This is what I felt like doing on Sunday night, I just couldn’t find a bit of branch to whip my car with.
I have a new car, you know that lovely shiny new Volkswagen Golf that I picked up the other day. Well on the weekend I thought I would take it for a spin to a mates place to show it off. He has one too, but mine is just a little bit more special than his… Well at least I think it is…
Here is my new baby
Isn’t she lovely, btw all my cars are girls…
So what has you so upset with her Capt?
Well my darling daughter rang me up just as I was about to get home from my trip. So I thought I’d talk to her on my hands free in the car, rather than calling her back when I got home… So we had a lovely little chat about things, talked about her impending visit with her two brothers, and how she is going at school. Then I hung up and did what you normally do when you want to drive off, I turned the key and tried to start the car…
Nothing happened, well apart from it briefly coughing a bit, then promptly stopping…
I tried again, cough cough, then nothing…
I was starting to get a bit frustrated, there was plenty of diesel in the tank, the battery seemed ok, and it had just driven 50 odd kilometres, not a problem at all.
So I took stock of things, thought maybe I was doing it wrong, not holding my tongue in the right direction, I crossed my fingers and gave it one my go… Cough Cough and nothing. I also noticed this funny error message on one of the displays in the car, ‘Key not recognised’, sounded funny as it was the key I had been using all day.
So I resorted to reading the manual, I was getting pretty irritated by now, no explanation of this error message. Then I decided I’d take the key out of the ignition, call for help, and wait outside the car.
Well no, my car was having none of that, it wouldn’t let me take the key out of the ignition…
AARGH!!!! The last straw… I was starting to fall out of love with my new mistress (my VW).
This was me… Except my teeth aren’t nearly this well looked after.
So I sat locked in my car, waiting for the roadside mechanic to come and fix the car… 20 or so minutes later a cheery chap for the local roadside assist company (NRMA) turned up to see what the problem was…
He listened to my tale of woe and first off said the obvious, “you haven’t had this car very long, have you”…
I replied, “well no, just a couple of weeks”.
Then he informed me, “Well you should have asked someone how to operate it before you drove it out of the showroom”.
I said, “it’s a car, I can drive already”.
But he said in a soothing voice, “this is a Volkswagen, it’s not just a regular car”.
Here is the NRMA van… Or one very similar
“well ok” I said “what should I have asked about”
He then pointed out that to remove the key you must have the car in Park (gear)… Otherwise it won’t let you (take the key out)…
Bloody Germans, they make their cars so safe, that we aren’t allowed to do anything dangerous, even if we wanted to. You see I already know that the gearbox won’t let me change gears except when its safe to. It turns on the wipers automatically, it self-parks, it beeps numerous warning sounds when I don’t put on my seat belt or lots of other things.
You’d think they actually won the war by all the bloody rules they have (look out I’m going to cop it from my ancestors for that one).
“So” I asked him “why won’t my car start?”
“I’ve no idea mate” he replied “you have to be a bloody computer guru to understand one of these cars”
“So what do I do then?” I asked rather frustrated
“You do what you do to any misbehaving computer” he laughed “you reboot it”
So the mechanic opened the bonnet, unattached the battery leads, waited for a minute or so. Then he reattached the battery, and amazing, the car started first go…
There is the battery box on the right of the motor at the back
He then told me that since I had rebooted, without saving my data, all the cars settings had reset themselves to the factory defaults… And before I could ask, he told me that since its a car there is no way to save the settings, it’s just too bad…
“Damn” I said “and I had just put in all of the radio stations… another wasted night reprogramming everything.”
I turned to the guy and said “Since when to Microsoft start making cars?”
“Yeah” he replied “you just got the blue screen of death, I suppose, except there is no computer screen”
The dreaded ‘Blue Screen of Death”, I used to have this kind of issue all the time with my Windows 95 computer, I just never thought I’d have it with my car…
Ok, so I’ll admit it, the honeymoon period with my new car is now officially over…
Capt. Savage
(Now knows how to reboot a car, what will I have to reboot next?)
CRUEL DEATH: Lilibeth Warby’s much-loved cat was killed with a bow and arrow.
Why are you writing about the killing of an innocent and much-loved family pet Capt?
