Norm Van Maastricht | The Norm's Spot

From The Bar ~ The Mating Dance ~ The Mighty Hunter Speech

The Mating Dance is a series of observations of human nature in pursuits of (more or less) romantic endeavor They are not in any particular order. That would imply rationality .

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The Mighty Hunter Speech.

This is the verbal resume’ a guy goes into when he see a girl he like and wants to be with.
In it, he describes what a catch he would be for the lass should she decide to accept his affections. Somehow, even tempered with what should be maturity, it doesn’t really improve from the way he felt about himself when he were twelve.
It has changed little since humans first started talking.
With variations, it goes like this:

~/~
Hrok is Mighty Hunter
Hrok is rugged. Hrok is Smart! Hrok is so smart he has to deliberately cover part of it up so people aren’t so jealous.

Hrok “can handle himself” implying invincibility in the field of battle…
Hrok may brag of his herd and cave. Of course few people have herds anymore nor do they live in caves but the sense is the same. Hrok will have a great car or truck. Some Hroks have “Harley’s”.

If he is not living at home with his parents Hrok will claim to have cool digs.
Hrok either has money or will have some soon.

~/~
Sometimes he can do tricks like bend aluminum cans his bare hands or belch at will.
All this to convince you, if you are a female, that you would be wise to want to bed Hrock
This last sentiment is not often actually voiced.
Not over the first drink anyway.

The “Hrok is Mighty Hunter” speech may not get delivered all at once. No. Not at all.

It is inserted into conversation whenever it can be managed, a section at a time. If the guy really likes the girl it may take several encounters to trot out the whole speech. Sometimes it is delivered more than once for reinforcement. But they all have one and I think it’s safe to say that, given time, every guy’s ‘Hrok is Mighty Hunter” Speech”, including upgrades, is constantly at the ready.

From The Bar ~ In The Beginning… A Prologue

Another segment of a project The Rise and Fall of a Saloon In The Latter Part off The Twentieth Century. These excerpts are not chronological. In fact very little logic prevails…

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                                 It was the best of times; it was the worse of times…
Today is tomorrow’s History and soon will exist only in old newspaper files and Halloween costumes.
                                                                                          ___ The Write Down Book
A writing describing what goes into the making of a Saloon… a primer, if you like…
But it is also being a Reminisce of Saloon Life in a burg in California.
A saloon called ‘The Bar’
It wasn’t much to look at from the outside but then most small to middle sized towns aren’t known for fancy exteriors on their saloons. In Nevada, maybe, but not in a town like this. The town was in what is called “The Bay Area” of California between San Francisco and San Jose. Someone asked why anyone would choose to live in such a boring town and some wag said “If you had a big rubber band and hooked one end on San Francisco and the other end on San Jose the skinny part would be this town.” Meaning that one would have access to the bigger places with none of the hassle and expense of actually living in the larger city.
The Bar was a saloon located in an industrial zone one block from the entrance/exit to a major freeway. And as McDonald’s Ray Kroc said, it’s ‘location, location, location’ so from that standpoint it was a good site. Good, because of the accessibility to a major freeway and good because industrial zones don’t have neighborly complaints because it is not a residential area by law.
It was in a state issue ‘utility building’, one of those flat, single story, unimaginative cement block things sitting on a utility concrete slab and painted a utility color with a utility parking lot.
It was smack in the middle of a block boasting a gas station at each end and an auto dealership next door. Since the building had seen some usage as a Department Of Motor Vehicles it was forever known as the ‘Old DMV Building.’   Odd that it should end up as a drinkhouse. Evolving from a place where one got their license to one where events could end up with their license getting suspended.

It is 1975…
The Beatles have disbanded… Members of the Watergate scandal are being prosecuted… Vietnam is still a war zone at the start of the year but the nation is sick of the war and it is winding down. Hostilities will end in April. The Picture Of The Year will be a black and white shot of the last helicopter leaving the American Embassy in Saigon…
Television made light of drinking in 1975. The Dean Martin Show, with Dean’s air of being borderline tipsy has just gone off the air but M*A*S*H was on with Hawkeye and his still and Cheers was a show based in a saloon that would be along in seven short years..
People and society hadn’t commenced the full demonizing of tobacco yet. Smoking was not only permitted, it was ubiquitous and those who disliked cigarette smoke were considered a minority or so it seemed at the time. Tobacco companies had a huge advertising budget and spent as if money made them invulnerable and they would never be brought up short.
AIDS wasn’t a problem…yet…The Pill was There but Herpes other forms of disease was always a possibility.

