badmigraine
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Posts posted by badmigraine
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I've always been bad at things that can be described as
"After you _______, then you are expected to ______..."
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Phoenix Frost!
Google it if you must.
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Ocean, as a Brit you are spoiled when it comes to finding good beer without really having to try. You hit the nail on the head.
It's not easy to find the Good Stuff here. But that doesn't mean there is no Good Stuff. I think a combination of factors such as the huge geographical size of the US, the established and heavy volume-based trucking distribution system that favors giant crateloads of guaranteed peewater sales of Bud and Coors etc., the different liquor license laws in each state, and the fiscal/production volume impossibility of a local brewer mounting a national sales, marketing and distribution campaign...
I left here in '95, returned in '02...things have changed for the better, that's for sure. But it is still not like Europe, where getting a good beer is as easy as falling out of trees.
There are a few nationally distributed "local" type beers, such as Red Hook, Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams, but those are nothing super-special and may not be for everybody.
A lot of the bottled Red Hook and Sierra Nevada that I drink here in Michigan is stale. It has languished on hot shelves for months, even a year or more...drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as a succulent, fresh draft brew in Nevada during my Tahoe trip, and then coming back here to the bottled stuff that tasted brackish and plain, was a true disappointment. I have better luck with bottles of Coopers, from Oz. Much fresher.
Here in the US, you have to know where to look. The type of place to find the Good Stuff changes depending on the state.
Out west it is pretty easy to find a lot of local and good beers in liquor stores and a few grocery chains. You can also look up brewpubs and microbreweries and go round there to drink it draft or buy their bottles. It's hit or miss but you can find some really good beers and/or pick a few reliable tasty types that you can use as everyday drinkers. I had this great Moose Drool beer out in Big Sky, Montana that would have been a standby for me if I lived in that state. Pete's Headstrong Ale was another good one.
Out east, it is a different ballgame. Many eastern states have odd liquor laws...in Pennsylvania, for example, the supermarkets can't sell beer and wine. How stupid. New York City's Brooklyn Brewery makes some super beers, but they are not distributed here in Michigan...I could buy them in Shibuya, but not Detroit. Go figure... I e-mailed to ask why, and they sent me a baseball cap.
Here in the upper midwest, grocery stores and regular liquor stores normally don't have a good selection of this stuff. You are better off finding a specialty wine shop...they usually stock a few good local beers and the bottles are usually fresh because there is a good turnover.
The "Local Color" brewpub is only a 7 minute drive from my house. They have a lager, amber, stout, hefeweise and pilsner all year long, plus a changing selection of seasonal beers. They also make their own blueberry vodka and lemon vodka...it's a fun place to hang out, good food, outdoor seating in summer, etc.
My favorite wine shop here stocks a number of good local brews such as a lineup of good ones from Bell's and also Great Lakes Brewing Co. and the Motor City ales.
None of these would ever be mass-exported out of Michigan, and the same is true of local beers in other states.
I've lived in London, England; Angers, France; Fribourg, Switzerland; near Genova, Italy; and spent several months working and traveling in Germany. I didn't make a big study of it, but of all the excellent beers I drank in Europe, I'd have to say that my everyday drinker would be a pint of bitter in an English public house.
Ocean, what do you like, and what do you miss drinking?
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Last night my wife and I went up to the Japanese video store here in Walled Lake, Michigan.
They had a Fujiwara Norika movie with the typical lurid cover emphasizing breastage and leggage all packed into and busting out of shiny black leather.
We rented it and found to our amazement that it is a kind of US/Hong Kong/Japan co-production done in English! Norika-chan doesn't speak English in the movie though, her lines are all dubbed in by a voice actress with a Chinese accent.
Coolio appears as a kingpin drug dealer from south central L.A. making a big deal with a Chinese gang lieutenant.
This movie is a gas and well worth a watch, for a number of reasons, some of which I list below:
1. Coolio and Norika both use their real first names in the movie.
2. Norika speaking English with a heavy Chinese accent.
3. Rather laughably good chop-socky action and a thrilling final fight scene on a see-sawing piece of window glass suspended hundreds of feet above a busy Shanghai street.
