Antone Henry Hammers

I would just like to riff a moment about the whole process of calling in somewhere for technical support.  There are many gripes that every single person can relate to.  For the sake of relate-ability, let’s just say we’re talking about calling your cell phone company.   First, you have to navigate the extreme maze that is the pre-recorded menu; god help you if it’s one of the ones that you have to talk to.

“For English, say ‘English.’”

“English.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you, please try again.”

“Ennnglish.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you, please try again.”

“Eeennnnglliiiiiishhhh.”¹

“For English, press 1 on your keypad…”

Finally you get to the part where you are going to get to talk to someone, then the recording tells you to describe the problem you’re having to her.²  It’s about at this point you realize, “If I push 0, I might be able to bypass all this bullshit.”  You give it a try, you get to start all over.

So you make it to be on hold after five minutes of menu navigation, they play some music.  I don’t care what the music is, but for some reason it’s always the world’s worst connection.  They they’re playing the music via cell phone from a tunnel in the Ukraine.  It cuts out every couple of minutes and you sit up straight and get ready to get your problems fixed, but the music kicks back in, or some lady tells you how special you are and to keep waiting.  You put it on speaker, decide to take a pee after a half hour of waiting, and right when your stream hits the water, “Hi, my name is Daniel, thank you for calling technical support.”  Your sense of panic that you’re going to miss the moment you’ve now waited thirty-five minutes for.  But you get to the phone just in time to verify an asinine amount of information to ask why you’re not able to get text messages.

Now your techie is reading from the same webpage that you’ve already read on their site.  And you already know they need to reset your account on their end, but they want you to turn your phone off for thirty seconds, take out the battery for a minute, throw your hands up in the air and pray to some deity, and make a sandwich to see if that helps.

I just don’t get how people get these jobs.  Shouldn’t there be some sort of prerequisite for these folks, like an IT degree or shouldn’t the company train them to actually understand the products and services that they are representing?  I would be a huge dick to these folks, but you know, it’s not really their fault.  I just use a lot of pleasant, “I knows” and “Yes, I tried thats,” until they get to the point where they give up and just do their system reset or offer to set you up with a new phone/computer/cheese grater/whatever.

This senseless rant was brought to you for no good reason by boredom in Kentucky.   Thank you for your time.

¹English mother-fucker, do you speak it?

² (Cause all the recording voices are female.  I would feel more comfortable if it were a man.  It would give me more confidence that someone who is giving me some sort of nerd technical support actually has testicles and probably knows what he’s talking about.  Not that women can’t know about these things, but the female nerd gene isn’t exactly common.)

1. Beef Jerkey – Nothing beats a healthy and salty snack of pure meat. That’s what she said. Also if you don’t have a fart to smell up the car, at least when you open the bag it can almost have the same effect.

2. Combos – You’re basically eating pizza, nachos, or other kinds of pizza and nachos that’s been condensed into one little roll.

3. Gas Station Sandwiches – This is the kind of time that you browse the cooler like you’re picking out the name of your firstborn. Its a commitment. You eat these things like three times a year, and you never feel that confident about buying a sandwich that might have been sitting on the shelf for months, but you just have that craving for a freaking chuckwagon. Who knows what’s in it? Who cares? I reccomend the chicken chipotle flat bread sandwich from Super America, quite a treat.

4. Sunflower Seeds – Nothing passes time like eating, that’s why sunflower seeds make a great number four. It takes a good 30 seconds to get on little morsel of food, so when you get through a handful you feel accomplished. Plus you have a reason to roll the window down and put your hand out a bunch while throwing your shells out.

5. Energy Drinks – I know you drink it, but while you’re pigging out on junk food, you might as well pig out on your favorite brand of energy drink. After a bag of combos and three Monsters, you will surely feel like a million bucks.

This post kept me busy for twenty minutes on my way to Iowa.

So I was having a very strange dream.  I was in a hospital walking around and there were a bunch of guys my age that were all prepped for some sort of eye surgery.  Blah Blah Blah, no one cares about your dreams, they’re boring. The only interesting part is that as it’s coming to a close and I’m half waking up with the feeling of something crawling on my neck and cheek, a lady doctor stops me from entering a room and says, “What is written on Jeff’s table?” Starts to close the door, and then a fucking ant crawls in my ear.

This is how I wake up this morning.  I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on.   And in my ear is this crazy noise, like water is filling up my ear.  Must have been the ant burrowing.  So for thirty seconds I’m clawing at my ear in a bit of a panic, nothing is happening cept every few seconds I hear that noise again.  Eventually I just face my ear to the floor and pull open my ear as wide as I can, and it just dropped out.   Can’t find the little bastard now, but I hope he’s dead.