But just what is a saloon, anyway?
When they hear the word ‘saloon’ Americans visualizes something like “The Long Branch” in Dodge City or Tombstone with swinging batwing doors, dancing girls and a rinky-tink piano. Well, yes, there were such places but ‘saloon’ is rooted in ‘salon’ that being a large room for public gatherings. Of course a saloon is more than that. In California you could get a beer/wine license with very little cost or process. You needed to post a notice on premises visible from the public that you intended to indulge in beer and wine sales. This notice gave neighboring businesses the opportunity to protest such sales if they so chose. But this does not make your business a saloon.
For a real saloon you needed a liquor license, a strictly regulated, limited issue, hard to get, very expensive piece of paper. Only a few new issues were made annually from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Agency (referred to as the ABC) yearly and those were assigned by lottery. If you got a license via the ABC you paid a reasonable fee to the state.
If you owned such a license you could sell this privileging piece of paper and in those days you could sell it for far more than you paid the state for a new issue because a properly run saloon could be a goldmine.
A saloon, then, is a drinkhouse… a tavern… a place where booze and beer is sold. generally over a bar, sometimes with food.   Some even had live music.
It was said in an obscure ‘How To Run A Saloon’ type book that all saloons were owned by drunks or reformed drunks.
The Bar was such a place…
But there was another, even more important thing that made a saloon what it was and is still their reason for existence even today…
Without lonely people
a saloon cannot not exist…
                                                                              __The Write Down Book
~/~
“The Bar” … which is what it colloquially was called…
was, after all, a petty, small time, neighborhood bar that featured live
music owned by a person who some say had no business being anywhere near alcohol in Large Quantities.
The pressures and debaucheries of a place like, say Carol Doda’s might be more interesting to the general public but The Bar could have been in your own town…
~/~
The Bar? Never heard of the place… naaaah, I don’t like hanging in bars.
Sure I’ll stop by for a drink with you. You’ve asked often enough…
                                                                          ~/~
And that’s how it starts.
That’s how most people found The Bar at first. Either by invitation or by seeing it in a chance drive by due to the location, location, location, right off a freeway interchange.

Marijuana, in small quantities, had been newly made a misdemeanor in California and largely ignored as long as you kept it outside…
Preferably under the [Getting Loaded ] sign in the back of the building.
The idea was to be a little discreet…not be so foolish as to blow pot smoke at any gendarmes who might be passing through the parking lot.
In 1975 if you got pulled over and failed a field sobriety test you spent the night in jail and could get a fine as high as three hundred dollars and know that you would get a ribbing from those who were your ‘drinking buddies’.
There is something about watching something grow, a business known as a saloon in particular, because that business is one that is based on the human desire to voluntarily imbibe alcohol and put their dignity at risk in the process.
Now this is not a new thing. When humans learned how to ferment just about any plant material and make alcohol from it, their imagination and creativity knew no bounds. Had they applied their collective focus to medicine instead of getting sloshed, disease in humankind would be very nearly eliminated.
Archeologists find saloons in every civilization they unearth. They’re mentioned in all the holy books, usually with an admonition to avoid such places. Even at that, most holy books can be bent to sneak in a drink or two if the interpreter is clever since holy books never seem to say the same thing to all readers. Even though religion seems to forbid the imbibing of alcohol since it Makes Much of this from various pulpits On the other hand, some of our finest wines and liqueurs, even champagne, are made by or were conceived by monks.
This same sentiment, to avoid the saloon, is echoed by most mothers but it seems as ineffective as the holy books since most saloons thrived at least they did for up to and including most of the twentieth century and certainly did so in America.

