Verbal Spark!

I once had a neighbor who made a living working for a company that installed home theaters for the rich and the famous. He noticed something about them other than their affluence. He told me that by listening to their conversations, they all were trying to outdo the other. In other words, if Jay-Z, for example, installed a $50,000 projector, he would get on the phone to tell his other peers. To go one up, the peers would then seek to purchase something for more money just to say they have a more expensive projector. Poor people like me are more inclined to help other poor folks find deals and ways to save a few precious dollars. For us, it’s all about how much we can save. For the rich it’s all about how much they can spend.

People I don’t know where I got it from, but be it my house or anyone else’s, I just can’t make a whole lot of noise when people are sleeping.

My floors are all tiled and the last thing I would do before I leave home is put on my shoes because I don’t want to walk about with all that tapping and disturbing people. I open my door quietly and I close it quietly. I close the bathroom door when I am brushing my teeth as not to allow the sound of running water to come through too loud. I don’t talk loud to anyone when I know others are still sleeping - I whisper. I try at all cost to not turn on any unnecessary lights and try my best to have all my things prepared from the night before so I dress in my garage where any sound will not be heard and lights not be seen. You won’t hear me reaching for the glass all the way in the back of the cabinet or fumbling through frying pans at 7 in the morning or 14 o’clock at night.

Now people have come to my house and did the opposite of all the above and I have gone to people’s homes who do the same thing. You’re sleeping and they’re carrying on like it’s a soup kitchen, lights on all over the place, in and out the doors opening hard and pulling it in so it could slam, up and down with hard shoes on and rumbling around in the pots and pans cabinet and calling one another from one area of the house all the way across to another. Maybe it’s because I have kids and at that nosey point in their lives, any little sound caused them to pop their heads up because they felt they were missing something important and had to get up and terrorize my ass after that.

Some of us are very well aware that when we call our credit card companies, Internet providers, computer vendors we are often calling overseas. The company I work for has call centers in India, the Phillipines, Costa Rica and I’ve even heard, Jamaica (still trying to confirm this one). This has frustrated customers that I meet on the field who either complain about a communication problem, lack of understanding of their needs or just outright anger at the idea that “American jobs” are going overseas to foreigners in the name of saving money.

Saving money? Well, the multi-billion dollar companies are outsourcing their tech support services and customer services overseas because they can get away with paying what we would consider pocket change to employees over there. Why pay someone in the United States $15 an hour when you can pay someone overseas $15 a week to do the same job?

Well a new wrinkle has been added to this arrangement. Countries like India are now outsourcing the work given to them from “First World” countries to African countries like Kenya where their workers are paid even less than their Indian counterparts. Of course, Kenya was a former British colony like India so English is also spoken and spoken rather well by the more educated class. When all is said and done, the exploitation still ends in Africa.

Ever walked into some banks and there are like eleventy billion people in line and one or two tellers to serve them? Not only that, as Murphy’s Law would have it, the two people being served have a laundy list of transactions they need to have done. But there’s more. Walking back and forth behind the one or two tellers at the counter are 17 other tellers just walking back and forth acting busy. Then, do you ever notice that one those two tellers always seem to get up to go ask the other teller a question, distracting him or her from helping the customer?

Well I think it is a plot. Let’s blame it on the devil. It’s a plot from hell to cause us to lose our blessing. There we are losing patience and mumbling cursewords under our breaths. You look around and the branch manager is looking at porn on his PC in his office, pretending to be engrossed in something deep - no pun intended. I say we go back to hiding our money under our mattresses.

Ok, so your parents could do nothing about your looks prior to birth, but they sure as hell could do something about your name. We have all heard or seen our fair share of strange names (well at least in our opinions).  You just have to shake your head.

Well there I am watching a recent football game featuring the Florida State University’s Seminoles and I hear the name of one of their players. His name is De’ Cody Fagg. Yeah, ya hoid me! Fagg’s the name.

I am sure the jokes can be plentiful at the expense of this young man’s last name. I mean, how do you introduce the Fagg family? Imagine the grief his future wife might have to endure. “Soooo, you’re married to one of the Faggs, right?” What about his mom screaming at him in the heat of anger - “You’re a real Fagg. Just like your daddy!”

