May 31, 2002

It's fifteen minutes away from

It's fifteen minutes away from my usual bedtime, but it's Friday night and I don't have to drag myself out of bed at 4:00 AM in the morning. I believe I'll stay up late and celebrate tonight. I have lots of White Zin and nothing else to do, except for laundry, dishes, vacuuming and other assorted domestic duties that I can ignore. I may blog late tonight. If the posts become incoherent, the White Zin is doing its job. (Note to the Masked One: alcohol units so far--4)

For anyone who wants to go back two weeks in my archives to Sunday before last, you'll learn that I went into a ninja-like state of hightened awareness because we were starting a run of experimental pigment at work. We've "experimented" with this stuff before, and everybody calls it "The Widowmaker," because it's the most difficult, contrary, uncompromising material I've dealt with in 22 years of manufacturing pigment. This crap was developed in a lab in Oklahoma City by a bunch of self-aggrandizing R&D people (fucked-up as football bats when it comes to the REAL WORLD) and thrust upon me like a root canal or a boil implant.

The only difference with this run was THEY weren't going to be there calling all the shots, running around like roaches on the kitchen floor and blaming every failure on my area of operations. They stayed home (THANK GOD!), kinda mailed in their request, and stood back, ready to rip me and all my people to shreds when everything went to shit.

It's been the best run of the best quality they ever saw. Now, those same assholes who covered their butts by blaming every previous problem on me and my incompetent crew are scrambling like drowning rats to find something they can crawl atop to take credit for what WE DID without THEM.

We have a meeting to review the situation next week. I wish I could absorb four units of alcohol before I walked in there, because then I would have the Dutch Courage to state the truth. When the chattering started from the people who breathe all that rarefied air in R&D labs, I would stand up and say, "SHUT UP! If you fuckheads would stay the hell out of our way, we can make ANYTHING YOU WANT! We're PIGMENTEERS, goddammit. Now, fly your self-important asses back to Oklahoma City and bask in the glory of this product you developed. And leave us alone to make it."

That's not gonna happen. I won't be drunk when I go to the meeting, and those assholes won't fly home until they have their thumbprints firmly pressed into my pie. My only qualification for being at the meeting is the fact that I MADE this pigment, and I've been doing the same thing thing for 22 years. Those are gnat's-ass credentials when dealing with highly-educated, highly-ego-cated, lab-dorcuses. They are coming to tell me that I don't know shit.

And I'll have to sit there and take it.

Southernisms If you ain't from

Southernisms

If you ain't from around here, you can learn to pass for a native (once you learn to eat grits, boiled peanuts and okra) just by using a few simple phrases in everyday conversation When you read my suggestions, you may wonder, "how will I ever WORK THAT into a conversation?" You'll be surprised how often opportunities present themselves Down South.

Somebody is stupid
He had one foot on the dock when the boat left.
He ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.
He's a few bricks short of a load.
He couldn't find his ass with both hands.

Somebody is lazy
He's as happy as a dead pig in sunshine.
He's as sorry as a cut dog.
He'd have to learn to give a shit before he ever gave a shit.
He's too sorry to wipe his own ass. Just waits for it to crust up and fall off by itself.

Something is difficult
It was hard as Chinese arithmetic.
It was hard as a minister's dick.
God couldn't do it on his best day.
Fuck this!

Something just quits
It won't do not nary nothing.
It's dead as Dillinger's dick.
It's deader than a duck nailed to a doorknob.
It's deader than Grandpa.

It Runs Gooood
Ho, man! That thang runs like a raped ape!
Lookit that! It runs like Moody's goose!
It ran like shit through a goose.
It ran like a rat with its ass on fire.

Screwed-up Situations
That's fucked-up.
That's about as fucked-up as a football bat.
That's as fucked-up as a worm.
Jesus! It would have to un-fuck itself for two solid days just to GET BACK to being fucked-up!

Personal Opinions
I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire.
Fat? If she had to haul ass, it would take two trips.
I'd like to buy him for what he's worth and sell him for what he THINKS he's worth. I could retire tomorrow.
If she had as many dicks sticking OUT of her as she's had stuck IN her, she'd look like a porcupine.

If I had written THIS

If I had written THIS SCREED, I would have been a lot meaner and used obscene language.

I may lust after Ann Coulter, but I despise Hillary Clinton.

Okay, SISO, you asked for

Okay, SISO, you asked for it. You post guy-porn on your site, I post GIRL PORN on mine.

Try to keep your clothes on when you check that link!

I KNOW you WILL CHECK!

Here we go, SAVING THE

Here we go, SAVING THE PLANET again. Yes, companies that operate diesel trucks are sliding under the wire to buy tried and true engines before the new government-dictated pollution standards kick in and force them to try untested technology in a multi-billion-dollar competitive industry. Who can blame them?

If you poll most idiots on the street, they'll tell you the new pollution standards are a great idea. Yeah, everybody loves clean air. Ask them if they're willing to add $20 to every trip to the grocery store for that minimal improvement in air quality, and their jaws will drop. "What? The trucking companies are paying for that. Not ME!" they will sputter.

Our public schools spend a lot of time teaching "self-esteem" to otherwise ignorant students. These students learn to feel good about themselves, even if they have no reason to. One way to feel REALLY GOOD about yourself is to say you're totally into saving the planet. I mean, man, like, I'm TOTALLY into THAT.

Try to explain to these dorkles that heads of California lettuce and bags of Idaho potatoes don't grow in a big garden behind the neighborhood Kroger's in Rincon, Georgia. That stuff is hauled in from far away on diesel trucks. Trucking companies run a BUSINESS, which exists to make a PROFIT on the service it provides. When the government dictates that the trucking companies will pay more money for an engine, the trucking companies do some simple math. Before, we could make the trip from California to Rincon, haul the lettuce, pay the driver, maintain the trucks, buy our government-mandated licenses, pay our taxes to the government and make a profit selling the lettuce at $1 a head. Now, however, an additional expense has been added to our costs. We can't make a profit without charging $1.10 a head for the same lettuce.

Who pays that extra ten-cents a head? It ain't the trucking companies, bozo. It's YOU!

I will oppose ANY additional environmental regulation until I see legitimate cost-benefit analysis results. I am tired of paying through the nose for insignificant or non-existent "improvements" in the environment just so the Sierra Club and Greenpeace can claim another public relations victory. This is bullshit.

I am required to make business decisions frequently on my job. The bottom line every time is, "What will it cost, and what is the payback?" If the cost is high and the payback is low, I'm not about to parade that foolish idea before my boss. He's a smart guy and he knows the same rules I do. We work for a BUSINESS and our goal is to make a PROFIT.

Environmental regulation should be approached the same way. The fact that it isn't is one of the reasons why SUPERFUND ended up being such a miserable failure. In every cleanup of a Superfund site, about 20% of the money took care of 90% of the cleanup. The remaining 80% of the money was spent on the last 10% of the cleanup (you couldn't settle for habitable land and drinkable water-- it had to be PRISTINE!) and assorted lawsuits against anybody handy in an attempt to recover a piece of the loot frittered away making habitable land pristine. Your tax dollars at work again.

If I'm going to pay $20 extra every time I go to the grocery store, do I receive $20 worth of cleaner air? No? I get ten-cents worth of cleaner air for my $20? Okay, let me think about that...

YOU'RE FIRED!

So? I'm supposed to be

So? I'm supposed to be shocked by THIS STORY? It's THE GOVERNMENT, for crying out loud!