The Drunken Blog

Circuit City, where I worked for 4 years up until last October, just cut 3400 jobs nationwide. In the store that I used to work at (with about 60 employees total) 11 were cut. They decided to cut everybody that was 51 cents over the wage cap for each specific position. A lot of these people were left over from when they originally fired people in 2003 when they switched from commission to hourly.

A friend of mine who had been there for 7 years was laid off. He received 4 weeks pay as severance. The sad thing about his situation is that he was a PC tech but he switched to customer service in order to help the store. Well, customer service has a much lower cap than a PC tech does. They did not give him the opportunity to switch back.

Many of the people laid off were career workers. At the store I used to work at, out of the 11 people laid off, 9 of them are over 40. I’m sure they will be able to find another job, but not paying as well (which wasn’t that well in the first place), and of course they lost all of their benefits.

I’m sure a lot of you don’t really want to hear about these individuals, and I can’t blame you. But, you should know that this will definitely affect your experience at Circuit City. Not only will they be short staffed, but the best and most knowledgeable, veteran associates will no longer be there. Everybody that the young guys went to when they had a question are gone. So, you can either expect a lot of made up answers (if you can find somebody to help you), or a lot of associates simply saying they don’t know.

Even after having worked there for four years, I have to go to somebody that I know for help, I get too frustrated with the normal associates. At my local store, the people to whom I can now rely on are mostly gone. Rock.

Read about it: Forbes.com

Ever since I left the safety net of school I have come across a problem that I’m sure is not unique to me, and that is that I suck at gauging the age of girls. To be sure, this problem was around in college and before as well, but it’s really only a problem when you go out to the bars. In class you were never far off because you had a point of reference.

Having a point of reference makes a huge difference in terms of being able to guess somebody’s age. In grade school, for example, if you guessed and were off by 6 months, the receiving party would be offended. I mean, if they are in your class, they are most likely in the same grade as you, and if they are in the same grade as you, they were probably born the same year that you were.

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There are certain situations in life that are called “sobering experiences.” When used in that context, the speaker is not talking about being really drunk and having the experience take the point of vomiting to being able to pass a sobriety test with flying colors. He is usually talking about a somber experience that brings you back down to reality, and by that I mean makes you sad if you were happy.

I won’t be talking about that kind of sobering experience, I am going to talk about the kind of sobering experience that could save you if you see the blue and red lights turn on behind you.

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While it is true that on a map the North and South may appear to be part of the same country, they are inherently different.  If you wanted the easy way out, you could call all Southerners rednecks, I prefer pointing them out as WT (white trash) in public – they haven’t caught on to that yet.

In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t associate myself with the South, even though I am technically from a southern state – Virginia.  However, I like to think that Northern Virginia (right outside of DC) and Virginia Beach (the biggest city in Virginia) are exempt from the “South” status of the rest of Virginia.  However, I do get a good look at the South’s drinking habits, and I can make up some stereotypes of the North in terms of drinking habits.

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Competition is what makes the world spin. In business it forces companies to innovate, to create better products, better distribution models, or better advertising. If a company doesn’t have a leg up on its competition, it is going to flounder. The same can be said about personal competitions, like the Olympics. Sure those guys are in shape, and they could kick your ass without training in any sport, not even just the sport in which they compete. But they wouldn’t have pushed themselves to be as good as they are unless they had some serious competition. If you’re the best and there’s nobody close to you, why should you try to improve yourself further?

I enjoy winning, who doesn’t? But when it comes to fighting for a girl I hate competition. It doesn’t even have to be real competition; I’ll just roll over, or more aptly, walk away. You see, while competition is good for the consumers, it’s hard for the people that have to compete. So, while it’s good for a girl to have two guys competing over her, the guy would much rather not have to compete, it’s a lot less work that way.

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Did you know that it’s impossible to remember a complete dream? You see, you only remember a dream if you wake up in the middle of it. So all those people out there that say that they don’t dream, do – they just don’t remember any of their dreams.

