Potpourri II

Is that for you?

I was picking up some fluids at Costco recently, with my friends Brett and Andy in tow. I picked up some Snapple and some Dad’s Root Beer (not as good as Barq’s, but Barq’s was nowhere to be found), and then I spotted some Smirnoff Ice on special—24 bottles for $19.99. So, I threw those into the cart as well.

When I got to the checkout line, Brett and Andy met me there with a look of sincere consternation. “Is that for you?” Brett asked, while pointing at the Smirnoff.

“Well, yeah,” I offered. I didn’t realize that I had done something wrong, but I was about to, I was sure.

“Je-SUS, man,” Andy said. “Smirnoff Ice...what are you, dude? It would be okay if those were for some ladies...”

“Have you ever had it?”

Both of them looked off and said no.

“Hey, I’m not using this to mope over a breakup, guys...I actually like the taste of this shit.” Then, I felt myself start to defend a malt beverage, so I eased up. “Hey, it’s not for you, so eff ya!”

This exchange reminded me of the time that my friend Sarah Dobson came to visit me in Falls Church a couple years back, and when I offered her something to drink, she peeked into my fridge and saw that I had cider (not apple, but the alcoholic kind) on the door. “Is that yours?” she asked.

Nope, my roommate’s.

“Whew,” she said. “I was starting to get worried about you.” This led to my roommate Chuck having to defend his beverage of choice. Why can’t people just let it go?

Surreal

I got a phone call from my friend Bree on a recent Saturday afternoon—she got engaged. This is the first former girlfriend of mine to do so (that I know about).

Doesn’t it whack you out when a former partner gets engaged? Bree and I dated our second year at UVA, so it has been quite some time since we dated, and I met her fiancé years ago and I felt even when I first met him that not only is he a cool guy, but he is a better fit for her than I ever was. But, it still made me feel old, if only for a hour that day—it registered a “one of these days, I might join her” feeling, and those usually only happen the four or five times a year that I go to a wedding.

I wonder how I’ll feel when I see Bree get married...whoa!

Wahoo...wha?

I was watching the shitty UVA/Colorado State game recently with a few UVA grads at a bar here in San Francisco. Even though the game had a bad ending for the good guys, there were some quality UVA moments, and at one point, we scored a pretty incredible touchdown that sent all of us cheering around the bar.

I was a touch nostalgic, so I reached for my friend Melissa Kern to sing The Good Ol’ Song, the admittedly-pitiful fight song of my alma mater.

“I don’t know the words to that song” was her reply.

I was shocked. “You don’t know our fight song? You sang it for four years straight!”

“Look,” she started in, “first of all, I was pretty much wasted at all of our games, and second, I wasn’t ‘singing’ the fight song, I was reading it off of the scoreboard!” Kern then went on to talk about how she had a bad singing voice, blah blah blah. (Kern realized as soon as she didn’t know the fight song that she would appear in this essay, so she wanted to add, “You know, if I DO end up in a Bellview, I should also say that I never went to a basketball game during our four years, either. So, there!”)

Kern wasn’t alone. Four other people at the bar also froze up when I asked them to sing along with me...the only guy that did know the song was former Male Cheerleader Andy Kellam, who HAD to know the song since he tossed girls into the air for his letterman jacket. I thought this was shocking, but none of the folks involved did...are we that old that we have forgotten our schools’ respective fight songs?

The Job Market

I was doing some research today on some Silicon Valley tech firms at work, and I stumbled upon a familiar quote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I put an ad in for a customer service person two years ago and got two responses," said Burt Schraga of Bell Electrical Supply. "Two weeks ago, when I put an ad in, I got in excess of 250 people. There were people with MBA's in there."

In a similar story, I interviewed for an AA job at a real estate firm back in July here in SF. Two years ago when they had an opening for the same job, the HR manager got 14 resumes for the position; when I came in, the HR manager told me she got over 300 resumes for the position. She only pulled my resume out because she saw that I had worked for Freddie Mac, which is another firm involved (tangentially) in the real estate industry.

The job market here is not in a recession, it is a full-out depression in my mind now. Actual fact: according to a recently-published report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the unemployment rate here is 7.9% as of the end of August 2002. The national average is hovering around 5.5%. With forecasts for many of the area's tech firms looking grim for the fourth quarter, the market here won't recover for at least another six months...if that.

I want to reiterate once again that the job market isn't crazy-bad in other cities--it is atrocious here. Going over my phone list of friends here in town, 25% of them don't have jobs. Of all the folks I know in Washington, only one of them is out of work...and, that’s because he is not looking for jobs.

Another actual fact: San Francisco County and San Mateo County have lost 1% of its population in the last year. 1% sounds small, but that's almost 7,000 people in both counties. (No wonder it is so easy to find an apartment here right now.)

More Job Stuff

I met up with my friend Anh-Van recently for brunch and she inquired as to how I found my current job. I told her that the company actually called me...from my posting on Monster.com. In fact, with both my job at Freddie Mac in Washington (my previous full-time gig) and my current job, recruiters found me on Monster.

The look of shock on AV’s face was great, but she was right in saying that “[finding jobs on Monster] never happens, and it’s happened to you twice!” I guess I never really thought about it, but I will say that I was extremely lucky to find a job after just five weeks of hard-core searching. When I was job-hunting in the fall, I was doing a pretty half-ass job of it because I really didn’t want to sit down at a desk again. But, even I have to admit—the magical way that companies put money in my bank account every two weeks really is something.

In terms of what I did on Monster with my resume both this time and in ’99, when I got my job at Freddie, I will admit that my pitchline was pretty interesting and I utilized my writing talents to sell myself in the 100-words-or-less format that seems to work for some, but not at all for others. I think that this time it was some play on the three R’s (reading, writing, arithmetic) and I made it funny while sounding reasonably professional...and, that was all it took for a couple of companies to call me off of that. Hey, in this job market, my advice is to try anything...but, hey, this Monster thing worked for me and there’s no reason why it can’t work for you.

