I heart germs.

Okay, not really. But I am a subscriber to the belief that being a germaphobe does more harm than good. For one, preventing yourself from being exposed to germs weakens your immune system, making you more susceptible to getting sick when you do finally meet with one. But worse is that the overuse of antibacterial products helps create superbugs that are hard to kill because they're immune to everything.

I get it though. There are some pretty nasty bugs out there that you REALLY don't want to get. However, I've seen some commercials that are the epitome of taking things too far when it comes to avoiding germs.

A little while back I saw an ad where the actors made a big deal about not touching anything with their hands. It ended up being an ad for portable hand sanitizers that you can carry around in your purse. The message: you never know what your touching, so HAVE HAND SANITIZER AT ALL TIMES!!!! Well, how about you just wash your hands before you eat? Problem solved!

My all time favourite, though, has to be a new commercial out for automatic hand soap dispensers. They actually say that "you'll never have to touch a germy soap pump again!" Okay, boys and girls, let me explain this to you. When you touch the germy soap pump? You're doing it to get soap. Guess what you do right afterwards? YOU WASH YOUR HANDS! What does it matter if the soap pump is germy or not, anything you happen to pick up will soon be gone without a trace.

Like I said, if you want to avoid germs I won't begrudge you. To each his own. But really, advertisers? Really? I'm disappointed.

Birthdays gone wrong

My family went through a phase where we were really into using funny candles on birthdays. You know, the ones with multi-coloured flames or that play music when you light them up. I loved those candles, they added some flair to your everyday, average birthday cake. Recently, my uncle reminded me why we stopped using them.

Situation 1: The Best of Intentions

One year for my birthday, my grandma found a trick candle that wouldn't go out. Excited to have a laugh at my expense, she snuck one onto my birthday cake. After it was presented to me with a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, she watched in glee as I skillfully blew out every candle with one breath. As I sat up, feeling smug about my achievement, one of the candles sputtered and came back to life. No problem, I simply bent over and blew it out a second time. Again, it sputtered back to life. At this point most of my family members had caught on to what my grandma had done and were snickering quietly. Except my uncle. Seeing that I was struggling, he licked his fingers, reached over, and put the candle out for me. The uproar afterwards was impressive, and my uncle was in the doghouse for the rest of the afternoon for ruining my grandma's fun.

Situation 2: The Zombie Candle

It was my younger brother's birthday. My mom found a candle that, when you lit it, would play Happy Birthday. After much eye-rolling and groaning when she got it going, my brother was eager to make it stop so he blew it out. The music kept playing. Then he tried the lick-and-snuff manoeuvre. The music kept playing. Next, he actually removed the candle from the base. The music kept playing. Houston, we have a problem.

At this point we were at a loss. How could we make it stop? As much as it was amusing at first, the tinny, overly-cheerful music was starting to get on our nerves. Finally we decided to submerge it in water and short out it electrical bits. I kid you not, the base not only continued playing but changed its tune and started playing This Old Man. We stood there, baffled, and started considering the possibility that this candle base may be haunted. We tried tons of different ways to kill it, I think we even found a battery in it and removed it, and nothing worked. Eventually we buried it in a bag of garbage and left the room to wait it out. It took hours for it to finally give up the ghost.

I believe that was the last time we used a funny candle. Somehow I'm not surprised.

It's the little things

Remotes are rather simple devices. You point it at something. You press buttons. It does stuff. But I never realized how under-appreciated my remote was until it decided to stop working.

The whole ordeal started off fairly simply. One day I went to use my remote, and even though it went through the motions my TV refused to wake up. I looked up how to program my remote, and eventually figured out I had to get the remote into program mode, press codes for the television until the button in the corner started flashing, take out the batteries, put them back in, and voila! The remote worked. Until the next day. So I tried changing the batteries and repeating the process all over again. Once again, the remote worked for a day before losing it again. And then it quit all together. Finally I resigned myself to the fact I had to get a new one. During the two weeks it took for me to actually get out and buy one, I simply went without. Never have I missed an inanimate object so much.

The biggest issue was that my TV doesn't actually go to all the channels on it's own. It can count to 15, and then skips to 70. Suddenly my show selection was limited, and I found myself watching lovely programs such as the Tyra Banks show *shudder*. You think I would just stop watching, but I like to have background noise when I'm hanging out around the house. Then I'd try and find out what else was on, but I'd look away for a couple seconds and miss the few channels I could actually watch. Eventually I just left my TV on one channel and watched it regardless of what was on. Ever heard of "Day of the Triffids?" Neither had I. It's weird.