4. Norika and Coolio are both kung-fu experts, as good as Mortal Kombat players!
5. The dress Norika wears in her opening sequence. It is a tight skimpy shiny silver breast-hammock with mile-high leg slits, erotic lace-up front and non-existent back. This dress had me salivating from the get-go and I am not even a Norika fan. WOW!! Three thumbs up, if you know what I mean.
6. The bikini Norika wears in the onsen scene. This skimpy black push-up g-string flimsy bit of nothing could only make her look better if it were crumpled up in a ball next to her stark-naked body...which it IS in the very same scene!! YEAH!! You even get a nice rear-side angle shot of most of one boob. Another three thumbs up.
If you have read this far, then don't stop here...go and rent it. The movie is called "China Strike Force" and here is a link to it:
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1804906431&cf=info&intl=us
This one is an instant camp classic.
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I recommend a "doorbell tax" placard on your front door. The placard will say in perfect polite Japanese,
"50 yen charge for each ring of this doorbell. Ring doorbell to make payment. If doorbell tax collector is not available, please leave your home address and telephone number. Doorbell tax collector will visit you on Sunday evening around dinnertime. Thank you for your cooperation. Let's enjoy to cooperate in payment of taxes."
Howzat? Not for nuthin' did I go to law school.
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I ended up disconnecting the doorbell because I was so tired of those guys ding-donging all the time...especially on Sunday evenings when they think they'll trick you into answering the door expecting a friend at that hour...
If there is no consequence to non-payment, then the tax is actually a voluntary tax.
So you don't have to pay.
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I beg to differ..."microbrews" is an artificial concept develop to contrast beers with mass-produced, national peewater lagers like Bud, Michelob, Pabst, Coors, Miller etc.
In Europe, where beer is at its greatest, they don't really "get" the concept of microbrews...because it has always been that way over there. Lots of local breweries and famous local beers. Thousands of them, actually.
There are plenty of great beers in the US but you have to live here to find out about them.
Just like you have to live in Germany, say, to find out about all the great local German beers.
This is what I call a "happy problem"...
FYI in Japan the national brewers brought about a law change years ago required a brewer to make some huge godawful amount of beer each year in order to qualify for the license to do so. This effectively killed the "craft brew" or "microbrew" maker market.
A few years ago the minimum requirement was decreased, and we saw a micro-brew boom in Japan. There was a market correction and now you see a few good ones here and there.
I love beer!
But I won't drink the national peewater lagers of any place, even if they're free.
Well maybe one or two if they are free, but if I am buying, I spend on what I want!
YEAH!!
MMMMMm, BEER!
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Kamoshika, you are onto something with the alcohol there!
Sometimes it seemed I was floating in an ocean of it...I blame Mogski and also those shiny t-back g-strings I would sometimes see on the booted/miniskirted gals at the dance clubs.
I blame society!!
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Nice try kamoshika, but my 8 hour need doesn't come from something I read, it's what I find I need to function right!
If I don't get about 7:45 or 8:00, then forget it. I am slow and tired and definitely need a nap!
Believe me, I've tried all ways and combinations. Student, athlete, lawyer, loafer, company man, night work.
After 40 years, I know. I need the 8!
Now if this is going to shorten my life, that is even MORE unfair!!!
NOTE:
It is possible that I am sleeping badly, so the total bedroom time is 8 hours but the total sleep time is less. I snore pretty loudly and probably suffer from sleep apnea, which can lower the quality of one's sleep and make one tired throughout the day...
MY NOTHER NOTE:
I'd love to see the demographic analysis of the million people tested in the sleep study to which you link. Do you think it is possible that people who had things to do, jobs to go to etc. normally slept 6-7 hours, but loafers, idle rich and losers who could afford 8+ hours a night managed to statistically off themselves through a coalescence of lifestyle patterns (e.g., more binge drinking, more snowboarding/skiing with disreputable friends, more recreational drug use, irresponsible thrill-seeking and ill-advised sexual choices?
If that is indeed the case, I wonder which group has the better quality of life...
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Oh please. Watching executions is something many people are interested in, even today.
