The Dilbert Blog

Windham

Today I am visiting the small town where I grew up: Windham NY. I have to write this post on my BlackBerry. If it looks odd, that's why. In Windham, they've heard good things about the Internet, but there's still a wait-and-see attitude. 

I haven't been back to Windham since I left 28 years ago. A big reason for leaving was the weather. So I carefully selected a calendar date with the lowest chance of death-by-snow. Furthermore, I checked the forecast before getting on the plane. There was only a ten percent chance of rain all week. So I left my umbrella home.

It's amazing how stupid you can get in 28 years.

As we dragged our luggage from Albany airport, lightning started a shock and awe campaign apparently aimed at toppling the Scott and Shelly regime. We tucked and rolled and made it to the rental car area just as the sky opened and the death-rain began. Before long, the rain turned to dime-sized hail and destroyed crops, stunned small animals, and made children cry.

"This is what 'ten percent chance of rain' means in Windham," I explained to my wife. You don't want to be here on a bad weather day.

Luckily, traffic was not an issue, since most of the time we were the only car on the road. If your car goes off the road in Windham, your best bet is reincarnation.

I tried to give my wife the audio tour of my hometown as we drove through, but I quickly realized all of my landmark references were based on memories of who allegedly got fingered where. That gets old faster than you'd think.

I kid, but Windham is actually a shockingly beautiful town and the people are nice. This is where I learned the art of humorous exaggeration. Exaggeration sounds funnier than "It rained." And they do have high speed Internet in Windham, except where I am right now.

The part about the dime-sized hail was true, but I am assured there is only a ten percent chance it will happen again today.

On the Road

Today I am visiting the small town where I grew up: Windham NY. I have to compile this post on my BlackBerry. If it looks odd, that's why. They've heard good things about the Internet here, but there's still a wait-and-see attitude.

I haven't been back to Windham since I left 28 years ago. A big reason for leaving was the weather. So I carefully selected a calendar date with the lowest chance of death-by-snow. Furthermore, I checked the forecast before getting on the plane. There was only a ten percent chance of rain all week. So I left my umbrella home.

It's amazing how stupid you can get in 28 years.

As we dragged our luggage from Albany airport, lightning started a shock and awe campaign apparently aimed at toppling the Scott and Shelly regime. We tucked and rolled and made it to the rental car area just as the sky opened and the death-rain began. Before long, the rain turned to dime-sized hail and destroyed crops, stunned small animals, and made children cry.

"This is what 'ten percent chance of rain' means in Windham," I explained to my wife. You don't want to be here on a bad day.

Luckily, traffic was not an issue, since most of the time we were the only car on the road. If your car goes off the road here, your best bet is reincarnation.

I tried to give my wife the audio tour of my hometown as we drove through, but I quickly realized all of my landmark references were based on memories of who allegedly got fingered where. That gets old faster than you'd think.

I kid, but Windham is actually a shockingly beautiful town and the people are nice. This is where I learned the art of humorous exaggeration. It sounds funnier than "It rained." And they have high speed Internet everywhere but where I am now.

The dime-sized hail was true, but I am assured there is only a ten percent chance it will happen again today.

Aroused by Pie

There was a study in the late nineties that showed males become aroused by certain scents.

http://health.msn.com/centers/mensexualhealth/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100167992

The biggest winner in the smells-that-make-men-horny contest was pumpkin pie. The researchers are baffled by why that particular smell is so effective. Allow me to help them out with the explanation part.

When a man smells a pumpkin pie, it means there’s a 90% chance a woman baked it. And she must be around here someplace. That’s worth half a boner right there.

Researchers found that the combination of licorice and pumpkin pie worked even better than pumpkin pie alone. Again, duh. If I smell pumpkin pie AND licorice, the odds of a woman being nearby rocket to about 99.9%.

Second, making a pie is a lot of work compared to other things. So there’s a good chance the woman who baked it is a pleaser. The pleasing probably won’t stop with the pie, if you know what I mean, wink-wink.

