Author: David

Tonight I have started the process of switching my webhosting services from Yahoo/Geocities over to another company. There were a few different reasons I have decided to do this. The first one is the price. I am currently paying $8.95 a month to have my site on Yahoo’s servers. The new service is only going to charge $50 for the entire year. For you non math folks, that’s less than half price. On Yahoo I was getting 5 email accounts, I will now get 15. The same goes for subdomains (see 3rd Bass Page), I was able to have 5, now I will have 15. Storage is another issue. On the Yahoo site I was given 25MB of space to put my stuff up in. My new service is offering me 200MB. I guess the choice isn’t hard to make, switch that shit. My domain name (disgruntledhuman.com) expires on 4/7/2004 so I have put in a request at my new host to renew the name through them and secure the name for another year with auto renew so my name won’t get snagged from me. Once the name is in their custody so to say, then I have to cancel my service through Yahoo. Once I do that then I let my new service to point my domain name to my new host and I start over with the websites. Actually all the sites are built and I will just FTP them up to the new site and be done with it. Here’s to hoping it goes smooth.

Ever have a lot of things going on so you decide to do more? Me either, but sometimes it feels like it. Luckily for me it’s nothing I can’t handle. I am currently running both of my sites (this one and the 3rd Bass one) and starting last night I began moderating duties at the Looking Glass Lounge. I don’t think it should be a tremendous challenge or anything, but should be fun at the least. I guess I’m expanding my horizons or some shit. You can start calling me Bruce Almighty now.

Hey, another two inches of snow is heading this way. Who could ask for anything more? How about temperatures above 30 and some sun; and oh yeah, I want to see my fucking lawn again. This coming weekend is the first day of Spring and the motherfucker better show up. I know where you live Spring, and if you don’t show up at my place; I’m showing up at yours.

It’s Tuesday, but it feels like its Friday. Why you may ask, because I’m off of work tomorrow. I’m always happy when I’m not at work. Speaking of not being at work, I talked to my old boss tonight and he sounds like is really happy to be out of that hell hole. I mentioned a few of the jobs I’m looking into and I at least have a very strong reference if I need it. Maybe that will be the extra push I need to get the fuck out of that store before it destroys itself. I give the store itself one year before it is closed unless we get bought out in the near future. Let’s hope I can read that shit in the paper and not be in the middle of the goddamn thing.

In one of the stupidest things I’ve heard of, M&M’s lost their colors a while back. Now suddenly they have them back and we are supposed to give a shit about it. Do you? I know I certainly don’t. Apparently, there was some sort of contest and there were six bags out there that had colors in them and they say that Blue was the final bag of all-one-color M&M’s to be found, from among more than 37 million black-and-white packages in circulation.

37 million bags we went through since New Year’s Eve? We aren’t even half done with March yet people. No wonder we are such a nation of fat fucks. That’s 500,000 bags a day since December 31st.

Now they are coming back with a more colorful version of the candy… because that should really be a deciding factor when you eat something. Hey look at those purty colors… let’s eat ’em.

This weather needs to lighten up already. I know that winter still wants to run the show, but I wish spring would get in here and take this mofo over already. I don’t care if it ever gets hot out, but would it be so bad to get some 60’s in here. Hell, I’ll settle for 50’s at this rate. Saturday we had a little battle between spring and winter again, as the weather wanted to be spring like, but the temperatures decided it would be winter instead. What that results in is temps in the high 20’s, with freezing rain/snow/sleet and the occasional hail. It also results in lightning and thunder, which when you hear it, makes you think it’s raining outside. When you go to look and you see snow you think, that’s fucked up.

I heard some disturbing news today. The Game Show Network is going to be changing their name to GSN. That’s nice, I’ve got three letters for you: WTF? I need an explanation and here’s what they give me:

GSN is a blank slate, a name for which marketers can create an identity. There’s plenty of precedent in the television industry for initials; many people who regularly watch ESPN or CBS couldn’t tell you what those initials once stood for (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network and Columbia Broadcasting System, respectively). “MTV started as a music channel and evolved to be a youth culture channel, still music-based,” Cronin said. “That’s a model for us.”

Oh, well that explains it all, you want to model yourselves off of MTV. I don’t think the world can handle another Real World or Road Rules, probably because their bastard incarnations are running rampant around every network already. But alas, GSN will fail to heed the warning as they are looking to get into the reality TV genre now as well. First up they will rebroadcast the original mole. Well thank God, now I can not watch it a second time and feel twice as good about myself.

Shit’s been getting worse at work lately. We have been in a constant cutting of hours, to the point where some people can’t even be considered full time. This has been occurring company wide and not just in our own store. Company wide they got rid of over 100 full timers by offering them a part time position without benefits. Most probably did not accept.