Some countries actually fill stadiums with people who come to view stonings and executions.
You can view executions in the US and books and movies about them have been bestsellers. Check out Norman Mailer's prize-winning bestseller/movie "The Executioner's Song", about the murderer Gary Gilmore. Look at the popularity of the "Faces of Death" vid series in the US. There is a Japanese series that is basically the same.
Throughout European history, hordes of people have gathered with gleeful or morbid curiosity to watch hangings, beheadings, gladiatorial death battles, public torture, etc.
In some African villages mob justice is a fact of life, and lots of people come out to watch it without joining in.
I do not say you and I want to watch it.
I merely state that plenty of people throughout history have been interested in watching it, many still are and do watch it, and this appears to be a facet of human nature.
We may profess disgust or disbelief, but our personal reaction does not change this fact. It's also going to be hard to size up and opine on the death penalty while professing do deny that a lot of people are interested to watch this kind of thing.
To go one step further, why is is "OK" to have a multi-billion-doller movie/TV industry heavy on cop, violence, death, destruction and murder movies/shows that even teens can go and watch...but "sick" to profess interest in seeing an ostensibly evil murderer get executed in the name of the law?
Doesn't this seem backwards to you?
How many murders did we see in, say, the latest James Bond flick? The Matrix movies? Hannibal Lecter, anyone? The Godfather series?
Isn't that sicker?
Oh, that is just fiction, so it doesn't count...well, the interest in seeing people get blown away hardly seems "fictional" even when it is just characters in a story.
But if you don't buy that argument, how about all the movies about true, real-life mass murderers? Real criminals? Real disasters, real wars?
I am not trying to make a deep or detailed point here, all I am saying is we don't need to pretend that only sick people are interested in this stuff.
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I need to sleep about 8 hours per night or I am just dull and out of it.
Other people I know only need 6 hours per night...more than that, they don't even want.
It seems to me that this is unfair, because every day they get 2 hours more of waking life than I do.
Do the math, and this is 30 days extra per year!!
UNFAIR.
They have a better quantity of life than I do...
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"de wa, osaki ni..."
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Leaving aside the "death penalty or not?" question, it has always amazed me that executions are carried out in such strangely complex and often ineptly painful ways.
As said above, the electric chair? Come on. That is horrific!! Who thought up this one? Sheesh. Maybe the intent was to establish a horrible way of dying as a criminal deterrent, but I doubt that it works and you could never prove this anyway.
The gas chamber? I heard that is horrible and not as quick or painless as you might imagine.
I'm no expert, but aren't there lots of quick, painless and cheap ways to execute someone? What about that gas that dentists use to put you under? What about an injection of a lethal dose of anaesthetic so you just go to sleep?
Even a guillotine seems more humane than the electric chair, gas chamber and firing squad.
Sheesh.
And what's with the spate of death-row inmates being found innocent through recently-presented DNA evidence?
Stats prove blacks in the US are several times more likely than whites to get the death penalty for the same kind of crime.
Another angle on this issue is the extreme cost of keeping someone in jail for the rest of their life. This is not cheap, folks.
It was a better solution the Pommies had when they shipped their convicts to Oz. Is there a place we could send the baddies, like Snake Plissken in "Escape from New York"?
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Ender, you'll stumble on other places in Tokyo where you can get all that stuff and more, too. Your problem will change from "unable to find what I want" to "unable to afford all the things I found and now Must Have..."
Check out the grocery store underneath Shibuya Station "Tokyo Food Show". There's a warren of stores down there, but for your reference this is the one located underneath the road separating the Mark City complex from Shibuya Station (look for the suspended glass bridge walkway...under the road below that). They have some stuff National Azabu doesn't, and it's pretty convenient being right under Shibs Stn.
I believe there is one under Shinagawa Stn. too.
Have you tried Kinokuniya Market in Omotesando? That's another place to get all that stuff and they have some US microbrews up in the wine shop on the 2nd floor.
