Well, I've been working at Big & Huge Electronics for a few months now, and let me say, it's been an experience.
This is my first retail job. Previously, I had experienced the holiday season from the outside, as a consumer. Let me tell you, it's craziness.
First off, Big & Huge hired me as a product specialist, specifically to sell security cameras. So naturally they stuck me in Pro Video, where I had zero knowledge. So I hung around and watched the other salespeople and learned a few things about film making and cameras and workflow and non-linear editing and so forth. I've broadened my knowledge base. And I've learned some valuable things. Specifically, I've learned how to be a BS artist. At least once a week, someone asks me what camera I shoot with or offers me a job on a movie shoot. And I have to tell them that I have only the sketchiest idea of what it is the cameras are for.
I've also learned a good deal of human behavior, working at Big & Huge. Specifically, I've learned that people are nuts. Over 5,000 people walk through our doors on an average, off-season day, so if even 10% of them are nuts that's still 500 whackadoos and half of them seem to want to talk to me. Seriously, I keep a bottle of Purell in my vest pocket, and frequently feel the need to wash my hands. Working in the security camera department I get a lot of perverts who want to buy cameras hidden in teddy bears. Which I then sell them, of course.
Bottom line, though- this is, by far, the best job I've ever had. I'm happy. Not content, or too lazy to look for a better job, or apathetic- genuinely happy in my work.
Ain't that something?
Sunday, January 20, 2008
What's worth doing is worth doing for money.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Update
Wow, I haven't posted in, like, two months. And that was only a quicky post to let you guys know about the release of Chainik ver. 2.0
Where to begin?
First of all, I got me a new job at a place I'll refer to simply as Big & Huge Electronics. It's a good job with great pay and awesome benefits and terrific colleagues and if I didn't have to commute 2 hours each way for my ten-hour-long shift life would be totally awesome.
Mrs Chainik and I are slowly getting used to Chainik 2.0. He's loud. Very loud. He has a way of making his displeasure at the world known quit efficiently despite his total lack of a vocabulary, much like Wall Street analyst Jim Cramer. Luckily for the kid, he's been able to stave off a bout of drunken, unfit-parent-initiated neglect by being so cute I could just kill myself. He looks mostly like his mother, except for the enormous Chainik nose, which has been laboriously passed down from father to son from time immemorial, like our hair-trigger tempers and tendency for diabetes. He smiles, though. Yes, everyone has told us that it's just gas, but he smiles in response to stimuli, such as his father smiling at him, tickling him under his chin, and saying things like "you cost more that a used Honda in decent condition, you screaming, eating poop machine!" in a big, smiley, Sesame Street voice. He even laughed at us, twice.
I'll try to update more often, okay?
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Passaic PD vs Passaic Hatzolah
Passaic City officials and the director of a Jewish ambulance service are addressing new tensions that have erupted following a clash with police who attempted to tow an ambulance this week. On Sunday, resident David Kaplan, 25, who founded the local branch of Hatzolah, an international ambulance corps staffed by volunteers in many Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, confronted police who had ticketed an ambulance parked the wrong way on Reid Avenue. The site is around the corner from Hatzolah headquarters at 243 Van Houten Ave. A group of people congregated in front of the ambulance about 11 a.m. as five police cars and a tow truck arrived at the scene, Kaplan said. The tow-truck operator was unable to move the ambulance because of its size, he said.
Hah. Whaddya wanna bet the cops called the tow truck guy to the scene and the tow truck guy made up some excuse so he wouldn't have to tow a freaking ambulance, because people need ambulances to not die.
Mayor Samuel Rivera said he was on the scene Sunday and thought the ambulance volunteers acted "belligerently" and that perhaps police responded too harshly.
I'd be belligerent too, if someone was trying to tow my piece of vital lifesaving equipment. And, perhaps, the police responded too harshly? If the cops would have summarily executed everyone at the scene and set the ambulance on fire as a warning to others, that would have been way out of line, but just confiscating a volunteer medical unit is, maybe, a little too harsh. Depending on your perspective, of course.
"They were going to be towed because they were parked in a dangerous position," Rivera said.
That dangerous position: parked the wrong way on a one way street, which is something everybody does, even people not driving emergency response vehicles.
Rivera said he met Monday with Kaplan and Paton to try to resolve friction between police and the volunteers. "I'm trying to work with them. My goal is for them to work with our [the city's] EMS," Rivera said, adding that part of the frustration with Hatzolah goes back more than two years.
