BULLET POINTS!
I was on the train last night, sans book, (A major oversight on my part. As a general rule the maximum acceptable length of a subway ride without reading material or an iPod is 10 minutes) and so, found myself reading the advertisements (I wish I could pull off say ad-VER-tis-ment) on the walls. Nothing against Dr. Zizmor, but it's rare than any of these signs stokes the intellectual fires, you know? Yesterday, however, was an exception. One ad struck me as being so blatantly absurd as to render it paradoxical; kind of like how people sometimes think Keannu Reaves is deep. The ad was, as 58% of all advertisements now are, for 'man problems'. It read, in part, "Don't let Impotence Ruin Your Sex Life". It's probably safe to assume that you all know what impotence is, but I think this makes for a good opportunity (excuse) to bust out some of the euphamisms I've been thinking up.
Mr. Softee
Lincoln Logless
Frightened Turtle Syndrome (FTS)
Droop Mountain (no really it's a thing http://www.droopmountainbattlefield.com/)
Anyway, I'm reading the sign and I'm asking myself if they really mean what they say or if they just don't know how to say what they mean, because as I'm sure you've figured out as well, it's kind of impossible for impotence not to ruin your sex life. Sure you can do things to make yourself potent again, take pills, hire someone to travel back in time and take naked pictures of the 20 year old Jennifer Love Hewitt for one. Which reminds me, if anyone owns a time machine I have a favor to ask of you... and a digital camera you can borrow. All that being said, those are methods to combat impotence, to undo the problem. This ad, on the other hand, wants you to 'get past' the whole impotence thing, work around it, find a backdoor (that's an unfortunate pun) to the problem. It's like telling your puppy he can knock up as many poodles as he wants, the day after you take him to get fixed.
Role playing - I recently had a training seminar on public service. I don't know why, I find the public reasonably serviceable, though I'd prefer it if there were fewer of them. Still, in our seminar we were required to play the part of an angry person from the public and an unhelpful public servant. Apparently, this was supposed to help us understand the difference between providing full service and minimal service. Now, I'm a full service kind of guy, which is why in my role play I offered to meet my customer at her place and discuss her problems over a nice bottle of wine, or if she preferred, cheap tequila. I've been told I still have a job, but it's unlikely I'll be asked to role play again. So much for the city really being about providing satisfaction.
Due to someone's mistake (I've been having some trouble figuring out who I can hold responsible for said mistake, as I am obviously excluded from the suspect list, so for the time being I'll hold off on assigning blame and just leave it as 'someone') I didn't actually prepare for work yesterday. This isn't to say I didn't work, I did, I just found myself unprepared even after all that work was done. What happened after though was almost as surprising as an impotent man being told to enjoy his sex life anyway. My day went smoothly! Literally, no obstacles presented themselves, no one called me names or looked at me the way they did the one time I got that guy deported by accident. It was amazing. I have to say, I'm now tempted to try it out on a regular basis. I call it 'The Reverse Raincoat Effect'. You see, as with an umbrella, the odds of it raining on a given day is inversely proportional to the number of people wearing a raincoat or an umbrella, the more people making use of one, the less likely it is to rain. So, I theorize, it is with work, the more prepared you are for every eventuality, the more questions you preemptively answer, the more problems you create. As Newton said evey action has an equal and opposite reaction. They call this the preservation of momentum/motion, I call this the preservation of problems. Every solution has a consequence and every consequence potentially creates a new problem. So, if you do nothing, if you don't prepare, don't answer a single question or solve a single problem then, according to the theory, you can avoid creating any new ones. So, who wants to be my guinea pig? What? I need this paycheck!
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