Stuff - Just Some Things I Felt Like Talking About

Not too long ago I asked my readers to write and tell me about the crappy things they have done over the years to make money. The idea here was that I would get you to do my own crappy job, and write this column for me. I got a fairly good cross-section of all the predictable replies to that request - you know, everyday occupations like executioner, road kill scooper, medical experiment subject, or telemarketer.

Several people wrote to tell me that the most unpleasant job they’d ever had was shucking corn in the hot sun. I’m sure all the corn-shuckers suffered greatly, but I’d just like to tell these pansies about a friend of mine who, as a teenager in England, was periodically lowered into the sewer in a harness with a high-pressure water hose to “tidy up the pipes.”

Forty years later, all of us are still a bit hesitant about shaking hands with him.

Each Spring, as Old Man Winter starts thinking about getting his frosty white butt out of town for Spring Break, we Michigaroonies begin to experience a phenomenon that's unique to states where we spend four months out of every year walking around in stupid-looking little wool hats and wearing our socks to bed.

I'm talking about Slush Nuggets.

In case you've never heard of them, "Slush Nuggets" are those great little treasures that show up in your yard as the snow melts. I live on a busy street, where the snowplows push their grimy little glaciers up into my yard all winter long. By the time March rolls around I've accumulated a pretty substantial heap of road slop, and a particularly rich haul of Slush Nuggets.

Last week I started to tell you about the time I decided to join the Few, the Proud, the Phone Book Deliverers. I had passed the initial rigorous screening (I could prove that I had a pulse) and I had clawed my way through nearly forty-five minutes of arduous training. Now I was ready to take to the streets.

I have always been ambitious, and I was more than a little bit broke, so I had signed up for ten routes. At two hundred addresses per route and eleven cents per successfully delivered book, this meant that after just ringing some door bells and saying, "Madam, I hold in my hands a brand new phone book, yours to enjoy with my compliments," I stood to bring home a cool $220!

My new phone book arrived the other day, delivered directly into the bushes by the front door. It was in a plastic bag, but it was jammed in crooked and the twist tie was not properly attached.

I was appalled! As a trained professional, it was almost painful to witness such shoddy work.

You see, at one (brief) point in my (not so brief) working life I was myself a phone book delivery guy. Of course, it's been something like thirty-five years since I served on the front lines of the Battle For Handy And Reliable Home And Business Directory Information, and maybe the standards have fallen since then.

There has been a lot of talk about chimps in the news lately, what with the tragedy involving a wild chimpanzee kept as a "pet," the suggestion by the New York Post that the President of the United States is really a chimp who should be assassinated in the interest of improving the financial stimulus package, and the birthday of Charles Darwin, whose theories explain pretty much where the missing links involved in both of the above stories rank on the evolutionary scale.

 

Here is a vaguely related piece I originally published in 2002, just in case you missed it.

 

I just finished reading about a study that concluded that humans and chimps have less in common genetically than anyone had previously thought. It seems that a biologist named Roy Britten at the California Institute of Technology has used his computer and whole bunches of numbers to demonstrate that the genes of humans, once believed to be about 98.5% identical those of chimps, are in fact only about 95% the same.

What a relief!