Sales have fallen considerably in the five years that they have owned us. The sad fact is that they have absolutely no idea about retail and how to be successful in it. If your business is wholesale, then be in wholesale, stick to it and do it well. Don’t go sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong like into retail. The corporate stores are nothing more than bitches for the warehouse. We are the dumping ground to make the warehouse look better. Why have sales fallen so far in the past? They have an idea that they should be the sole supplier of the store. Here is a list of vendors that I’ve lost since they bought us out. I lost three lines of makeup (Maybelline, Max Factor and Wet & Wild). I lost all of my perfumes. Every Christmas we would do two pallets of gift pack fragrances and we would get credit for all of our markdowns, so we made out like bandits on that. I lost a 24′ guaranteed toy section in lieu of an 8′ non guaranteed warehouse toy planogram. I also lost all of the guaranteed Halloween and Christmas items I used to get from them also. I lost my established private label from the pharmacy supplier in order to carry the warehouse brand, which had roughly half of the SKU’s of my old brand; prices were also close to 30% higher on the warehouse brand. I used to have an electronics section where we sold basic kitchen appliances. Yep, they’re gone too. I just recently lost all sell thru video and it sounds like rental may be next to go. I currently only have two suppliers left. The first is of course my warehouse; the second is my pharmacy supplier which I am very limited on what I can buy from them.

As you can see, I’ve lost thousands of dollars in sales each month because the warehouse wants to be the only game in town. You would think that if you are going to take away all of this stuff that you should probably put something back in. The big plan from the corporate office was to raise our prices. Apparently the big idea was that if we jacked our prices up the customers would be stupid enough to not notice and continue to buy the same products at a higher retail and when we put something on an ad it would look like a really good price. Not so; apparently the customers have a brain after all and we lost quite a few from that botch. Once your sales start slipping tremendously it becomes a panic situation up at the corporate level.

Hours are the next thing to go. I have been on a 35 hour week for well over a year now, and in the last month it has gotten worse. I didn’t take the book keeping job because I really gave two shits about that position. My boss told me that shit was going to get real bad around there in the near future, although he didn’t elaborate. The book keeping position was offered to me in order to keep me in a full time position. That was the main reason behind it.

I was off of work yesterday and when I went in today I found out that my store manager was no longer employed there. Shock, disbelief, anger; and that was within the first 15 minutes of being there. Basically there is a sense of who is next going around there. My manager knew that the corporate didn’t have a clue as far as what to do in running a store, so he would usually tell them what he was going to do and how they should be doing things, which ultimately led to his departure. We were one of the only stores in the company that didn’t get roughly ten jobs eliminated at the store because our manager stood up for us and pretty much stopped that from happening. Now he’s gone and we can all sit and wonder, who’s next?

In a shocking turn of events, Martha Stewart was found guilty of all charges in her trial. I guess that means that eventually Martha will have to start decorating a cell instead of a mansion.

I believe that even if she is sentenced to many years in prison, she will continue to be the domestic diva. Perhaps she will become the domestic dyke diva or something, but she will keep on keeping on. I think this is a good thing for her. What hasn’t she done already on her shows and in her magazine? This will broaden the scope of her abilities. Think of all of the cool things she is going to be able to do now that she had no need for before. I have thought of a few show topics she can do once she gets put into the joint.

• Getting blood stains out of the orange uniforms
• Baking cakes with files in them
• Butter as lubrication
• How to make cold steel more inviting
• Making Voodoo dolls of your lawyers
• Wiping your ass with both sides of the toilet paper

Long time no blog. It’s only been five days and I’m sure that isn’t a new record by any means. I have an excuse this time anyway. I have been busy as hell the last week. I started working Monday last week and I haven’t had a day off since. I work tomorrow but I told them I would not be there Tuesday. That is eight days in a row, so I guess I’m entitled to a day off. I did find out that even though I am usually awake early in the morning, apparently I’m not exactly a morning person. Lying in bed doing nothing is fine if you are awake at 5 a.m. but getting up and showering and going to work is a different story altogether. Oh yes, driving to work which on a good day takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes was slightly complicated by my least favorite topic.

Snow. It fucking snowed everyday that I had to go into work at 6:45. On Friday I woke up to roughly six inches of wet sloppy snow. By the time I got done with work I think it had snowed another inch or two, but it was all melted off the roads. Saturday morning I went into work and there was a nice layer of ice on the roads covered with a dusting of snow. Apparently the snow removal people have a rule that you don’t need to get your ass out of bed and plow if there isn’t at least six inches of snow because I woke up this morning to about two inches and nothing was plowed in my town. It wasn’t 3 a.m. when I went to work either, it was 6. There was no reason those fuckers couldn’t have gotten out and scraped it down for those of us that had to drive twenty fucking miles to work.

It can’t be. Mc Donald’s is going to phase out their super-sized menu. By the end of 2004, Supersize will no longer be available at the nation’s 13,000-plus McDonald’s outlets except in certain promotions.

What sort of promotion would that end up being? How about the ‘big fat ass’ promotion. Does McDonald’s think they are that important in the grand scheme of things that by cutting 20 fries and 12oz of pop out of everyone’s meals that it’s going to make that much of a difference? The people that are fat and don’t care that they are will just order another fry. The people that are conscious probably didn’t supersize that sonofabitch in the first place. The food is still prepared in the same way, so eating less isn’t going to do too much for you. Does that mean a smoker can cut a half inch off all of their cigarettes and then they won’t ever get cancer? It doesn’t work that way.