Which sure sounds like an unbiased statement to me.
In addition, the city has offered Hatzolah use of city EMS headquarters to park Hatzolah's ambulances, but Hatzolah has rejected the city's offer, Rivera said. "They say they like to have ambulances parked closer to the Jewish community," Rivera said.
How dare those uppity Jews want to park their ambulance close to where it's needed! The gall!
Idiots.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
IPhone Nerds!
I was in the mall with Mrs Chainik Friday, just chillaxin. We bought some maternity stuff, and I am just going to have to take my wife's word for it that simply buying normal stuff in larger sizes will not be sufficient.
While we were there, we passed by a group of hippies sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Gymboree. This confused me, as I hadn't heard that Phish was reuniting and playing the Freehold Raceway Mall (which has its own Wiki page? of course it does, what doesn't?). More hippies and nerds of various descriptions lined the walls of the mall. The mystery was solved when I got to the Apple store and remembered about the iPhone (looks like Apple has an employee in charge of editing wiki pages).
I went into the Apple Store to look around. I've never been to an Apple store before but I figured it couldn't be very different than any other of the countless computer stores I've ever been in. Boy was I wrong.
Have you ever seen an iPod? It was like that but in retail form. Everything was clean and white and perfectly proportioned and beautifully lit. The bright lights illuminated squeaky clean, helpful, knowledgable, interestingly multiculti staff. I looked at some of the computers there. Did you know that Apple laptops only have one mouse button? How the hell does that work? And the computers look pretty, like desk lamps designed by Frank Gehry. What in the hell? Computers need to look big and clunky and kludgy and functional, like they came out of the boiler room of a Russian submarine. This place looked like Dell had been bought by Ikea.
What a good metaphor. I need to write that down somewhere.
My cellphone is the Motorola Q. It's PC based, with Windows CE (which means it crashes about three times a week, badum-pshh!). It's very awesomely cool, and I get compliments on it wherever I go.
Okay, that last part was a filthy rotten lie. But I still like having a cellphone with an enormous screen and a full sized keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera and rotten battery life and the ability to hack into the registry and change stuff.
Mrs Chainik couldn't understand why people would stand in line for a $500 cellphone.
The lonely, misunderstood life of a nerd, I suppose. If only they had girlfriends.
On a related note, some lady in Texas decided to buy a whole big bunch of iPhones so she could sell them on eBay. She got $10,000 in cash and drove to an Apple store, where she paid the nerd who was first in line $800 cash to take his place.
The punchline?
Apple, unlike Sony, placed a 1-per-customer limit on purchases the first day to ensure everyone got one. Mwahahahaha, lady got iPowned. Watch the video here:
Monday, June 25, 2007
Rudy's Achilles Heel
Everyone remembers the lightning striking the building when Rudy was explaining his... nuanced opinion about abortion, right?
Well, Ann Althouse calls this Kerry syndrome.
There's far more support out there for the merger of politics and religion than the separation of politics and religion. And yet, Giuliani is popular. So was Kerry (up to a point). What's different about Giuliani is that the disjunct between his religion and his politics is also a disjunct between his politics and his political party.
Can a barely religious Northerner get elected President? Conventional wisdom would say no. You have to be either genuinely religious if you're a Republican or you have to pander to the religious freaks if you're a Democrat if you want to get elected. Also, everyone knows only Southerners vote and they only vote for fellow Southerners.
But is it true?
My gut says no. My gut says that people will see Giuliani's convictions and abilities and qualifications, and look at Hilary's lack of convictions (alas) and Obama's lack of experience and substance, and will go Rudy.
Most people, after all, hold competing and contradictory opinions. I, for example, believe that homosexuality is a grave sin and I think the state has no business in the bedroom. I believe that we should give tax cuts to the rich- they create wealth, which creates business, which creates jobs, which creates wealth- and I also believe rich people are jerks who should be shot. I believe that most social services are a waste of taxpayer money and I also believe that many social services are vital. I support the death penalty and oppose abortion. I am glad that Saddam is dead and Chemical Ali has a date with the hangman, and
I am saddened immensely that any human being, anywhere, has to lose his life.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
As for conventional wisdom-
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. John Kenneth Galbraith
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Wedding Legal Fun! I mean, Legal Wedding Fun! Fun Wedding Legal!
DISCLAIMER: IANAL
How do you become qualified to be an officiant at a wedding? Legally speaking, I mean.