Third, pumpkin pie is not the obvious first choice for baking. Apple pie is a more obvious choice. Chocolate cake is more obvious. A woman who bakes a pumpkin pie is clearly a little freaky. Gentleman, start your engines!

The research showed that perfume didn’t have the same effect on men as food smells. Again, that’s no surprise to me. When I smell perfume, my first thought is “What’s she trying to cover up?” I’m not thinking I got to get me some of that.

My weakness is vanilla. One whiff and I have to check my driver’s license to remember my name and address. I once made the mistake of getting vanilla scent after a car wash. My car has a stick shift. You can imagine the confusion. I spent twenty minutes trying to find first gear. I would still be there if the other customers hadn’t banded together to push my car into the street.

Coal: Can You Dig It?

Did you see the story about the two Chinese coal miners who survived six days after a tunnel collapse? They ate coal and drank their own urine.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070828/od_nm/china_mine_coal1_dc_1;_ylt=AjSdP8lISg1LTBPSwwJceN0E1vAI

I had many reactions to this story, and that’s not even counting “Eewwww!”

When I was young, parents encouraged their kids to eat their vegetables by saying, “People in India are starving.” This is the sort of parenting that teaches children values, such as stupidity. To this day, when I think about people who are starving, I eat a little extra. I think it helps.

Now, thanks to the miners, parents have a better argument. “Eat your broccoli, Brittany. Chinese miners only get to eat coal and drink piss.”

I am happy the miners survived. But their problems are not over. If you eat coal and drink piss ONE time, you’ll always be a coal-eating-piss-drinker. I don’t know if people in China tease each other, but if it’s anything like here, those miners are in for a tough time.

“Hey, Meng, can I refresh your drink?” Zzzzzip.

“Bartender, I’ll have a beer, and for my friend, just wiz in his mouth. And put a head on it.”

“If we run out of charcoal for the barbecue, Meng can squeeze out a few brickettes.”

One of my many mental hobbies is thinking up new country sayings. My newest one is “I’m thirstier than a Chinese coal miner.” While nothing can surpass my all-time favorite, “I’m hornier than a two-peckered dog,” this new one comes close.

What’s your favorite country saying?

Synchronicity

As regular readers of this blog know, all coincidences are clues that we are holograms programmed by our long dead ancestors before the planet was annihilated. How else could you explain the two stories forwarded to me today?

1. A Republican Senator has been arrested for lewd conduct in a restroom.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20467347/

2. Monkeys are sexually harassing women.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6959209.stm

This is a classic case of code reuse by our lazy ancestors who created our hologram. It’s practically the same story, i.e. an ugly male primate engages in allegedly inappropriate sexual advances. The programmers simply randomized some of the less important elements such as the type of primate, the location, and the intended sex partners. And remember this comes on the heels of the story I wrote about recently: Dwarf has sex with vacuum cleaner. It’s the same damned story with different characters.

Indeed, all of the news is nothing but basic stories with randomized features. Watch as I predict tomorrow’s headlines today:

EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE

IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE

POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL

PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX

EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY

BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY

FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING

A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS

GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL

The real test of our hologram existence would be my ability to predict the future. In theory, if I am a replica of the actual human who programmed me, I would think the way he did. Therefore, the future will turn out much the way I would program it if it were up to me. So here’s my prediction:

Many of you will leave a comment complaining that I blog too much about our hologram existence. Some people will be compelled to mention The Matrix.

True Story

Sunday afternoon, a youth league basketball coach and his team play an away game in Pleasanton, CA. After the game, they grab some lunch at the In-n-Out Burger, then head home. The van with the team takes off, and the coach drives his beat-up old sedan to the gas station before the long trip home.

That’s when the coach realizes his wallet and cell phone are in his briefcase, which he left in the van. He has no gas, no money, no identification, and no phone. He’s also African-American, which he knows is going to make this next part especially challenging.

He walks around the pump and encounters a middle-aged white guy in workout clothes, gassing his BMW. The coach launches into his story about the basketball team, the hamburgers for lunch, the van, the briefcase, and he’s sure he’s not selling it.

