Printer Problem

Do you have that person in your office who prints EVERY email he or she gets? And then they don’t pick them up on the shared printer for days? That was acceptable maybe 10 or 15 years ago when the older co-workers were still getting used to email, but c’mon. Most of us have adapted and realize we don’t have to print every single email. So yeah, you go to the printer and you pick up your document and you accidentally pick up his or her email regarding their dental appointment or something. They’re printing dozens of pages per day. And where do these pages end up? I honestly don’t know. Is there a giant filing cabinet somewhere that the rest of us don’t know about? This person’s filling about a drawer-full per week. 

It sounds cold, but somebody needs to start a “Do Not Email” list and these folks need to be on it. Remove their email privileges. They’ve proven that they can’t handle the concept, and they’re costing companies around the world valuable paper and ink.  

Oh, and by the way, I’d better not catch anybody printing out the “Do Not Email” List!

High School Instant Replay

The jury still seems to be out on instant replay. Not everyone likes it. Football has it. Baseball has it where they fake this communication with some imaginary off-sight referee in New York or someplace. Yeah, right. It’s all fake. Regardless, it seems like we have it backwards. We have instant replay at the pro level where we have the best referees and umpires in the world. We need it more at the lower levels. We need it at high school games.

As we often attempt to do here at Uncle Tommy, we have a solution to the issue. The only requirement is that it must be a game covered by local radio. Let’s say there is a question in a football game regarding whether a player stepped out of bounds or not. Under our Uncle Tommy plan, the refs would huddle, listen to a slow motion replay of the radio announcer’s call of the play, and then decide if they were going to reverse the call on the field.

OK. Maybe it’s not very high tech, but at least it’s real. And the delay in the game will help the cross-country parents sell more popcorn at the concession stand.

 

Bean Dance

I saw a baseball game last week where the pitcher threw behind the batter. Sure enough, the batter dropped his bat and started toward the pitcher only to get stopped by the catcher at whom he threw a punch. Both benches emptied. Then the bullpens emptied. This is all typical, but the bullpen part is odd. Oddly beautiful, I might add. Both bullpens at this game were located beyond the right field fence. The players from both bullpens ran out onto the field after the pitch and ran side by side as if choreographed for 375 feet before joining the fray near home plate. Now, if they were truly upset with each other, would they really trot 375 feet side by side before any confrontation? But, yeah, this was truly unique.  

It reminded me of one of those reptile egg laying rituals you see on The National Geographic Channel. They seem to know where they’re going but no one knows why…

Cartoonist Vacation

Someone told me recently that comics are the main reason to purchase a newspaper. You can get them on the internet but only in a newspaper can you get all of the comics in one place. That made sense to me. One of my favorite cartoonists just took a week off and had somebody fill in for them. Really? All you have to do is come up with a 3 frame comic once a day (it’s a nice gig) and you’re telling me you can’t accumulate a backlog of 7 strips before you go on vacation? So the cartoonist is basically saying, “Hey, I can draw 344 of these a year but I can’t do 365.” * C’mon!

Oh, and on Sundays I want at least 6 frames. None of this “I’ll just make the frames bigger on Sunday and nobody will notice”. You know who you are.   

*Assumes three weeks of vacation.

Jockey Outerwear

Remember in Easy Rider where Jack Nicholson rode across the country on the back of a motorcycle wearing a football helmet? Yeah. That was fun. Well, I was looking at a picture of the winning jockey from Saturday’s Preakness and noticed that he was wearing his special jockey helmet. Well, I asked myself, is that special helmet really necessary? Could he (like Jack) have just worn his football helmet? 

The amount of money spent on sports equipment in this country has gotten out of hand. Do we really need a different helmet for every sport?  Like knitting kneedles and chop sticks, some of these items may be interchangeable.  (See post dated June 20, 2015.)

Oh, and why doesn't the horse get a helmet? Where is the outrage?

Par King

It’s sad when you’re really good at something and then it’s not needed anymore. For instance, I feel bad for the people who don’t get to use their beautiful handwriting anymore. Bummer. 

One of my talents as many of you know is parallel parking. The new self-driving cars will eliminate the need for that talent unfortunately. But yeah, for the time being, I’m pretty good at it. So good that I received an unsolicited compliment from a stranger eating at a sidewalk diner earlier this week after I backed my car into a tight spot on one attempt. It’s a beautiful art when you do it right. And it makes for fun, inexpensive entertainment for sidewalk diners. They can place bets as to whether you’re going to get the car into the spot, how many moves it’ll take, whether you hit one of the cars or maybe a meter, etc. I suspect the woman who complimented me had won a bet of some sort.

I, like the good race horse jockeys in yesterday's Preakness Stakes, don’t mind being the subject of an occasional bet. But look out you talented jockeys! Are jockey-free race horses the next thing?