Son of a...

Not one full day after blogging about how nobody would want our "Osama says: buy more heroin!" poster for use in their office, I got an order for one.

Eagle-eyes readers might recall a time a few months ago where I wrote about a monumental screw-up on my part just a day after writing about a monumental screw-up that ended up costing some poor collector thousands of dollars.

The only logical thing to do, of course, is complain about how my boss will never give me a $5-an-hour raise or let me hook my Xbox up to the TV in our spare office.

Lots of updates this week. Wow.

No, it's an egg in a frying pan.

Peemeistering has been a little on the quiet side lately, so I thought I'd share one of my favorite aspects of my new-ish job back in the shipping room: the propaganda posters.

Everyone remembers the good ol' "this is your brain... on drugs" commercials. Egg, frying pan, yadda yadda. Good stuff. Later on they released a remastered edition with a skanky white lady who, instead of frying the egg, smashes it with the frying pan and proceeds to completely demolish her entire kitchen, thereby proving that you don't need to be on drugs to be a certifiable nutball. Well, one of the materials I'm responsible for shipping out to clients are tacky "drug-free workplace" posters that make the fried egg commercials look like masterpieces.

Some are inoffensive enough, like the ones that just have our company logo and phone number. Actually, flipping through our brochure, that's the only one. The rest are... well... let's just say they aren't oozing class.

Take, for example, our Taco Bell dog rip-off. It features a picture of the owner's dog saying "Yo no quiero drogas!" Never mind the fact that the Taco Bell dog hasn't even existed in like five years, and the fact that every person on the planet was completely annoyed with it even when it was relevant... is anyone really going to re-think their entire outlook on drug abuse because a Photoshopped dog head told them to -- in Spanish?

Speaking of Photoshopped heads, I really like the one where they just went in and collapsed the top of Mona Lisa's head to prove marijuana shrinks your brain. They forgot to paste a doobie hanging off her cryptic smiling lips, though.

Our most popular poster features a cartoon frog and the message "get a grip on life." I don't have any idea why people love the frog so much. Either he's related to the Geico saleslizard, or it has something to do with the fact that it looks a few shades less tacky than our other offerings.

If I had to pick a favorite, I'm afraid it'd come down to a tie. On one hand we have the "circle of friends" poster, detailing all the wonderful friends your life of drugs will introduce you to by showing a picture of four or five fat, sweaty white guys standing in a jail cell with their eyes blacked out. On the other we have the one with the pot leaf surrounded by every euphemism for marijuana my boss could think of, including a few I'm sure he made up. Being a 20-something suburbanite, I've met a few people who partake of this particular substance, and none of them have ever used the terms "bone", "sinsemilla" or "hog leg" before... although, I'm sure at least one does now that I've shown him the poster.

Mostly these posters are just harmless fun. They get a chuckle from employers who put them up in break rooms and office cubicles, and make them feel good because they're doing something to curb drug use in the workplace. Some of the information is tenuous at best, but there's only one poster I really think we should discontinue: the one with a giant picture of Osama bin Laden, along with the phrase "Osama says: buy more heroin!" I don't think I've ever had an order for this poster. Aside from the offensive implication that all drug users are terrorists, people probably just don't want a picture of the man himself hanging in the office. Except, maybe, as a dart board.

So that's what the peemeister does when not peemeistering: he prints out hilarious anti-drug propaganda on thick card stock and ships it to trucking companies and landscaping services all over this great country. God bless America, etc... just remember to stay away from the hog leg.

Another one of the slang terms used on the pot leaf poster is "sh*t", which I believe is pronounced "shasteriskt".

The revenge of Mr. Tattoo.

Mr. Tattoo came back today for round two. He was in from a different car dealership; you'll recall the first one didn't hire him because they requested a hair test, and he's bald. (If you recall no such thing, you may click here to read about my first adventure with Mr. Tattoo.)

I couldn't see his tattoo today, on account of he was dressed up all nice. Collared shirt (tucked-in, even!), tie, nice slacks, the works. During our first meeting he wore ripped jeans and a wifebeater. My guess was he came in right off his job interview today, probably because he couldn't wait to yell at me.