I, on the other hand, seem to remember all of my dreams, and I had an interesting one last night. Of course, the pinnacle of dreams is the lucid dream, a dream in which you realize you are dreaming and are therefore able to do whatever you want. I can only recall one lucid dream, and as soon as I realized I was dreaming, I started flying, it was awesome.

Last night, however, I had a dicul dream. Yes, dicul is a word that I made up, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know what it means. A dicul dream is a dream that controls you, the opposite of a lucid dream. So in a dicul dream, for instance, you may dream that you’re peeing, and then wake up and realize that you actually wet your bed. If you do that, you have problems.

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In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day I would like to take a few steps back and tell you about a story that happened 12 years ago to the day. I would have been 10 years old and in the 5^th grade. No, that’s not when I started drinking, but it would have been a good a time as any to start because there was a big party going on.

My elementary school, Candlewood, every year hosted this little shindig called the Sock Hop. It’s as much of a school dance that you can have in elementary school. Really it’s more of a fair type of environment. The entire school is open and different rooms have different events. The gym had dancing and limbo, I think. The cafeteria had a hula-hoop competition and a cake walk. Basically, it was the most fun that a 10 year old kid could have at something called a dance. At this point in my life I was too naïve to be scared or intimidated by going to a dance. Or perhaps it was this dance that secretly scared me for life (both figuratively and literally) regarding school dances.

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Drunken conversations are amazing. You can take the most mundane subject that you could ever think of and make it interesting. Of course, it will only be interesting to you and to whomever you are speaking (they also have to be drunk) – to everybody else you’ll sound like the couple of retards that you actually are.

But, there is value to be taken out of these conversations. While it’s true that during the actual conversation you are most likely making a fool of yourself, sometimes you actually do manage to hit gold, and if you can remember that conversation the next day, you might even have something to talk about while you are in the process of getting drunk next time.

Today I was killing time because I took the day off from work by looking at somebody’s profile on some website. They listed their height as being 5’ 4”ish. This brought back a drunken conversation that I had with Doug, where he convinced me that you can add “ish” to anything and be correct. So, if that girl claims that she is 5’ 4”ish, she could be anywhere from 4’10” to 6’. If you saw this girl in person, you may call her out on the fact that she is not actually 5’4”, in which case she would justifiably say that she never told you she was 5’4”. You would, of course, concede defeat.

The ish factor is a great thing, it works in so many circumstances. What time are you guys heading out tonight? 8ish. Of course, we all know 8ish is actually 9:30, but in the rare circumstance where you the girls are actually ready when they say they will be, you may leave closer to 8. If you have a guy friend that shows up at 9, expecting to leave at 9:30, you can tell him that you said 8ish, and on this freak occasion, the moons aligned and you made it out at 8:05.

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I absolutely love this time of year. I was going through various debaucheries in which I have participated throughout my life, and a lot of those happened during this part of the year. It makes sense for why that would happen, it’s been a while since drinking heavily around Christmas, and the weather gets nice.

You may call me an optimist, but this is my favorite time of the year. The days are getting longer and longer, it’s getting warmer out, and we all know the warmer it gets, the less clothes that girls wear. I think the standup by Robin Williams pretty much sums it up.

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Cancun was an interesting time, to say the least. It was the Spring Break trip I took my junior year of college, right after the second hot tub party which nearly got everybody kicked off campus. The week long debauchery in which we participated was a nice break from the standard debauchery in which we normally participated. I should preface this by saying that there are a lot of things I don’t remember from that trip, and some things that I have been sworn to secrecy over. Unfortunately for you, those are the best things.

I remember that our flight was at 7am; a direct flight to Cancun. We got to BWI at about 4am. We were among the only people there and we really couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t get our bags checked or our e-tickets or anything, there just wasn’t anybody there working yet. I’m pretty sure we just napped until we finally got on the plane. The flight was uneventful.

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