Dam You.
POST NUMBER TWO: Typo Spotting
This typo brought me more grammatical and proofreaderly glee than I even know how to express. It was an unfinished callout box in a movie review in SEE Magazine.
POST NUMBER THREE: Fun on the job
my friend steven thought that the candy wrapper ingredients said "partially defeated peanut" when in reality it was "partially defatted". it made us wonder just what a partially defeated peanut would actually look like.
POST NUMBER FOUR: "Girl on bus with stroller"
i found a note that i wrote myself on my desk at work the other day...it was a reminder to myself to remember to tell my co-worker about the girl i saw on the bus the other morning. the yellow sticky note said "girl on bus with stroller". let's start with a discussion of my addiction to sticky notes. i think i am sincerely and severely addiced to post-it products. my desk is a mess of sticky notes that gets cleaned up only when somebody new and/or intimidating comes into my office thereby inducing wave of self-consciousness re: the mess of yellow that is my desk. the real problem is that oftentimes the notes to myself are written in a semi-conscious haze as an attempt to let a persistent idea pass by instead of fixating on it, and as such say random things such as "call stacey", grocery lists, to do lists, or "girl on bus with stroller".
so, waiting at the bus stop outside of Corona station on Jasper ave one morning, i am standing next to a girl with a stroller. when the bus pulls up, naturally i allow her to board first. she manoeuvers onto the bus and parks her stroller in the front section, while i choose a seat across from her. as my gaze scans the bus and pauses at her, looking for a cute baby (or an ugly baby, either one will do), instead i am met with a stroller that has a plush dog with a pacifier in its mouth strapped in where the baby should have been! now, to clarify, this girl was in fact not a young girl who still is at an age where pretending you are a mom is a fun game, and neither was she an older, crazed looking woman who has been driven in desperate response to a biological clock that is winding down to pretend she is a mother. oh no, she was about my age (read: the age where it is extremely wrong to push around a stroller with a plush dog in it).
the rest of the bus ride was spent playing 'scenario', a game that ended with me settling on the most plausible explanation of course: that she was an extremely unstable individual who, if the fine line between her fantasy and reality was breached by a stupefied stranger staring at her plush "baby", would be inclined to snap and have a violent meltdown. to avoid this situation i focussed my attentions on my riveting book, which is listed above, and is worthy of an entirely separate blog story.
POST NUMBER FIVER: "Nothing you can't spell will ever work" - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
nerdy admission: today, while flipping through the liner notes of my new john mayer cd, i found a typo. they wrote "wont" instead of "won't". i would classify that as a blaring mistake, but here's the thing: before i knew it, i had whipped out my red pen and circled the mistake in the liner notes. and while i did it, i wasn't even thinking to myself "this will make a great xanga post".
POST NUMBER SIX: Job interviews stinkis it possible to secure a job and still feel like you were completely true to yourself throughout the interview process? for a very lucky few perhaps. i think i am on my way to being a job interview cynic.
POST NUMBER SEVEN: Smells like government!
after working for only a month in an office job, the funny factor of dilbert has already shot up dramatically. also, i have a story for you:
so, we were supposed to have a big live webcast celebration of *something* (keeping it anonymous) at work the other day, and everyone went down to the conference room to watch it together on the big screen with all the other offices across canada. an email had been sent around the week before reminding everyone to be there and telling us that there would be a cake.
i was curious to go so i could learn more about the new *thing* that was going on, but my supervisor was joking to me that everyone else would only go if there was a cake, or doughnuts. anyways, we get down there and the webcast isn't working...they try for half an hour. we painfully watch every move that the tech guy makes on the big screen. they log off, reboot, open, close, open, close, etc, etc. meanwhile, through the chatter, i can hear the word "cake" popping up every few minutes from all around me:
the room was filled with a chorus of "where's the cake? when do we get to eat the cake? why don't they just give up and cut the cake? well, at least there's cake! who cares, i came for the cake anyways..."
so, after 42 minutes of trying, you'd think they would get up and say something - our top guy was scheduled to give a little talk at the end for us all, but no, the big guy stands up and says "well folks, looks like it's not going to work, so, uh, let's cut the cake." no speech, no overview, no nothing. just cake.
and everyone was happy!
appendix 1: update - today at our staff meeting, we watched the dvd from the failed webcast. at the end of the 45 minute speeches, the mc comes back on for some closing remarks and NO JOKE spends at least 2.5 minutes talking about the cakes that they were about to eat at headquarters, and referring to the cakes that were most likely present at all of the branches. they had two cakes at headquarters. one representing the occassion, and one representing the hopes for the future of this endeavor.
appendix 2: our cake didn't even taste good.
POST NUMBER EIGHT: What to do?
what to do with yourself when you are graduated from university and don't have a job? do online quizzes that tell you what you should have majored in! so now we all know i completed the wrong degree...dang, if only i had come across this four years ago. i am thinking of retiring and writing a novel, and on the side pursuing my apparent (according to this quiz) passion for dance, as it came in third place in a 5-way tie, flanked by disciplines such as mathematics (?) and anthropology. my aptitude seems to be a bit elusive, since when i did an aptitude test in high school, they recommended i be a ballerina or a priest. i almost choked on my tongue when i got the results from that one...