“What do you need?” asked the guy with the BMW, judging the story to be legitimate.

“I don’t need any money,” explained the coach, defensively. “I just need some gas. Maybe I could just pump some from your pump after you finish?”

The BMW guy reached for his wallet and said, “How far are you going?” Again, the coach insisted he didn’t want money, just gas. He knew it would sound too suspicious to ask for cash. He had trouble believing he closed the sale with such a lame story, and he didn’t want to be thought of as a scammer.

The BMW guy handed him a twenty and said, “Is that enough?” The coach tried one more time to explain he wasn’t asking for money. The BMW guy just smiled and shrugged. The coach thanked him enthusiastically.

Was this an unlucky day for the coach, because he forgot his wallet? Or was it a lucky day because he found help so easily and it restored just a little bit of his faith in humanity?

I can answer that question, because I was the guy with the BMW. And it wasn’t until this morning that I realized he said he was heading to Monterey. If I had done the math, I would have realized twenty dollars would only get him halfway home. I just figured that out this morning.

So, thanks to my help, he’s probably stranded in Gilroy (the garlic capital of the world) and wondering why that briefcase-in-the-van story only worked once.

And in retrospect, I suppose I should have offered to let him use my cell phone. So I grant you it wasn’t a clean win for humanity. But I felt good about myself for half a day, and that was worth twenty bucks.

For the record, Coach, I would have given you forty bucks. I hope you found your way home from Gilroy.

Invent This Product

I’d love to have a complete scrapbook of all my vacations, but it’s too much work. That’s why I need a service that would create the scrapbook automatically, online. Here’s how it could work.

First, my digital camera should have GPS so it always knows where I am. When I download my photos, a Google map would pop up, and the photos would go into storage according to the points on the map where the pictures were taken, ordered by date. The map forms the backdrop for organizing the scrapbook.

Second, I would use a special credit card for all purchases on my vacation, from gas stations to hotels to restaurants. The special part is that the records of my purchases would feed into my automatic scrapbook software and coordinate it with the camera’s GPS data. That would be enough data for the scrapbook system to intelligently guess the name of the restaurant or attraction where I was at the time of the picture.

Third, the system needs face recognition software so it can label photos with at least the names of family and friends who appear in them. It doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, but it could give you a big head start.

Let’s say you take a picture of a family member standing in front of the hotel where you are staying. The GPS from your camera would provide the approximate location, and when the scrapbook system compared it to your credit card receipts, it would know you stayed at the hotel near those coordinates. Your digital photo would be automatically labeled “Bob at the Hilton in Cleveland, April 15, 2008.” And it would store those pictures at a labeled location on the Google map.

When the vacation is over, the scrapbook is 85% complete. You just have to check its assumptions and add/correct any descriptors you want.

You could run it as a slide show, with a little icon of a car traveling from location to location on the Google map, while the calendar date appears in the corner. When the icon reaches a destination from which there are photos, it displays them in a slide show. Optionally, the system could bring in pictures from other sources to beef up your scrapbook. For example, if you visited the Grand Canyon, it could bring in some stock pictures to round out your album. It could also capture a screen shot of the hotel or resort’s web site during the period you visited.

Google should invent this product.

My Life as a Hologram

I don’t tell this story often, because no one believes it.

It was 1979, my senior year at Hartwick College, in Oneonta NY. One early morning I woke up from a dead sleep and had what could best be described as a vision of my future. In this vision, I would move to San Francisco, and create something that would make me famous. And I saw myself standing on stage in front of a huge audience. At the time, I knew no one who lived in San Francisco. I didn’t even know anyone who had visited. It seemed entirely random. I was majoring in economics so I could become a banker in New York City, not a stage performer in San Francisco.

After graduating, I traded my beat-up Datsun 510 to my sister for a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where my brother had moved a few years earlier. I slept in a sleeping bag on his couch and applied for banking jobs. I had two offers, and was planning to pick one of them.