So what’s the big attraction.? A new bar in a dumpy looking building. What was it that made The Bar different from any other in a dumpy looking building?.
Two words…
The Bar…

The actual bar itself…
In the 1800’s Brunswick-Balke-Collendar made pool tables. Very ornate pool tables and they also made beautifully figured and carved back bars and bars custom fit to any area you chose. They used a method of molding sawdust and wood fiber to resemble wood carving and were very capable in using veneer and between the woodworking and mirrors installed, they could take a plain, nondescript room and make it look like a palace. When you sat at such a bar or stood facing it you were transformed back to the elegance of the Victorian Age. An elegant Brunswick bar was like a wooden Siren singing to sailors from their rocky trap….
~/~
Man what a piece of work that back bar was… graced with nicely made faux Tiffany style lamps suspended….
Maple, cherry, mahogany just what kinds of woods were in there was a source of constant genteel argument.
Brunswick…the bowling ball people…
“Edwardian” was the model… great example of how a back bar, finely crafted can look… If it were done in marble instead of polished dark wood it would look like an altar for The Holy Mass…some say it was so inspired…
If this is truly the case it is an altar to Mammon for in the center was an antique NCR cash register
The Bar was proud of its Bar…and rightly so…
It was a gorgeous piece of furniture featuring a large central mirror flanked by four wooden Doric columns, two to a side, each pair separated by two narrow vertical mirrors. The long top section and columns had tiger stripe ‘flaming’ of darker rays in the warm brown overall color. The framing of the mirrors had beautiful examples of woodworking moldings and the central figure was a “carved” lion’s head.
Many saloons have fancy back bars but this one also had the original bar section included, a singular work of elegance hard to find today.
It was a bona-fide antique that had been lovingly restored by T.O. and friends.
“T.O.” Is what the patrons called the guy who owned the place. The name is not important for this tale. It could have been anything. “T.O.” could mean “the owner” so let’s leave it at that and call him T.O.
When T.O first got the bar it was separated into its various pieces and had been painted white and stored for some years in a warehouse after it’s previous owner, a hotel, had gone belly up.
It became a labor of love to restore the thing. T.O. and some friends took it, stripped it of every vestige of paint and sealed and varnished it.
When it got installed somehow the main mirror was broken slightly…a ten inch crack in the lower right corner of the glass. No one would admit just when and how it happened. Some say it happened during an after-hours party when T.O. was showing off how loud the company stereo could go but no one knew for sure or, better put, them that do know ain’t talkin’.
It was beautifully lit at night by three hanging lights, faux Tiffany lamps, controlled by a dimmer switch. There was one at each end of the bar holding a single globed milk glass and one twin globed lamp over the middle of the bar. All three lamps had Tiffany style stained glass shades.
The bar top itself was made of solid, nearly three quarter inch mahogany. It was well over a foot wide, a size and thickness difficult to find nowadays.
As you faced the bar, the left end curved and went flush into the wall. The right end did the same but it had a “gate” being a flip lid, (that had been removed) to allow the bartenders egress to go behind the bar. This left a single seat by the side door at the right end where the bar section went flush to the wall.
This bar did not have a brass foot rail. Instead it had a twelve inch foot ledge overlaid with 12” marble tiles. The tiles were installed with donated labor by a tile mason so he might use it as a demo for his quality of workmanship I don’t know if it paid off for him but he did a beautiful job of it. The old tradition of having a raised area for one to put their foot harkened back to the old days when stools were not provided. The foot rail helped ease ones back by allowing one to change their stance occasionally while standing for long periods.
The Bar had stools however. The bar was surrounded by eighteen red leather covered barstools of sturdy manufacture, stout enough to support the heaviest patron and heavy enough to discourage their use as a weapon in any future disagreements. It had two waitress stations each with brass stanchions and each with faux marble slabs which made the sliding of trayloads of drinks over the mahogany spill rail easier.
This was a bar designed to be a working bar.
It was gorgeous.
It was beautiful.
It looked like a movie set. With such a bar, taking up almost one entire wall of the main room, you immediately forgot you were in a nondescript concrete box.
Those cement block walls were covered with smooth but unfinished redwood boards further adding to the illusion of ‘place’.
As you entered the building The Brunswick masterpiece was on the left wall.. On the right back quarter was a dance floor made of hardwood tiles that was of a decent size. It had an honest to god stage raised almost three feet off the floor, very sturdily built and carpeted…It was large enough to comfortably hold a four piece band and their gear and had a three foot fold-away extension which could be implemented for extra room onstage when needed.
It had a good stage lighting and sound system for its day, run from a section of rail which divided the room in half. The rail, more like a fence, allowed free passage at both ends and through its center to give some separation to the room. and was a good location for the sound mixing board.
Immediately prior to The Bar’s inception someone had tried to make a business of a Mexican restaurant in the place. Since the only Mexicans in the staff were the busboys it failed but it left a full kitchen for The Bar to use.
There were about ten 24 inch cocktail tables and eight or ten tables that were about three feet across and extra stack chairs on hand for busy nights. Two bathrooms were down the hall as was the office…

The fire department said it had a capacity of 180 people.