Finally, check out Don Quixote in Shibuya, across from the Tokyu Dept. store "honten" ("main bldg."). In the back part of their grocery section they often have miscellaneous US and European groceries for CHEAP. It's hit or miss, but worth a look. Even if you can't find your groceries, you can stare at all the gorgeous Shibuya girls doing their thing.
If you want to find a nice selection of good beers, including some US micros, check out the 2-story liquor shop near the Udagawa-cho Kouban in Shibuya. That is the round-shaped police box near that game center sort of around the Tokyu Hands area. The entrance to the liquor store is across the street from the "Two Dogs" restaurant ("Two Dogs" being that lemon-flavored malt beverage from Oz).
You may find your pocketbook can't afford a regular supply of US micros. You may want to get used to drinking equally great, often better beers from places like Oz, England, etc. and try some of the better Japanese micros. You can even get a decent amber at all Tengu (cheapo chain izakayas).
If you are truly interested in drinking good beers in Tokyo, then you need to check out this amazing link full of all the info anyone could possibly need to know about craft, micro and foreign beers in Tokyo.
Try a night out with a great US-style burger and US-style micros at the T.Y. Harbor Brewery near Shinagawa Stn...it's exactly like a US brewpub and you can sit out on the dock watching the boats go by. It's near Mogski's company so you may find him there working on the OLs...
Probably the best and most delicious beer night out in Tokyo is to be had at the Popeye Beer Club near Ryogoku Stn. on the Sobu Line (where the Sumo wrestling happens). Read this, then just try to tell me you aren't salivating:
"The largest selection of Japanese microbrews in the world, many of them served on tap. (They even have "tasting sets" so you can try a few at a time.) They also have Belgian beers and "Hair of the Dog" from Portland (considered to be one of America's finest beers) on tap. The food is above average, and sometimes inspired (they bill themselves a "Western-style izakaya"), but the main draw seems to be the beer."
YES!!!!!
MMMMMM, BEEEER!!
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In Tim Burton's original draft, when the astronaut fast-forwarded to the future, he found the entire planet was one big Japanese company and he was the guy who people asked to correct the English in the bosses faxes.
He corrected the English and they thanked him and agreed with his changes. But the next day when he looked to confirm that the fax had been sent, he found that they had put it all back in the boss's original, terrible English, because nobody wanted to make the boss look bad.
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When I first got to my J company in the mid-90s, you could still chainsmoke at your "desk" (just a giant open area of metal desks pushed together so everyone is basically sitting jammed up next to each other in one big room).
Many, many people took advantage of the freedom to smoke and the place was a blue haze of stinking secondhand-smoke all day long, every day.
I recall two amusing anecdotes from those days.
1.
After a few months I saw workers erecting a partitioned area in the middle of the room with special fans and air cleaners over it.
I asked my boss, "Is that going to be the non-smoking area?!"
"No," he laughed, "we read that smoke can damage computer drives, so from now on all computers will be in a non-smoking area..."
I said, "I've read that smoking is bad for people, too, so why don't they make a non-smoking area for us?"
"Ha, ha ha" he laughed, holding up his smoking cigarette with a wry look. Then he turned around and went back to work.
2.
There was a guy named John there who spoke Japanese. He sat next to two incredibly bad chainsmokers: his boss on his right, and a regular salaryman on his left.
These two smokers would each go through 4 packs per day, just sitting there smoking one ciggy after the other.
They were the kind of smokers you sometimes see in Japan who don't appear to be smoking aggressively or quickly, but at some point you notice they always have a ciggy right near their face, held as if it were tweezers, and they are always accompanied by a cloud of smoke.
If you ever see them WITHOUT a cigarette, such as in the elevator or train, it seems very strange, almost like they are naked.
They were the kind of smokers who'd hold the ciggy just near their lips all day, and on every breathe-in, move it slowly into the mouth...and repeat this all day, on every breath. I'm confident in saying that these guys probably only took 50-100 breaths per day that were not cigarette puffs.
Well anyway. Now you know how bad this guy John's life was, sitting in between these two human ashtrays.
He routinely asked them to put out their cigarettes and they just laughed. He avoided his seat as much as he could, doing work at conference tables and in the little libarary on the 2nd floor.
