Listography

I received a small raise at work this week. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. I'm slowly climbing my way up the corporate ladder if you will. It can only get better up there, since I'm already getting a plethora of free food and tshirts. So when I make lots of money (because according to the woman who read my palm 2 years ago I will be a billionaire someday), here are a list of things I want:

1. A Great Dane. This gigantic, yet gracefully beautiful creature, necessitates a large living space and plenty of food and luxury canine accoutrements. I think having a Great Dane was like the status symbol of sorts in the pre-car era, akin to owning a Cadillac.

2. A trampoline floor, in a room with padded walls and tall ceilings of course. Rumor has it Bill Gates has one. It'd be at least 7 times more awesome than Tom Hanks' trampoline in Big.

3. No stairs in my house. Just escalators. Why? Because I can. And also for the excessively long hallways in my huge home there will be people movers like in the airport/NGA. This is also a good investment for when I become old and mobility-challenged.

4. Aquarium tunnel. I can't remember if it's at the Baltimore Aquarium or not, but you stand on a people mover (see above) and are effortlessly maneuvered through an amazing aquarium tunnel as if you were underwater yourself! Fish and sharks etc glide over your head. Children cower. Old people drool and point. It's fantastic.

5. A fireman's pole. I will make my children slide down this for dinner when I ring the dinner bell. Call me old school.

6. I'm going to pull the world's top marine engineers away from their important work. Then I will put them to work figuring out how to create some private islands in the form of a palm tree out in the middle of the ocean. This would merely require spending billions of dollars importing sand and rocks and shooting them out into the water almost futilely - oh wait, Dubai beat me to it!

7. A Segway. Don't judge.
My inspiration:

Where my hoes [sic] at???

So at work, I look at lots of custom designed t-shirt orders. Generally they are boring: So and So's family reunion, So and So's "Fling Before the Ring" (or some other cutesy rhyme about getting hitched), Such and Such sports team, etc. However, peppered within the boring ones are some sparkling nuggets of craziness. I oft come across blatant sexual references, or perhaps just an innuendo. There are orders with curse words, orders that are anti-Obama, orders that are artsy, orders that are hideous and poorly designed, and orders that are just silly and or quite clever.

When I first started back in August/September, I was unfamiliar to the gamut of material I might see and how I should proceed. Well, turns out we totally just support the First Amendment, so pretty much anything goes if it's what our customer wants. One of the first orders I got that taught me this went something like this:

A particular group of saxophone players at a university in Arizona made some t-shirts, I guess to commemorate their group's inside jokes and what not. On the back of the shirt was a list of their top ten quotes. It was a barrage of bad grammar, misspellings and bad punctuation, not to mention chock full of multiple swear words. I pulled a coworker aside to see if we actually would print this, and he just laughed and said yeah, and that I should go through each of the ten lines and pull out edits for grammar/punctuation and have our customer service reps call the customer to see if they wanted us to change those things. So my list for customer service was something like, "Should we capitalize 'bitch' in line 7, since they capitalized 'Whore' in line 6? Should we put a comma after 'Fuck' in line 3 or before 'shithead' in line 4?"

The best however was their spelling of "Hoe," to which they made some malicious statement. And I don't care that Urban Dictionary says it could be spelled either way, because as far as I and Merriam-Webster are concerned, this spelling refers to a...gardening tool.

Eventually the customer told our service rep, "NO! DON'T change ANYTHING on our shirt." So we proceeded to have this shirt printed and somewhere in Arizona there are multiple people walking around with angry commands aimed at gardening tools. I mean, while I would much rather prefer to initiate delicate communication with a "hoe," at times I find it is necessary to perhaps speak with aggressive tones and slightly raised voice towards the aforementioned "hoe."

God Bless America.