And oh boy did he yell. He yelled about how we must have been lying about the hair regulations, since [insert our biggest competitor here] took his chest hair just, like, two or three months ago. He yelled about how it's demeaning to do a urine test. He yelled about how our company policies were stupid. He yelled about how it's discriminatory that he can't work at Car Dealership X because he chooses to cut his hair a certain way.

I tried to explain the difference between "company policy" and "state regulation". I tried to explain (without sounding like I was badmouthing them, and I admit it didn't come off very well) that some labs choose to skirt around regulations if they can profit from it. But as you probably know, there's no reasoning with someone who just wants to piss and moan and just generally be belligerent.

We didn't touch on the subject that, apparently, Car Company Y is a better place to work than Car Company X anyway. Meeting as many car dealership guys as I do, you get the feel for these things.

This story is actually a couple weeks old. I should check my saved drafts more often, I guess.

Why I love the ER blogs.

In the past month of no updates I have probably sat down to type something here about three dozen times, at least. Every single time, though, I had to erase what I had written because I realized all I was really doing was ranting like a lunatic. Which can admittedly be fun to read, but it's not the kind of stuff I like to write. I like relaying quirky stories about weird people taking drug tests, not six paragraphs of "rawr everyone is an idiot but me, rabble rabble rabble."

A lot of things have gone down in the tiny peemeister offices these past few weeks, and some of them have left me a bit shaken. But it's all office politics stuff, which isn't the focus of my blogging. It has cut me though, sometimes deeper than I would have figured was possible. Changes are happening, some good, some bad. Management has woken up and is starting to make some decisions... again, some good, some bad. Anyway, all the politicking has left me unable or unwilling to document the various zaniness I've come across while conducting my collections, and for that I apologize.

Things are starting to settle a little, I think.

One of the new decisions is the arbitrary blocking of half the internet from all our computers. I disagree with the decision for basically selfish reasons: I like the internet and I get cranky when it's taken away from me. I feel that in an office of a dozen or so people, if it's found that someone is abusing MySpace or whatever you can just block that address from that machine and be done with it. Er, there I go, ranting again. I'll stop now.

Anyway, the criteria for what is blocked and what isn't is pretty strange. Websites I used to hit once a day (comics, news sites, educational sites, and a forum or two) are gone now, even though I'm the only person in the office who would ever dream of visiting them. However, sites like LiveJournal and Blogger are unblocked, so I've been filling my days reading a lot more blogs than I used to.

I've never been much of a blog guy. I really love writing and sharing my experiences, but I don't take a lot of pleasure in reading the rants of others. There are several blogs I check daily, but they're either videogame related (and thus of no real value to anyone except gamers) or they're the awesome cream-of-the-crop blogs that everyone is already reading anyway. Maybe I'll put the links up someday.

For some reason though, I have discovered that I love the ER blogs. I love them. I can't get enough. I don't know how I found the first one, but after I finished the archives I pulled a random link from its blogroll and plowed through another one. The ER blogs captivate me.

I'm not really interested in the medical industry, even though I kinda sorta work in it (in the same way the janitor at CBS works in the "entertainment industry"). And a lot of the ER blogs are the "everyone is an idiot but me" rants I tend to roll my eyes at. So why do I love them so much? I think it's the combination of two things. First, they do have a point. Anyone who's sat an an ER for any length of time at peak hours sees the kind of absolute crap hospital employees deal with on a daily basis. It's enough to make anyone jaded. And second, jaded or not, the work they do is incredibly difficult and I would probably have a coronary just thinking about it.

In a few ways, reading all those ER blogs helped me realize that a lot of the petty nonsense I'm putting up with at work right now is just that: petty nonsense. I know perfectly well that my laziness and lack of compassion preclude me from ever doing the important and often thankless work they do. So I offer my heartfelt thanks to all of them, especially the ones who blog about their daily grind and share their experiences with the rest of us.

Here are three of the best ones I came across, which have made it onto my "check these daily" list:
http://ernursey.blogspot.com/
http://lastblogstanding.blogspot.com/
http://ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com/

Please note: this isn't any indication that the peemeistering is going to pick up anytime soon. Here's hoping, though!