The Bar was ready to open…

To be continued, it already is, fragmentally, in the “From The Bar” category on this site….

From The Bar ~ A Bar Manager Story…

Another segment of a project The Rise and Fall of a Saloon In The Latter Part off The Twentieth Century. These excerpts are not chronological. In fact very little logic prevails…

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The actual running of a small bar is usually done by the owner or his Designated Lieutenant known as “The Bar Manager,” usually the Senior Bartender.

Traditionally, the duties of The Bar Manager” include hiring, training and firing of Crew, scheduling waitresses and bartenders. In that capacity the The Bar Manager was expected to be responsible for covering not only their bartending shift but also covering for emergency shifts, and getting sick or vacationing bartender’s shifts managed intelligently. The Bar Manager also had to oversee inventory and ordering. It was The Bar Manager’s duty was to oversee special projects as well as to drop in on other shifts to see to it that the duty bartender is performing up to snuff and all needs are fulfilled.

The Bar Manager is expected to keep the Pour Cost down.

At The Bar, The Owner’s (referred to as T.O. by the customers and this missive) management was somewhat scattered.

T.O. left most of the actual running of the bar to several people. I was in charge of the Waitressing Crew and looking back on it I think I may have been given that job not as a personal triumph but as a headache relief. There is a certain amount of people skill required to oversee a crew of women. In any case I had to schedule the waitress crew and keep the petty disagreements to a minimum.

Eventually I also had to hire and schedule the bands, staff the door and sound man and be sure that band calendars, mailing lists and free advertising were in place.

The bookkeeper oversaw purchasing and accounting.
T.O. usually hired the bartenders but firing any of the crew usually fell to me.

The bartender scheduling was usually assigned according to seniority and the rule with them was that if they were sick or needed time off it was up to them to arrange to have their shift covered.

I think T.O. disliked having a designated Bar Manager to avoid egotistical problems and infighting. On the other hand, he didn’t like having to deal with petty details of running a bar either.

So we didn’t have a Bar Manager. That’s the way it was. And some saw this as a vacuum waiting to be filled. After all, who ever heard of a bar that didn’t have a Bar Manager?

That vacuum should be filled by the one who wanted a little power, of course. “It should be myself appointed King”

There was always someone wanting to be King.

“If T.O. would make me Bar Manager I’d show ya how a bar should be run.” was the mantra of the Ambitious.

T.O. would try this one…that one…An exercise in futility, actually because somehow his Bar Managers tended to work less, drink more but somehow spend less time at the bar than before they gained the exalted title.

Here we must introduce, Sam, the star of this little morality tale.

He was a good, but not spectacular, bartender. He pulled his shifts and otherwise was not a troublemaker. He was not particularly good looking so male customers did not look at him as a bird dog, a threat or challenge to the pursuit of womanflesh. Not being particularly tall or muscled he was not intimidating. Women did not dislike him but neither did they seek his company. He bit his nails severely and his hands felt overly soft in a handshake. Top this with thick glasses and you had a person who did not draw attention to himself. He was almost perfectly neutral.

For some reason, possibly the description just listed, Sam started talking about a Promotion.

“The Bar needs a Manager” Sam said to me one night.

“Izzat so?” said I, having an unseen eye roll. “You think we should advertise for one?”

“No,” Sam went on to say, “T.O. needs to appoint someone Bar Manager.”

At this particular time everything seemed to be running fairly well so I waited…

“It should be obvious to anyone who the manager should be.” said Sam.

I was about to ask him who he had in mind when, like a psychic, he read my thoughts and provided an answer:

“It should be me!” Sam said.

“I hadn’t heard T.O. say anything about hiring or appointing a manager.” I said.

Sam had it all worked out. “Well, he needs one and it would be good for business if he made me Manager. I’m gonna tell him I’ll quit if he doesn’t make me Manager.”