Eventually his boss decided this was inappropriate. In front of everyone in a loud voice, he told John, "stop hiding from work...you need to be sitting in your seat unless I give you permission to get up. You can go to the bathroom but anywhere else you have to ask me..."
John replied in an equally loud voice that he was doing his work and his boss knew it, but that he couldn't stand sitting next to all the smoke, all day long.
His boss said, "that's another thing...stop complaining about other people and focus on your job!"
At this point John had had enough. He announced in a really loud voice, "Look, imagine if I sat next to you and farted all day long. I farted constantly from 8:45 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. And my farts were so bad, they make your eyes turn red and you start coughing and get a headache...when you go home at night, your clothes and hair stink of my farts...even your closet at home begins to smell like my farts... And the worst part of all is, my farts cause cancer. Would YOU want to sit next to me all day? Don't you have any concern for others around you? You are a drug addict, and the most selfish boss in the whole company!"
The boss had no answer to this, and actually cut down smoking for a couple of days, but soon it was back to normal.
John became a hero to the OLs and non-smokers and retains legendary status for this tirade.
A couple other amazing things about John.
He was dating the NHK Italian language lessons chick (this is before Dario and that other bug-eyed guy took over). She was truly hot.
Also, his dad was a university prof of anthropology, and John grew up in a small African village...the only little white boy around for hundreds of miles.
As fate would have it, the very minor dialect he learned there was the same as spoken by many of the Africans who were working in Roppongi.
One night he was walking along with some pals near Gas Panic when some Africans said something or the other about his date in their own language, and he answered them right back. Naturally they were shocked, and in the ensuing conversation/explanation it turned out they actually remembered playing with him as a boy in that small African village. "I lived in the hut near the big tree by the rushes, do you know it?" etc. etc.
Great stuff, legendary stuff.
Almost as amazing as me having dated Lucy Liu back in law school, eh?
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My latest Worst Hangover I Ever Had was just two Saturdays ago. But if you're like me, you've been a position to say "That was the worst hangover I've ever had!" more than once...possibly annually or even more frequently than that.
I would say the essential elements of a good hangover are HEADACHE, NAUSEA, INTESTINAL DISTRESS, OVERALL MALAISE, and GODAWFUL REMORSE.
Here's what I got on my latest one:
1. HEADACHE
The site of the pain changes according to unknown factors, but lately it's hitting me at the base of my skull, where the spine goes into the brain...lately it's an aggressive, unbelievable pain, as if someone has just hit me there with a baseball bat.
If I hold one position for more than 5-10 minutes, for some reason the pain ramps up to unbearable and I have to shift.
After 6-8 hours though, for unknown reasons my right sinus dries out and feels ice cold, and the pain moves behind my right eye a la classic migraine.
That lasts another 6-8 hours, but I am usually trying to be asleep for that portion.
2. NAUSEA
I don't usually get nauseous except in the absoulte worst cases...like last time. When I get like this, any sound, any movement--no matter how slight--results in retching and dry heaves. The heaves are so traumatic that I sometimes pull muscles in my stomach or rib area, but at the time that is almost a blessing because it is a distraction, something new, something fascinating.
As mentioned above re HEADACHE, I have to change position every 5-10 minutes to avoid unbearable head pain...but moving even one inch makes me retch, so you can imagine the fun as I lie there waiting, waiting, waiting for the headache to start ramping up but not wanting to shift position yet because it will mean another bout of dry heaves and bitter bile coming up into the bucket placed conveniently by the bedside.
To move, or not? This psychological torture is perhaps the worst part of it all.
3. INTESTINAL DISTRESS
This could be anything from diarrhea to plain old stomach-ache. But frankly speaking, intestinal distress is not very troublesome to me.
4. OVERALL MALAISE
The dull, fatigued, blasted feeling that there is nothing new under the sun and that hiding in curtained rooms under warm sheets is the only place worthwhile.
The sudden lack of interest in outcomes of professional sporting events, magazines with smaller fonts, and exercise.
The need to figure a way to wipe around the toilet and curl up in the company bathroom stall using toilet paper rolls as makeshift pillows.