Meanwhile, sometime after my so-called vision, an ex girlfriend dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. While I was in LA, she invited me up for the weekend. I went. She convinced me that San Francisco was a much nicer place than LA, and I should move there. I said I’d stay if I could find a job on Monday. I was almost out of money. Otherwise, I would return to LA and accept one of the offers there.

On Monday morning, I walked into a branch of Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, asked for a job, and got one, as a teller. I’ve lived in the San Francisco area ever since. This is where I created Dilbert. And I have stood on stage in front of huge audiences a few hundred times, just as I saw it in the vision.

I’ve had several of these so-called visions. Most of them happened just the way I saw them. A few haven’t happened yet, but could. So how do I explain it?

The obvious explanation is that I remember the alleged visions that come true and forget the ones that don’t. I can’t rule that out. Another possibility is that I have some weird psychic ability. That seems unlikely. If people had that sort of ability it would have been measured in a lab by now.

Perhaps my subconscious makes all my decisions, and creates all of my so-called visions. Then it does its best to make me do the things that would make the visions come true. That seems like a perfectly good theory.

But my favorite theory is that I’m nothing but a hologram in a computer program built by my ancient self, before the planet was destroyed by some disaster. The reason I can glimpse my future is that I have all of the qualities of the real me who wrote my program. In other words, I can accurately imagine my future because it is playing out much like I would have authored it myself.

The great thing about this theory is that I can find all sorts of clues to validate it. For example, when I come up with a “new” idea only to discover that others have had the same thought, this fits my theory too. The reason other people have my same thoughts is because they were programmed by my ancient self, who only had a finite number of thoughts to build into the program. This reality is bound to have repeats.

Then there is all the science I don’t understand. One explanation is that it’s over my head. But I prefer the explanation that it is nothing but gibberish programmed into the system. The reason I don’t understand string theory, for example, is that there are no real scientists, only holograms programmed by my ancient self. And since my ancient self didn’t know string theory, he concealed that fact by making it seem as though it is just too complicated to understand.

That’s how I would have programmed it.

Donut Theory of the Universe Proven

Astronomers have confirmed that the universe has a big hole in the middle and is, for all practical purposes, a giant donut.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082400600.html

The Power of Stupid

A reader sent this story about his workplace.

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“A theme from many of your previous comics came true to life for us today. Quality in the workplace.

Yesterday, a pointy-haired boss decided our meeting room needed nice motivational pictures on the wall. Twelve by eight inch, wooden frame, 1940s-style motivational tools (think 'Rosie the Riveter' in artwork, color and font). So an assistant was ordered to procure such things.

The first mistake was where the artwork was obtained from. Rather than pay $15 per picture for the real thing, it was decided to take the small JPEG images of what we wanted from a website that sold these trinkets. Cheap picture frames were bought (from a dollar store, by the look of things).

When the images were enlarged to fit into the 12 by 8 frames, the pixelation was terrible. In itself, this was funny. A picture that celebrates the idea of quality in the workplace looked cheap, and knowing it was a stolen image lessens the impact of the message slightly.”
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This story made me think about one of the great wonders of capitalism: It is driven by morons who are circling the drain, and yet. . . it works!

Think about all the people working and earning paychecks from companies that will ultimately fail. It’s a lot of people. But until those companies fail, the employees are getting paid, buying goods, and contributing to the economy. After the failure, those employees hop over to another sinking ship, and so on.

Within successful companies, a huge portion of resources are dedicated to projects and products that will ultimately fail. But in the meantime, everyone is getting paid and propping up the economy.

I once worked in a bank, making loans to small business start-ups. Our rule of thumb was that 90% of new businesses fail. The exceptions were franchisees and pizza places. But we saw no shortage of people willing to mortgage their homes to start their own sporting good stores and boutique dress shops, despite the 90% chance of failure. Without clueless optimists, the economy would grind to a halt. My own career has been a long string of failures and a few notable successes.

I understand the math of capitalism, and how the few successes are so large they pay for all the failures and then some. But at any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons. This fascinates me. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

In the rest of the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business.

My point is that I hope the monkeys that already know how to use sticks for tools don’t start using leaves for money. If that happens, we’re screwed.