Walk/Jog

The way it works with my commute is I have a 10-minute bus ride, and then a 10-minute walk uphill to my office. When I am taking my walk, I walk as slow as possible, mostly because I would rather be outside than working, but also because I don’t want to break a sweat on the way to the office. Man, it blows to even be a little sweaty at 8:30 in the morning; you just got to work, and already nobody wants to be around you.

This also allows me to enjoy all of the people around me that are running late to be somewhere, and more than anything else, I love the people that aren’t quite sure whether to jog or flat-out run to their place of employment. This lady that got off the bus at my stop was a classic recently. She was carrying a bag and was wearing three-inch heels—far from the optimal running gear. But, it was 8:23, and clearly, this lady had somewhere to be at 8.

So, she brushed past everybody to get off the bus. When she got off, she started to walk really fast, and if she had tripped over a Starbucks coffee lid, she might have killed herself. She got to a crosswalk, and had to wait for the little white man to start blinking his approval. It looked like she was going to piss herself, her feet were so hoppy; it was like she was a real jogger and was jogging at the intersection, waiting for her race to begin anew.

Green means go! She jogged across the street, and then got back into her speed walk again. It was like she was embarrassed to be seen running, so she just made a fool of herself walking really fast. For a block, I tried to keep up, because I was waiting for the money shot—a woman running in heels. I was sure after she cleared some of the early people traffic, she would take off. Sadly, she did not; she did the jog thing every few seconds and finally turned off my block four blocks up.

I’ll see her again, I’m sure. And hopefully, I’ll be around when she takes that dive in her three-inch heels...mmm, sassy!

Samurai Jack

My man Chuck turned me on to the Cartoon Network action show “Samurai Jack”, which features a samurai—thoughtfully named Jack—that wanders the countryside in various lands taking out evildoers with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. The show is loaded with pop culture references (what isn’t these days), and the other day, in the episode “Jack and the Farting Dragon”, there was a great exchange between Jack and a shopkeeper that is classic if you know your video games.

Shopkeeper: “At the fork in the road, follow the rocky path—it will take you to the dragon’s lair!”
Jack: “Where will the other fork take me?”
Shopkeeper: “Space Ace!!”

The PS Telestrator

Did you watch the season premiere of “Monday Night Football?” The mostly forgettable blowout win by the Patriots was memorable for one thing, and one thing only:

For the first time in TV history, a video game was used to telestrate plays during a football game. Madden demonstrated receiver routes using the latest version of the popular “Madden 2003” game, and honestly, it made me step back and really reflect on how far gaming has come.

There’s a game for the PlayStation2 called “Devil May Cry”, and it might be the best-looking game on the system. When I had some friends over a few months ago, even non-gamers were staring at the visuals of the game, which look so real that now, you really can say that when you quickly glance at the screen, it looks like a real actor is running around shooting bad guys. The “Madden” visuals are no different—the animation of the players and their movements are shockingly lifelike. We’re at the point where games are going to hit a glass ceiling soon; I don’t want to play a movie, I want to play a video game, and now the visuals are so close that the games are becoming TOO lifelike, if that is possible.

eBay

Careful...look around the corner...I'm comin'...I'm the

MAN WHO BIDS ON eBay's GOING, GOING, GONE PRODUCTS!

For those of you that shop & surf eBay (i.e., all of you), I am that asshole. I will—a couple of times a week—surf items in the Video Game category under the "Going, Going, Gone" tab and look for games that I want to add to my portfolio for cheap. I specialize in last-minute auctions--if I see that an auction has "<1" in the Time Left column (less than 1 minute), I will make an impulse buy if the price is right.

Recently, I bought a Game Boy Advance, with some accessories, for the low price of $47 (MSRP: $70). I beat out the guy that was winning the bidding by 11 cents with my bid, and when I clicked on the listing, the bidding was over—I was the winner.

I didn't really feel bad for that anonymous schmoe—I played by the rules and I had a higher bid. There's just something cool about beating somebody at something that has a defined set of parameters. This is why I hate it when people try to see movies with a student ID (when they are 27 years old and out of school—fucking pitiful) or when my old dormmate Jerry used to score goals off of a system error in NHL '94 for the Sega Genesis.

(Note: nothing angers men more than losing in a sports video game. Not real-life sports teams, not losing a girlfriend, not getting stood up by friends, not getting into a car accident...nothing. The only two times that roommates of mine at college came close to blows were during games of NHL '94 and NBA Live '95. During my first year at college, we had ten-person Tecmo Bowl seasons that ran successively for four months. I've never heard so much profanity in my life. My old roommate Chuck—every single person on this list that knows him knows Chuck as "one of the nicest guys you have ever met"—used to always lose his mind during games of NBA2K1, NCAA Football 2002 and Madden. I've never heard another person say "What a load of crap!" more at a television than Chuck during gameplaying. Seriously, Guys Losing Video Games Disorder ought to have overtaken ADD as the nation's most serious disorder.)

Like my man Gordon says, "Winners never cheat...cheaters never win." (I'm sure he stole that from somebody, but I haven't figured out who yet.)

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell & Longer Community Trust:

Two words—late-night doughnut run to Krispy Kreme: Opening Weekend
Seeing the video for “Scenario” on MTV2: $9.00 Show
Matinee movies: Matinee
Having to work till 11 PM on a Thursday and miss the late-night run to Krispy Kreme: Rental
Attributing beating your 4-year-old in a Kohl’s parking lot to “having a bad day”: Hard Vice

bellview--i love to nibble

Potpourri II