And--please don't tell me I'm the only one--an almost teenage preoccupation with thoughts of sex, breasts, butts, lingerie and very naughty scenarios peopled with attractive gals from work under rules like "it can involve any item that began with the letter 'v' in that house I lived in in 1992...hmmm...Vaseline...Vacuum Cleaner...Vibrator...Vegetable...Videotape..."
In fact pondering scenarios like this is the best medicine for me to get through a nasty hangover...better even than pain pills...
5. GODAWFUL REMORSE
This may be the most uncomfortable part of any hangover. You have an overall sense of failure and having made mistakes, and you are regretting the loss of this new day to a puking migraine hangover.
Your girlfriend or roommates are disgusted with you as all plans for the day have gone into the toilet.
No phone calls will be made, no bills will be paid, no books read, no shopping done...you'll be an invalid for the full 14 waking hours of that day.
BUT, in addition to this general bad feeling, while lying in your cocoon of suffering, you will start to flash onto things you did or said while drinking the night before.
They may come to you as static, embarrassing images of yourself frozen in some posture of drunken semi-awareness, just after having said or done something extremely wrong (e.g., a fuzzy memory snapshot of you handing your meishi with your company name, your own name, your job title and company phone number to some 20-year-old gyaru and her friends while they eye you with a mixture of fear and derision as if you were a sort of talking circus dog holding a ray gun)...
They may come back as tags of regretful words that poured out and can never be taken back (e.g., "I'LL DO A SHOT WITH EACH ONE OF YOU LOSERS, COME ON , COME ON, BRING ON THE WHOLE BOTTLE!!!")...
Or they may even be physical traces of completely-forgotten events, such as a badly sprained finger (er, probably) from falling off a bike on the way home, or scrapes and bruises all up and down the knees (er, probably) from slipping on those metal stairs...
If you're Mogs, it might even be waking up in a hotel next to a girl who'd seemed attractive the night before, but in the harsh morning light is revealed to be a hangover multiplier.
In the case of Mogs though, to his credit, he usually makes the best use of what is available under any circumstances, even hangovers...
As for me, if it is a work day, I use an old lawyer's trick to get the most out of my hard-won hangover: I make all my most difficult calls on these days. I used to save up all calls where I had to be a hard-a** or a tough negotiator, and them make them one after the other on the hangover days...a headache, a gravely voice, impatience and utter cynicism...these are fine tools for any lawyer's toolbox and I highly recommend them as a way of justifying a night on the town.
Well, what about you and your hangovers?
Do tell!
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Yeh mogs is right...this grand-daddy lawyer had a good legal sense and loads of experience, but he couldn't use a computer and couldn't type either.
In the negotiations he'd say "Let me take a stab at drafting that provision..."
Then he'd sit at a table by the window with a pencil and a big yellow legal pad, slowly writing in longhand.
The full negotiating teams would be on a break or just sitting around waiting for him to finish.
Eventually, he would complete his masterpiece, then pass it to ME, a lawyer, to type up. His writing was almost illegible, it was notoriously hard to read and even in his own firm there were only a couple of secretaries who could decipher it.
I'd type up a rough version as best I could, then print it out with blanks where I couldn't make out the words.
Then, I'd have to track him down in whatever place he'd wandered off to, sit him down with the longhand draft and my typed version, and watch him pore over it, explain the illegible words, then make more longhand changes and revisions.
Then I'd go back to type up the 2nd version, print it out, track him down wherever he had wandered off to, get his corrections again...and so on 3-4 times until we'd finished the job.
For a half-page paragraph of legalese, this rigamarole would often take 2-3 hours. He couldn't use e-mail, so he'd get a constant stream of faxes that would have to be brought to him in meetings or negotiations...then he'd write out a longhand response for someone to type up.
I once caught him dictating a long letter over the phone to his secretary in America...we got a bill for his time, then had to pay for the phone call too.
His billing rate? $570 per hour.
Boy were we getting ripped off.
This guy was totally helpless when out of his office and away from his secretary.
IIIII, there are lawyers who can function without computers, and lawyers who can use computers but shouldn't, in order to maximize their efficiency.