I drove over and visited my mum today, and after doing some chores for mum (there are always chores with my mum), I sat down and had lunch with her. After lunch I picked up the local paper, the Central Western Daily, and came across this very gruesome picture and the story below which really disgusted me. Regardless of what you may think of cats, this one was someone’s (Lilibeth’s) cherished pet, and no animal deserves to be slaughtered like this.
The attack also happened in a town that I used to live in, and loved living in, Orange, a beautiful leafy city surrounded by orchards and vinyards. To think that there are sick little cruel bastards running around there now, hunting pets with bows and arrows… And I apologise for my language, but this article got under my skin a bit.
Help catch despicable person
By NICOLE KUTER Aug. 11, 2012, 4 a.m. RSPCA chief inspector David O’Shannessy said without information from the public they have little hope of catching the people responsible for shooting a cat with an arrow last week. The cat was shot at 9.30am on Wednesday, August 1 by people in a silver four-wheel-drive. Mr O’Shannessy said the crime was premeditated and could carry a jail term of up to five years. “It’s concerning there are individuals out there capable of doing this,” he said, “There’s that element of premeditation where they have called the cat over and shot it,” he said. Mr O’Shannessy said the RSPCA was working closely with Orange police to find the people responsible.
Sergeant Brenden Turner of Orange police said they would conduct forensic tests on the arrow. “We’ll be testing to see if there are any fingerprints on the arrow and if there are we’ll try and match them,” he said. “It could take up to a month before an outcome.” Sergeant Turner said police had viewed the CCTV footage of the incident but were unable to get a number plate. “We can’t enhance the footage anymore to see the rego registration number,” he said.
Mr O’Shannessy said the incident was high on their list of priorities. However he said without witnesses there isn’t much they can do. “We are heavily reliant on someone who knows something to come forward,” he said. “With situations like this it’s common that the person who did it would tell someone about it.” Mr O’Shannessy said crimes of this nature were not uncommon. “It does happen from time to time,” he said. “This is a crime of serious animal cruelty.”
I hope they catch the sick idiots who did this and that there is a bit of justice for this senseless attack. I also hope that Lilibeth is offered a new cat, there are plenty on offer, my little Tabitha came from the RSPCA, and she has settled in and become a valuable member of the Capt. Savage family. I also think it’s reassuring that the Police are involved and that they are actively seeking the bastards who did this.
What do you think of this sort of cruelty, is a 5 year prison term enough?
Hi, I’m posting this on behalf of a person who bugged me to friend. This friend works in a government department as a public slave servant. They like a cup of coffee now and then as their work is SO BORING and the coffee helps them stay alert. So they usually take in a litre carton of milk now and then. They clearly label it as theirs. The problem, it seems, is people steal it.
At first it was small amounts, not worth worrying about. Now it seems wholesale. I’m convinced that someone on the floor is bathing in his milk like Cleopatra, because it disappears just like that.
My friend had taken to marking the level of milk with a texta. People got around this by either:
Rubbing out the mark badly and drawing a new one in.
Adding new marks.
Worst of all, putting in a bit of water to the milk, I suppose to replace the milk they nicked.
In the last case my friend has twice seen the same co-worker remove a cup full of milk which that person hides away, then add a cup full of water to the milk.
Lately, someone has simply taken to stealing the whole litre of milk. They work in a large open plan office of about 100 people. They are not sure who has been doing it. They would like to find out. As the office is in a secure area, use of cameras isn’t allowed, mainly because what we do is so BORING.
My suggestion was that my friend just lock their milk in their desk and be damned if it is warm. Or just live with the occasional theft.
But I am sure many of you have far more devious, humorous, downright evil creative ways of catching a milk thief. Please remember though that any method should not incapacitate a person or affect their permanent ability to work, because that might get my friend in hot water.
Concerned Co-worker
—————
Dear Concerned Co-worker
I’ve had to deal with this same issue at my workplace, luckily we are allowed to carry weapons, so the perps don’t often go back for a second slurp of milk if we catch them at it.
But after some thought, here are my top ten suggestions, gained from an extensive survey of the office where I happen to work … And they are in no particular order…
1. Label the milk as Breast Milk, that’ll stop most people, apart from the non-weaned variety of thief
2. Just occasionally drink straight from the container in front of people. Write on it “My herpes is in remission, Help yourself”
3. For something more boring, pouring it into a different bottle would probably work. Something unappealing like butter milk or low-fat soy or even as goats milk.
