Chepooka.com

Did ya’ll see this?  Oh how I squirmed with delight upon witnessing Paula’s public display of pain killer abuse.  Which is only my theory of course.  But come on.

Seriously?

First it was an email forward from Brian’s die-hard wing-nut step father about Barack Obama.  “Everything in this email is factual!  You can verify on Snopes.com!” Having not been born yesterday, I verified it on Snopes, yuh, that it was false. 

I emailed him back, thinking he would be embarrassed, but he emailed me back again and said “if you believe what you read on Snopes I have some land in Arizona to sell you.”

Huh? 

Then there’s this other man, same crotchety old white guy demographic who I met earlier in the year, friend of an acquaintance, who I am pretty sure interpreted me handing him my business card as an invitation to forward me emails about Jesus and animated glitter flowers that will send me straight to hell if I don’t forward on to 12 people in 3 minutes. 

But because I am nice (shut up), I asked him to kindly direct non-work-related emails to my personal email account.  That way I could delete them without reading at my leisure. 

Then!  And I can only assume it’s because he deems them SO CRITICALLY IMPORTANT TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY, he started forwarding these nutball Barack Obama emails to me.  Let’s see, there were a few “Oh-my-god-he’s-a-terrorist and the main stream media is lying to you!” And the latest, “Michelle Obama hates white people so for the love of God don’t vote for the blackies if you value your whitehood forward on to everybody you know that is white ok?!!!”

Hi, have we met?  I’m kind of a big liberal, so. 

Fuck off already. 

Yeah, I said it. 

First I felt bad for asking him to email me at a different address.

Then I felt a bit guilty when I wrote again with “Please take me off your forward list for these types of emails, thanks.”

And now, today, I feel pretty good about responding the third time with “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE STOP FORWARDING ME THIS CRAP?!!!”

I am going on record to say that if you get your information from six month old email forwards, you are a republican douche bag.  And if you forward me one more email I’m coming over with every Michael Moore movie ever made and An Inconvenient Truth too, some duct tape, and a baseball bat. 

As you may know, my Brian works at a fancy pants hotel.  Lots of celebrities stay there and he has lots of contact with them, which is always fun to hear about, but it doesn’t really interest me all that much.

However.  When somebody from my secret I’m-middle-aged-I-have-no-business-having-a celebrity crush list stays there, I get a little giddy I must admit.  Right now, one of the past contestants (hint: the really really hot one) from one of my favorite shows, Top Chef, is staying there.  And he’s on my list.  I didn’t go to any of the events he’s here to cook for, I could have, but didn’t want to fork out the major cash to do so (I’m saving up to pay my electric bill).  But Brian tells me about their interactions every day because he knows that I know he has the power to slip me this guy’s hotel room key but never would, bwahahaa, whatever.

B: “Tell your other boyfriend to stop trying to be my friend.”
Me: “What’s he wearing today?”
B: “Ew!”
Me: “Just tell him that I love him.”
B: “Ew!  What’s this thing you have with Chefs?  Between this guy and Gordon Ramsey ...”
Me: “I just think a man with a skill is very appealing.”
B: “I have skills.”
Me: “What are they?  Watching television?”
B: “It takes a lot of talent to watch that much ESPN.”

So true. 

Yesterday I got a voice mail from an associate of mine, a fun and attractive woman in her mid-40s that I do MonaVie presentations with.  I love my MonaVie friends.  They love to get together to sing karaoke, drink wine, talk about how we’re all going to make it big if we only just BELIEVE!  It’s just enough crazy to hold my attention. 

Network marketing people are a special breed.  You probably already know that if anybody has ever tried to sell you Mary Kay cosmetics or invited you to an Amway meeting.  But it’s actually rather endearing, they don’t really eat your brain or make you spend your life savings on laundry detergent.  It’s a nice change of pace from my actual reality—a relatively passive income stream in a highly social industry that requires that I bathe ... it works for me.  A lot of people I meet come from non-traditional educational and career paths, and it can get interesting.

I am amused that they call me the “girl who is really good with computers.” No I’m not.  I’m good at designing websites and even that’s debatable.  It’s like saying that a chef is really good with appliances. 

Most of these folks have access to computers but only at work, they have email but they don’t use it as a form of communication, but rather, a way to forward on information that people forwarded to them.  You remember the 90s too right? It’s just so ODD to me that people aren’t plugged into their computers all day long like I am.  What do they do? 

One of them, a 70 year old woman, bought herself a computer and a blackberry for the first time, but it didn’t take me long to realize that she doesn’t know how to type. And to not contact her that way because she’d just call me to respond to every message.  And I hate that.  She even told me that email is good but only if you follow it up with a phone call to make sure they read it. 

Aarrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh. 

This is the same woman who volunteered her laptop for a PowerPoint presentation for an audience of 100 people, complete with a guest speaker that flew in from Oklahoma, and when “it didn’t work,” handed it to me.  The “really good with computers girl” then discovered there was no software installed on this machine. Software such as PowerPoint.

Then the woman asked me to “just fix it.”

Back to my voice mail.  So this woman is extremely frustrated because she needs to type something on her computer and she doesn’t understand why she can’t just type something and print it out.  I can imagine that is frustrating.

The guys down at Best Buy told her they would charge her $130 to install Word Perfect (what?) and that was so ridiculous, and do I just have a disc she can borrow?

I didn’t return her call and funnily enough while I was writing this she called again.  Such a sweet woman and I do understand her dilemma, but I had to tell her about this new thing called “licensed software.” That I understand that it’s expensive ... but try buying the Adobe Creative Suite and then tell me about it. 

At the end of the day, I just can’t fathom how people get to 2008 and at the age of 44 without having ever purchased a copy of Microsoft Office.