I watched the first, say, 30 episodes of Rosie O'Donnell's daytime TV show. Weird, I know. But it was funny and fresh back in the day, and she shot koosh balls at the audience, and koosh balls rule. I thought to myself at the time, "If I'm ever famous, when I'm doing the talk show circuit, I will go on Rosie's show, and be like, I saw all the first episodes of your show. I am not a poser, or whatever. Also, can I have a Koosh?"
Around the same time, watching a lot of talk shows, I noticed that people with a thing to plug had a very clear path ahead of them. Laid out by publicists and their ilk. You had to go on all these shows, and some had good interviewers (Letterman (we didher show like Jonathon Ross; it'll be HUGE)) and some had terrible interviewers (Has any guest ever gotten a full interesting sentence out in the presense of Regis Philbin?). You'd see someone on a popular morning show on Monday, and by Friday they'd pop up after midnight. I remember thinking to myself, "If I'm ever famous, I will go on the best shows first, rather than save them for last. So, for example, Leno and Letterman and especially the Today Show could wait, Imo goin' on Conan day one."
All that to say, omygosh you guys, Andy Richter's gonna be on the Tonight Show with Conan. Squee!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Rhetorical question, short hand for same rheotrical question, rhetorical answer, tell a friend.
First posts back from long blog hiatuses are supposed to be about the events of the interim, supposed to apologize for it being so long since the last post, tell you stories about how the author thought a lot about writing, but life got in the way at first, and then the habit fell away, and you, dear readers, should be grateful that the blog has continued at all.
Whatever.
Besides one justifiable dalliance on my birthday, this blog has, I admit, lain dormant since the day I got waylaid on the way out of the cubicle row with lunch on my mind and sent to a meeting where we were told by a man with a creepily thick neck whose position in the power-structure of my brain is still "company stooge whose unintentional Simon Pegg movie quotations asked me to shill our now terminal Previa out for the company" that everyone in the room was getting laid off. Among these fine people were the company party planning committee (one woman), the only man I've ever seen actually enjoying long conversations with real estate agents mid-tech-support-call, and the guy who took more calls on average than any other tech, and who once spent 20 minutes chewing out an AOL technician who refused to allow a user the basic email functionality to receive emails that they themselves were sending from another email account because it "might be spam" (SIR, this woman is sending the email, please do your job as an email provider and allow her to get emails that she herself is sending! She is telling you that she wants to get a particular email, there is no more basic function of your job than to let her do this!), among plenty of other fine people. So, the creepy neck guy who had just waltzed in to say his little speech about the importance doing his dead wife proud by winning Village of the Year again, or whatever it was, I wasn't really paying attention, waltzed right back out to go lean over a desk in a glass-doored office next door and look important with the new execs. That morning they'd also just laid off the entire executive team, which was a nice gesture to the rest of us, I'll admit, but I'm not sure what good it actually did. Then again, I don't really care how the company does anymore. Surpisring, I know.
And that day set in motion an over-3-month ordeal of trying to collect unemployment benefits while emptying what paltry savings we had, and relying quite heavily on the kindness of strangers and friends (Thanks, friends and anonymous donors . . . theinds and thanonymous donors.) to be able to do basic things like eat food and not get kicked out of our apartment for failure to pay the rent.
This morning, we drove to the credit union and used our fancy new state-mandated-financial-institution-I-don't-really-trust-issued debit card to deposit the daily maximum in our checking account, the rest to follow via electronic transfer in "up to three business days".
So, although it was not intentional, ala my eight-month, post-teaching job search sabbatical from Halo 2, the day of bloody finally depositing the first money from the unemployment office I've been paying into for, say, 13 years, seems like a good day to get back to this blogging business. I can't promise it'll be as frequent, as I used to blog almost exclusively during the work day (while still resolving more calls on average than any other technician, I might add) but it's back.
Oh, and now I TOTALLY wish I had taken that license plate cover for the Previa. The back bumper is falling off, the front right blinker cover is shattered, and the rear end screams like a dying animal with a really high pitched, whining, moaning scream whenever you drive more than 30 MPH. Its going to just die on us someday soon unless we shell out a couple grand. Nothing signifies my confidence and belief in the fidelity of that real estate software company I used to work for than that mini-van.
Whatever.
Besides one justifiable dalliance on my birthday, this blog has, I admit, lain dormant since the day I got waylaid on the way out of the cubicle row with lunch on my mind and sent to a meeting where we were told by a man with a creepily thick neck whose position in the power-structure of my brain is still "company stooge whose unintentional Simon Pegg movie quotations asked me to shill our now terminal Previa out for the company" that everyone in the room was getting laid off. Among these fine people were the company party planning committee (one woman), the only man I've ever seen actually enjoying long conversations with real estate agents mid-tech-support-call, and the guy who took more calls on average than any other tech, and who once spent 20 minutes chewing out an AOL technician who refused to allow a user the basic email functionality to receive emails that they themselves were sending from another email account because it "might be spam" (SIR, this woman is sending the email, please do your job as an email provider and allow her to get emails that she herself is sending! She is telling you that she wants to get a particular email, there is no more basic function of your job than to let her do this!), among plenty of other fine people. So, the creepy neck guy who had just waltzed in to say his little speech about the importance doing his dead wife proud by winning Village of the Year again, or whatever it was, I wasn't really paying attention, waltzed right back out to go lean over a desk in a glass-doored office next door and look important with the new execs. That morning they'd also just laid off the entire executive team, which was a nice gesture to the rest of us, I'll admit, but I'm not sure what good it actually did. Then again, I don't really care how the company does anymore. Surpisring, I know.
And that day set in motion an over-3-month ordeal of trying to collect unemployment benefits while emptying what paltry savings we had, and relying quite heavily on the kindness of strangers and friends (Thanks, friends and anonymous donors . . . theinds and thanonymous donors.) to be able to do basic things like eat food and not get kicked out of our apartment for failure to pay the rent.
This morning, we drove to the credit union and used our fancy new state-mandated-financial-institution-I-don't-really-trust-issued debit card to deposit the daily maximum in our checking account, the rest to follow via electronic transfer in "up to three business days".
So, although it was not intentional, ala my eight-month, post-teaching job search sabbatical from Halo 2, the day of bloody finally depositing the first money from the unemployment office I've been paying into for, say, 13 years, seems like a good day to get back to this blogging business. I can't promise it'll be as frequent, as I used to blog almost exclusively during the work day (while still resolving more calls on average than any other technician, I might add) but it's back.
Oh, and now I TOTALLY wish I had taken that license plate cover for the Previa. The back bumper is falling off, the front right blinker cover is shattered, and the rear end screams like a dying animal with a really high pitched, whining, moaning scream whenever you drive more than 30 MPH. Its going to just die on us someday soon unless we shell out a couple grand. Nothing signifies my confidence and belief in the fidelity of that real estate software company I used to work for than that mini-van.
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