4. Send out a memo asking why people stole your horse semen… Whoever vomits is the thief.
5. Put some drops of red food colouring, it will not change the flavour and it will look very unappealing.
6. Buy a bottle of milk and leave it in the sun for a day or so, then place it in the fridge for the thieves to make themselves very sick on!
7. Write on the bottle (I have spat in this, use if needed). Just be aware that some clown is likely to amend it with “That’s OK, so did I” what do you do then???
8. Get passive aggressive and put a note on the bottle or even email the whole organisation stating said bottle is yours and taking it is theft.
9. Laxatives? …. too far?
10. Final suggestion, learn to drink black coffee!!!
Capt. Savage
(Against all forms of milk theft, especially when it’s his own)
When can the use of waterboarding ever be justified?
Well it’s week 19 in Karmaland, and the tale of Karmic excellence continues between a wicked temptress (aka Rose) and a frustrated accountant (aka the Capt.).
So why the waterboarding picture Capt.?
Well if it was an alternative to horrendous torture of a corporate planning day, well I’d give it serious consideration!!!
Today as you may have guessed, involved me and the majority of the staff in my office being dragged kicking and screaming, to an offsite team building, corporate planning, love-in. As usual we had a pep talk from our senior manager and there was a ‘facilitator’ there to assist us (the chief torturer).
Motivational sessions to me are like a day spent gorging of sugar, you get a temporary feeling of sweetness and smile a lot, but at the end of the day all you get is a little bit fatter from all the food, none of the management talk, the ‘sugar’ makes any real difference.
Yep, listening to ‘motivational’ speakers is like drowning in sugar…
What I hate the most is that you practically drown in the insincerity and that you have to be nice to people that you spend most of your day trying to avoid. Then the ‘facilitator’ decides that we’ll all swap seats to ‘mingle’ and you then end up sitting right next to the very same person you just walked to the other side of the room to get away from. You know the guy who only wants to talk about his projects, his issues, his ego…
By about lunchtime I was hoping that my own stomach would force itself up my throat and strangle me, to save me from this torture session.
You also start to wonder that instead of trying to ‘motivate’ those of us who are ‘demotivated’, why don’t we just FIRE the ones who are instead, and only pay those of us with a brain…
I had more fun doing the research for this little blog post than I had all day, and I bet the ‘motivational facilitator’ earned more for that one day than I do for the whole week…
So now that the day is over I have to endure the inevitable post-mortem, the discussion to identify the ‘outcomes’, the ‘deliverables’, and then develop the new ‘plan’. You know the plans that managers make, that they sit up on the wall behind glass, next to the sign that says ‘in case of emergency or upper management inspection, break the glass’. Because to the best of my knowledge the majority of these plans end up sitting in some corner gathering dust. Maybe people who think of these plans should be treated like zombies and shot on sight…
This should read ‘in case of management zombies’
Makes me cry when I think of how much sincere insincerity I had to muster to be seen as a useful contributor to the day. I should have taken the same option as half of the invitees, called in sick or had to attend another important meeting…
Ok, to show how much my mind was on the job at this planning day, I managed to send half a dozen emails to my best friend, arrange 2 test drives of new cars, spend 20 minutes talking to one of the lucky employees who avoided the dreaded planning day, and hid in the toilets as often as possible.
Only plus for the day?
They had lots of mints to chew and the food at lunch wasn’t too bad, had some nice vegetarian wraps and fresh fruit.
Apart from that I would have rather been tied naked over an ants nest in the middle of the desert!!! I would have even volunteered to go on a Japanese game show, had to be better.
Maybe I would prefer the planning day to this!
Here is an example of something I found just then as I searched for DE-motivational posters on my iPad, also while still at the planning day. And this one would be really funny and maybe I should hang over the toilets at my workplace… I’ve seen some funny sights there girls… But maybe not in my work unit as I’d have to look at it too.
Yep, nothing upsets us guys as people commenting on our equipment while we are doing the business, one of the advantages of being a woman, you get your own private cubicle…
So how did you go at Karma Gathering Capt.?
Well this week I think I deserve some credit for being unbelievably nice to my manager and the ‘motivational’ speaker today. Managed to stay there the entire day, didn’t insult anyone (in their hearing) and was nice to my arch nemesis and my boss (felt like being sick).
Maybe 5 points?
