How To Survive The Black Friday Shopping

AAAAAAAtttention, shooooppers!!!

Black Friday is upon us, shoppers!  Black Friday is war, Black Friday is hell, Black Friday is chills, thrills and occasional kills, and I, drill sergeant X, am here for the drills!  I am here to make lean, mean shopping machines out of your sorry just-browsing rookie asses!!

Did I say something funny?? DID I SAY SOMETHING FUNNY, SHOPPER?!?!? Drop and give me twenty!  Now you look at this twenty-bill very carefully, shopper!! Do you want to save those twenty dollars?  DO YOU???  Do you want to save twenty dollars AND LIVE, shopper?? Then shut up and listen to what I have to say, unless you want your dead body to be found covered with packing peanuts and stuffed in a cardboard refrigerator box marked for in-store pickup for your family’s convenience!!!

Anyone here who’s weak and doesn’t feel they’re up to the task?  Anyone here who’s having second thoughts??  Anyone here with heart conditions, who’s trample-intolerant, or allergic to stab wounds???  If you as much as had to think about it, I’m gonna give you 20 seconds to pack your stuff and crawl back home to your wussy Amazon shopping – and I do mean Amazon, because even eBay’s online auctions would pose too much danger for you, weaklings!

Now, those of you who stayed… at ease, shoppers. I see a few scarred faces of seasoned Black Friday veterans, but I see newbies, too. Why do you need to shop, you ask? You need to do this for your country, shoppers. You need to buy stuff to support the economy – Chinese economy, Indian economy, Indonesian economy, all the world economies!  The fate of the entire world hangs in balance on your shoulders, shoppers! Remember what President George Bush said after 9/11 – by going shopping is how we shall defeat the terrorists.

Why on Black Friday, you ask?  Because this is the day when you get the most bang for your buck!  You’ll spend a buck and you’ll get banged up so hard in the process that your mama won’t recognize you!  But you follow my cues, shoppers, and you just might live to see the daylight on Saturday!

Rule Number one! Do NOT go shopping on Black Friday!  Yes, you heard me right, shopper!  You take your positions AT LEAST a week before, otherwise you might as well drag your asses back to your basement and try your luck next year!  You take positions right here in line in front of the store, yes, right here at the front lines, and you take advantage of the high ground – so no lounging up in the parking lot, you get your asses all the way up on the sidewalk!

Rule Number Two! You’ll need provisions, you’ll need supplies, you’ll need rifles and shotguns. They don’t call it “hunting for bargain” for nothin’!  You’ll need a tent. What? You DON’T own a tent, shopper? This means that you gonna have to buy one this Black Friday, so you could pitch a tent for the next Black Friday! Add that to your shopping list – and I better see it tattooed on your ass, shopper! Take your cell phone with you so that you could call for reinforcements, and don’t forget the phone charger cord, because you never know when you may have to strangle somebody to move up one spot in the line!

Rule Number Three! No matter what, you DO NOT give up your position, shopper!  Not rain, not wind, not fire are to deter you from completing your mission!!! But what about Thanksgiving, you ask? What about family, turkey, cranberry sauce cylinders, you say? Forget about it, shopper. Do you realize that Thanksgiving Day is a made-up holiday, and was invented by professional Black Friday shoppers who wanted to weed out as much competition as possible! A day to get together with people you try to avoid 364 days a year, and to eat a bird-shaped blob of tasteless chewy paste, that you would never in your right mind order at a restaurant?  You call THAT a holiday, shopper???

Engage your Target, shoppers!

Rule Number Four!  Preparation is half the battle! Prior to BF-Day, scour the target store, familiarize yourself with the floor (getting a job at the store can help), map the shortest route to the shelf you need to get from the door, and practice, practice, practice some more! Do practice runs from the entrance to the target shelf at least ten times a day, and time yourself each time, until you are satisfied.  Then run, run, run again, until you can get from the entrance to the shelf, then to the checkout, then clear out to the parking lot in under 15 seconds wearing a blindfold!!!

And keep one final thing in mind, shoppers: on Black Friday, all people fall into two categories: cashiers and obstacles!

Are you ready, shoppers?? Are you ready to crush and trample your fellow man to save five bucks?? Are you ready to wreak havoc and devastation in your path when the store doors open at precisely oh-two-hundred hours?? ARE? YOU?? READY???

Three! Two! One!  ATTAAAAAAAAACK!!!!

How To Go To The Bathroom In The Office

Many people work in an office or other workplaces where we have to share a bathroom with other people, and most people are usually potty-trained by the time we begin our careers. However, if you share an office bathroom with enough people, you’ll know that the question “how to go to the bathroom” is not as trivial as it seems.  Judging by the behavior of some of our coworkers, many of us don’t use the bathroom correctly.  Here are a few hints on how to go to the bathroom in the office properly.