My Google-fu is strong. I found this list of qualifications to be allowed to officiate at weddings, organized by state. Fascinating reading, if you have the time. The common denominator is, you have to be part of the gubmint (either a judge, county clerk, clerk of the court, mayor, councilperson, what have you) OR you have to be some species of religious poobah muckety muck. Most states are quite liberal in their definition of "sky pilot".
Alaska allows a "commissioned officer of the Salvation Army" to preform a wedding. Connecticut specifically states that "marriages witnessed by a duly constituted Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is are valid". Florida lets notary publics marry people. Guam keeps things simple by saying, simply "All ordained clergymen and priests of whatsoever religious faith who are recognized as such by the religious body whose faith they represent".
Hawaii lets members of Congress conduct weddings. Indiana, wanting to outdo Connecticut, recognizes "(6) The Friends Church, in accordance with the rules of the Friends Church. (7) The German Baptists, in accordance with the rules of their society. (8) The Bahai faith, in accordance with the rules of the Bahai faith. (9) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in accordance with the rules of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (10) An imam of a masjid (mosque), in accordance with the rules of the religion of Islam". A resident of Maine can be married in Maine by a lawyer and member of the Maine bar. Nevada allows even those authorized to preform marriages in other states to marry people in Las Vegas if they fill out a form.
New York allows leaders of The New York Society for Ethical Culture to preform weddings, and also I presume to drone on and on about secular humanism and to be as boring as real ministers of actual religions. in Ohio the "superintendent of the state school for the deaf" may preform weddings. In Oklahoma an "ecclesiastical dignitary" must be at least 18 to preform marriages, and Oklahoma is also the only state to refer to "him or her" instead of just "him". Pennsylvania requires that "marriage does require words uttered to establish at that precise time the relationship of husband and wife". South Carolina is the strictest, saying that "Only ministers of the Gospel or accepted Jewish rabbis and officers authorized to administer oaths in this State are authorized to administer a marriage ceremony". In fact, the only state in the union that will let any damn fool preform a wedding ceremony is Vermont, which doesn't appear to have any qualifications at all.
Yet there is no qualifications to actually get married. Maybe some kind of test or classes or counseling would be appropriate and help curtail divorce.
My baby bro got married last night, and my mind wandered during the chuppah. The lesson: when attending a sibling's wedding, charge your camera batteries beforehand. Otherwise, your camera will die and you will get bored and your mind will wander as you try not to die of heat exhaustion. Bonus: my bro's father in law's rebbi came, and at the chassan's tisch we learned that this esteemed individual is actually our third cousin (Jewish Geography ftw). When calling him up for a brocha under the chuppah, he was referred to as the "great uncle of the chassan". Hah.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
I've had a tough day, due to lack of drugs.
Hate.
Anger.
Rage.
Murder death kill.
My back is somewhat better, so I stopped taking the Flexeril my doctor prescribed.
And now I want to set people on fire and punch buildings.
I know what I typed. I want to punch buildings right in their smug little cornicing.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
A guy cut me off in traffic. So I pulled into the oncoming lane, cut him off, boxed him in, and parked my truck so I could yell at him. Unfortunately, he got away, and I don;t have a gun. Instead, I summoned all my psychic energy and focused all my hate on him, trying to hate him to death.
I don't actually have any psychic powers but tried it just in case any latent psychic abilities chose that moment to manifest themselves.
The guy's head did not explode but I think his car's blue book value depreciated a teeny tiny fraction of a penny, and I'm going to have to settle for that.
Then I went to a pizza store to move a perfectly good camera, just because they decided to move the cash register.
I had my MP3 jammed into my ears, listening to Eitan Katz, in a desperate bid to lower my blood pressure, and also so no idiots could talk to me.
An idiot came up to me, and started talking.
I glowered at him, but he seemed unperturbed, so after about five minutes I took the headphones off and snarled "what?"
"What kind of calzones do you have?"
"I don't work here." I said. I have a drill in my hand and I'm wearing my company's uniform shirt with the name and logo on it, not the pizza store logo. Also, I wasn't wearing an apron.
"But I just want to know what kind of calzones you have!"
I did not leap over the counter and throttle the man in order to keep him from reproducing, but it was a near thing.
Then three more people did it to me- asked me a pizza related question and then argued with me when I explained that I did not work for the pizza store.
I need a drink.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
We are all jigsaw men.
