Saturday, January 31, 2009

I Just Don't Get It....Sorry.

Now consider. Just for a moment. I blog, I tweet, I'm on Facebook. I work in an industry that likes to think it's more high tech than it is, in a city that IS more high tech than it should be, thanks to some guys called Bill and Paul. I keep up with the news, and I'm relatively intelligent (except for Sudoku, there you got me).

But there's some stuff out there that I see, sometimes regularly, that I just don't get.

Exhibit A. Christmas wreaths attached to the front of cars. What? You love your Christmas tree SO much you wanted a portable version? Does it come with a deployable Santa air bag in case you have an accident? Nope, don't get that one.

Exhibit B. The rural mailbox shaped and painted like a farm animal. Is it cute that the mailperson shoves the electric bill down the gut of a fiberboard Holstein, or is it more fun that you have to disembowel a bovine to get the Victoria's Secret catalog. Perhaps I lack a craft gene. Thank you God.

Exhibit C. The little caricatures on the back window of your car that represent the members of your family. It began with one for dad, one for mom, and then as many little boy and girl stickers as were appropriate. Then some creative genius made add-ons for cats and dogs. This is kinda cute, but where does it end? What if the cat gets hit by a car? Is there a squished cat sticker? How about if one of the kids catches lice at school? Do you get a million little rice sized stickers for the back window? And then does the defroster still work? Are there options for guinea pigs, boa constrictors? What if there's a divorce? Do you get the half-a-dad sticker option? It just seems to me there's a potential to really mess with people here.

Exhibit D. The completely f@cked up fashion statement of wearing short skirts without hose or tights when it's 28 degrees fahrenheit outside. Guys wearing shorts in the middle of winter took some getting used to, but they're guys. They can't help it. They also have the benefit of leg hair to keep them half-way sheltered from frostbite. Plus shorts don't typically ride up to the point where we can see the color of your thong when the wind blows. (If you happen to be a guy who wears a thong, no offense intended). Honey, I have tights, I'll give them to you. (I suppose most men reading this post won't actually get the point, but pretend I'm talking about your daughter...)

Exhibit E. Why is it that my boyfriend and step-son, who wouldn't be caught DEAD buying feminine products for me, or their sister, or girlfriend, or whomever, think absolutely nothing about popping down to the local to get a package of panti-liners for our in-season whippet bitch? I didn't even have to ask, they just did it cuz they couldn't find the extra package. Nor did I have to answer any questions about design, brand, scent, or absorbency. Men all over have just been outted - you really CAN do this if you want to.

Exhibit F. I'm starting a grass-roots movement to remove the cc: field from email in the workplace. I'm starting by refusing to read anything that isn't addressed to me. Remember back in the good old days when all we had was paper, and a typewriter, and snail-mail? (Sigh. Maybe you don't. Trust me on this one) You didn't cc the world. You cc'd someone only when absolutely necessary because you had remember to do another envelope and make an extra copy and buy an extra stamp to get the cc out. Now, approximately 995 of my 1000 emails a day at work are cc'd to me. The hell with it. You want to send me something, send it to me. Otherwise the happy key in the upper right corner is going to do its job. God made delete keys for a reason.

I wonder if I can delete my neighbor's pig shaped mailbox?

Cheers!

7 comments:

Mo said...

Jenn...I have a stick figure family on the back window of my Subaru! LOL No lice though.

Patience-please said...

No stick figures for me. And no animal mailboxes. When we did live out in the country, the chief entertainment for adolescent males was "mailbox bashing." So we always bought the cheapest.
Our neighbor put a 3/4" thick steel pipe the diameter of his mailbox inside. Every so often we'd read about kids in the hospital with broken arms from swinging a metal bat at mailboxes.

Mary@Holy Mackerel said...

Jenn, Extremely well thought out points. I totally agree, although I've never actually seen a car with a Christmas wreath on the front of it. Really?

As for the animal mailboxes, I kind of like them, I have to admit, although I can totally see your point and could not for the life of me ever receive or extrude mail from its bowels.

Unknown said...

Hey Jenn.....love it! I agree with you on every point.

Have you seen how the stickers have morphed? Hiking boots, sea turtles... are some that I have seen to represent family members. Cute, but I don't do stickers on my car. If my kid ever comes home from school with one of those "My child is an uber student at Peterson elementary" I'll put the rocket box back on.

On the CC: Can we add people who no longer type with punctuation? When did it become acceptable to skip upper case letters and sentence structure. Drives me nuts.

To Mary Moore....Seriously, you haven't seen the wreath on the car? I invite you to Kodiak, AK. We don't even have good christmas trees here on the island so I don't know where people get them.

Okay, I should get off my soap box now.

Ciao!

t said...

hate the CC....hate it. I'm joining the movement. That's if I don't die from this swahili flu I seem to have.

When a Problem Comes Along, You Must Whippet... said...

So males can actually figure out which package to buy? All on their own? Wow!

The mailbox thing - well I do agree with the farm animal aspect but I must say I always have liked unique mailboxes - barns and the like. In fact I have thought about a coffee table book on that very theme (and I know which stretch of road in Michigan that has a lot of great subject matter for the book).

The Christmas wreathes - have seen them and don't get it.

Haven't seen the family sticker thing here - and I hope I don't. Love the lice idea!

Unknown said...

This is hilarious. I have never actually seen the caricatures on cars that you speak of but based on the description it sounds weird. And I totally agree with you on the cc thing.

Jenn and the City

An Award

An Award
Thanks Patience!

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