And I have volunteered to become a respite foster carer for disabled children. I still have to do the training course and pass the reference checks etc. But I think I should get some credit for just volunteering.
Maybe 20 points?
Rose has claimed only 5 points this week, so I ever so slowing catching up on Rose, maybe I could be reincarnated as a earwig by now.
I’ve got to admire her for lasting the distance with her pensioner, I personally used to feel sick after listening to my dad’s war stories. But I still joined the army anyway.
Capt. Savage
(I’d rather see the end of the world before attending another motivational team building day)
The word "farnarkling" has become firmly entrenched in the GOF family lexicon. From the verb "to farnarkle" it was coined in Australia back in the days when television pictures only came in black and white. It means to waste time, fart around, or otherwise indulge in an unproductive occupation.
For a brief time it was frivolously redeployed as the name for a team sport where underwear was worn on the outside of normal clothing. This was however only a temporary perversion of its true etymology.
When Globet was born I tried my very best to ensure "farnarkle" was the very first word she would annunciate to the world. It was not to be. She was a miserable failure in that regard, merely siding with the masses by uttering something predictable like "mama" or "ice cream" through the dribble and bubbles.
A word which rolls so beautifully off the tongue obviously…
Maybe for once I’ll let the numbers tell the story, Rose still climbs ever closer to her 500 points of Karmic Nirvana, will she slip up soon? Who can tell, but with someone as interesting as Rose we are all bound to hear about it on either of her two blogs LivingInFairyland or ButImBeautiful.
Me, well I’m going to continue chasing Karma and my own little battle for enlightenment.
So Today, What a Frustrating Day!
Today was a challenge, a very frustrating and challenging day. I’ve been working on reviewing and making recommendations of a major report that will soon be considered by a major Central Government Agency for public comment and release. I and several of my team, as well as a number of other managers, have been slaving away like drones on it, working our typing fingers to the bone, researching, consulting, and drafting the response to this position paper.
And like some kind of endless waterboarding exercise we have been subjected to a marathon of continual redrafts by the various layers of management that infest my workplace like some kind of ravenous bug bladdered beasts of hell…
(Me, or what I probably looked like, during the process of continual redrafting, ARRRGH! #$@##@$#$)
In the end what did it all this redrafting come down to? What caused all the angst and endless redrafting?
Well it certainly wasn’t the content of the final recommendations, not my teams’ critique of current policies, procedures and legislation. NO, it all came down to semantics, stupid weasel words that managers feel have to be put in so that no report ever actually says anything.
So is this document finished?
Heck no, it’s going through one more redraft, I find out tomorrow what needs to redrafted next… May the final reviewer suffer a brain haemorrhage, or maybe their own stomach rises up their windpipe and throttles them, and then someone else with some common sense justs decides to sign the damn thing off! There is always hope 🙂
So NO I didn’t earn any Karma today, especially not for what I would like to do to my management team…
Capt. Savage
(Almost tempted to go Postal, if only Australia had liberal gun laws… And YES I am only JOKING)
Ok the world is a pretty strange place, and maybe I need to be a bit accommodating for the desires of others, but really, why would anyone want to tour a beautiful place like Jenolan Caves while listening to a tour guide speaking in Klingon. Ok I find this pretty unbelievable, my old boss who used to be the boss of the Jenolan Caves house would be turning in his grave. Well maybe not quite as he is still breathing, but he may not be soon if he found out about tours to his beloved caves being described entirely in Klingon.
What the hell is the world coming to!
The scary thing for me is that a language was actually invented just for a TV show that only really ran for a couple of seasons before getting canned. And that apparently the bible has been translated into Klingon as well. There are more speakers of Klingon alive today then there are people who can speak Latin, come on NERDS, and get a grip please!!!
Here is Warf (yes he’s Klingon) caught in the middle of touring Jenolan Caves.
I suppose there are worse things that people could be up to, and that this is a pretty harmless idea.
What next? Will they be adding Klingon to Google Translate?
Ok, Rant over… But if you want a few useful Klingon phrases, go to http://www.kli.org/tlh/phrases.html. And by the way, all you Klingon Nerds, well why don’t you all naDevvo' yIghoS (go away in Klingon)…
1. Capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
2. Manifestation of a high mental capacity: He writes with intelligence and wit.
3. The faculty of understanding.
4. Knowledge of an event, circumstance, etc., received or imparted; news; information.
5. The gathering or distribution of information, especially secret information.
I have this friend of mine, and she is fantastic, lovely, interesting, intelligent, but ever so slightly arrogant about relative intelligences.