Yesterday I finally got a new remote. Today I didn't like what was on, and the glee I got from being able to just flip around and see what was on was a little scary, to be honest.

On a completely unrelated note, I've decided it might be time for me to get out of the house more.

An eerie surprise

When I was younger I had an obsession with smilie faces. I had smilie face pencils, smilie face notebooks, and drew smilie faces over everything I owned. I also tried to pass on my love of smilie faces to other people. So one christmas I managed to find an (in my opinion) awesome pair of boxers for my dad. They looked a little something like this:

My dad, being the more boxer-briefs type, graciously accepted the gift and never wore it. Didn't even take the tags off. So years later, when I started wearing boxers in the summer as pajamas, the boxers got returned to me.

I've worn these boxers many times since then and never noticed anything untoward. Last night though, I woke up in the middle of the night for no good reason. I was warm, so I'd kicked off all of the covers. I rolled over, stretched a bit, looked down, and my crotch was glowing. Glowing. I didn't have my contacts in, so I couldn't clearly see what was going on down there. At first I thought there was a light shining from somewhere, but after a while of blindly searching (literally) I couldn't see anything that could be the source. Then I rolled over, and the glowing rolled with me. Finally I reached down and stretched out the boxers, and there smiling back at me was a glow-in-the-dark smilie face.

I'm sure I've been wearing these off and on for years, and this is the first time I've noticed this. Needless to say, it would have been nice to realize this when I was a little more awake and not in that state when you first wake up where the thought that you got spat on by a ghost in your sleep crosses your mind. Or maybe that's just me.

Office Scandal

At my work, there are a lot of people who choose to bike in rather than drive or take the bus, myself included. Luckily for us, the office has showers we can use to freshen up so us sweaty bikers don't stink up the whole place. This is especially important for me as I work at the front desk, and having a receptionist that looks and smells like she came straight from the gym probably wouldn't be all that great for business.

I work very hard at not waking up any earlier than I have to, so I've gotten into a good routine. Leave the house by 7:40 at the absolute latest, which gets me to work about 8:10. Take a very quick shower, dry off, get dressed and pretty myself up just in time to grab a cup of coffee and start work at 8:30. It's worked really well for me so far. Until today.

7:40 rolled around and I was still packing my bags. I was only a few minutes behind, but with my schedule a few minutes has the potential to make me late. I hop on my bike and pedal as fast as I can (which admittedly is not very fast) to try and make up for lost time. Miraculously, I get to work the exact same time I normally do, but the adrenaline was still with me so I grabbed my bag of clothes and rushed to the shower. After a quick scrub down, I step out of the shower and reach to grab my towel...which isn't there. I'd left it on the towel racks in the common area. Which left me in a bit of a pickle.

Now, to give you a good grasp of the situation, I drew out what the shower area in our company looks like:

(The weird curvy things for the doors are supposed to represent which way the door opens)

The towel racks are in the common area, and I know that my towel is no more than two steps away from the stall I was in. I also knew for a fact that I had forgotten to close the door to the common area, and that most of the people that work in the service department directly outside of the door had already arrived. I briefly tried to conjure up a way to open the door to my stall and quickly sneak over and shut the common room door before anyone sees me - I am, of course, butt-naked and dripping wet. I gave up on that idea pretty fast because if it didn't work and someone saw me, I wouldn't be able to look them in the eye ever again. I mean, we're at work. It's not a place where being seeing naked is excusable. Not to mention my dad works there, so it would then become incredibly awkward for him and the coworker. Just a bad situation overall.

Suddenly I realized that I could call the front desk on my cellphone because my friend covers the phones for the first 30 minutes of the day. If I reached her I could get her to come and throw my towel over (the stall walls don't go all the way to the ceiling) and I would be saved! Not half a second later I was dismayed to realize that I didn't bring my phone into the stall, so I woefully discarded that plan. What was left for me to do? I started work in 15 minutes, I didn't have all day to sit around thinking. Finally, reluctantly, I turned to the pile of discarded clothes from my bike ride in, picked up the long-sleeved running shirt I wore in, and started drying off with that. The fabric was horrible for absorbing water and left little bits of black fuzz everywhere, but eventually I got dry enough that I could get dressed and step out of the stall to get my towel without the fear of being exposed.

