ANOTHER WORK BATHROOM POST

They changed the faucets in all the bathrooms here at the office in what seems like a one-hour period. They used to be the kind that would just put out a single stream of water, right? Now they're the kind that give you water in a shower of little, separate streams. I like this a lot less because it's somehow harder to tell when you've got the right mix of hot and cold when you want to wash your face or something.

What was wrong with the old faucets? Nothing.

It's been remarked upon that my blog seems to have a preoccupation with the bathrooms at my office. This is probably because I feel like literally the only thing that's safe for me to blog about when it comes to my job is the bathrooms. Nobody ever gets fired for blogging about the bathrooms at their job, unless they work for some super-secret defense company, probably.

IT HAPPENED

Dogblog update went up just now. This city will never run out of dogs, and I will always be there, unless I'm not. I can't be literally everywhere, though I guess you knew that already.

SKUNK PROXIMITY MINE

Here's what happened:

1. I drove through a puddle last night.
2. My car now smells like skunk.

These events have to be connected. The instant I drove through the puddle, I noticed an immediate blanketing of skunk stench in the air, and drove slightly faster to try and get out of it sooner. But it lingered kind of disturbingly long time. And it's still there. When I first get into my car, it's there. After I've driven around for about a minute, it's gone, but still.

My best guess is that there was skunk ... material* in the puddle, and when I drove through it, the material adhered to my car. I hope that by parking in sun, I can cause it to decay through the application of solar radiation. This may be a vain hope.

* What is it that makes the stench? Is it an oil of some kind? This is not a topic I ever expected to want to know a whole lot about.

SLEEPYTIME INVENTION MUSEUM

Last night I dreamt that I had a job interview at Bungie which consisted of a bunch of guys watching an animated movie about a group of tigers while we ate snack foods. What's important here is that my brain made up an entirely new snack treat: Buffalo-wing-flavored Cheetos. Some of them even had that clublike wing shape.

I also had a dream that I was searching an abandoned barn/workshop with the Mythbusters, but nothing new was invented or achieved there. My brain had apparently done enough for the night.

MUST NOT BE A FAN

So there's this videogame called Battlefield 2142 that, through black magicks, displays ads on billboards while you're walking around, and keeps track of which ads you look at and how long you look at them. Whatever. My computer isn't a bad enough dude to run this game anyway, but what I want to know is this information: Does BF2142 have destructible environments? Can I use my guns to shoot the billboards I see? Like, would the game keep track of how many Hummer ads I destroyed? Wouldn't that be excellent? "I guess he doesn't like our SUV."

HOW ABOUT REAL SLEEP

I had a dream last night that I was escaping from a prison for people with superpowers. I don't think I had any, so I don't know what I was doing there, but the point of me telling you this is that I did a lot of running in this dream, so much running that when I woke up, I was actually tired. This does not bode well for the rest of the day, friends.

EVERYTHING GO OKAY?

Halloween decorations are up in the office now, and one of them is a pretty elaborate skeleton ghost with glowing red eyes hanging from one of the light fixtures. What's funny about this is that he's* hanging so that he faces the people coming down the main hall, which also happens to lead to the bathrooms. So whenever I come out of there, the first thing I see is this dude staring at me with his glowing eyes, as if to say "How'd it go in there. Everything working okay?" Yes, skeleton ghost, everything is fine; thanks for asking.

* For some reason I think of this skeleton as a guy. This is probably an example of built-in gender bias.

LIGHT MYSTERY

The Albertson's on 32nd & Clement has been closed for months now, but I've noticed that every single time I drive past the place, the lights are on in there. What in the noise is that all about. There's nobody in there, as far as I'm aware; the entire parking lot's been fenced off and the building is effectively abandoned. But the lights are on! All the time! Why.

PROBABLY JUST THE EGO

On my way out of the Presidio this morning, I passed a guy driving an extremely fancy Bentley automobile. It occurred to me that you probably have to be a huge asshole to think that owning a car like that is a good idea.

To wit: I posit that the hassle of owning such a car is probably tremendous; you have to worry about parking in a part of town where some dudes might steal it, plus you have to think constantly about driving carefully so you don't scratch it, and this is entirely aside from the "worrying about accidents" factor, since accidents (by definition) are completely beyond your conscious control. That's a lot of hassle.

It seems to me that the #1 reason to overcome that hassle is to flaunt your fancy car to the peasants. The only other reason I can think of is that it might be your only car, but really, how likely is that. Not, is what I'm thinking.

THINGS I'M GOING TO START SAYING

Just two:

- "What in the noise" substituted for anything that would require "What in the hell" as in "What in the noise is that all about." This was brought to me by an excellent friend of mine out in Baltimore. I don't know if she meant for it to be spread, but I am going to start spreading it. I don't expect you to follow.

- "Time to solve ALL the problems!" This is basically self-explanatory. Sometimes there are problems. Sometimes you have to let people know what it's time for.

YOUR CORPORATE MATH IS BULLSHIT

Downstairs there's a list of goals or something for the IT Department to look at every time they want to go to the bathroom, and one of them is:

R =/= NR + E (Results don't equal No Results plus an Explanation)

I call the most bullshit on this. "No results plus an explanation" is absolutely a fucking result. It's just not the result the company wants. I thought of a plausible one right here in the time it took me to type this sentence:

Q: Hey dudes, can you fix the email server, that shit is running slow.
A: No, actually, we can't, because it's running on outdated hardware. You have to buy a new server if you want us to upgrade it.

And I don't even work in IT. I can't imagine what it must be like to look at that stupid sentence every time you just want to go empty your bladder. It's on a really big sign with a bunch of other mottos and guidelines, too, so it's not like they could take it down without violating their mission statements or whatever. Poor bastards.

COMPLETELY EXCELLENT

A friend of mine at Seton Hall U is organizing an Ultimate Team Cardboard Fortress Battle next week. This is, to my knowledge anyway, the first one of these outside of the game's nurturing cradle of San Francisco.* It feels really weird not to be putting it together or participating in any way aside from having invented the game in the first place. I think I'm just marveling at the fact that people other than me and my friends who've already played it are getting excited about it!

* A different friend of mine was going to put a "snow version" together in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, but I think the weather failed to cooperate.

SUREFIRE PROPHECY

The appearance of the sun in both the city and the peninsula today kind of throw my prediction of rain by Saturday into question. I understand this.

But one thing about which I'm absolutely certain is that both The Definite Articles and I will be playing at the Bazaar Cafe this Friday, 10/6, at 7pm. How's that for a segue! What I am is a wordsmith. Anyway, you should come. It's a guaranteed good way to kick off your weekend.

DELUXE WEATHER ORACLE

Without looking at weather.com or anything else, I'm going to predict that we'll see some rain up in this piece by no later than Saturday, 10/7. I'm not saying I want to see some rain, I'm just saying it's going to happen.