So what do I mean by arrogant about intelligence?
Well I think I am no dope, at least I think I am relatively intelligent when compared to my fellow passengers on planet earth. Maybe I am arrogant? No, I try to be humble about my own intelligence, because I realise there is so much I don’t know, and so much of what I do know is based on the assumptions of others. My friend is always questioning, not a bad thing to do I think, but what gets my goat is the constant comparison of my intelligence to others. To me the obvious implication is that my intelligence is less than these ‘other’ people, as if there is a relative benchmark to compare intelligence, like a Wheels Magazine ‘Car of the Year’ comparison tool, but for intelligence.
It hurts to be continually told that you are not as intelligent as someone else, even if you know that the person is not consciously being insulting. What hurts most is that the comparison is based on what those mysterious other benchmark ‘intelligent’ people ‘know’ or have ‘learnt’.
In my opinion what each us knows is small proportion of all knowledge that we individually know almost nothing. Also, basing intelligence measurement around someone’s ability to punch holes in someone else’s argument or knowledge is in my view not intelligent, but smacks of intellectual arrogance.
But what is intelligence anyway?
Well here is what a couple of famous ‘intelligent’ people said about it…
Einstein said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
Socrates said, “I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.”
Types of Intelligence
There is this really great discussion which kind of echoes my views, that there are multiple types of intelligence with each of us has different levels of intelligence, within each type of intelligence. You can get a full discussion of that at http://bigthink.com/.
Dr. Howard Gardner was interviewed by BigThink.com about the types of intelligence, below is an extract with a link to the full interview.
Question: Is our culture biased towards one type of intelligence over another?
Howard Gardner: Well the theory claims we all had these eight intelligences and people are different from one another in their profile of intelligences and there’s no necessary link between one intelligence and the other. It also is based on the assumption that we wouldn’t have these intelligences if they haven’t been valuable in human evolution.
He argues that these various forms of intelligence wouldn’t have evolved if they hadn’t been beneficial at some point in human history, but what was important in one time is not necessarily important in another. “As history unfolds, as cultures evolve, of course the intelligences which they value change,” Gardner tells us. “Until a hundred years ago, if you wanted to have higher education, linguistic intelligence was important. I teach at Harvard, and 150 years ago, the entrance exams were in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. If, for example, you were dyslexic, that would be very difficult because it would be hard for you to learn those languages, which are basically written languages.” Now, mathematical and emotional intelligences are more important in society, Gardner says: “While your IQ, which is sort of language logic, will get you behind the desk, if you don’t know how to deal with people, if you don’t know how to read yourself, you’re going to end up just staying at that desk forever or eventually being asked to make room for somebody who does have social or emotional intelligence.”The full interview is at http://bigthink.com/ideas/16280
Another key concept that Dr. Gardner discusses in this interview is what is stupid.
Question: If there are so many ways to be smart, what does it mean to be stupid?
Howard Gardner: The first thing I would say is that life isn’t fair and some people are going to be strong in a lot of intelligences and some people aren’t. I think of the intelligences as a set of computers. If you wanted to summarize my theory in a sentence, we used to think there was just one general computer in here and if you were good at one thing, you’d be good at everything. If you’re lousy in one thing, you’re smarter across the board. Stupid across the board. I think the step I took, I would call it an advance is you can be very smart with language, average with music, lousy with understanding other people, or vice versa. There’s no necessarily correlation between the two.
I think stupid has two very different connotations. One is that your computer isn’t very good. For example, I’m not biologically very good spatially, but the truth is with a map and a position determiner and some special attention to the environment I can do perfectly well, but I suppose if there were a test of spatial intelligence I wouldn’t do very well.
So, one meaning for stupid is it takes you a long to do what it takes other people who are smarter in that intelligence. I’m very musical, especially when I was younger, I heard something once, not only could I remember it, I couldn’t forget it. So that’s smart in kind of a technical sense.