But this guy was a prime example of someone who needed to sit down for an hour and learn to use one.
I wasn't the only one acting as his Tokyo secretary either. It took two or three people to take care of him on his trips...
I'm a lawyer myself, and it bothered me to have to sit there as this guy's secretary, when I had plenty of legal work to do.
I complained a few times, but got nowhere.
The irony is, that company brought ME in in 1995 saying "we are tired of using this old grand-daddy and want to change..."
It was really galling. Here this guy comes and takes me away from my productive work, and uses me as a typist at the company's expense, then sends us a bill for $570/hr. for our trouble?
Sheesh.
Eventually there WAS a sea-change when the company was partially taken over by Germans. In keeping with his normal practices, he royally pissed off the management of that German company on more than one occasion...we eventually got a letter from their vice-president complaining "Who is this strange man from America, and how much are we paying him?"
When the answer came back "several million US$ per year", we got rid of him and used other, younger lawyers who could type.
A final note on computing for lawyers... I've been doing consulting work here in Michigan, and two weeks ago I sent off an important e-mail with 3 MS Word attachments...it was a Japanese company's final comments in a $300 Million joint venture.
Two weeks later, we'd heard nothing, so called up to ask why they were ignoring our comments.
Turns out they never got them!
"Well, what happens is, if an e-mail has attachments, our servers think it is spam or virus-laden, so it does not get through the firewall..."
"Uh...OK...uh...but you guys send US e-mails with attachments all the time..."
"Yes, we can send out attachments no problem."
"Uh...well, do you want me to fax these comments?"
"No, we need the computer file so we can make a markup and print clean copies for upper management..."
"Uh...OK...uh, well, what do you propose?"
"Can you send us a floppy disk by regular mail? They sometimes get damaged in shipping, so can you send two copies, each in separate envelopes?"
TRUE STORY
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Er, actually I just have a big mouth and drink too much coffee in the a.m., too much beer in the p.m.
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Ta db!
Good info.
I am thinking my gal is right on the edge of OK vs. too small for Flows... We're definitely going to have to try them out in the store before buying.
It would be madness to do otherwise!
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Does the Infopop system allow admins to see who has posted the most characters?
We've already got a handle on who has posted how many times, but we don't yet know who writes the most text!
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Yes please db!
And thanks Ray!!
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Don't sweat it, danz.
How about a nap in the bathroom to cool down?
Just tell them you were "in a meeting".
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You tell 'em Ocean...after almost 8 years at an old-line Japanese automaker, I had forgotten what a normal person did at work every day.
It's amazing.
Living here in Michigan, I see there are actually people who go to work and make decisions and get things done, then leave around 5:30 to go home for dinner and family.
What selfish, arrogant bastards, eh?
Inconceivable.
PS - You forgot mandatory second-hand smoke inhalation and zero support from the much-vaunted "OL" gals who are so pitiably discriminated against.
EXAMPLE:
"Uh, this is the closing letter for the urgent $690 Million transaction. I'm running the closing in the next room and there are lawyers, investment bankers and govt. officials all waiting for me to get back in there right away... Sorry to bother you, but can you tell me how to send this out by Federal Express or something like that? It needs to be there in two days...I wrote the address/phone for you on a separate sheet..."
"You have to do that yourself. What is 'Federal Express'?"
"It's kokusai takkyubin..."
"Takkyubin? You mean you don't know how to use takkyubin? [smirks like a spoiled brat] Well, call information and ask for the number for Kuroneko. They deliver you know..." [OL runs away to hide in bathroom, abandoning her urgent work of making name labels for old King Jim file folders]
Now repeat this experience 50 times per year and you have just understood a tiny, tiny bit of what it is like to work in a J company.
But to be fair, I used to hide in the bathroom too. At first I went in there to cry, but after a year or two it was just to sleep.
I had this special way of wiping clean the floor, then curling around the bowl and using toilet paper rolls as pillows.
Not a bad nap, actually. The snoring in the next stall usually drowned out any noises I might have made getting into position.
Norika-chan and Coolio--Together!
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
Markie, it most certainly wasn't a Japanese accent!