunchboxes. It might make them less hyper." For some reason I was the only one who laughed, my gf rolled her eyes, the cashier was stone faced, and the cop eyed me warily.