But the other sense of stupid, but I think is much more important, is how do you go about leading your life? Do you know what you’re trying to do? Can you achieve it? When you make mistake, do you make same mistake again? Or do you simply stick in a rut? That has to do with your own understanding of yourself, what you’re trying to achieve; what I call intra-personal intelligence. I much rather to have somebody who was stupid in the first sense but had a good sense of how to negotiate their way through life, than somebody who had the computers going full blast but kept knocking their head against the wall.
I make fun of Mensa—I don’t know a great deal about Mensa, that’s the high IQ group—but I say, “To get into Mensa, you have to have a high IQ, and once you get in, you spend your time congratulating people who are in Mensa with you.” To me that’s a pretty stupid way to spend your life.
I agree, simple academic measures should not be the only measure of intelligence
Emotional Intelligence
Another way of understanding intelligence is by understanding the concept of emotional intelligence.
Big Think also interviewed Dr. Daniel Goleman, author of the bestselling “Emotional Intelligence,” and spoke with him about his theory of emotional intelligence, which comprises four major poles: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Here is an interesting question I intend to pose to my friend next time I see her.
Question: Are women more emotionally intelligent than men?
Daniel Goleman: Well, I get asked that question in a different way, which is, are women more emotionally intelligent than men? And you have to remember that emotion intelligence is a range of abilities, self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy, social skills. Women tend to be better than men on average at empathy, particularly emotional empathy, sensing in the moment how the other person is feeling and also, at social skills, at keeping things feeling good between people in a group.
Men, on the other hand, tend to be better on average at self-confidence, particularly in group, and at managing distressing emotions. But what’s very interesting is if you look at leaders who were in the top 10%, there’s no difference between the men and the women on any of those variables. In other words, you have a whole human being. So I would say that on average, there probably are differences men and women in this domain of ability. But as people develop their skills, as people become more effective, they pick up strengths in areas that they need.
So the Arrogance of Being Thick
So am I relatively thick? Or are others thick? I think that people who think they know more than anyone else or know everything are really thick. As I said at the beginning, none of us know even a fraction of all that there is to be known. Even worse are those people who assume that their knowledge is unchallengeable, especially when it is sourced from just one source, my basic issue with religious beliefs, they are absolute and based on interpretations of a single source document.
As far as I can see, nothing in the universe is absolute, or certain. What we know about everything is based only on what we know now. Truly great thinkers realise that and understand how knowledge should be based on what we can prove, explain, demonstrate, but balanced by the realisation that the next experiment or discovery may change our understanding completely.
Are scientists arrogant?
Well, here is a discussion about being thick as a brick… I found this interesting as it discusses why science and the views of scientists are not arrogant, or invalidated just because their views are based on theories and assumptions. True arrogance for me is living in the belief that your knowledge is in some way the only answer that others are thick because they don’t get it, i.e. your view or your assumptions.
So am I less intelligent to others? No I don’t think I am, as intelligence is based on so many different skills, types of knowledge, abilities. What I think makes me intelligent is that I can recognise that I don’t know anything (self awareness), that I have an enquiring and open mind, and that I am willing to accept the views of others without Arrogance.
I agree with Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman, intelligence has multiple dimension, and that intelligence is an amalgam of each ‘intelliegence’ not just an IQ score, or how smart you are in social discussions, or how charming, or how you can punch holes in arguments and belittle others views. No, true intelligence is having an inquiring mind, self-recognition of our own limitations, and the ability to listen to others with empathy, tolerance, and a willingness to learn.
Capt. Savage
(I know almost nothing about almost everything, and I am so glad I can see that)
So here are my thoughts… And this was not my original blog post, which was well… kind of Savage, and it’s still smouldering in the corner as I type!
So instead how about I tell you a ‘once upon a time’ story…
I may have been at a pub, and I wound up at a table where three gorgeous girls were sitting around complaining about, and don’t be shocked! – Blokes. In particular they were complaining about pickup lines that had been used on them in at a pub (a bar for US people) a few nights before.
One woman said: ”This guy comes up to me and says, ‘haven’t I seen you someplace before?’ how lame is that?”
All three women looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
Another one of them said: ”This bloke says to me, ‘your place or mine!’ he just had to be kidding.”
(This could have been them, but it’s not, cause I never have a camera when I need one)
Now I’m sitting at the end of the table quietly sucking on my beer, watching them laugh about guys trying to chat them up, and just wondering if they had even noticed I was breathing. I was feeling bad for the guys and a little bit intimidated too, as I’d been thinking of trying my own classic ‘can I buy you a drink’ line on at least one of them.