The new Bar Manager would have an appreciation for the Funner Things that life had to offer the Rounder and Sam campaigned Mightily to have T.O. make him Bar Manager.

He got the job. T.O. figured this guy would not be plagued by girlfriend problems and he wasn’t pugnacious either. Had a lot of bartending experience and Sam had even had put in some time in a deli. Our kitchen enterprise wasn’t doing all that spectacularly at that time and, as we shall see, T.O. had some ideas about putting the new Bar Manager to work to perhaps integrating The Bar and the kitchen franchise to everyone’s advantage…

T.O. left the waitresses in my control however which dashed any hopes Sam may have had for having a harem but he was satisfied. He, Sam, was Bar Manager.

There were a few adjustment problems, however.

Sam, in true Bar Manager fashion, started drinking a bit more when he was off duty and started getting into the habit of wanting to buy his friend’s drinks by way of the P.R. key, the comping key on the register. The P.R. key is for public relations. Using the P.R. key meant T.O. was paying for the drink. Giving his product away. Overuse of the P.R. key tended to make for a high Pour Cost and that, of course, meant there was less profit.

Since he was now Bar Manager it was difficult for the duty bartender to say no to his insistence that the P.R. key be used for his and his friends drinks. To her credit, Tiffany, the main daytime bartender, refused to do this. The use of the P.R. key was observed by the bookkeeper and she had no way of telling if, on Tiffany’s shift, it was Tiff doing the comping or Sam. But since it was Tiffany’s shift it would be seen as Tiffany’s exploitation of the courtesy key on the register. Tiffany knew this and she was determined to use the key to her advantage not some tipsy mook who thought he was King showing off for his friends.

Sam had to lose that one because Tiffany was the one person in The Bar that T.O. would not fire.

There were a couple of episodes involving the waitresses that “larned him a lesson” of why that area was not going to be his either but that is not the purpose of this example of human frailty

T.O. came up with a good idea.

Charter a fishing boat! Be the provider of sandwiches and beer! Take a bunch of people out on San Francisco bay on a day-long fishing cruise. Come up with a package price.

It was a Good idea, actually. An idea like this could be a repeater! Everybody has a great time…get baked more ways than one as you terrorize the denizens of the sea…

Then afterwards, off to The Bar for more drinking and camaraderie! It could be an annual event requiring a larger boat each year! Maybe even a Summertime Monthly thing if it caught on.

The beer was easy.

Now about the sandwiches…

He turned to his new Bar Manager.

“Sam! I need you to make me a number of sandwiches for this fishing trip. I’ve booked forty people for this thing. Forty pre-paid packages. Food, fun and fishing included. You are to make sure we have enough sandwiches for forty people! You can see to the bar. Work the beer concession yourself if you want to. Even with a no host drinking situation people will tip you lavishly”

The idea made good sense. Sam had Deli experience; there was a full kitchen available to make the sandwiches… So Sam took it a step farther. Rather than delegate the sandwich making to the kitchen crew he would make the sandwiches himself! T.O. would save labor costs. Sam would be a hero!

T.O. was not aware of the increased drinking Sam had engaged in and even if he had been I’m not sure it would have made much difference. The Bar was a bar after all. People drink in a bar. And all of the employees were aware that T.O. expected you to control your demons even if he sometimes did not control his.

Still, he was very concerned about having all this work right.

“Now I’m counting on you, Sam. You have to have the sandwiches and three kegs of beer fresh out of the walk-in refrigerator, on that boat no later than 7:30 Saturday morning! That’s a week away. Do you think you can handle that?”

“I’ll Do It Chief!” said Sam the SuperBar Manager.

And the rest of the week the Sam, with liberal demands on the P.R. key, told the world of this project and how great his sandwiches were going to be. Worth the cost of The Package all by themselves. And he Sam was going to be the Hero and the Star of this enterprise make tons of money besides.

Sam got to where he was staying pretty late… On Friday, the eve of The Great Fishing Trip I came in and saw that Sam was pretty drunk.

“Um… Sam, have you made the sandwiches for this thing?” I asked.

“No.,” Sam said, “I have it all planned out. I’m going to set my alarm early and make them in the morning so they’ll be really fresh.”

Saturday morning rolls around and I’m in there at eight in the morning as always getting the place ready to open.

