Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

This will be my last post for 2024 due to my yearly blogging break. I plan to return on January 6, 2025.

I hope you have a merry Christmas, and a prosperous, happy new year.

***

1. Alison Green's Ask a Manager blog has been very entertaining this month, my favorite post being her top ten reader stories about the holidays at work.

My favorite of those is #7, "The Date," which ends:

The rest of the evening he played my boyfriend to all my coworkers. Charming, witty, everyone was so impressed with him. We lied our tails off about our marvelous fake relationship to everyone.

We walked out to the cars afterwards, I thanked him profusely, and then we never contacted each other again.

I waited until January and then told everyone at the office who asked, "How are things with Ryan?" that we broke up on New Year's Eve.

It was the most romcom movie experience of my life and even now sixteen years later I am shocked it went as smoothly as it did to bring a stranger to my company Christmas Party.

Said date was a Shopko salesman who'd helped her a couple of weeks earlier; she (19 at the time) called him so she could have a plus one at her company party.

2. At The Wall Street Journal is an essay about "The Closely Guarded Secrets of Manhattan Doormen" that sometimes reads like a detective story or a spy thriller:

Then there are the frenzied or farcical requests that no doorman could see coming. Consider the courageous finance bro who, hours after Hurricane Sandy sucker-punched the city in 2012, descended to his 19th Street lobby with two masks and snorkels.

"This guy was obsessed with saving his new custom Surefoot ski boots in the flooded basement storage cage," recounts my cousin, Jay Peterson, who was the president of the building board. "I said, you're nuts. You're not diving down there."

But with the prospect of fresh powder on his brain, the tenant powered ahead. "This guy hands the doorman a mask and snorkel and said with a straight face, 'Man, let's do this!'" And the craziest part? They did. Jay confirms that a monster tip followed.

There's more, in case you don't buy the contention that doormen must "think like engineers, architects, contractors, lawyers, gardeners, plumbers, firefighters, cops and parents."

This classic thread from a Seinfeld episode came to mind as soon as I saw the headline.

3. "The Worst Male Facial Hair, Ranked by a Woman" offers advice I no longer need, but enjoyed reading, anyway.

Here's what Gigi Engle said about my type of beard, which she ranks at 9 of 18. (Contrary to the title, lower numbers are better.)

The "business casual" of beards. This guy is inevitably the fourth-best-looking guy in his group of friends. He enjoys golf but is not particularly good at it, and mostly just likes the beer and the golf carts. His sense of humor is neither great nor terrible. He works in sales. Always sales.

Of course, there are exceptions. Like Idris Elba. But Idris Elba can make anything look cool. Even Dockers. We can't say the same of Kevin from sales. [link omitted]

Me? Sales? (He says, with a half-scoff, half chuckle.)

If I knew someone considering using this list as advice, I'd recommend also consulting with a trusted female friend.

Case in point: I began wearing a beard way back in grad school on the advice of a female friend who saw a picture of me after a beard-growing contest on a submarine deployment.

My wife wouldn't let me get rid of that beard now even if I wanted to.

4. At some point over the holidays, I plan to finish watching a video about "The History of Slipping on Banana Peels," which I believe got made by someone who wondered if that old slapstick cliche was something that ever actually happened.

Beware of banana peels. They are capable of inflicting great physical harm. Even worse, they might own you so badly that you'll need to make a 33-minute documentary about them several years later simply to purge yourself of the abject shame and humiliation.

The author relied on newspaper accounts and, if I recall correctly, went from thinking he'd need to scour the world's archives to needing to restrict himself to the United States.

The video occasionally lists the great harm such falls (or knowledge of them) led to over time by category, with things like loss of limb, fraud schemes, and death included.

Reminder to self: Share this with Mom, who once saw some poor guy in a suit slip on one "just like in the cartoons" when she was a little girl.

-- CAV