September 25, 2006

Credit celeblogger and celebrinerd Dave Barry for this incredible discovery.

The office where the HR department gives candy bars to people who use the handrail while using the stairs.

This is not Comedy Gold. This is Comedy Platinum.

First, the mandatory check… yep, it’s a Government Office… in fact, it’s the Los Alamos National Laboratory. If anybody’s got the money lying around to have two people standing around the stairwells handing out candy bars, it’s Los Alamos.

On the other hand, isn’t Los Alamos supposed to be a place where really really really smart people are supposed to work? And what does it say if you have to remind really really really smart people how to walk up stairs?

I’m not even going to get into the fact that they’re handing out candy bars with peanuts, which for me as a peanut-allergic is more dangerous than falling down stairs. And what do they do if you throw the candy bar wrapper down the stairwell? Or eat the candy bar while using the stairs? Are these circumstances that will result in revocation of your candy bar rights?

And, as the picture shows, the candy-bar-handrail-reward-personnel are standing at the top of the stairs. Now, I have always thought that the danger of falling and the need for handrail usage is much greater if you’re going downstairs. So shouldn’t they be at the bottom?

I wonder what they’re giving to people who use the elevator.

I wonder if there are forms of handrail use that do not qualify for candy bars, or is the HR department required to give it to you even if you walked up the stairs while licking the handrail?

I wonder how many of the really really really smart people at Los Alamos thought of all this before I did.

And, on an only-slightly-related note, what the snork is this image on the same web page as the handrail story? I know that HR departments, especially HR departments at government offices have an unnatural attraction to the United Way. Doesn’t that picture just confirm the image that most non-HR people have of the United Way? Or maybe the graphic is supposed to represent the United Way’s leadership in anti-pirate activity? Was this left over from Talk Like a Pirate Day? Or a Johnny Depp Movie cross-promotion? Or is the United Way now affiliated with the Swedish Pirate Party? And why is this graphic attached to a dead link?

Do the HR people on Pirate ships go around asking for donations to the United Way? And are they made to walk the plank for that?

So many questions. So few answers.
Yeah, I wonder about that too.

Those mental_flossers at mental_floss have hijacked my train of thought again with a blog post about euphemisms, which I pointed out as ironic since I was already using them as a euphemism.

So let me point out some original euphemisms I’ve come up with (that like all my other contributions to the language, will forever be used by nobody but me):

Bodily Functions

A “symphony” is an attack of diarrhea, since both involve several movements. “I can’t go out; I’m conducting a symphony in the bathroom.”

And vomiting? Since it mixes non-digested food with digestive fluids, I like to call it “acid recycling”.

This one’s kind of a reverse-euphemism, but when I was in the hospital, the catheter they put in to measure my urinary output I called my “penile extension”.

Sexual Stuff

The two most common preparations for sex are undressing and “re-dressing”, ifyouknowwhatimean… (“Yes, honey, I’ll help you take that off if you’ll help me put this on…”)

And of course, there are three standards for the duration of a sexual encounter, the “Looney Tune” (7 minutes or less), the “Sitcom” (a half-hour) and the “Lord of the Rings Trilogy” (8 hours, you braggart). Which does open you up to other TV/movie based euphemisms like “very special episode”, “after-school special”, “Police Academy 37″, “the best stuff was in the trailer” and the dreaded “season-ending cliffhanger”… and woe be to you if you finish in a “Bullwinkle” (half the time of a Looney Tune).

Going out in the water to wash off after having sex on the beach is “skinny double dipping”. (What? You’ve never done it? Hey, it’s the best way to get sand out of sensitive places!)

Religiosity

I do refer to Lent as the “Vatican Top 40 Countdown”, but not in front of my Catholic friends. On the other hand, the long, boring football pre-game shows on Sundays are “Agnostic Mass”.

Getting married in a church, in the eyes of both The State and The Lord? That’s “getting double-locked”.

Other Cultural Stuff

Since “Lost”, I don’t call the numerous actors on complicated dramas an ‘ensemble cast’ anymore. I call them a “passenger list”.

Any dull ‘boilerplate’ ‘fillin-in-the-blanks’ official statement I call “Sane Libs” (after “Mad Libs”).

Since “The Colbert Report” (with its silent t’s) has become the standard for this satirical sub-form, I’d refer to any deadpan exaggeration of opinions you don’t believe in as “doing a silent T”, or maybe “silenty”.

A ‘nipple slip’ on live TV? That’s an “FCC fundraiser”.

Finally (for now), a political reverse-euphemism: you could call ‘waterboarding’ the “Cheney’s Water Torture”.

Coming soon, I have some words about my least favorite common euphemisms, which I was going to include here, but I’ve been trying to break up my blogging into less-than-3000-word-pieces