Just because it says “rest room”, it doesn’t mean you have to stop working.

Use the time you spend in the bathroom stall to call in to a meeting or make a personal phone call.  You have more privacy there, because the walls of the stall are higher than the walls of your cubicle.  Always pick a bathroom for its cell phone reception because the rest of the stuff there is pretty standard.

Do not flush. Flushing wastes water, and you know how your company is committed to slashing costs. Also, a flushing noise can disturb your colleagues in the nearby stalls who might be in a meeting.

If you need to use the stall, don’t automatically assume that a closed door means that the stall is occupied. Shake the door a little bit. If the door doesn’t open, it still doesn’t mean it’s locked from inside – the door could just be stuck. Look under it. You may see the shoes on the floor, but once again, don’t make any assumptions, because someone could have just left their shoes there. Instead, jump up a few times until you can glance over the door and decisively verify that the stall is occupied.

If you are the one inside, the only way to prevent people from jumping over stall the door to look at you, is to call in to the meeting from inside the stall.

If you work in a place where the stalls are always occupied (for example, where Arby’s is the only lunch place within driving distance), and you are sure that your co-workers will never read this post, you can always designate your own personal stall by tightening the door and leaving a pair of old shoes on the floor.

Remember, when the money’s tight, the workplace bathroom is the place where you can stock up on some free toilet paper.

How to go to the ladies room. Do not go into the ladies room if you’re a guy. This may seem obvious, but in some offices this advice can be really tough to follow with the company’s tendency for constantly moving the bathrooms and for using really gender-neutral signs on the bathroom doors.

These are the signs on the men’s and ladies’ bathroom doors from the office that requires all employees to wear business attire. Men’s restroom is on the left – you can tell because there are urinals inside.

Unlike the ladies’ room, the men’s room has a designated area for having brief in-person business meetings.  Just head to the nearest urinal and wait for the person you need to talk to.  Scientific studies have shown that people are more likely to be honest with you when their pants are down.

To maintain professional appearance, do not go to the bathroom empty-handed. Print out an article from the internet (this post is a good choice) to read and carry it with you to the bathroom in a neat stack or a folder. Also, waiting to go to the bathroom until the last minute will give your face an extremely concerned and professional look, and add the sense of purpose to your walk.

If your office doesn’t care about professional appearances, bringing printed reading materials is still a good idea. You think you can just read anything from your smartphone, but let’s see how useful your iPhone will be when you belatedly find out that somebody just used your stall to stock up on the toilet paper.

And finally, don’t forget to thoroughly wash your hands. That way, you can delay going back to the routine of your work.

How To Celebrate The Fourth Of July

This looks very safe. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many of you are well aware that Fourth of July is the American Independence day.  If you were ever unsure how exactly to celebrate it, here are a few helpful hints.

First of all, the celebration consists of four important parts, namely American flags, grilling food, drinking alcohol and fireworks.  While some of those parts seem unrelated to the history of American independence, all off these elements actually have deep connections to the American Revolutionary War.

Let’s start with the flag. Make sure to buy a lowest-quality American flag made in China. This may feel slightly unpatriotic, but in a few hours, when the flag falls apart and you have to sew it back together, you will feel exactly like Betsy Ross.

Drink a lot (like A LOT) of beer to celebrate the holiday. If you know your history, you should remember that the colonists threw out boxes of tea into the Boston Harbor, protesting when the British King tried to make the colonists drink tea instead of beer.

If Samuel Adams beer is sold in your region, drink that brand to honor one of the Founding Fathers. However, if you plan to drive, please remember that the legal founding father level in your blood should be below 0.05% to 0.1%, depending on the state where you live.

Of course, it’s much better to not to drink and drive. However, should you run out of beer mid-party, it’s still legal to send horseback rider to gallop through the dark streets and roads to that liquor store that’s always open late. Then keep an eye out for the lone rider, approaching your party while yelling “Beer is coming, beer is coming!”. This ride will be forever known as “the Re-beer ride”.

Still, try not to drink too much.  You know you drank too much beer, if by the dawn’s early light you wake up to find yourself crossing the Delaware river in somebody’s boat.

If you are too young to drink beer, it’s perfectly ok to drink tea. Yes, it’s still a patriotic thing to do, because when you are dropping the teabag into the water, you are creating a miniature re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party in your tea cup.

Grill plenty of burgers. Remember, those burgers sacrificed their lives for your freedom to eat them.

End the celebration with fireworks.  Buy plenty of fireworks and break laws if you have to.  Remember, it’s a proud American tradition to break state laws to buy the fireworks, because, seriously, what’s the point of having freedom if you aren’t free to buy fireworks to celebrate your freedom?

