Not sure why this fascinates me so, but it does

The caller-id on tv from Time Warner can be a mixed blessing. I do most of my calling with my cell phone, but when the TW phone rang and displayed my older sister's number on Tuesday night, I couldn't help but cringe. Love her dearly, but she makes me nuts. It's a call I knew I had to deal with but I wasn't looking forward to it.

She is in epic streak of bad luck. She is in the graphic arts/printing industry in Manhattan. Her firm got sold and the new owners started running the business into the ground by bouncing her in late 07. The industry is both changing and rapidly deserting NYC. She hooked on with another firm for a while and booted around this time last year. Since she is by herself, that wasn't an immediate source of panic. This was before the economy took its current swan dive.

Unemployment and 401K draws later, so drastic steps have to be taken. She was busy holding out for the miracle offer and associating way too much with coming back to our parents house. It's for a few months and a chance to attack the job problem from another angle and a little more support, not to mention some relief from the pressure of looking for work around NYC while living in New York.

She had herself wrapped up that coming home meant the end, that she envisioned returning to Buffalo to take care of an ailing parent (which we don't have) or our disabled brother. He has a job and his own place. Somebody had to be an asshole and tell her to prioritize, that those past couple of sentences don't exist as issues, that our younger sister lives in Harlem and has all kinds of experiences in subletting, so she keeps the place, she had their place to stay for interviews as the economy improves and yields more chances. She just needs to accept the offers.

So, a little respect as I took one for the team. She got rolling today and enable my dad and younger sis to get the ball rolling with local storage of her stuff in NYC, getting going with a sublet, prioritizing what to bring to Buffalo for the summer, and more.

I'm still tired from the one man intervention, but if you need a short term sublet -- I know a 2 bed room in Chelsea that could be had for the summer for a comparitive steal.

Sometimes it pays to be the jerk.

I LOVE MY JOB

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne , Indiana , who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all.

Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature.. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water.. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch.

So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. With in a few seconds my butt started to burn. Â I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.

Now repeat to yourself, ‘I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.’ Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?

I get the feeling the Bisons just don't care. It used to be that you didn't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy a game at SodaBeverage Field. They used to sell the place out. I went to a game last year with my Dad and we couldn't help but wonder what happened. Limited open gates, desolate corridors, oh, where have you gone Mike Billoni? It just seemed fairly lifeless.

The Bisons changed major league affiliations over the winter and I thought that might inject a little more life. They are hooked up with the Mets and you'd thinking the prospect of sucking in HD on SNY might liven the place up a bit. Nope. As part of my reward for being a marketing judge at UB's departmental presentation, I was given a ticket to tonight's game by one of their teachers, a good guy who helps the Zoo out from time to time. Access to beer and burgers, I'm a happy guy, especially when the students are to scared to touch food that is still covered. Risking the wratch of the concessions workers and generally not giving a damn in the first place, I got things going at the grill.

Properly satiated, I settled in to watch a little ball and there is nothing so desolate as a sparse ballpark. I've always been intrigued with baseball architecture a little bit (as I am quite the dork) and the game wasted my interest, so this is what happened. I set off looking for dessert and found the following along the way. Enjoy