I remember, in my misspent youth, reading the short story The Jigsaw Man, by Larry Niven. It concerns a future in which organ transplantation is cheap and easy, thanks to the Organ Banks. Where do the Organ Banks get their organs? From criminals convicted of capital crimes. Unfortunately, thanks to supply and demand, there are not enough criminals to keep up, which causes the politicians to keep redefining "capital crimes" downwards.
The protagonist in The Jigsaw Man has been convicted of repeated speeding violations.
I haven't read the story in years and don't remember how it ends, but I do know that I never thought we'd be debating the ethics of involuntary organ donation in real life, any more than I thought we'd be discussing the best way to defend civilization from religious crackpots who live in the desert guarding a precious and scarce resource. But here we are.
The authoritarian maniacs running China today have long been suppressing Falun Gong. Allegations of torture and various human rights abuses are well documented.
But this is just sick.
On 9 March 2006, allegations were made of organ harvesting on living Falun Gong practitioners at the Sujiatun detention compound, an alleged labor camp and part of the China Traditional Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center, [1] a joint-venture with Malaysian healthcare company Contry Heights Health Sanctuary and subject to oversight beyond local Chinese authority, located in Shenyang City, Liaoning province. According to at least two witnesses interviewed by The Epoch Times, internal organs of living Falun Gong practitioners have been harvested and sold to the black market, and the bodies have been cremated in the hospital's boiler room. The witnesses make allegations of nobody coming out of the camp alive, as well as six thousand practitioners being held captive at the hospital since 2001, two-thirds of whom have died to date. According to these sources, removed organs include hearts, kidneys, livers and cornea.
Now, NTD, the New York based Chinese language television network, reports Rav Elyashiv's opposition to organ harvesting, even when the patient's life is in danger.
For giggles, listen to the anchor mispronounce "Elyashiv" and "Sharei Tzedek". Highly amusing- probably the same reaction the anchor would have if she heard me pronounce "moo goo gai pan".
Anyway, my point: China is evil.
H/T The Yeshiva World.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Gunboat Diplomacy!
It's the most efficient kind of diplomacy, after all. Lots quicker than dressing up in striped pans and handing around little bits of chocolate wrapped in gold foil during embassy receptions while that annoying string music they always play in movies during fancy shmancy black tie receptions plays in the background (you know the music... dah dah dah dah DAH! Dah dah... dah dah...)
(Irrelevant tangent: this came up in a Google search for "those songs they always play in movies".)
Look, I'm just some moron with a moronblog, not someone who's opinion actually matters. I don't have the jorb of coming up with a good, solid, workable strategery to deal with that evil little troll in Tehran who is busily trying to get nukes and is crazy enough to use them if he ever got his evil little claws on them. I do know that one good thing, at least, has come out of the Iraq mess.
People know that the current Administration is crazy enough to actually go to war with anyone who pisses them off sufficiently.
They aren't, of course, not really. (Shhhh. Keep that little tidbit to yourself.) But speaking softly and carrying the big stick only works if people think you really might take the big stick and start getting all LAPD on a country. People know the difference between a promise and an empty threat. If Clinton or Carter told someone "behave or I'll bomb your country", no one took them seriously, and for good reason. But when, say, Ray-Gun spit in the eye of the Evil Empire and told them that the United States of gosh-darn America was no longer taking no guff from nobody, people listened, because the crazy senile old whackadoo was really seriously gonna push the button and laugh while he did it.
Is this the ideal way to conduct international intercourse? No, of course not. But if, for example, Denmark began a nuclear program, we could talk to them, reason with them, buy furniture and cellphones from them. You can reason with the sane. The insane sometimes will listen only to a tazer.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Shock Report: Goyim may actually be human beings, new study suggests. Satmer not convinced.
A Conservative Rabbi from Minnesota has come up with what he calls a "hechsher tzedek", a certification testifying to the company's commitment to social justice issues.
Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again- hearing "justice" from a liberal is like hearing "freedom" from a conservative, a code word meaning you aren't going to get any. And The Forward is the one hyping this, and their beef (ha!) with Rubashkin is well known, as is PETA's.
Now, as an evil neocon, I support the abuse of workers and the torture of animals and burning orphanages and so forth. Also, most if not all of the meat in my freezer is from Rubashkin- they are, after all, the largest kosher meat company in the US. But, as much as I hate hippies (and Rabbi Morris Allen seems like a prime example of the type), he might have a point.
I am an alarm installer, and I do a lot of installations and maintenance work for a lot of Jewish owned businesses in New Jersey and New York. Many if not most employ illegal immigrants, and treat them like dirt. I know they get paid peanuts and get abused constantly.