I am just ever so patiently waiting to go to the new Twins stadium to see them play.   As some may know, I was in Europe for about 25 days or something.  Originally planned as a 19 day trip to visit and travel with my lady friend, I was grounded by an Icelandic volcano that shut down airports all over Europe.  Luckily, I had a place to stay, and good company.  I was supposed to be back on the 19th, which meant I would be able to go to the Twins game on the 20th.  But, volcano.  I had even bought a ticket, that left an empty seat where my butt could have been.  But my butt was in Ireland, which is probably the more preferable of the two places.

I just wish that Major League Baseball would change around the schedule.  I’m back now, I’m ready to see a live game.  So just change this Detroit series to here, and we’ll be doing just fine.  I really don’t want to wait until next week.  That’s just not fair, Baseball.  I’ve been so loyal to you.  I haven’t fallen in love with other sports, I don’t claim any other as my true lover.  I just don’t get why you can’t work with me here.

I guess Baseball and I’s relationship is more like prostitution.  I give her money, and she gives me satisfaction.  If she’s out turning tricks elsewhere, well I guess I just have to wait my turn.  You dirty whore, Baseball.

Why does Folgers insist on making me feel so awkward when I watch their nauseatingly cheesy commercials.

Now today, I’m doing some researching on how to patch up holes in some of my dress pants, and this commercial plays.

Neither of these commercials really say anything about Folgers itself, which I get, but I would think the first add is some sort of commercial for a travel agency or church or incest prevention organization, and the second commercial be a jewelers commercial.  The commercials really just leave me speechless.  I vomit, and then feel a little bit violated.  As if Folgers is trying to rape my emotions by making the most over the top, heartwarming sorts of ads I will ever have the displeasure of consuming.  Don’t you exploit my innocence, you bastard Folgers.

This has been a long time coming from me.  Apple has successfully duped a huge portion of the market share into thinking their products are some how superior to that of any other brand.  I am known to my friends and family and such as a knowledgeable person when it comes to purchasing, using, and servicing all sorts of electronic devices.  I will agree with them, but I am no programming or A+ certified kind of whiz.  I’m a consumer who educates himself and tries his best to take care of his own problems related to his pieces of technology all for one reason, I am cheap.  So when someone comes to me and says, “I’m going to buy a Macbook,” I ask the question, “What are you going to use this computer for?”  Usually the response is something to do with school or work.  Nothing you could use a PC for.

This is not an ad for Windows.  Hell we’ve all had our share of problems using that operating system.  Not based on it’s suckiness, it’s just so damn popular that hackers/bakers/infants can make a program to run on it.  With so much shit out there for you to clog  your computer’s arteries with, and your average computer user’s non-knowledge of how to use this expensive porn box they bought, this leads the user to believe in all of this anti-Windows slander.

Now let’s get to what I really want to bitch about.  If I am using a Mac, I am young, kinda attractive, pretty hip.  If I am using a PC, I’m overweight, dimwitted, can’t see very well without glasses, and some sort of no-fun person wearing a suit.  Obviously, Apple has never heard of Barney Stinson.  But that’s another topic.

What really gets under my skin is people somehow believing that because Apple computers are ridiculously expensive, have pretty looking cases, and slick ad campaigns that means all of their products are better than their competition.  I really just don’t want to hear another dullard try to explain to me how the Mac is better than the PC.  Here’s a clue, idiot, they are the same god damn thing. You’re not aligning yourself with a different, current, and hip computing device, you’re aligning yourself with a brand.  A brand that rapes you for your money, and let’s you believe it was well spent.

Now, by all means, using OSX because of the software sold for it is a different story.  Some folks need themselves Final Cut, or iMovie, or Garage Band or things like that.  There aren’t too many great video/audio editing programs that run for Windows.   Not that match up to the usefulness of the OSX programs.

Just do some research before throwing away an extra 700 dollars on a computer that you’re only using to play Farmville and check email.  You’ll see that there’s no reason to give that silly fruit double of what you can pay for the same quality of machine.

This entry didn’t turn out as good as I expected.  It was supposed to be more entertaining, it’s really just nerdy.  I guess now it’s a mission to save you a little bit of cash.  Or hire me to build you a “Mac” for a lot cheaper than buying one at the Apple store or Best Buy.  It’s not even well put together.  Oh well.  Sucks you read it.

Good trick I played on you, dummy.

Stupid Fucking Bird

Just about everyday now, I wake up to this stupid bird caw-ing all over.  It’s not even “caw” and then a few seconds go by, it’s cawcawcawcawcawcawcawcaw a good twenty to thirty times in a row.  What the hell is he yelling at?  I’ll never know.

All I do know, is that I would have no reservations in going over to the sporting goods store and buying a pellet gun, some pellets, and finding the bird that hangs out in our neighborhood and putting it down for the big sleep.  Yes, it is innocent, but apparently I have a short temper and want to see him lying dead on the ground so that the stray cats in the neighborhood can feast on his lifeless carcass.  I couldn’t even find some sort of info that says his call is to warn other birds to stay away cause this is his domain, so obviously he just does it cause he a is an attention whore.

