• Don’t those spots bother you?

    Cheryl, John, John, Cheryl.

    If not for the fact that chance meetings between strangers rarely occur in your master bathroom, you’d wonder if the two people in this story knew each other. On the eve of prime time, this fine March evening, Cheryl was slaving away in the bathroom. She left the bathroom running at full impulse power, carrying an armful of cleaning supplies. Upon her departure, yours truly asked her if she was done in the bathroom. “No,” she replied. “Do you have to go?” I asked. “No,” she replied. “Well if you just cleaned up in there and you don’t have to ‘go’ then what do you need the bathroom for?” I asked. “How can you see out of the mirrors in there?” she asked. “Am I missing something?” I replied – keeping up with the Socratic tone of the conversation. “There are spots all over the mirrors, haven’t you noticed?” she asked, returning to the bathroom with more powerful cleaning supplies. “I didn’t know there were any,” I replied – dropping weak the Socratic guise once and for all. “They are all over the mirrors, doesn’t it bother you?” she asked.

    Cheryl, John, John, Cheryl.

  • Rebel without a clue

    “Cheryl, why don’t you take the knobs off before you paint the doors?”
    “If you want to paint, then take the knobs off.”

    Touche!

    Three hours later,

    I find myself finishing up the inside of our pantry door. I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece, a flawless paint job around a doorknob – still installed. It must have taken me fifteen minutes, easy (just for that half inch around the knob).

    It really felt like I was proving a point at the time, I just can’t figure out what it was. Somebody find me a point, please?

  • The drop of tea that broke John’s will to work

    We’ve all been there, right? You know, one of those days where we set ourselves up for a spectacular failure.

    It all started with my bottle of freshly mixed, instant ice tea. First, I picked up the bottle, applying a sudden force. Due to the nature of the force applied to the bottle, it rose from my desk in a relatively rapid manner. The bottle, in turn, applied a similar force to the liquid inside, my freshly mixed instant ice tea. Long before the earth’s gravity applied sufficient force to stop the bottle’s upward motion, I applied a second force to the bottle. Due to the nature of this second force, the bottle changed velocity suddenly, this time moving down back towards my desk. Unfortunately, the bottle was not able to apply sufficient force on the liquid to stop it’s upward motion. This, of course, was due to the cap sitting atop the bottle in an insecure manner. Just as Newton would predict, the liquid continued to travel in the same upward manner, until gravity acted upon it sometime later.

    In case I haven’t made myself clear, I went to shake up my tea – and ended up the only thing that was shook.

    It is true what they say about things that go up, most of the time they do come down. What happens when “it” comes down depends on what “it” is, and where “it” comes down. For all of you out there with a neatness obsession (my wife included); the upside of being disorganized at work is that there is a lot of absorptive materials lying around to soak up stray tea.

    HAA! Take that.