Well, the big silly election is happening as I type this. And the results should be interesting, to say the least. Back 10 years ago I did a little work during election season for the Guilford County Board of Elections. I had a bit of a lull at work and a very nice lady I worked with named Libby was doing work for the GCBE (she handled absentee ballots) and they needed help with this and that and Libby got me this brief job with them. I mainly worked entering voter registration cards into a database for 8 or 9 hours a day - sheer drudgery. After a few days of only doing this menial, although important task, the guy running the place, a George Gilbert if memory serves, was sufficiently impressed to give me the expanded task of answering incoming phone queries. And that's where the job got interesting. In between entering the voter registration data, when a phone would ring I'd pick up and say, "Guilford County Morgue, how can I help you?" Almost no one laughed when I did that. As you can imagine, some of the calls were from the most clueless would be voters that ever could have been dreamed up in the history of western literature. My favorites were the folks who wanted to know who was running for president. Seriously, some people did not know the 4 candidates on the ballot - Albert Arnold Gore, W, Nader, and my man Harry Browne (the Libertarian candidate). Once I'd list the 4 choices on the NC presidential ballot, many of these idiot callers would question why they couldn't vote for William Jefferson Blythe yet again. I tried to explain the 22nd Amendment to these confused possible participants in the messy world of democracy; alas, my efforts tended to prove fruitless - they bore no fruit, not a single orange, or tangerine even. I also enjoyed members of the Democrat Party who dialed me up thinking they were getting the Guilford County Democrat Headquarters. They'd request Gore signs to put up in their yards or spew mindless hatred about W - weird stuff like that. I quickly had the Democrat Party Headquarters number memorized and urged the fools to call them instead. Some weren't so willing to hang up too fast. I had one angry old woman on the phone for 5-7 minutes trying to convince her that I did not work for the Democrat Party (if she'd only known the complete lunacy of that suggestion...). One of my favorite recollections of working at the GCBE was that the ladies who were full-timers there couldn't have been nicer to me. They must have been under the impression that I never got a home-cooked meal (which I rarely did) because these ladies would bring me food almost every day - soups, roasts, stuff in crock pots, breads. It probably didn't hurt that other than George Gilbert, their boss, I was the only guy working there. And being that I was much younger than anyone else there (not quite 30) they wanted to mother me, I guess. It's funny because RumbleForeskins is just a block down W Market across the street from the GCBE and every Saturday as I drive past the Guilford County Courthouse on my way to watch Gameplan I think about those crazy would be voters, the way too nice ladies, and the utter stupidity of the whole election process.
Someone asked me the other night about the World Series. I told the guy that if they play a World Series and no one cares, did it ever really happen in the first place?
I'm at the point where I could certainly use a haircut.
I've been watching this season of The Office online, usually a few days after an episode airs. And I gotta tell you, with the exception of the season opener and one other episode, it has been pretty bad. That whole thing with Andy and his play or when Andy and Darryl start their band or even last week with the Halloween stuff - not funny, painfully not funny most of the time. I know this is Steve Carell's last year with the show and I really think they should go ahead and end it next spring. It's sad to see the show going down this road. One bright spot on that Halloween episode was seeing Angela dressed as a very sexy nurse in one scene.
Blah, blah, blah...
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