Maybe I will just build a scarecrow.  But then he’ll just not eat my corn.  Bastard.

I keep going to McDonald’s for lunch after a long night.  I sit around after I get up and go, “Damn, wouldn’t it be nice to just sit here for a while and stuff my face?”  And yes, it is nice.  I have had a long love/hate relationship with fast food and it just got worse.  For some reason I am using McDonald’s Monopoly to justify going there.  I have been 3 times in the last 7 days.  This is not okay.  So after I woke up today and decided I needed to get some groceries so I stop going there, I went to McDonald’s cause of Monopoly.  I have somehow convinced myself I am going to win something.  If I won $50 bucks, I’m not sure it would pay back how often I have drove through, excuse me, drove-thru, there in the last couple of months.  So I think as of this moment, I am going to stop doing so.  Shit, it’s Saturday night. We’ll see how I feel in the morning.

I moved along on the path through high school.  As previously stated, I never had a group of friends that I spent a significant amount of my time with.  This was becoming very lonely.  I had been playing a bass guitar at home a lot, and an acoustic six-string a little as well.  I mainly learned Blink-182 songs and quietly wrote some of my own.  For a week I played with a couple kids in a band called Two Times Tuesday, named after a Domino’s commercial I saw.  If you know me, you will see the irony in this one already.  My pops was really excited, he came, we played at a church.  He must’ve had a few brewskis in him before he came because all he did was yell, “Play Freebird!”  This was hilarious, yet embarrassing.   I was nervous as hell to play my first show of my life, and here I’ve got this guy yelling shit at me.  Now it’s really funny to think about, but at the time I was pretty annoyed.   A short time later PMDD girl and her friend were buddies with me, and set me up to speak with a guy in my Philosophy class.   In this class I would turn back to this girl and tell her she was beautiful everyday, then I asked her to marry me a few times, she politely declined.  One day, the class took a journey to the library.  I was told the previously mentioned guy played music with another guy.  So I was determined to get in and play as well.  I walked up to him at the end of class, “Hey, I hear you play music.”  After a pause, “Yea, I heard you do too.”  Another pause I purpose, “So, we should play sometime.”  “Yea, that’d be cool.”  We sat in silence watching the clock for the last minute until class ended.  Salutations were exchanged.  Cut to a week or so later, I am trying to get together for our first play date, some awkward situations at home lead me to get angry that I wasn’t allowed to leave to go play with these guys after a few failed attempts.  I ended up moving back to nowhere land with my mom, and went to play with the boys.  We played some bad vocal pop punk.  We ended up self-releasing three things.  Spanish Rice: Live Catcher in the Rice, The Hot Mouth  / Mexico’s Best EP, and A Pessimist’s View of the World.  We opened for two bands that I really liked, The Queers and Dogwood.  With these guys and the two girls who set me up with them, I finally had a close group of friends.  During this time, the band mate I met in Philosophy became closer and closer to the girl that I was calling beautiful in class.  We all hung out, and after a few times I noticed they had something going on.  When I confronted him at band practice for not telling me, he apologized, and the drummer man said, “Well at least he made sure you didn’t have a fighting chance.”  Which is still to this day, one of the funniest things ever said to me.  Also, during this time I was going out to Minneapolis a lot.  I had a friend who was a little older than me and had a bunch of concerts at his house, Camp Firewood, named after the “Wet Hot American Summer” summer camp.  I met tons of people I still know to this day and am delighted to see every time I  do.  I go out to a concert and run into these people and don’t have to say much but just enjoy what we have in common in the music I was growing up with.  I did a little bit of falling in love with the cities, and was determined to do college at the University of Minnesota.  In high school I ended up working about 20-30 hours a week, first at Subway, then a small pizza store delivering pizzas, and then delivering for Domino’s Pizza.  I didn’t have an interest in extra-circular activities, so I didn’t do any.  Nor did I have time.  Gas and insurance were my responsibility, I also paid for all of my entertainment.  So when applying for schools, I had little to show on my application besides a 3.74 GPA, which I didn’t really earn, I just coasted along to that.  I was running an event in which some other classmates and I rented out a space every month and threw a concert called Antone’s Few Hours of Fun.  We raked in a bunch of cash, but were constantly running into road blocks on how to make it more successful.  With five people having an equal say in how this event was run, we ended up running into a lot of conflicts.  Also with the owner of the space we were renting out seeing that we were bringing in money, he wanted to make sure he got a good share.  This all eventually led to us giving up on it, but it was a good year and half of experience that set me up to want to run my own business in the future.   I applied to the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and St. Cloud State University.  St. Cloud accepted me right away, and I ended up being put on the waiting list for the U of M.   I didn’t hear from the U for a long time, so I signed a lease with my cousin to go to St. Cloud.  The next day, I got accepted to the liberal arts college at the U, and had to pay to get out of my lease.  I really wonder how life would’ve been different if I didn’t do that, but moving on.  I decided to get a single room at the U, and made a mistake in doing so.  My freshman year I probably only made a total of four friends.  Of course, I wasn’t drinking at this time and would elect not to go out to parties because I wasn’t interested in people’s main motivation of the night of getting drunk.  I spent a lot of time hanging out with this dude I knew through a friend, we skateboarded around campus really late a night, and explored the hospital and all it’s creepy back halls.  By the end of the year, I was moving in with that dude into a house in Saint Paul, and dating a nice girl whom I would spend lots of good and bad times with in a blink of an eye.  I was hanging out with this girl and our mutual friend constantly, we went to a bunch of concerts together and separately.  I wish I kept a running list of them all.  The relationship here would define how badly I could mess things up with one slip of the tongue, and also show how disgustingly needy I could become.   I kept a livejournal of all my depressing self-loathing thoughts, and eventually turned very bitter toward most things.  A very wise person sniffed out my lack of direction at the time and straight-up told me that I had nothing to be passionate about.  I gave up on studying business, my band was done with, I was investing my happiness into only other people, it was kind of rock bottom.  I talked to a good friend about dropping out of school and opening our own pizza place, I wasn’t going anywhere with school at the time.  After a bunch of conversations with this guy, I really found out I had some sort of future to look forward to.  I think a lot of people go through that mid-college crisis.  Things change so much.  I realized at this time too that I had been ignoring one of the things I love to do most, video.  I started this website, got a camera, and tried to start making stupid videos for fun.  There were a few funny ones, and I regret not making more recently.  I should start toting that camera around with me everywhere again.  So I ended up changing my major to art, the U doesn’t have a film school, and started writing and creating a couple of my own pieces.  You can still find them on this website.  Around this time too, I started dating a new person and that would suck up two years of my life.  I didn’t want to be involved for about 90% of the time, and felt more like a parent to this person.  It was very unhealthy, and not really that interesting.  I learned lots of lessons on how to have self-respect and not let someone else’s problems put your life on complete hold.  I wouldn’t take it back though, it was an important lesson and led me to the best relationship I’ve ever had and am lucky enough to be currently in.  After I graduated, I quickly landed a job with September Films, shooting a pilot for TLC,  Mall Cops: Mall of America.  I was a production assistant who was lucky enough to get a little bit of footage that I was asked to shoot put on the small screen.  Working on a TV show had been my goal for the last few years, and I just accomplished it.  But I would like to continue to work in this field, and will continue to try to.  At this very moment I am waiting to hear back from the show runner if we are going to be shooting this for a season or not.  Oh yea, I also stopped working at Domino’s finally.  Five years I spent most of my Friday nights until 4am at that place.  I won’t miss that one bit.  Payed my bills, but I wouldn’t recommend working for that company ever.  I serve at Sawatdee, and hope for more work.  I don’t know how to end this thing.