Now I realise that there are certain hardships that only females have to put up with, like childbirth, waiting in lines to go to the toilet, and a crippling, psychotic obsession with buying shoes and makeup. Also, females tend to grow up quicker, so that by age 7 they are no longer able to appreciate the simple pleasures of farting loudly in public, whereas we (males) can continue to derive huge pleasure well into our 80s.
(It’s tough being a women… Here’s one tormented individual)
So I can see maybe it’s not easy being female.
But I reckon nature has given us males the heaviest burden of all: the burden of always having to… Make the First Move, and risk getting Shot Down in Flames. I don’t know WHY males get stuck with this burden, but it’s true with almost all animals (wait until I’m finished girls). If you watch the documentaries, you’ll see that birds, crabs, spiders, clams – well it is ALWAYS the male who has to take the initiative. It’s always the male bird who does the courting dance, making a total moron of himself (I can soooo identify with this), while the female bird just stands there, looking all aloof sticking her chest out, thinking about what she’s going to tell her girlfriends. (”And then he flapped his wings a bit! Like I’m supposed to be impressed by THAT!”).
Male insects have it the worst. Let’s consider the sorry case of the male mantis: ”After the mating, the female mantis bites off the male mantis’ head, and then she and eats it.”
(How cruel is that!!! Thank god women haven’t cottoned onto this nasty little after sex habit)
I live in Australia, my balcony is basically a giant singles bar for all sorts of insects and things. On any given day, I’ll see some poor male thing out there making their most suave moves, trying to crack on to whatever they are chasing. They seem to think that females really go for that sort of stuff, but I have never once, in 4 years of watching, have I seen a female respond (but I have to admit most of the time I don’t know which is which however). But the animals who are being persuaded, often sit there looking bored, while all around them males are mucking around an going on and off like defective warning lights.
(Male birds trying their best, but as usual, the females are playing hard to get)
Every now and then you’ll see some weird TV news story about some animal that has for some reason has fallen in love with, and decided to relentlessly to try and mate with, something totally inappropriate, such as a tractor or even the farmer. This animal is ALWAYS a male. Watch this YouTube clip and you’ll get the idea…
(Yep us males, even the animals, just can’t help ourselves)
My point here is that, in matters of the heart, we males have the brains of a walnut. No, wait! That is not my point. My point is that perhaps you women could cut us blokes a little bit of slack in the move-making process, because we are under a lot of stress (and I know this cause I’m a guy and I’ve been there done that). I vividly remember when I was in primary school, and I wanted to talk to a girl, let’s call her Jane and ask her to sit with me, and before I walked across the playground, I spent maybe 28 hours rehearsing exactly what I was going to say. So when I actually made the move across to her, well I was pretty smooth (yeah right).
(This was the plan…)
‘Hello…?’ I said. ‘Can I sit next to you?’
She looked at me as if I was some kind of horrible toad or something, and told me to go away. I was totally crushed. I would have dropped out of school and lied about my age and joined the Army, if they would have had me (BTW I am now an Army Officer, see, girls I was totally crushed).
(Here’s a typical crushed school boy)
That is the awesome power that you women have over us men. I hope you understand this, and the next time a guy walks up and uses some incredibly lame, boneheaded line on you, I hope that, instead of laughing at him, you will remember that he (and I am too) under extremely intense pressure, and wanting to impress you enough so that you might want to get to know him better and maybe eventually, perhaps within the next 15 minutes, let him jump on you and have wild sex (if only). Making it easier for us blokes will enable the survival of the human race, which believe me is the only thing that we males are truly concerned about (honestly, we don’t get ANY pleasure or satisfaction out of sex, WHAT SO EVER).
(That’s us men for you, always being gentlemen, never in it just for the sex… NO WAY)
In conclusion, let me just say to all females everywhere, on behalf of all males everywhere, that you are very beautiful and your eyes are like two shining stars, unless you’re a female fly, in which case your eyes are more like 2,038 shining stars. So please give us a chance.
And if you’re not interested, could I show you my etching later?
CS
(A gentleman to the very end, well until he gets his end in)
(Ok, maybe just maybe this blog is the biggest piece of crap I have ever written… and this is what us blokes really want from women, so why not girls, I know you’d love it really)
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