Invite your friends to watch your fireworks. Set off the fireworks when you see the whites of their eyes. Call the ambulance if you still see the whites of their eyes 20 minutes after setting off the fireworks.

Have a safe and fun Independence Day!

P.S. It’s totally up to you whether to invite your British friends.

How To Mix Blogging And Working Successfully

Warning: people blogging! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a well-known fact that many bloggers have to juggle working at a full-time job and writing a blog*, and they often complain that their work encroaches on their blogging time, and vice versa. Both activities are very time consuming, and nosy co-workers and managers can make it very difficult to dedicate even a few hours of your workday to blogging. Remember, while blogging and working are both important, your company probably has other employees to move the work forward, but there is no one else to write your blog for you. However, the importance of keeping your job cannot be underestimated either: it helps you pay for your internet and therefore for blogging, provides blog fodder and hundreds of potential blog followers in your co-workers. Here are some tips on how to blog yet make it seem like you’re working.

• Make sure to factor in blog-related deadlines along with your work-related deadlines. Add blog deadlines to your Outlook calendar as well. When planning how long your work-related projects will take, always factor in 6-10 hours of blogging time every day, and allow an extra day in case your post gets Freshly Pressed and you have to respond to hundreds of comments. (In the unlikely event that your post doesn’t get Freshly Pressed, you can always troll Freshly Pressed posts of other bloggers.)

• Write comments in the Outlook E-mail messages rather than in the comments sections of the blogs where you plan to comment, and return to the blog to paste the completed comment. Not only you are actually blogging, but you also create an appearance of passionately typing a work-related e-mail. However, make sure that you don’t click on “send”, unless you’re absolutely sure that your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts.

• If your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts, ask him/her to follow your blog. Didn’t s/he ask you to cc: him/her on all important stuff? And isn’t your blog important to you?

• When your co-workers ask you to do something, agree to help on the condition that they follow your blog. Yes, they may complain to HR, but you can use this opportunity to convert your HR representative into your loyal follower.

• Hint for Twitter users: Adding a #work hashtag automatically makes any tweet work-related.

• When making a PowerPoint presentation for a team meeting, “accidentally” slip your latest and greatest post into the presentation. Let attendees read it in full before you “notice” the “mistake”. After the meeting, log out of your WordPress account and refresh the blog post page as many times as there were people at meeting: unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t count the PowerPoint views, and you probably want your stats page to reflect the accurate count of blog post views.

• Spend a lot of time on your Stats page. It looks very professional at a cursory view, and if anyone asks, you can always explain that it’s a new productivity metric. Well, it is! It measures how productive your blog readers are: if you see a lot of views and comments, they are not very productive.

• For your blog, pick a theme that most closely resembles the screen view of an application you have to use for work. There is a reason WordPress carries so many blog themes and even lets you customize them.

* Note that some people claim to juggle a full-time job, a blog, and raising multiple kids. However, that is physically impossible and we will not even discuss it here.

How To Become A Better Public Speaker In 7 Steps

A lot of people feel anxious and even scared when they are speaking in public.  I know that for a fact because I used to fear public speaking for years myself, until I stopped speaking in public.  But it’s actually not too difficult to overcome your anxiety and become a better speaker if you just follow these 7 steps.

Step 1.  Relax. A well-known way to relax is to imagine that everyone in the audience is naked. If you are a blogger and you don’t have an audience in front of you, feel free to imagine anyone you want.  You know, Robert Pattinson or Megan Fox might be reading your blog right now.

Step 2.  If you are Robert Pattinson or Megan Fox, please stop speaking and interrupting the flow of other people’s imagination.

Step 3.  Follow the example of an ancient Greek orator who had practiced his enunciation by putting pebbles in his mouth and trying to talk as clearly as possible. If your speech doesn’t go well, at least you’ll have a mouthful of excuses.

Step 4.  If imagining naked people does not help, consult with your psychotherapist. You may be suffering from what doctors call “nuduspopuluminauditoriophobia”, also known as a fear of naked people in the audience.

Step 5.  Use the help of your loved one to practice public speaking. Get into an argument with your spouse and remember that doesn’t count as not public speaking, unless your neighbors can hear you.  Hint: a sure way to start a lively argument is to mention how often you imagine Robert Pattinson or Megan Fox reading your blog.

Step 6.  Stop googling “naked people in the audience!”.  Now is not the time to conquer your fears.

Step 7.  When you make your speech, speak clearly, make eye contact, and don’t be afraid to use your hands.  Wait, no, no, that’s not the use of hands that I meant!  Oh God, stop that, please!  Eh… I give up.   At least try not to do THAT when you are speaking in public, and it shouldn’t go too badly.

