Anyone?

*crickets*

Well anyway, I’m back with another exciting blog after a couple of weeks off.  I know I should be writing more, but to be honest, my life just simply isn’t all that wonderful these days, so I guess I don’t have much to say.  Hopefully this will change soon.  We’ll have to see.

So I’m walking back to my apartment from the mailbox today, and I’m just reaching my place when a very attractive blond girl approaches me.  I have a vague recollection of seeing her before, and it strikes me that she’s possibly a tenant in one of the end units in my building.  The girl is strikingly pretty– model pretty I’d say– and she’s wearing a low-cut top and short-shorts and tall hooker pumps.  Honestly, she reminded me of those girls you used to see sneaking away from the guy’s dorms, all disheveled, early on Saturday mornings back in college.  At any rate, it took a second to realize she was speaking to me.

“Excuse me sir?  Can you jump me?”

My first thought, naturally, was “sure.”  A second later blood resumed flowing to my brain, and I got my senses back.  My second thought was, “sure,” but then my vision cleared and I followed the sight line of her outstretched arm, which was clearly pointing to a little red Honda sitting in the parking lot with the hood open.

“Do you have a car here?  My car won’t start.  Can you give me a jump?” is what she probably said.  Of course, being the good Samaritan that I am, I said sure and walked over to my car.  I drove over and parked it in front of hers, then proceeded to make the necessary connections and get her car started.  She didn’t say too much, other than asking me when it was safe to try and fire it up.  The whole process only took a few minutes, and she thanked me and jumped in her car.  I parked mine back over in my regular spot, having done my manly duty, and went back inside.

The odd thing about this situation, to me at least, is that I re-emerged only seconds later, having grabbed my bicycle for a nice evening ride, (The temperature during the daytime here is hotter than the sun, meaning riding later at night is essential) and saw the girl clop, clopping back to her apartment, not having gone anywhere and having turned her car off.  Surely her battery didn’t have nearly enough time to recharge in only a few seconds.  Why did she ask me to jump-start her car if she didn’t plan on going anywhere?

When I returned from my ride an hour or so later, the little red Honda was gone, so I suppose she sorted it out.  Just seemed weird to me.

]]> http://sovknight.com/can-you-jump-me/feed 2 http://sovknight.com/a-kind-of-blog-from-the-distant-past http://sovknight.com/a-kind-of-blog-from-the-distant-past#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:55:20 +0000 sovknight http://sovknight.com/a-kind-of-blog-from-the-distant-past Continue reading →]]>

(Click for a larger, readable size.)

Ok, so it’s not technically a blog.  A blog is a web log, a term specifically created for the digital age.  You can’t just call any old bit of writing a blog, but there are similar characteristics, so I’ve decided the moniker is still a fitting one.  This would be a "blog" of mine from the dawn of the online age.  Well, not the dawn so much as maybe early morning… but still… way early on.  The year?  1995.

I came across this one whist searching an old folder in my possession.  This folder contains lots of loose bits of notebook paper, tons of photocopied sheets, and several fresh-off-the-dot-matrix printer articles written by yours truly, and a very good friend of mine, the always entertaining Claire of Claire De Lunacy fame.  There are also a few written by other contributing parties as well.  These bits of paper all came together at one time to create a masterpiece of literary importance and historical significance called, "It’s All in the Attitude."

First, a bit of history.  The Attitude came about sometime in early 1995 as a request from management for a newsletter aimed at the service department of a regional retailer named Meijer that Claire and I both worked for.  This retailer was one of the first hypermarket one-stop-shop kind of places, where you could buy all of your groceries as well as clothing or sporting goods or whatever all in one place.  These days, Wal*Mart has the corner on that concept, but this was before Sam Walton’s kids descended upon every single community on the planet with huge mega-mall parking disasters full of white trash and loiterers.  No, before Wal*Mart Supercenters, the white trash and vagrants belonged to us.  The Attitude was our release from the mayhem and our voice.

Anyway, Claire and I both worked in the customer service department as cashiers.  We’d met a year earlier when I started working there, and our personalities just seemed to click instantly.  I don’t know what else to say, but despite our differences in almost every other conceivable aspect, somehow our brainwaves just match up perfectly when we come within a certain radius of each other.  We think on the same wavelength.  At any rate, management noted our talent for humor and extreme intellectualism, as well as our propensity to charm co-workers and clown for people, and thought we’d be the perfect people to detail the daily life of a Meijer cashier in a nice, corporate-conforming newsletter aimed at the wonderful service side of a major retailer. 

Boy were they ever wrong.

Right now, Claire and my other Meijer bestest friend Jess are chuckling to themselves in a knowing way, and who’s to blame them?  Management really should have seen this coming in my opinion, and I think it’s their fault for encouraging us.  You don’t take a oppressive, horrid environment like retail, mix in a brain-dead customer base, some "colorful" management, and hand it over to the two most creative and outspoken people on your staff.  People that have the pulse of over 100 cashiers and the power of the written word at their disposal.  It is folly, to be sure.

In the beginning, we set out to adhere to conformity.  Management wanted a simple, two or three page newsletter that attended to things like dealing with customers, and shoplifting, and coupon abuse, and stuff like that.  We obliged.  Of course, all of that stuff is pretty boring, so we thought we’d spice it up a bit with some humor and inflict our own brand of wit.  After all, it must be informative as well as entertaining, right?  The first issue was pretty straightforward.  Nothing controversial at all really.  It was released to eager employees who gobbled it up and asked for more.  Management was pleased.  "Do another one!"  They said.

The second issue was anything but the first.  In it, we included our thoughts and feelings on the working atmosphere of Meijer, as well as taking a couple of shots at various procedures.  We knew this going in of course, which is why I wrote what I wrote in the article posted above (assuming you clicked it.)  It became more of a platform to express our issues than an informative newsletter, and management was not amused.  It was pulled from circulation by the store director, who had a "talk" with the service department manager, who in turn had a "talk" with us.  There were to be no more issues of the Attitude that weren’t approved beforehand.  Of course, this didn’t set well with Claire and I, who pointed out (correctly) that the employees in the store (by this time the newsletter had expanded beyond customer service) loved our writing.   We were popular and liked by the masses, because we were willing to say out loud what everyone usually only whispered to each other.  In the end, it didn’t matter.  The Attitude was over after only two issues.

There was a third issue, but it died on the operating table.  As far as I know, only one thing remains of it, even in my giant folder of goodness.  I do seem to remember that it was even more scathing than the second issue, and was bound to get us into more trouble, but at that point we didn’t care.  Claire and I were moving on to other things at that point, and Meijer was the least of our concerns.  We had fun, and in that type of environment, that’s all you had to look forward to really.

I still have a full copy of the first edition, along with all of the edited copy and loose-sheet hand-written pages, and I have the notes and a couple of articles and the artwork for the second.  The only thing left of the third is a cover picture I made.  It would have been grand, let me tell you.

I’ll close by posting Claire’s article from the first edition.  You can really get a sense of the writing styles we both possess from these and recognize them, styles that would later become blogs in the 21st century, transmitted not only to a few cashiers, but to millions of people all over the planet.  With both of our blogs, and both of our styles accessible to anyone, the Attitude lives on.