yes. we are international kung fu spies.
you mean i didn’t mention this before?
i was very early to my training today (yes. more training!) and so I made good use of my time by going to the bathroom to pee.
in the stall I noticed a label. i liked it so much, i took a photo of it to share with you (iphone!).
don’t you just wish we still lived in the era of parcels?
don’t worry, i flushed first.
i had the (not so) rare privilege to be in training (again) the last part of this week with many of the fine folks who were in training last week.
what this ultimately means is that my 1.5 hour commute each way by train turned into a 1.25 hour commute by car each way to somewhere else. well, it’s 1.5 normally hours by train on a good day. wednesday, aka NOT a good day, was a 3.25 hour commute home. BUT WHO’S COUNTING??
side note: this commute, and 5:20am daily wake up call, is kicking my butt. i’m not posting nearly as much as i want to be, but if i’m not asleep by 9:30 every night by the sheer gravitational pull coming from my pillow, then the next day is torturous. all this is to say, bear with me here. shinyfork may have suffered a little at the start of this job, but it is my intention to come back into full glory…once i move down to the city and away from my husband and dog. oh, wait. did i say that out loud? well, that’s just another story altogether.
so the point of this is that while driving back from training the other day i noticed one particular billboard. it was simple, but a bit confusing. it only had four words on it, plus a website address, but as soon as i saw it i knew i would have to investigate further.
i grabbed my handy-dandy iphone (iphone!) and read out the web address, www.wnd.com, to my google voice recognition search function. THE IPHONE IS SO COOL.
and then i proceeded to wait the additional 45 minutes of the drive home to safely know what i was dealing with here.
holy geez. people have bought billboards across the country to demand to see the president’s birth certificate. turns out that this is a phenomenon that began last may that i am just now hearing about. so if you’re new to this idea, too, to catch you up, this “news” website decided that the president is…from another country?!…from another planet??…from a hole in the center of the earth not geographically linked to the US??? i’m not exactly sure what these people were thinking, but they were having none of the president’s silly little claim that he is from the US.
but, if you think about it, this request for verification from world net daily totally makes sense. i mean it’s only realistic to assume that the federal election commission, or whoever the people in charge of verifying that presidential nominees meet all legal requirements to run for president are, dropped the ball on this particular requirement. maybe the guy in charge of this detail was home from work that day sticking a fork in his eye. you just never know.
really. WHAT are people thinking?
(thanks to mike for the inspiration/text of this post. thanks to gnomes for being…well…gnomes.)
what’s better than one gnome?
three gnomes!
what’s better than three gnomes?
—
nothing.
i definitely recently said i wouldn’t talk about work. where i work, who i work with, etc. and this post, even though it involves an activity that i am currently required to do because of work, does honor that initial statement…technically. here’s why (don’t you just love when the defensive part of the post comes first?):
what i’m about to talk about deals with the training i am currently taking, and not at all about my job, or any of the people that i work with. truly. i promise.
now, having said that, HOLY COW. what a treat, or terrifying nightmare, this training has been so far. i just can’t decide.
so for the past two days, plus tomorrow, plus two days next week, i have been and will be surrounded by a bunch of super macho, manly men types. that description looks so puny when it’s typed out. ok. how to explain? dig down REAL deep, and just imagine the most testosterone that you think i could ever handle, i’m talking at like at my maximum capacity here, and you are imagining my wednesday, thursday, and future of friday of this week.
naturally i assumed everyone in the room was going to hate me. look, it may sound inappropriately self-deprecating, but i’ve got a weirdo haircut, an iphone (iphone!), and i am not what anyone would ever assume as a card carrying member of the nra. it seems appropriate that this particular crowd might hate me. (and while i am actually getting along quite well with some of these folks to my great surprise, others, as anticipated, do hate me.)
so as to not add to this list of “reasons why april is not a desirable student and workmate in this particular environment,” i decided to keep my mouth shut, and not laugh out loud when listening to the FANTASTIC amount of material that was coming from these people. i’m nothing if not courteous.
but i did make sure to write it all down to share with you folks.
this first one is for mike, and for all the rest of you out there who have this particular pet peeve: the main instructor for the course says with pride, “these three days are going to literally fly by.”
a person’s last name in an example the instructor was giving was ‘mantooth.’ he he. MAN. TOOTH. that’s just silly.
says one macho to another, “do you know of any place where i can find and buy a lot of ammunition?…for personal use. i’m talking about A LOT of ammunition. like thousands of rounds?”
the instructor tells us as a compliment, “anyone of us coming into a situation is a toolbox.” twenty minutes later, “we are all great toolboxes.” ten minutes later, “you are a toolbox.”
“shoot the big gun early.” — that one just sounds dirty.
and finally, coming from the same guy who boasts about doing some very unethical things involving making brown people who work for him pose as terrorists at work (yeah, that shit just got wrote down), says today: “i’ve had so much sexual harassment training, i’m an expert at sexual harassment.”