One thing I do know though. If he plays his cards right, Fagg or no Fagg, he’ll be far richer than most of us stiffs when he inks some lucrative contract with a preofessional NFL team, but I can’t help but think he might still cringe when introduced in a stadium filled with thousands who will watch this Fagg prancing across an open filed where he will be slapped on the ass a few times and rubbing up against other men in the course of a game they call football.

So that co-worker brings her newborn baby to work and you take a peek and you are immediately shocked into taking a few steps backwards. You instanly realize God has a sick sense of humor. There, wrapped up in a nice warm blanket is a baby with a face only a blind person could love. So you try to play it off, even dropping a lie or two in regards to the baby’s appearance.

It’s really a fact of life, however. The cute, pretty babies will get more positive attention, probably be spoiled and probably given a longer leash. It’s definitely not fair, but it’s the world we live in.

Being up late at nights affords me the opportunity to see all kinds of commercials, but the ones that often has me nodding my head are the ones dealing with allergy relief and impotence. You never fail to see some happy person or couple prancing around in a field of daisies with this huge smile on their face or faces. Everyone seems so happy while the person narrarating the commercial goes on singing the praises of whatever drug they are promoting, however, at the end of the commercial you hear of all the side effects from dry mouth to resulting heart condition effects to “erections lasting more than 4 hours.” While some woman might be very happy with the latter, such people are advised to call their doctor though.

So I guess it comes to down to one half of one thing and a half dozen of the other. Sure the product being advertised may help the suffering, but perhaps not after having bouts with constipation, headaches, nausea, temporary blindness, temporary madness, etc.

For many of us, when we got to a certain age we began to crave for our independence from our parents. Some of us have had heated conflicts, getting into arguments about said freedom. We could not wait to get out of their house so we could come and go as we pleased, have our own space and get away from their nagging ways or even get away from sharing with other siblings. After all, this is a thing of nature. The young grow up, challenge the authority of their elders, a fight in one sense or another ensues and the young heads off into the world/wild to carve their own path in life.
Now with all of that in mind, why do many of us turn right around a few years later and lock up ourselves in "committed" relationships where we are again back to where we were in our parents house to some degree. We can’t really come and go as we please, we have to answer to someone, explain ourselves, share (love is one thing, but our money, or space, our car, etc) and other such things?
What is interesting is that when these relationship begin with all the euphoria, the idea of freedom and sharing is not considered so much. Each person WANTS to be in the constant company of each other, want to tell each other about our day, willing to share even our cups, etc. Over time (generally speaking), some start to relive what occurred in their parents home. The questions that were once gladly answered are now considered nagging. The sharing now becomes annoying. The 6 hour conversations on the phone have now dwindled to calls asking questions like, "where the hell are you," and "why the hell did you leave the milk on the counter!?"
Humans. I tell ya!

Nestle, the world’s largest food company based in Switzerland, bought U.S. weight-loss company Jenny Craig for around $600 million, according to a CNN report. Now I am not sure if you see the irony in all of this, but a company that aids and abets in many a fat crimes has bought a company that tries to rid people of fat. So how does this work? According to Nestle, “This acquisition will … reinforce Nestle Nutrition’s presence in the USA, the world’s largest nutrition and weight management market.” Huh? This is the same Nestle that produces blubber catalysts like Kit Kat and Nestle Crunch, right? Talk about the cat guarding the hen house. What next? Barcardi acquiring Alcoholics Anonymous?

There is a rumor that there is a wrestler out there from the Spanish wrestling circuit who has a winning move that is, let’s say, a gas. When the time comes for one of his matches to come to an end, he swings his opponent into a distant turn buckle, back first. The opponent, of course, falls to his knees as part of the script, facing this imposing figure of a man. To build up the drama, he looks to the crowd and slaps his rear indicating he is about to apply his pet move which prompts the annoumncer to cry out, “oh no! No perfume letal!” (Oh no! Not the lethal perfume!) With a look of delight on his face, he walks over to his slumped over, half dazed opponent, turns around and plants his butt crack squarely in his opponent’s face, wiggles it around and then rips a fart or a few of them. Once completed, he steps away and the opponent, now intoxicated with the noxious fumes, falls forward in a crumpled heap. The refs steps in and counts the fallen opponent out. The “perfume lethal” claims yet another victim!