I had this thought the other day while working at this beautiful Thai restaurant with amazing food.  We carry chopsticks, barely involved in Thailand’s culture.  Why?  Pretentious assholes that think they’re somehow enlightened by being able to use a useless tool.  A quick wikipedia study shows that chopsticks are super ancient.  The earliest record of the eating utensil dates back to 1200BC.  Though a citation is needed on this wikipedia article, chopsticks were originally made for cutting food, not some sort  of tweezers extending from your fingers to awkwardly pick up pieces of food.  Just because ancient Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and whatever other Asian cultures used to use these things, doesn’t mean that any time you go to some local Asian food place that you need to ask for a pair so that you can show you know what’s going on.

I am not sure if anyone really knows about this exciting new technology, but I am very happy to share it with you all.  It’s called a fucking fork.  Not only can you act like a civilized person and not eat by scooping piles of food into your mouth with your bare hands, you can pick it up without having to train your fingers to try and pinch a tiny fragment of whatever the hell is on your plate and drop it in your mouth.  Honestly, besides the  sheer fun of trying out something different to us ignoramuses in this place, I don’t know why you would ever try to use this difficult tool.  If you go over the Pacific to an Asian culture that uses primarily the chopstick, by all means, try to fit in.  Otherwise, if you’re here, be proud to say that you are living beyond the negative 13th century and will be happy to show how you evolved into a smarter mammal that can develop better and more efficient ways to perform the most basic action of the world’s animate creatures.  We should probably all just be hooked up to IV’s at this point in order to regulate our obesity problems and probably stabilize the world’s food supply.  To avoid further tangents I will sum this up, just because you are an American using chopsticks when you eat your sushi or random American-Asian chicken, does not mean you are more cultured than the person next to you using a fork.  It really just means you’re insecure.