With that, my problem was solved. But I couldn't get properly dry before I got dressed, and didn't have time to get undressed again just to finishing drying off, so I spent the rest of the morning feeling damp and more than a little silly. Lesson learned: ALWAYS shut the door to the common room. And that Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy was right: always carry your towel.

Personalities at the office

This may make me sound crazy, but ever give inanimate objects personalities? Maybe it's a product of my boredom at work, but lately I've found myself looking at the machines I use at my office in a whole new light. Here's what I've come up with so far:

The Dot-Matrix Printer

This printer is an old dog that's been forced to learn a new trick. At my company it has two jobs: print cheques, and print invoices. The first it does no problem at all, clearly in line with it's original function. The second, not so much. First, it has trouble taking the paper. Then, once it finally manages to load properly and print it doesn't want to let go of the paper. And once I remove the paper, it has to be restarted before I can start the whole process all over again. The printer tries, it really tries. But clearly it struggles working with the larger size of paper, like an old man struggling to learn to use a cell phone.

The Desktop

My desktop is the newest piece of machinery that I work with. Which isn't saying much. Still, it reminds me of an overachiever, with one weakness. 99% of the time it works beautifully, completing commands with grace and ease. However, it seems to have a pathological fear of the fax program. When I load the program, the whole screen turns beige and it takes effort to everything back to normal. And every once in a while the desktop freaks out and shuts the program down.

The Fax Machine

This machine is a simpleton, straight up. It can do one task at a time, and that's it. Either it can send a fax, or it can print a confirmation. As soon as it's doing one, it's tiny brain it working at full capacity and NOTHING ELSE CAN BE DONE until that task is completed. Not to mention that sometimes it doesn't seem to understand what pressing the "send" button means. Poor, simple fax machine.

The Copier/Scanner

Ever read hitchiker's guide to the galaxy? If you haven't, the important point here is there a machine called Marvin. He's very depressed. And has this constant pain in all the diodes down his left side. The copier/scanner machine reminds me of Marvin. It does what it's told, but often not without a lot of grumbling. It constantly jams, and sometimes completely fails to send the scan where you told it to go. Occasionally, it will tell me there's a jam somewhere, but after opening all of the different compartments you find out it was making up a problem. Dealing with this machine is beyond frustrating. But when it decides to work it does everything we need to it do, so it doesn't get replaced.

See where I'm coming from, fellow Douglas Adams Fans?



The Printer

You know the stereotypical jock from highschool? The guy that's not too bright, but is good at sports so he's the figurative belle of the ball? That's our printer. It does a fantastic job of printing. Fast, efficient, and rarely breaks down. However, it struggles to process print jobs that aren't a basic word document. And sometimes, it has to think about each individual page of a job before it can print it. Not too bright, but still a good printer.

The Coffee Machine

The coffee machine is brilliant. A genius in its own right. But it does things his way. Want to use the same pot to put water in the machine that you're going to hold the coffee in? No can do. Once the water starts going in, coffee is going to be made whether you're ready or not. It makes a good pot of coffee in no time at all though, so what's a little inconvenience here and there?

Dear energy-saving light bulbs...

You have one job. Just one job. When I turn you on, I want to you make my world significantly brighter so I can get stuff done. You don't even have to look pretty while you're doing it. I'm not that picky.

Instead, I trudge up the stairs in the morning and flick your switch only to be greeted by a disappointingly meek glow, maybe two steps up from complete darkness. This does not work for me. I need to put in my contacts, shower, and do a few other things in my morning routine that all require the ability to see. Because of your lackluster performance, I end up leaving you turned on while I wander off with my glasses to check my emails or something until you decide that you're ready to work now, really. By then I've usually forgotten that I turned you on at all because I'm distracted by something else, until someone notices that you're just sitting there waiting for me and mistakenly turn you off. Then the whole process starts over again. Not very energy-efficient now, are we?

I know sometimes I wake you up very early in the morning, but that's no excuse. You knew from the start that this was an on call position, you have to be ready whenever I need you. I'm having some difficulty replacing you, but unless you shape up I'm going to search high and low for a lightbulb that's more willing to do it's job.

You have been warned.

Disappointedly,
Danielle