Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (55 page)

NO SHRIMP FOR YOU!

A woman in Haltom City, Texas (name not released), ordered a takeout meal from A&D Buffalo’s in 2009: shrimp fried rice with extra shrimp. She left with her order, but 20 minutes later she was back, complaining that she didn’t get the extra shrimp. She demanded that they either give it to her or refund her $1.62. The cashier told the woman that the extra shrimp
was
added to her order, but because she took it out of the restaurant, there was nothing they could do about it. Irate, the woman called 911: “Yeah, I always get the shrimp fried rice, so I said I’m going to get extra meat this time. But he didn’t put extra shrimp in there! I’m just saying, to get a police officer here, what has to happen?” Making a frivolous 911 call, that’s what. An officer showed up and cited the woman for misuse of the 911 system.

BAR NONE

Late one night in December 2009, a 911 operator in Oldsmar, Florida, received a call from 37-year-old Gregory Oras. He said that several men attacked and shot at him outside a bar. “My nose is broken and my ears are bleeding!” When officers rushed to the scene, they found Oras—and his nose wasn’t broken nor were his ears bleeding. Appearing quite intoxicated, he informed them that he just wanted a ride to another bar, and thought dialing 911 was the fastest way to make that happen. The police ticketed Oras for the frivolous call, but he put up a fight and kicked one of the officers in the knees. They tazed Oras and took him to jail.

In medieval times, it was believed that owning a cat could help cure insanity.

PROFESSOR 911

Here’s an actual exchange between a little boy and a 911 operator:

911:
911 Emergency.

Johnny:
Yeah, I need some help.

911:
What’s the matter?

Johnny:
I need help with my math.

911:
With your mouth?

Johnny:
No, with my math. I have to do it. Will you help me?

911:
Sure. (pause) What kind of math do you need help with?

Johnny:
I have take-aways.

911:
Oh, you gotta do the take-aways?

Johnny:
Yeah.

911:
All right, what’s the problem?

Johnny:
Okay. 16…

911:
Yeah.

Johnny:
…take away 8. Is what?

911:
You tell me. How much do you think it is?

Johnny:
I dunno. 1?

911:
How old are you?

Johnny:
I’m only four.

911:
Four?

Mom (yells in the background):
Johnny, what are you doing?

Johnny (to mom):
This policeman’s helping me with my math!

Mom:
What did I tell you about playing on the phone?

911:
Listen to your mother.

Johnny:
You said when I need help to call somebody!

Mom:
I didn’t mean
the police!

Bestselling postcard image in the 1970s: the World Trade Center.

THEY MIGHT BE FED UP

One of our favorite bands, They Might Be Giants, issued this “things you may no longer say” list of overused phrases to their friends and crew. So if you roll with them, don’t go there, or they’ll throw you under the bus
.

• Too much information

• Off the hook

• That’s what she said

• My bad

• Game changer

• I can’t work under these conditions

• Playing the (whatever) card

• Throw someone under the bus

• Drinking the kool-aid

• LOL

• Phone tag

• Don’t go there

• Crackberry

• It’s all good

• It is what it is

• Talk to the hand

• Think outside the box

• Off the reservation

• Oh no you didn’t

• I threw up a little in my mouth

• Give one-hundred and ten percent

• IMHO (short for “In My Humble Opinion”)

• No worries

• Jumped the shark

• Voted off the island

• (Anything) on acid

• (Anything) from hell

• (Anything) on steroids

• Literally (unless it’s used in the correct context)

• That’s how we roll

• (The list itself is now on the list too.)

There are about 15,000 vacuum-cleaner-related accidents in the U.S. every year.

FUNNY BUSINESS

Big corporations sometimes make strange business decisions
.

T
ACOS!
In the early 1990s, Taco Bell opened three stores in Mexico City. That seems like a natural fit, but Mexican customers weren’t buying it, and the stores had to close. The reason? The Taco Bell menu is so Americanized that Mexicans didn’t know it was “Mexican food.” In 2007 the company tried again, but this time positioning itself as an
American
food restaurant. For example, the crunchy “tacos” are called “tacostadas” in Mexican Taco Bells, so as not to confuse them with traditional tacos—soft tortillas filled with seasoned meat and onions, not ground beef, cheese, and sour cream. The menu also includes standard American fare like soft-serve ice cream and french fries.

COFFEE!
Starbucks’ sales have declined in the last few years—the recession has forced many consumers to cut back on expensive coffee. But sales are up at
independent
coffeehouses, most of which sprang up after Starbucks became popular. In an attempt to cash in on the anticorporate shift, Starbucks redid three Seattle stores as generic coffee bars with no Starbucks signage whatsoever. The experiment did not go well—word got out on the Internet almost immediately that “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea” was still a Starbucks. And if the company was actually trying to keep it a secret, they didn’t help themselves by posting “Your neighborhood coffeehouse is getting a makeover!” signs in stores while they were still operating as Starbucks.

CAMERAS!
One side effect of the availability of affordable digital cameras: It killed sales for Polaroid’s instant-print cameras. In 2008 Polaroid announcing that it was ending production of the cameras and focusing on digital photography products. One of those new products: a portable photo printer that hooks up to any digital camera (essentially the same thing you got with a Polaroid camera). The printer sold poorly, and Polaroid’s revenues continued to decline. Meanwhile, Fuji bought the instant-camera technology from Polaroid, and its new line of instant-film cameras were the most popular new cameras in Japan in 2009.