I can’t help but notice that absolutely nothing has changed in the kitchen from the evening before.

The phone rings.

It’s Sam.

Sam had just woken up, badly hung over.

You saw that coming, too, didn’t you?

Well then, you also know the sandwiches were unmade.

And it’s eight in the morning.

If this had been a movie, a darkness would be drawn like a curtain across this scene. Symbolic shadows would be cast by circling buzzards…

Circling sharks might be a better analogy.

Because… Out There… in the Vast Reaches of the Pacific… was a boat containing T.O. and his forty pre-paid packages. Wanting beer. And sandwiches.

I had about six hours to visualize the situation and my imagination ran impossible but interesting scenarios trying to imagine what must have been going on.

T.O. finally came in. By himself. No happy entourage of revelers in tow…

He looked haggard, as if he had been chased all day by villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.

Since boats and fishing was involved perhaps it was being chased by villagers carrying fishing gaffs, harpoons and torches.

He somehow escaped with his life but narrowly avoided getting sued. Several refunds were given. Some customers were never seen again.

For weeks after no one was allowed to discuss it. T.O.’s eyes would roll back in his head…he would start to shake. It took a great effort for him not to scream.

“It was ugly.” was about all anyone could get out of him.

No one said the word ‘fishing’ in his presence for a long time…

The post of Bar Manager was vacated.

True Evil… The Happy Talking Phone Entity!

Somewhere lives a computer programmer who should be drawn and quartered.

He/she would be the person who came up with the idea that the already frustrating task of making a phone call to a company and having to go through endless selections, menus and button pressing is lightened by creating something called “voice recognition.”

In case you don’t use a phone much or are otherwise secluded from the real world ‘voice recognition’ is a computerized answering program that is put in place by companies that have a horror of actually hiring someone to talk to their customers.

In the past this was done by requiring you to press an infinite number of telephone keys as instructed by an electronic voice. A voice that is the sister of the briskly efficient but cold voiced operator with the odd, screeing, four note Bosun Pipe whistle that tells you that ‘you have reached a number that is disconnected or no longer in service.’

This button pushing was never intended to be a convenience. This was a sadistic maze that resembles the old, old, joke about the house of ill repute that effectively channels the customer through a series of doors only to exit to a “You’ve been screwed” sign, never seeing a girl during the whole process. The process is intended to make you do anything but talk to a live person.

This cruelty was not enough. No. Now they have invented an Iron Maiden they call “voice recognition” which is a computer program that, according to the lying thieves that sell it, can understand the spoken word in Amerenglish.

They have created two voices to inhabit this thing. The male voice’s lines have been read by a guy who must be named “Bob”. He has that irritating high pressure announcer-salesman’s voice like the one that freverently urges you to “use your credit card” on all the TV infomercials. Him you just want to murder and would if you could. No court in the land would convict you

The other voice of course, is female. It is this voice we shall discuss. It really doesn’t matter since they both use the same lines.
The female voice sounds so bright and happy you suspect she has a scrip writing doctor who is an amphetamine specialist. I, for one, cannot visualize a human face to this female voice. What I see are the brown haired pretty women rendered by commercial artists for appliance ads. She’s a lot friendlier sounding than the telephone company’s woman who icily tells you you dialed the wrong number but don’t let that fool you. The end result is still the same with a demonic difference.

Before, when you had to deal with the button pushing, your coworkers knew what was happening because they could hear you muttering darkly to yourself while you hammered the suggested button code.

But with the new ‘voice recognition’ things are a little different.
Now you have Sally Sunshine telling you to “Say what your problem is.” and gives you several examples you could use except none are remotely similar to what it is you’re calling about.

So you gather your thoughts and part of you wonders whether to talk in a normal tone or perhaps talk a little more loudly…you don’t know if it has its hearing aid turned up. And while you’re getting ready to speak she gets impatient. She’s sunny and cheerful about it but still she says “I didn’t quite get that.” or some such so you know right then you’re dealing with a pushy, hearing impaired robot that is possibly suffering from dementia. As a matter of fact, “I didn’t quite get that.” is its favorite thing to say.

Even if you didn’t say anything.
Great.

But you soldier on…

On simple things like “Yes” or “No” she performs brilliantly. But god help you if she needs a number. That will result in a back and forth comedy of errors which she may or may not ever get right.

Argh!

