So the commute is bad enough without extra delays on the neighborhoood side roads. The latest insult is the seemingly new courtesy of garbage trucks stopping in the middle of the street as they wind along their routes. And I mean the middle of the street. Parked, if only for the 30 seconds or so it takes for the poor grunt at the back of the truck to handle another few houses’ worth of trash cans. The absolute middle of the street, typically directly in between parked cars along the street. The dead center middle of the road, as if some NASA-guided GPS device was informing the driver exactly where to put the truck, to the nearest nanometer. The middle, where there is no room to go around. No room on either side.

Garbage trucks throw a full solar eclipse sized blind spot for all but the giant Canadian strip mining earth movers, the ones in northern Alberta that guzzle deisel 24/7 simply to keep from freezing solid in all but a lengthy 6 week thaw every June and July. Trying to get to a cube in an office building just shouldn’t involve roulette around a trash truck. And they just inch along. It takes a few minutes to build up the courage to pull out around the beasts to face potential head on death, or extreme tardiness to that 9:30.

I’ve been navigating suburban neighborhoods, painfully, for over 30 years, at all times of day or night. It’s only in the last year I’ve seen this garbage truck garbage. Have I missed something? Anyone? Anyone?

What is it with you all? Do you think your cars are made of Teflon? Or unbendable alloys? Or have giant magnets that will repel anything that comes close?

The other day I had three separate Benz-idents. The first two involved the beltway and the absolute right all Mercedes drivers seem to think they have to cut around traffic to get into their preferred lane, only to slow down and force the rest of us to brake hard. Keep up your speed or wait in line! German engineering doesn’t seem to come with an operator’s manual.

To top off the beltway close calls, the final Benz-ident involved a parked one in an a ridiculously narrow and tight downtown parking lot. It wasn’t one of those “I’m taking two spaces here everybody because, well, we’re all in it together to keep my car unscathed.” No, this was of the clueless “oh well” didn’t manage to get it anywhere even close to between the two tropics longitudes variety.

Every Mercedes driver should be forced to do a two year stint with one of Smart Cars — they’re Daimler Benz products.

So maybe there’s no really good answer to the war/strife/situation in Afghanistan. But here’s a thought. Suppose the U.S. Government committed to spend $300 billion over the next five years, and all it was going to do was make a payment of $2,000 to each and every man, woman and child in the country. Set up some biometric fingerprint account system and a debit card computer network. Condition it all on elimination or reduction of whatever nasty activity the government wants to reduce. Promise bonus funds to everyone for capture of folks on the most wanted list. But just deliver the cash and leave. The cash is tied to individuals. It may be a mess, sure, but any more of a mess than already exists? And everyone gets a stake, and foreigners leave the country. Just a random numbers thought.

So I’ve been tracking the t-shirts at the farmers’ markets this summer, because they are as wondrous and varied as the types of tomatoes and colors and shapes of peppers. My favorites thus far:

A shirt proclaiming the global village, with a humongous cross on it, the wearer sporting a big Wegmans bag to carry the spoils. I found the inclusivity of the forced evangelism almost as tasty as the enviro-friendly packaged food distribution grocer.

A shirt with the words Virginia Crew lettered as spikes in a skull’s mohawk hairdo, with “our wake, your funeral” as the motto underneath. That one gets lots of art style points; I wish I had a link to a photo of it.

The big-breasted woman with navy blue shirt sporting “I’m tweeting this” across the front. Wasn’t sure what to make of that one, but none of the possibilities were good.

Here’s a free tip for anyone attempting any home project: look for the oldest guy still standing.

Without fail, I have found that the oldest employee of the big “home improvement” stores is far and away the most helpful and knowledgeable. A bit chatty they might be, but they’re old, so you can escape them fast by just walking away. These guys (and thus far it has been just guys) have spent their lives engineering, building, tinkering, and, most likely, driving their spouses or SOs crazy. Once they retire, it takes about a month before they’re kicked out of the house, with no purpose. Just get out! she says. So with their own to do list undone, they wander aimlessly to the big box store, where they meander for hours, interrupting and giving unsolicited advice to strangers until a smart, enterprising young manager sees an opportunity to take annoying grandpa and turn him into a minimum wage revenue stream.

These old folks know everything about home improvement, and are just looking for someone with whom to share their wisdom. Well, I’ve learned most people shun the geezer class, fearing they must be toxic, especially if they’re working in a hardware store in their 70s or 80s. Not so, my friends. These people are in elder day care, and they’re the only ones who can walk you through the store and hand you everything you need. They also are cheap (they are old after all), and they won’t let you buy what you don’t need. If you seek them out for help, they’re hoping you’ll come back to the store with another project so they’ll have someone to talk to.

Okay, I’m back after a summer break that shouldn’t have been a hiatus from blogging. But enough of that. I bought an iPhone on that $99 deal with two year soul sell to the carrier. I have just one observation.