Hey, it’s Super Tuesday. You know, you would think there might actually be something super about it, but I can’t really figure out what that is. When I first heard about it I was stoked because I thought maybe the new Spiderman movie was coming out or something, then I heard it was just some political shit. I guess anything would be better than Bush getting another four years. The only way I’d ever vote for that fucker is if I was voting him off the island.

I see they are doing their annual list of the most stolen cars again. Let’s see how it ranked last year. The ten most commonly stolen in order of frequency of theft are:

1. Toyota Camry
2. Olds Cutlass/Supreme/Ciera
3. Buick LeSabre
4. Olds Delta 88/Royale
5. Honda Civic
6. Chev Caprice
7. Honda Accord
8. Chev Cavalier
9. Buick Century
10. Plymouth Voyager/Grand Voyager

Well, that’s good; I’m safe for another year. Who the hell would want a Mustang anyway? None of the dealers that I’ve taken it to, that’s for sure.

Did you see those Academy Awards last night? I thought they were supposed to tame that shit down. That one chick was totally naked, then the second chick walked in and; oh wait, that wasn’t the Academy Awards, that was a porno I was watching. My mistake.

I’ve been doing this blog thing for almost three years now. I have just recently started this whole new blog thing which is somewhat cool. Since I am being burnt out at work I really haven’t had much of an ambition to write anything worthwhile in here. Maybe I just haven’t had anything worthwhile happen to me. Let’s see, what happened today? I went to work, I came home from work. I did see a tanker truck in the ditch on my way home. I guess “in the ditch” is a little of an understatement. This semi was buried into the hillside, meaning the fucker hit it going a good 60 miles an hour or so. My friend had drove by this about 3 hours earlier than I did and informed me that there was a car involved. The car was completely smashed to hell which is no surprise, just wonder if the person in the car survived or not.

Anyway, back to my blog thing. There is actually an article I found online talking about blogs saying that: The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. Of those, only about 10 percent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often. See dammit, I’m ahead of schedule then. Actually this week is going to be a burn out for me I think, meaning less blog entries, going to bed earlier than normal and all of that fun bullshit. Come on Lotto!!!

Hey, tomorrow is leap day, or it’s leap year, or something like that. What in the fuck is that all about anyway? Hey, this whole calendar thing doesn’t quite work out so every four years we have to add an extra day in to get it to balance all out. Isn’t that all that Enron and Worldcom were doing? Shit wasn’t quite working out so they just put some fake numbers in, kind of like an extra day in the calendar; just to make the books balance out. Damn I’m slick, I should have been a lawyer. I should look on the bright side, an extra day to be 30 before I get older.

I keep looking at the clock and thinking it is too late to be up. Sadly next week it will be too late. Friday, Saturday and Sunday I am going to start at 6:45 am. I have no problem getting up that early since I am a morning person now, but there goes staying up even to 10 Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. Shit, this is going to suck isn’t it?

I see the hunt for Osama Bin Laden is intensifying. Of course it is; Bush needs some positive numbers for his popularity, or what is left of it anyway. I actually believe that they have already caught Bin Laden and are just holding his ass until they need the photo op. This whole gay marriage thing is going to hurt Bush’s numbers in the long run and they might pull the Laden thing out of their asses to try and recover from that or they might hold out until mid summer/late fall for it. Knowing this administration they will stage the capture close to the third anniversary of 9/11 just so they can try and go for the heartstrings of America. Just my opinion, but we’ll see.

Ok, when I got home and checked my email today I find out I’ve got four new emails and each one just happens to be the new W32.Netsky.C@mm virus. So, I have Norton AV so I didn’t really care because they just go away. A little later I get an email from someone telling me thanks, it’s a virus. Wonderful, now my email has been spoofed as well and people are thinking I’m sending out a virus to them. Hopefully the person who got this virus only has like 10 people in their email box and this will be an isolated incident.

Oh what the hell else is going on around here? I’m starting to work in the office at work now. I just started training today to start doing some bookkeeping. The good thing about that is it is more eye candy for my resume. I think the book thing might actually help me expand the kind of jobs I’m interested in finding.

I see Jesus is back today. I thought he wasn’t coming back until Easter; I don’t even have the eggs colored yet. That was a little Jesus joke. Ok, I know I’m not the most religious person out there, but I guess I am not exactly sure of what all of the controversy is about. Well, I know what the controversy is about, I just think it is a little over the top. This is Mad Max directing this, let’s not forget that. It is a movie; the people in it are actors and it is there to make money; and make money it will. Controversy always equals money. Apparently it is a powerful movie as it has already killed one moviegoer. A middle-aged woman died of an apparent heart attack on Wednesday while watching the climactic crucifixion scene in “The Passion of the Christ” at a morning showing in Wichita, Kansas, a television station reported.