1051 Of Hats.

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I am not a fan of being the one to open, or close, a store when it comes to alarm systems. I’m also not thrilled with being the one with the keys. The main reason for the latter is I tend to get halfway home and then can’t remember actually locking the door. I am also not the kind of person who can cope with not knowing. I drove all the way back to the stores so many times it’s really sad. I had always locked the door too.

Of course I’ve done the same thing leaving the house. So you get to work then become convinced that you left your door unlocked. Or a gate, or any number of things. Which makes waiting till break a torture. You’d think I’d learn to take note of locking things, but I only do it for a few days, then I forget and the process starts anew.

Now that I think of it a lot of my random fear comes from locks. Either being locked in or locked out, or having things be unprotected. I tend to check that my keys are in my pocket about three times before I actually lock my truck. I didn’t decide on that number, that’s just the number of times I get distracted between getting out and finally locking the thing most times.

I guess these fears serve their purposes. I haven’t ever locked my self out of my truck that I can remember, and I lock doors I’m supposed to have.

Wreck-It Ralph was pretty cool. The DVD release was really kind of shitty though. They didn’t bother to put any actual special features on it. It’s filled to the fucking brim with commercials though. I guess Disney DVD has forsaken itself for Blueray. Either that or the Wal-Mart I went to just didn’t have the special version of the DVD. Which I doubt because it’s Wall-Mart. The sad thing is that this is the only animated feature in ages I actually give a shit about where extra content is concerned.

One thing I will say about the actual movie is that, as a fan of 30 Rock, Fix-It Felix really is just Kenneth in a video game. Which is fine, I’m just saying. King Candy is just Ed Wynn. Of course it’s not really him because he’s long dead, but he actually was the voice of the Mad Hatter in Disney’s Alice In Wonderland. (Basically the same character, and clearly done on purpose. Don’t email me about it.) So, in a way, they are carrying on a tradition; repackaging known personalities for children’s entertainment.

26 Comments

I liked Wreck It Ralph a lot. The Blu-ray has a bunch of stuff on it. I usually just by the Blu-ray for cartoons anymore. They come with the dvd anyway and then I can bring that to my parent’s house without fear of them losing it or letting my nieces ruin it.
OH MY GOD, though! I accidentally clicked on those damn sneak peaks. There were like freaking 20! What the hell!!!
You ought to grab Rise of the Guardians when it comes out tomorrow. It was damn good, too.

I continually check to see if I locked stuff, too. I’ve driven back before to check. What I do now is if I close, I lock it, then yank on it to make sure. Even if I work with someone else and they lock the door, I still yank on it so I don’t have to worry. That way it just slips out of my mind and the worry doesn’t come back.

Literally just finished watching Wreck–It Ralph.

A) cute story
B) impressed that I never guessed who the King was
C) even more impressed at the all star line up of characters

Wasn’t my favorite Disney movie, but done OK and worth havig a copy

Hehe I say crud monkeys. If you can come up with really fun/funny phrases or words to replace bland ones like shoot or crap or dangit or curse words, it’s so much more fun to say. I used to say freak when I wanted to say f*ck but I got out of the habit of saying that when I was working at PetCo (I’d been out of work a while before and saying freak was something happened during that unemployment period) because I don’t think customers would have appreciated suddenly hearing a worker yell out, “Freak!”

I haven’t seen Wreck-It Ralph. Don’t know when I’ll see it, either. Renting is a bit of a problem.

I like plain old “crud”. Other phrases less offensive phrases I’ve been known to use include:

Nuts
Rats
Crap (usually considered a little less offensive than it’s scatological cousin that starts with S)
Beans
Flip
Frikin’
Scrud
Horsefeathers (digging into the old-fashioned well for that one)

Anybody else have any favorite non-swearing swear words?

I personally find that, if I ponder swearing directly, I tend to just go for it. I see no reason to betray my intentions in how I voice them.

I do use gorram, though. And when insulting people or ideas I tend to get pretty creative…

I’m particularly proud of my tendency to say, “Shostakovich” when I swear. It will occasionally get an amusing reaction from people, too.

Normally, I use this at the same time Aita would use “gorram”, if Aita got that word from where I think s/he did.

Other things I tend to say as follows. Originality will vary.
Shot
Freakin’ ‘ey
Dog gone it
*low throaty groan*
Ouch (For surprise, not necessarily pain.)
Come on
Oh, good <– usually while playing video games (Hint: It's not good.)

When something’s good (which happens depressingly seldom), I like ,”Shiny!”. And anyway, I’ve never lost a primary buffer panel.

My cat is funny and can’t really meow. She just goes “IF” so I’ve gotten into the habit of annoyedly growling “IF” when something annoys me. Whore is also good for many occasions.