How do I know this?
I never quite learned the trick of treating certain people differently, I guess. I know you are supposed to treat your social inferiors a certain way, your peers another way, and your social betters yet another way, but I've never been able to pull this off.
That's right. I talk to Mexicans like they're human beings, not like they're horses who have unaccountably learned to talk and wear clothes but are still fit for nothing but drudgery.
I get told things most employers never hear.
This hechsher tzedek may not be a bad idea after all. Maybe a movement in the heimishe velt to learn how to treat other people like human beings btzelem Elokim (see this post) is something that is sorely needed.
H/T Y-Love
Friday, May 25, 2007
The stuffing is the ikur.
There is no such thing as a potato blintz.
There. I said it. I have stated this as a hard, unequivocal fact.
The only real blintzes are cheese blintzes. Cherry, cherry and cheese, strawberry, blueberry, apple-cinnamon (my personal favorite)- all these are pale imitations of the One True Blintz Stuffing, which is cheese.
Grated or mashed potato stuffed in dough is called a knish. So let it be written.
What is the difference, you may ask?
The accompaniments, of course. Blintzes are served with sour cream. Knishes are served with deli style mustard. It doesn't matter if anyone actually eats the sour cream or the mustard- I've happily eaten knishes with no mustard, just like I've eaten falafel with no techina- but it mamesh does not pas to serve blintzes with no sour cream, just like serving latkes with no apple sauce is a booshe despite the fact that it tastes just fine stam.
Ai, you can say that knishes are fried and blintzes are baked, but I can show you Gabilla's knishes (no website), which are both fried and baked and are delicious.
You can tell me that blintzes are rectangular and flat, whereas knishes are either round (pizza shop style) or square (Mom's Knishes)- but I tell you that this is no reiya, because a food is a food even when you change its shape. We learn this out from Italian slices, which everyone holds is still pizza even though it is puffed up and square and not flat and triangular.
And bourekas are no reiya, either, because I hold the same thing by bourekas- stuffing potato into dough makes it a knish whether it is square, round, or in the case of bourekas, triangular.
You can ask me what makes a boureka different from a blintz, and I can answer: you serve a boureka with schug, tomato salad, and a hard boiled egg.
Calzones are clearly the work of the Satan to confuse people, and I have serious doubts on what bracha is appropriate- and in any case, it is part of the pizza family.
If you ever wondered what your husband/ brother/ son does all night in the BM on Shavous night, now you know.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Candidate number 368923560: Mike Bloomberg
Mayor Mike is planning on spending a cool one billion- $1,000,000,000- to guarantee a Democratic win, by running as a third party independent. Chuck Hagel is cheering him on. That's not my joke, it's Ace's. And Newt Gingrich is mulling his candidacy.
At this point, is there a white, Christian, middle aged male with (as Dave Barry sez) two dark suits who has not been indicted recently not running? At this pace I may just throw my hat intot he ring myself.
Heh. There's a thought. Our first blogger-President. With an all blogger Cabinet. Tee hee.
Well, for Secretary of State, I'd get Mark Steyn- he knows how to talk to those furriners, being one himself. Glenn Reynolds will be Attorney General and Frank J will be Secretary of War (one of my platforms will be to rename the Department of Defense, because everyone knows that the best defense is a good offense).
Secretary of Education will be Ahitoricality. Secretary of the Interior will be Lileks. Rubin can be the Secretary of Commerce- he's in advertising, he must know how to get the furriners to buy our stuff, which is what the Secretary of commerce does as far as I can tell. Secretary of the Treasury will be whoever runs AdSense.
Did I leave anyone out? Want to nominate a blogger to fill a position? Comments!
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Buzzwords a go go!
What, exactly, does Web 2.o mean?
I tried Wikipedia, which is never incorrect, and they say that "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."
Which means precisely bupkis.
I think that Web 2.0 is one of those marketing buzzwords that have no real meaning, like paradigm, or synergy, or fair trade. These words are the prostitutes of the English language, willing to work for anyone at all. Words like these have no definitions, just connotations. You don't know what it means, but you know what it implies, and you know if some slick Rick in a Hugo Boss suit mentions two or more of these words in a single paragraph you are going to be paying about 20% more than you thought.
Here's a cute little viral video about Supermarket 2.0. Enjoy!
Full disclosure: as I wrote this post, I realized that I'm probably going to up my Google hits quite a bit. X Box 360. IPhone. Paris Hilton.
Tee hee.