In frustration you hang up.

Big mistake!

     You realize, too late, that you now have to go through the whole process all over again to transact your business but duty calls and you go back to the firing line. Then some people are like me and we another problem.
     Not all of us have the elocution of a Shakespearian actor. Some of us have diction of startling clarity but truth be told, most of us do not have this clarity and some of us even have small impediments, lisps, etc. This is my lot in life…
     So you have to deal with getting her to understand simple commands and responses to her questions and all she hears are Mondegreens…
        From time to time you realize that you’re not talking to a real person but to a machine…wait, it’s not even a machine. It’s a chip. A mini computer and you can’t help feeling like the idiot you appear to be…your co-workers are snickering under their breaths because you are trying to reason vocally with a gadget and the gadget doesn’t care in spite of its happy-puppy tone. The gadget won’t let us pass unless we tickle its electronic sensors with the right sound waves to trigger the circuit.

You have no choice.

Sally Sunshine, at any time, might pause for a commercial and ecstatically ask you if you went to their website at www/itainthereeither.com. to try to resolve your problem. In fact she does this often as if you’re actuallly going to stop, now that you have invested all this time, and go to a website. To “enter” that website they will require you to sign in by sacrificing your e.mail address so they can spam you endlessly. And fifteen or twenty mouse clicks later they’re telling you they can’t solve your problem at the website.

You know what it does then…

Sure you do.

The website advises you to call their Kustomer Kiss customer service number which will be identical to the number you called to get where you are now…

         If you thought you could have fixed it at a website you would have gladly gone there to avoid this insanity.
            You curse the cyber-woman most foully and she doesn’t flinch. She asks you to repeat yourself because “I didn’t quite get that.”

    There is, however, a solution.

If you keep punching ‘0’ often enough and desparately enough it will wait until you are about to smash the receiver on the edge of your desk and rip the speaker from your speakerphone.

It will then, grudgingly, put you on hold and sullenly punish you by playing the latest CD they found in the three for a dollar crate at a garage sale, usually badly played classical music containing too many violins..

After twenty minutes of this it passes you to a human….

…in Bangladesh…

From The Bar ~ Liar’s Dice.

Another segment of a project The Rise and Fall of a Saloon In The Latter Part off The Twentieth Century. These excerpts are not chronological. In fact very little logic prevails…

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Dice cups and the use thereof, are a strange Social Exercise probably originating in ancient Greece or Rome if not earlier since men have always loved to gamble…loudly…
For the uninitiated, it is a game base played with two cups, ideally made of leather, each containing five die. The game (which has endless variations) is played by the dice being shaken up in the cups and the contents dumped on the bar top and the scores tallied according to the dictates of the game in question. As with most betting games sometimes strict, sometimes silly rules are made up for the varieties of games played.
The Boys, not surprisingly, use this pastime as a stage for one of the many variants of Male Posturing and other expressions of time wasting mentally unchallenging exercises they cherish.

This is best expressed in the Macho Slam of bringing the cups crashing to the bar top with considerable force. Even expensive, well made cups crumple to virtual uselessness after about a year of this kind of abuse.

Somehow, they seem to be convinced that the harder and louder they slam the cup to the top of the bar the more it reinforces their self-image of Paragons of Masculine Prowess making them seem More Impressive (than they already are, of course) and Someone To Be Reckoned With and this of course makes them somehow much more desirable to the opposite sex.

It doesn’t matter if there is music being played (live or recorded) or conversations are being held… the Macho Slam of dice cups is far, far, more important to the players and greet any requests to modify the Macho Slam as un-American sniveling by fags, Communists and whiners.

This activity would go through the lunch period and pick up again around four in the afternoon when the Boys would start to reassemble. The cups were confiscated when the bands started because otherwise invariably someone would demand that the noise cease and the gauntlet will have been thrown down and a challenge issued. The two adversaries would allow themselves to be placated but only after a certain amount of Hard Looks and Huffing and Puffing and throwing of leaves and sticks…. I was kidding about leaves and sticks but you get what I mean…

It never came to blows, of course, but it could interrupt the desired ambiance whenever it occurred so the long view was that it was wiser to just collect the things when the bands started….

There’s a band tonight…

“Stu Blank and His Nasty Habits”

Great band… gonna be a lot of pretty girls here tonight…