Thanks! The male strawberry poison dart frog keeps its mate’s eggs warm by peeing on them.

THE CUBICLE

Audiences cheered when the hero of the 1999 movie
Office Space
unscrewed the walls of his cubicle and watched them come crashing down. Yet 30 years earlier, when the very first cubicle walls went up, employers and workers alike cheered them as the “workplace of the future
.”

S
EA OF DESKS
“Today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”

That may read like a critique of the modern corporate office, but it was written by an inventor named Bob Propst in 1960. Propst went to work in post-World War II America, just after the majority of the U.S. workforce had shifted from factory jobs to office jobs—“pencil pushers,” as they were called. Their typical workplaces were giant rooms full of rows of desks laid out in a grid, all facing the same direction. The average pencil pusher’s view: the back of a fellow worker’s head. No one had any privacy, but that didn’t matter too much, because workers were discouraged from talking to each other. They had few places to store work papers and personal items, other than an inbox on top of their desk and maybe a drawer or two below. “Here were large numbers of intelligent people working on complex tasks,” said Propst about an aviation company he’d worked at in the 1950s, “acres of them hunched over their desks, trying to create.”

SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

As a sculptor, designer, and former college art professor, Propst specialized not so much in inventing new things but in revamping entire systems (he’d previously designed new quality controls for manufacturing concrete and a more ergonomic cockpit for supersonic jet pilots). Setting his sights on creating a better workplace, in 1958 Propst signed on as head of research and development at the Michigan-based office furniture company Herman Miller Inc.

How could Propst and his design team give office workers more privacy and autonomy, yet still maintain the open environment that he felt would facilitate interaction and communication? First, Propst had to find out what made workers tick, so he interviewed hundreds of them and their bosses, as well as doctors, psychologists, anthropologists, architects, and mathematicians.

Nerd king: Electrical engineer Hurley Smith invented the pocket protector in 1943.

Propst also studied a new kind of workplace gaining popularity in Germany called
Bürolandschaft,
or “office landscape.” Based on socialist principles that encouraged working together as a group, this system eliminated the grid and—depending on the workers’ duties—turned some desks to face each other, placed others side by side, and put still others in a circle. In addition, the file cabinets and bookshelves, usually set along the office’s perimeter, were pulled away from the walls and put in the middle of the room, creating makeshift privacy dividers. Potted plants were strategically placed throughout the room to complete the “landscape” motif. Propst borrowed elements of
Bürolandschaft
and improved on it to create what Herman Miller called the “Action Office.”

BUILDING BLOCKS

The first design, released in 1964, was a single, freestanding piece of furniture that included bins and a few shelves on each side. The biggest selling point: Employers could place these units anywhere they saw fit. Sales were slow at first, but Propst and his team kept working on the full version—which would feature the floor units attached to partition walls that could be joined to each other in different configurations. In 1968 Herman Miller released the complete Action Office, touted as “the world’s first open-plan office system of reconfigurable components.”

• The entire workroom floor consisted of both common and private spaces. Workers were urged to move from one to the other several times throughout the day. Potted plants and bright walls spruced up the mood even more.

• Each desk was surrounded by three attachable dividers, or walls, which were high enough to give some privacy but not so high that the worker couldn’t stand up and see the rest of the workroom (a practice that would later be called “prairie dogging”).

• These walls didn’t connect at 90-degree angles: The angles were much wider, allowing for a more open space. This irregular geometry was designed to facilitate “organic circulation patterns” that would keep movement—and productivity—flowing.

• The old desktop inbox was replaced with slanted wall slots allowing files for several different projects to be off the desk but still within arm’s reach.

From 1968 to 2000, the International Olympic Committee required all female competitors to undergo a “gender verification” exam.

• Soft boards and plenty of thumbtacks let employees personalize their spaces and keep important papers in full sight.

• The height of the desktops varied in places, which encouraged workers to change their posture frequently and even stand up while they worked in order to keep their blood flowing. (Though Propst was a big proponent of this practice, it never really caught on.)

• Perhaps most important of all: Action Office allowed managers to customize their constantly changing workplaces for a fraction of the cost (and downtime) that would have been required by hiring architects and contractors to do the job.

ACTION OFFICE
³

In 1968 Intel, a new technology company in Santa Clara, California—located in the heart of what would later be called Silicon Valley—became one of the first to incorporate Propst’s system. Hundreds more companies (both startups and established ones) placed orders for Action Offices, and Herman Miller raked in over $25 million in corporate sales in the first two years alone. As the 1970s ensued, workplaces across the United States steadily switched from rows of desks to partitioned walls. By the end of the decade, the average workspace area was 12 feet by 12 feet.

Then, in the 1980s, the Digital Revolution took hold. The Action Office system (and the dozens of copycats that followed) could easily fit a computer, monitor, and printer. Sure, those early computers were much larger than today’s sleek PCs and Macs, but the Action Office was spacious enough to handle them. At least that’s how it was supposed to work. But as office rents skyrocketed in the 1990s (nowhere more than in Silicon Valley), employers were forced to accommodate more workers in smaller areas. Ironically, the feature that made it so easy to give these workers more space—adjustable walls—also gave bosses an easy way to cram more and more cubicles together. Result: The wide angles of the Action Office closed up and became squares, and the area of the average workspace was reduced to 8 feet by 8 feet. (It’s even smaller today.) The grid of desks had returned, only now they had fabric-covered walls between them.