Month: February 2023

Olive Garden vs Marie Callender

~ Alfred Tech
Parking for taking your spouse out for a date?

I first must state that Italian food is not my favorite, but if you like it that’s fine. It’s been awhile since I’ve been to an Olive Garden. I can tell you that it hasn’t changed a bit. A beautifully decorated restaurant with food that tastes like Marie Callender’s out of a microwave. I was really excited for the bread sticks they are proud of, however they tasted a bit odd. The olfactory aroma was similar to the inside of a brown paper bag.

The trick is they fill you up on salad and bread so you won’t be able to finish your meal. Then you take the bagged boxes out in public and advertise to draw more people into the restaurant. By the time you finish your leftovers you realize it wasn’t really that big of a portion. The best part of the meal was the salad, however there was only one olive the entire bowl and not a garden of olives as I was expecting.

Service is still slow, but that’s because they are always crowded and fielding complaints from the guests. I heard someone a few tables over say their food was disgusting. There was a 10 minute delay in getting our child menus and a 15 minute delay between two halves of our table being served.

Someone from my party actually got sick from their meal. I’m glad my Tour of Italy didn’t finish it’s route at the bottom of my toilet bowl.

Getting over your fear of spiders

~ Alfred Tech

IMG_9694Spiders are about the only thing that really creeps me out. I guess it has something to do with eight independently moving legs. Growing up I was tossing a towel into the hamper and noticed something squirming in the background. After closer inspection, I uncovered a nightmare nest of a mother and about five million babies spiders that were alive and kicking.

There was only one way to dispose of this horrid web of terror and I knew the perfect weapon. Since my sister was habitually teasing her hair to its length to create an afro of curly stickiness, I grabbed a can of Aqua Net. I then located one of the numerous lighters that ignited Dad’s lung candy. I was fortunate not to burn our home down, but I gave them a hurricane of flame broiling that turned them into the crispiest of critters. The cremation ceremony was finalized with a quick flush of the deceased. My family was now safe from a pending arachnid avalanche for whoever emptied the hamper.

Bring back the floppy disk and sneakernet

~ Alfred Tech

I think it’s hilarious that vinyl has become popular again. For the longest time, it was all the rage and the only thing that existed. Did you ever listen to a 78-speed record at 33 and a third, it was pretty amusing. Cassette tapes made music portable and CDs made it even easier to abuse other’s ears with your terrible music choices via your car loudspeakers. Now that we have music on our phones, you can carry a Bluetooth speaker inside of every building and force your horrible music on everyone’s eardrums.

I’m sure the people buying turntables and listening to vinyl are the same people who use typewriters at Starbucks. The next logical step is for people to install floppy drives into their computers and trade files via disk. USB is too mainstream.

Guide to bragging on your children.

~ Alfred Tech

You have to be careful when bragging about your kids. Just know someone will “one-up” you almost immediately, if not sooner. For instance…

“Our baby is finally sleeping through the night”

“It’s nice right! My infant started sleeping through the first night we brought him home from the hospital”

“I think I see a tooth popping through!”

“Yay for you, of course, my infant already has his adult teeth, in fact, we let him open our soup cans”

“I think I just heard him say Mama”

“Really? I’ve been having conversations with my child for months now. He’s already moved on to Latin and Mandarin.”

“He took his first steps!”

“That’s nothing, my kid started walking as soon as he was born, in fact, I was 52cm dilated and he walked out of my uterus.”

“He has figured out how to open the baby gate!”

“Well, our kid didn’t have enough weight to push the foot pedal to open the gate, but he managed to find the toolbox and use the screwdrivers to disassemble the gate to let himself out”

“I think we are finally potty-trained after a few short weeks!”

“That’s great! Our kid was potty trained on the first try, of course, he was changing his own diapers since birth anyway”

“Our kid learns songs so quickly he has such a great memory”

“Let me know when he learns to play an instrument with precision such as mine that is the same age. He can join our band and start touring”

“First day of Kindergarten!”

“How sweet! Sorry, your kid was held back by your terrible parenting. We started at age 3 and we are already moving on to Linear Algebra at age 5”

What is the worst thing you’ve smelled?

~ Alfred Tech

IMG_4300
This DQ Fountain smelled like puke

I’ve got a pretty sensitive nose and I’ve always smelled everything since I was a kid. I have no idea why but whenever I pick something up no matter what it is I smell it. The smell is also linked to memory somehow, so I guess that’s why I have a good memory.

Here are a few top choices for worst-smelling things

  • The back of my ear after I forget to wash there for a few days (take your index finger swab the length of the back of your ear and try it)
  • A blackhead that you can’t reach on your back that has been growing without your knowledge until your wife wants to dig it out with a pair of tweezers.
  • A sippy cup of milk that has been under the seat for months until the stink escapes the one-way valve.
  • I used to own a toy called a Stink Blaster, fun to play with at work, but had to keep it in a zip lock bag in the garage.

I know one smell that is supposed to smell good is leather. However, I now have a bad memory associated with the smell of leather. Back in 10th grade, my biology lab partner would wear a leather jacket and forcefully belch up his stomach aromas at the desk. So now when I pass Wilson’s leather store at the outlet mall, I can also smell the school salad bar and whatever meat product they were serving that day.

Probably the worst thing I’ve ever smelled is when I got home from school one day in Nitro WV. As soon as I got out of the car it hit me like a sack of soiled diapers that had been set out on the beach during the summer months. We finally tracked down the source. Apparently, there was a dead cow on the hillside and it was halfway decomposed and apparently exploded.

How to quickly get out of any conversation.

~ Alfred Tech
Photo by Arindam Raha on Pexels.com

Some people just don’t know when to quit their verbal dialoguing. There are a few things you can do to ease the conversation to an end.

Electronics!

Play with your Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max or Nintendo Switch OLED.

Making eye contact

You can make eye contact with other people as they walk by and use your “Help me” eyes. If you see a person with said “Help me” looks, call them on their phone and save them. Or you can make deep eye contact with the person talking your face off. Don’t reply, just maintain deep eye contact, even if they walk away first.

Have children under five, so you can blame ending the conversation on them.

Start asking really personal questions

Start talking about your lord and savior Jesus Christ – Might save you from ever talking to that person again!

How many more weeks until Spring?

~ Alfred Tech

Groundhog-Day
Phil and Phil

Groundhog day is one of those special times of the year when we all wait for a woodchuck to give us the forecast of how much longer we have to deal with seasonal affective disorder. Don’t worry, spring will be here soon enough along with all of the allergies to go with it. Then you have summer heat exhaustion to look forward to. How about you just enjoy your present moments. Don’t trust meteorologists or prognosticating rodents but rather a system we’ve all agreed upon.

How to Behave at a Urinal

~ Alfred Tech

IMG_4168
Watching someone drain it

Urinals are great for allowing an expedited transaction almost anywhere. However, there are a few essential things to keep in mind to make everything go smoothly.

  • Look toward the ground when approaching the urinals (especially if others are urinating)
  • No eye contact, look at the wall in front of you. Some places have TVs!
  • Make sure you get all the fluids into the urinal, no one likes a slip-and-slide on the way to the drain
  • Don’t spit your chewing gum into the urinal, remember someone has to clean that out.
  • Do not make conversation.
  • Do not vomit into the Urinal
  • Do not defecate into the Urinal
  • If it’s a manual model, only execute a flush if the content color is that of water collected in a rusty bucket. “Save a flush”

I would say wash your hands but sometimes your man parts are cleaner than the wash station at some restrooms. Remember to use the hand sanitizer when you return to your car or use the one you carry in your holster.