Stupid Tuesday

Today I learned about anion light bulbs, which claim to purify the air while illuminating from a standard CFL bulb, and when I Googled it (dammit, must add verb “googled”, “googling” and its kin to spell check), I was greeted with a very strange image.

So, I sent the picture to Marina in an email, with the message, “This is just a weird photo for an ad. It's for an anion light bulb that allegedly purifies the air, and is a CFL bulb. But the kid, pants down, it's just bizarre.”



Marina: That’s just too weird. I don't want a light bulb that makes kids appear on toilets in the meadow.

Me: Do you have meadows by you? Maybe it's already happening and you don't know because you don't have a big, Sound-of-Music meadow.

Marina: lol, I'm glad we don't have a meadow then!

So, beware the anion light bulb. And other bulbs. Kids with pants down, sitting on toilets, could magically appear in meadows somewhere when you use them. Or so we think this ad implied.

* * *

I had a patron today who brought over a receipt for 11 pages of faxing.

Me: Okay, so can I have the pages you need faxed?

Man: It’s this packet. I have six pages, and they’re double-sided.

Me: Are they all double-sided?

Man: Yeah.

Me: Ah, that’s 12 pages to fax then, not 11.

Man: No, it’s 11. I counted.

Me: Maybe one of the pages isn’t double-sided then.

Man: No, they all have stuff on the back.

Me: Then, yeah, it’s 12 pages.

Man: No, it’s eleven.

Me: Let’s count them. Because 2 sides of 6 pages is 12, so let’s double-check.

Together: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11…

Man: 12? How did I get another page? They were stapled together!

Me: *blink, blink* Sorry. You’ll have to pay for another page.

Man: When I get back, there better not be more pages to pay for!

Me: *blink, blink, blink*

* * *

Me: I’m making panko crusted pork chops if you want some.

Bro: I don’t like pork chops, but I’ll try one. Smells good. What is panko?

Me: Um, it’s like breadcrumbs, I think. Alton Brown told me to use them. Oh, the box says, ‘Panko is Japanese bread crumbs.’ Uh, why do I need breadcrumbs from Japan? And these are Italian flavored, so I paid extra for Italian, Japanese breadcrumbs? What the hell?

Bro: *laughs*

Me: They’re not even…what’s the word? Bionic? No, organic. Sorry. They’re not even organic.

Bro: Bionic? Mmmm, bionic bananas! We have the technology. We have the ability to make the first bionic bananas. Better. Stronger. Faster.

Me: *dying laughing*

Bro: The banana moves in fake slow motion making weird metallic noise. *mimics running banana in fake, Six Million Dollar Man slow mo*

Me: *holding in guts, laughing too hard*

Bro: Why did old 70s TV shows depict people running in fake slow motion to make it look like they were going fast? That doesn’t look fast! It looks slower than regular motion.

Me: That’s true! We just bought right into it. Bionic Banana, running in fake slow motion looks like a fast banana because we didn’t know better.

Bro: Ring, ring, ring, ring, bionic banana phone!

Then he had to explain banana phone to me and I suddenly got a joke Leelu told me weeks ago. I’m simply not with it when it comes to much of the Internet lingo. But I did use “copypasta” in an email to my coworkers, and once I hit Send, I regretted it because they’ll probably think I’m a moron for the typo of copy/paste. Maybe I’m just another version of the ad exec who puts a kid on a toilet in a meadow for an air purifier, and a guy who doesn’t know what 2 x 6 is, because other people are rolling their eyes and laughing at me for not knowing banana phone.

Sigh. It’s all relative.