Every human on the planet should be given a number in line to donate part or all of the liver to Steve Jobs if and when he needs another one. Everyone; all 6 billion plus of us. Keep him going until he can no longer possibly think of the next big thing. I’d personally be willing to be in top 1% of the list, though not in the top 500; reserve those spots in line for Congress perhaps. I suspect their constituents would approve if it came to a choice of reelecting the incumbent or losing the benefits of Apple’s creative spark.

A colleague of mine thinks privacy is underrated.  I disagree.  Somebody, somewhere, can watch everything we do.  And by and large, it’s pretty damned boring, I would think.  Personally, I assume the good Lord is omni-everything, so s/he/it has a complete file on how much of a screw up I am, and can figure out something to do to cure the boredom that must emanate from tracking my sorry ass.

Well, I love technology, and I want technology to be looking at us more and more, specifically on the roads.  We need massive enforcement of basic civilization on our roads.  Yesterday, in a span of thirty minutes in rush hour traffic, two separate motorists directly in front of me tossed their finished but still lit and hot-enough-to-burn-the-chemicals-inside cigarettes out their windows directly into my path.  And frankly, this happens all the time.  Twice in thirty minutes was a new one on me, but this happens to me at least five times a week average.  No exaggeration.

It’s possible I am some incarnation of a minor Hindu deity that is attracting lit tobacco products.  I am blessed with tremendous, nay, beyond extraordinary even, luck at finding parking spaces in the most crowded destinations at the worst possible times.  My wife is convinced that in a taxi outpost in some tucked away corner in Delhi a cabbie has a little statue of some strange looking white guy, and says he commissioned it because the guy came to him in a vision and he always finds parking when he needs it.  But I don’t believe it.

And I don’t believe I’m the only one on the roads who is getting cigarettes tossed his way ALL THE F#*KING TIME!!  There’s got to be a way to stop this.  I always honk and flash high beams relentlessly upon the immediate assault of a lit missive tossed in front of my vehicle.  I fantasize about passing said offending cars and tossing out in their paths one of the countless Diet Coke cans or plastic bottles littering my own car (and not the roads, by the way).  But that would just get me shot.

No, I want there to be massive fines for this sort of behavior.  Driving privileges revoked.  Work crews of offenders using their bare hands to pick up all the trash alongside the highways and byways.  I want them to drink cigarette butt smoothies made with stale warm yogurt.

And how do we get there?  With satellite camera technology.  The heavy duty military kind, the kind that can spot folks picking their noses from fifty miles up in space and direct a guy in a helicopter at 3,000 feet to shoot the hand off, in a stiff breeze, moving in traffic, leaving digit in nostril.

I want, I want, I want.  It’s silly, but I’m starting to agree with Steve Martin’s riff (oh my, that’s old now) about how to stop crime: death penalty for parking violations.  Well, I’m against capital punishment, but something has to be done about folks tossing their cigarettes out the window.  And I’m a big supporter of smokers’ rights even.  The health nazis want to take away every last pleasurable vice known, and I say give people some freedom, but cars have ashtrays, as well as the cigarette lighters, for a reason.

One solution would be to privatize the roads, and install cameras everywhere and have contractual agreements with confiscatory penalties for violations like butt-tossing.  But that’s for another post.

Yesterday, a scene from The Office must have been filmed where I work.  I couldn’t see the camera crews, nor could my colleagues, but I’m certain they were around somewhere.  No doubt carefully hidden to get the full documentary effect of the truly preposterous event we witnessed and participated in.

Due to a particular set of circumstances, there is a fair amount of fallow carpet in my acreage at the cube farm.  The file folders and computer monitor stands are starting to grow out of control.  But management hasn’t brought the big harvesters in to clean things up too much yet.

There are maybe a dozen or so of us left on our floor.  Most of us are congregated in a little cluster that I like to think of as London, the pulsing eclectic population center, off near a corner of the floor of this big open floor plan typical of industrial cube farming conglomerates.  Others in the group are scattered about, mostly near the south-facing window wall of the building; they’re like little islands really, quiet, sustaining, but lonely and sparse, like the Shetlands, Orkneys, Outer Hebrides, etc.

Well, yesterday afternoon around 3:00 PM, not 20 feet from the main door onto our floor, a stranger came and plopped himself into an empty cube, and proceeded to take an enormous honking 90 minutes and counting sleepfest!!  Not the head nodding, struggling to stay awake kind of repose.  No, this was the full Monty, a complete sprawl backwards in the nice Herman Miller Aeron chair, limbs akimbo, head back, nose reaching to the sky for maximum sleep apnea effect.

The galling thing was that this stranger was in a cube kitty-corner from a colleague; he was virtually in the open, and just didn’t seem to care.  There are quite a few other places on the floor that offer more refuge and solitude for a summer’s afternoon power nap.  Noises didn’t rouse him at all, oh no.  Whatever he did the night before, or more likely earlier yesterday morning, was sufficient to put him way under.