How To Write A Blog: 10 Obligatory Blog Posts Every Blogger Has To Write At Least Once

Today’s guest post is brought to you by the letter X better known as the List of X. To read more about guest posts, see step 6.

I have been reading WordPress blogs for months now, and I have noticed that certain types of blog posts are more common than others. So I thought I’d aggregate these most common blog posts into just one short post for your enjoyment. Alternatively, you can use this post as your blogging guide which will save your valuable time by providing you with the pre-written template blog posts that you can simply copy and paste into your blog.

I was planning to write a separate post about 10 most common blog photos, but this woman is in 9 out of 10 of them.

1) Hello, World!  This blog will be a platform for my thoughts about me, myself, my thoughts about myself, and occasionally about _____, _____, what I think about this, and Kim Kardashian. I will write as often as I can, since I usually think daily about different things, I think. See, I’ve just thought again! I better start posting stuff right now!

2) The Day Of Outrage:  I don’t normally get outraged about things, but ______ was outrageous! Did you see how outrageous that was! You didn’t? This is so outrageous that you haven’t seen it yet! You gotta check out just how outrageous this was! See! Told you! Wasn’t it outrageous? Please share your outrage in the comments section, because I’ll be outraged if you don’t!

3) The Away Message:  I apologize, my dear readers, for leaving you without your daily fix of information about me, and temporarily abandoning my blog for almost three hours. I am really sorry that you had to put your life on hold because you did not know what’s going on with my life. But I was busy with things. It’s not like I don’t have a life, you know? Haha. Honestly, I promise to write three times a day from now on. It’s not like I really have a life, you know? Haha.

4) Search Terms Of Endearment:  I have to share the good news with you! I am on Google now! Yes, you can enter something in Google and it will find my blog! Isn’t it cool? And apparently, people enter completely random things and still find my blog! Check out this hilarious search term: ______. Isn’t it hilarious? And what about this: _________? Even more hilarious, right? And this: ___________. What’s up with that?? Hilarious. But you know, seriously, even though all these result are hilarious and all, but the search for “most totally amazing blog ever” doesn’t lead to my blog for some reason. I’m gonna have to call Google because I think there is a problem with their search.

5) The Freshly Pressed Hangover (posted the morning after). Thank you everyone for such thoughtful comments! I have never seen so many thoughtful comments saying “Congrats on being Freshly Pressed” ever! It is so great to be Freshly Pressed! It’s like a total vindication of my life’s work! My blog got so many page views that my computer totally crashed! Well, I was actually jumping for joy, and my foot tripped over the wire and my computer actually crashed! But now that I am a famous blogger, I have bought a bigger and better computer to write bigger and better posts!

6) The Guest Post: This amazing post is brought to you by the amazing blogger named ______ . He/she won’t be writing about me today, which is sad, but I get a day off from my blog, which is good. Please check out his/her work, he/she’s almost as amazing as me. But please read all my amazing posts first! You don’t actually have to read them if you don’t have time, but please click on them at least! Then come back tomorrow and read them! Or just “like’” them.

7) Gems From The Junk Filter:  Check this out! I just found out that WordPress is blocking some of the comments on my blog! These people have been leaving the nicest comments like “this is an excellently wrote post”, or “I have learning so much from this site”, or “your qualification is for among the best blogs of the internet”. Why does WordPress block these comments??? Who are they, grammar Nazis or something???

8) The Traffic Report:  Check out this picture. This is my page views stats. This looks just like Manhattan skyline, doesn’t it? I removed the numbers so you don’t get jealous. At least I was hoped you would get jealous but I wasn’t really sure you would, so I deleted the numbers just in case. And then here is the next month, and it now looks more like New Jersey skyline. And look, here is this month, and it looks just like Nebraska. At least I think it looks like Nebraska, because I flew over it once and from up there Nebraska looked completely flat and sad, just like my recent traffic. Where is my traffic? Why isn’t anyone reading my blog??? I hate Nebraska!!!

9) My Amazing Cat:  My cat is totally amazing. It is so warm and fuzzy and smart. I wish my cat could write a post for my blog. I just know this post would have been so warm and fuzzy and smart that it’s gonna get Freshly Pressed instantly and I would get traffic again. I need traffic! Where is my traffic! Damn you cat! Write the post now!!! And make it warm and fuzzy and smart, damn it!!!

10) The Trends I Am Seeing:  I have been reading blogs for months now, and I have noticed that some types of blog posts are more common than others, so I thought I would aggregate them for your enjoyment and make fun of all of them at once.  Check out the whole amazing post here.

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