I’ve noticed that movies I buy at Wal-Mart are usually the “economy version”. The companies selling to Wal-Mart are placed under incredible pressure to slash their prices to cost (or below) just so they can get their product into wide distribution. One way a lot of those companies compensate is that the product that they sell to Wal-Mart is inferior to the product they sell through other outlets. Think about that the next time you see a bargain at Wal-Mart that is selling “the same thing” that costs 10% extra less than elsewhere – it often costs less because you are NOT getting the same product. The economy versions of movies I often find at WM often have just the movie – but none of the special features. For that reason I often go elsewhere to get the more complete experience. Granted – it isn’t always the case. Sometimes I do find special versions at WM with extra features that are not available elsewhere – but invariably they also cost more. That’s OK. I’m willing to pay a little extra to get a better product.

grrrr – my computer lagged what I was typing – that should have read just “10% less than elesewhere” NOT “10% less extra thane elsewhere”

I used to lock up five nights (sometimes more depending on overtime) at the local store I used to work at. It would have been impossible for me to have left without locking the doors because the damn alarm would have deafened me if I had, but I did have a few people walk in after we’d turned the tills off for the night. I always kept the second door bolted to slow down shoplifters (people in a hurry to get out tend to go for the middle of the two doors even if one of them was clearly locked on the way in) but sometimes other people would unbolt them and I wouldn’t notice, meaning if you pushed hard enough the doors would just swing open anyway even they were locked together.

Having to come back out of the office to tell people the doors were supposed to be locked and the place is shut for the night wasn’t fun, specially if it was a friday or saturday night and they’d been drinking.

One thing that I’m guessing would probably have annoyed the hell out of you is I remember one time I had to leave the alarm turned off overnight because my manager didn’t want to come in to sort it out. The system required all the doors (including internal ones) and windows to be shut and for nothing to be moving inside the store for it to set. Everything had a two digit code written on it and if the alarm system threw an error message you took the last two digits of the error, go find the door or window in question, open it, shut it and try again. Sometimes the code was for something like the post office counter or alcohol cupboard which I didn’t have the key for, which was fun.

This particular night the code didn’t match any number written round the store. Me and my sales assistant for the night took down the big hanging promotion sign from the ceiling in case it was moving too much for the alarm, but still no luck. I called my manager who was as confused as I was and really didn’t want to drop what she was doing and drive to the store, so came up with the very professional suggestion of telling me to pretend that I was unable to contact either her or the assistant manager so had to go home without setting the alarm.

Luckily nobody tried to break in that night.

Bonus points to a wearable… sometimes I can’t remember whether or not I did something, I can either go back and check in vid mem, or, in the case of my home lock, just text my deadbolt to have it reply it’s status (or, more likely, set the status to “true” so it doesn’t matter if I forgot, and then I have a record on my wearable/phone as well).

I *always* made damn f–cking sure I had the alarm code in-hand *before* even approaching the door. Besides all the ramifications of an activated alarm, the siren was so ear-piercing that the one time I did set it off, I couldn’t hear for 20 minutes afterwards.

About the only thing that could top that as a don’t-set-it-off incentive was a cop coming in with gun drawn on me.

I lived in a trailer home for a few years. I am very good about locking my doors and not second-guessing myself about it. There was this one morning I came home and saw my back door swinging wide open. Oh, it was locked, and no one broke in. It’s just that the wind was strong enough to pull the door open because I had not managed to latch it on my way out.

Thankfully, I lived out in the country at the time. If someone had seen that my door was open, they were just as likely to close it for me as they were to come inside and help themselves to something. Honestly, I was more worried that the foxes, birds, or stray cats would come in and find a way into my pantry.

Don’t feel bad. I’ve turned around and drove half the way to work back home to check on a coffee pot, or a box fan. I literally fixate on all the things that can go wrong because of one simple error. I can’t stand being like that, but I can’t force myself to not turn around because if I don’t I can’t focus on anything but that one problem.

And Wreck it Ralph is awesome. Saw it three times in theaters and watched it another four since I got the DVD last week. I was going to get the Blue Ray with all the special features, but I forgot I had to return the LCD TV I got due to various issues at the time and had to use my old Trinatron Sony.

Still a damm good picture on the Sony for being 19 years old, but I did feel kind of stupid when I was holding a blue ray HDMI cable in one hand and staring at the back of the TV wondering why I forgot I took back the only TV the BR would hook up too!

I work for Wal Mart and it’s not some great conspiracy like everything thinks-just having a budget DVD makes sense for the parents that want something for the car, or for the kids to watch in their room over and over w/o spending another 5-10 bucks for extras the kids would probably not even be interested in.

But I think plain DVD’s with lot of bonus content is on the way out. Why put in on a cheaper format when many folks have BR players and compatible TV’s? Just put the good stuff on the higher priced format and it’ll sell even better.

Funny enough one of my best surprises from watching Wreck-it Ralph was finding out that the voice of King Candy was Alan Tudyk, one of my favorite actors. If you don’t know him he was in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse.

I’m the same way with my dorm room, but luckily my tendency to wear my key under my shirt gives me a physical reminder the door’s locked. And I’ve yet to see Wreck-it-Ralph, which is unusual since my brother usually wants to see new Disney movies and I heard it was pretty good. Guess I’ll go find it somewhere…

I never failed to lock the door when I was working retail, but I did neglect to lock my car one night when I visited a girlfriend. The horn started going off around dawn the next morning because when the bastards stole the radio out of my car they knocked it out of gear, and it started rolling, a cut wire shorted out when it hit the curb. The experience left me obsessive about locking the car.

When I worked Security, I took the shop keys home twice. Both times I had to drive back (30 miles 1-way), so I brought one of my dogs, a Welsh Corgi, with me. It was a nuisance, but at least the dogs got a thrill out of their rides, and of course they were a hit with the crew.

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