And damned if his name tag wasn’t flipped over so none of us could see who this interloper was!  I suppose one of us could have walked up and tried picking up the badge and turning it over to identify the culprit (soon-to-be urban legend hero).  But getting caught with one’s hands grabbing at another employee’s lap, no matter the circumstances, well, that’s a bit too risky for any of us.

And what did we spineless cowards do?  Well, I don’t know, because the end of the workday came for me and I had done nothing and trudged my way home through the soul-deadening rush hour traffic.  I sure now regret not going up to this little turd and kicking the chair practically out from under his snoozing ass.  What’s gonna happen?  Waking up a sleeping employee.  Don’t see that as a code of conduct violation anywhere.  I haven’t checked yet to see if any of my colleagues took matters into their own or collective hands.  Lord I hope so; but I worry what’s becoming of us.  We just stood around chatting about the absurdity of it all, laughing at the nerve this guy had, how he was really bad form, hurting no one but himself, having crossed a line somehow.  But still, we had a certain awe, and subconsciously no doubt a grudging respect and admiration for the sheer abandonment and recklessness, the cast iron cahoneys, that would embolden a person to just plop down in the middle of an office complex and fall sound asleep.  I’m sure the camera crew got good close up looks of us as those thoughts of grudging tolerance ran across our faces.

Is this what it’s come to?  Will this schmuck have woken up at 8:00 PM, thought to himself “Holy shit!!  God, I’ve been out for hours!  I’m totally screwed!  My wife’s gonna think I’m at the bar again.  There’s not even a game on tonight.  Shit!”  And then . . . nothing happens.  No one noticed.  Hell, it was a great nap, dammit.  I’m coming back here; they’re soft and quiet over here.  Patsies.  Losers.  And I’m getting paid for this.  Awesome!

And what of the rest of us?  Are we the guy in the basement muttering about a stapler?  The horror, the horror.  I definitely need more flair.

It’s been 25 years since The Terminator first hit the silver screen, and really solidified the Governator’s hold on the American psyche.  I wonder, did Skynet bring the actor Arnold back from sometime in the future to run California one day?  Cleverly placing him in Austria to become a body builder immigrant, married to a Kennedy?  Did they send Jerry Brown too, but he just couldn’t get the job done?  Hmmmm.

Well, I remember well watching The Terminator the first time.  It was a marvel.  And to top it off, I had the whole theater practically to myself.  Couldn’t have been more than a half dozen of us watching the Saturday matinee.  It was as novel and exciting as Alien, Star Wars, and Blade Runner.

One scene among the many I enjoyed involved the cyborg holed up in a hotel room (I think) and suddenly having to interact with one nuisance or another on its quest for Ser-uh Kahn-ur.  Well, the human says something, and then a handful of options on how to respond pops up on the cyborg’s computer screen, embedded into its eye.  And the viewer has to be paying attention, because the scene doesn’t last too long, and the optional responses are all over the map, including an invective, which I think the cyborg chooses, of course to much amusement.

For some reason, unclear to me now and deeply regretted, I was talking with a colleague about the movie, and this scene came up, and he just plain RUINED IT FOR ME!!  Who’s looking? he said.  Always bothered him, he said.  It’s a machine; it doesn’t have real eyes, he said.  How could it be “reading” possible response options?  It’s a computer for crying out loud.  Some program is just going to choose the response, it’s going to get uttered, and we’re moving on.

On reflection, well, yeah, I suppose that’s right.  But I really, really, really like it better the way I first saw it.  I didn’t need to have it deconstructed like that, even if the whole blasted movie is fictional about something that can’t happen.  Sometimes, it’s just better not to know.

Here’s a free entrepreneurial idea for anybody out there.  It’s capital intensive, and I think the Germans may have tried it already.  But how about an airline catering to smokers?  Hell, there’s an airline for pets; I’ve covered that one already.

Actually, the major carriers should form a joint venture and establish the Smokers’ Airways.  Get it?  Airways, as in breathing.  The symbol could be a pair of blackened lungs.  Anyway, consider the benefits.  For nonsmokers, the pacing and fidgeting of smokers cooped up like caged animals for hours on end on a long flight, their temperamental snaps at flight attendants and other passengers – this will end!  The thick gauntlet faced when trying to get to the plane’s lavoratory will be diminished greatly.  The lovely scent of smokers, their clothes, the reek-fighting yet somehow intensely reek-producing smells of their chewing gums, breath mints, and perfumes, these too will cease.  The violent page turning of magazines and newspapers by those jonesing for a puff, and you know the types, this will be a thing of the past.

And for the smokers?  Paradise!  No leering and condescension from the nonsmoking health police.  The chance to light up and relieve a bit stress, sensible enough when  hurtling through the sky at 30,000 feet in a tin can at 450 miles per hour, over a heartless cold ocean miles in depth.  Flight attendants passing out cigarettes and cigars, like in the old days.

Sure, we gotta pay the pilots and flight attendants more because of the ill effects of the smoke and how it might prematurely shut down their careers.  But folks will opt in — folks work high-rise construction after all.

The tougher question is whether to force all European backpackers under 30 to fly on Smokers’ Airways.