It's a sad, sad day....

I had to fire IC yesterday. Yes, after letting him get away with jobicide for a month, yesterday he didn't bother to show up or even call. He left me no choice in the matter.....


May I have a moment of silence for the departed IC.

........................................................


*cue rock band*

And now it's time to celebrate!!

Why me....

So, the IC got himself a PSP for his barfday a couplea days ago and has taken it upon himself to do nothing but play it all.... day... long.

Normally I wouldn't care as it would keep him out of my hair, but...

He's decided that he apparently needs to play it while sitting right behind me. Yeah, he shoves his chair back here and plays no more than 3 feet behind me while I'm trying to work. So I get to hear all of his asinine mumblings the whole freakin day.

.... AWWW..... SO cool..... how did he DO that...... SO not right.... You THOUGHT you had me.... AWWWW UNcool.... blah blah blah...

Dayum.....

Bad enough ole IC tried to get free dollars out of me with his damned memory card thing, then at the end of the day he went to the other store and tried it on them!!

What a friggen idiot. (Yeah, that's why he's IC.)

IC - Hard at work, as usual.....

*sigh* Sometimes.....

Ya just want to slap someone upside the head.

IC bought a memory stick reader thing a few months back, (which he had absolutely NO use for) and since he can't use it, he asked if we could sell it in the store. Well, we can try but the odds of selling something so bloody useless are about 1 in a million.

Today, he asked me...

IC: "Can I go ahead and get the $8 out of the register for this memory stick?"

Me: "Did you sell it?"

IC: "Well no, but the owner said he would just give me money for it and then sell it."

Me: "Well, have him call me and tell me that and I'll give you the money for it. But as far as I'm concerned you'll get that money after it's sold, not before."

IC: "Oh, but he said....."

Me: "And I said have him call me and tell me that. Problem solved then, right?"

IC: *dejected look, then turns and walks back up front*

Me: *under breath* "freakin idiot..."

Man, that pit is deep...

Whatever one it is that IC lives in...

It's cloudy and raining outside right now. Not a speck of sunshine anywhere to be seen. Outside again, here's what he came out to say. Right out the door...

IC: "The sun, man. It's burning people up. SO bad. Cancer."

Me: *Glances over with raised eyebrow* "......."

IC: "The ozone. It's still disappearing ya know."

Me: *Still looking incredulously* "........."

IC: "Problems."

Me: "Ri-i-i-i-i-ght."

Participation?

This is rich.....


Walked outside for a smoke a minute ago, and......

IC: "Looks like we're gonna get some participation."

Me: *Looks around for incoming customers, and seeing no-one in the vicinity* "From whom?"

IC: "huh? What does that mean? All I'm sayin is, it looks like it's gonna rain."

Me: "......................................................................................................"

Bananas and CDs

IC: "hey, did you hear about how you can fix CDs with a banana?"

Me: ".............................................no."

IC: "Ya can, it's SO cool. I'm gonna try it!"

Me: "Whatever floats your boat...."


Remember kids, if it's on the internet, it's TRUE!

Too much weed will do that to ya....

IC has to be a dope-head. HAS TO BE. Check this out...

He went and picked up a banner yesterday to put out by the street for our store. We had already put stakes out to attach it to.
Well sometime last night I guess, the stakes were stolen. Here's the conversation from just a moment ago..


IC: "Oh, I got the banner, it's in my car."

Me: "Cool deal, now I've just gotta go get more stakes to attach it to. The other ones were stolen."

IC: "WHAT?" **You have to say this really fast, and in a high pitched voice so it sounds more like "WHHHTTT". It's another one of his abnormal expressions....**

Me: "The stakes we put out there were stolen."

IC: "Did they steal the banner too?"

Me: "..........."

IC: "Didn't we have a banner out there?"

Me: "It's in your car."

IC: *Looking really confused* "Oh, I thought..."

Me: "No, I don't think you did."

Ok, I'm ready to take odds....

What will the excuse be today, hmm?

Reply with your answer and I'll post the results up later today.






Well, when he called at 9:45, he was still asleep. I reminded him that he needed to get all those alarms fixed since they all broke just a few nights ago to which he replied...

"Huh?"

So, I bought a small fridge for the office today...

Upon seeing it after he got back from lunch...

IC: "SO COOL! Does this mean we can bring things to put in it? Like food, with stuff in it?"

Me: "Stuff? Food with stuff in it? What kind of stuff??"

IC: "Well, food."

Me: "That's kinda what it's for...."

IC: "Oh. Maybe we can make like a pool of money or something to buy food to put in it for us."

Me: "Us? I'm not putting money into any pool to feed you with. I'll get what I want, you get what you want." *IC is notoriously cheap and ALWAYS on the take to get something for free or at least something that HE doesn't have to pay for.*

IC: "Well, I thought....."

Me: "Wrong. You thought wrong."

Coffee anyone?

I really do wonder sometimes, how some people function in the world....

This morning, IC came in late as usual and after giving his excuse (it was actually valid this time!) headed back to the back where the coffee and stuff is....


IC: "You make coffee?"

Me: *Looks at IC, looking at coffee pot which is on and still 3/4's full, back at my steaming cup o'joe that's right in front of me, then back at IC who is still looking straight at the coffee pot.*

............

IC: "I mean... Is it fresh?"

Me: "You should know by now if I'm drinking it, it's fresh."

IC: "What kind is it?"

Me: *Walks over to the table, looks at the big bucket of Folger's that's been sitting there and being used since opening. Looks at IC, walks back to desk.*

IC: "Well, I wasn't sure if you had maybe gotten something else."

Me: "................" *Goes back to work*

Sheezus...

IC wasn't supposed to come in this morning, but he showed up about 10 minutes early with "Can I work today?" So, whatever....

Right in the door though, this happened..

IC: "Didja see the game this weekend?"

Me: "Which one?"

IC: "LSU" *looking all down trodden and stuff...*

Me: "Oh hell yeah I watched that debacle! That was a GREAT game!"

IC: "But... LSU lost."

Me: "Exactly! They not only lost, they got their little Tiger ASSES handed to them by 30 points!"

IC: "I don't think.. No, they didn't lose by 30 points."

Me: "I don't care what you think. They lost by 30 points. 51-21."

IC: "They lost like by... 20, maybe. or 25."

Me: "51-21. F-i-f-t-y.. O-n-e.. to.. T-w-e-n-t-y... O-n-e. That's thirty points."

IC: "*mumbling* Maybe 20..."

Me: "Go get your calculator out Gump, then come back and tell me how much they lost by.."

Ahhhh... A quiet weekend.

I'm going to spend this weekend workday IC free. I get to enjoy my morning coffee in peace and escape his lunacy for the next few days.

Life is good at the moment!

8:50am.. Where oh where could IC be?

Yeah, another shocker, I know.. I'm gonna find a way to put polls up on this thing so I can take bets on what excuse he'll use each day.


--------------------

9:15 now.... Still no sign.

--------------------

9:50 - I get the feeling this excuse is gonna be a doozy!

--------------------

11:35 - And the phone did ring..... and I was not disappointed. Here's the tally for this morning's no show..

a) The laptop alarm clock somehow messed up the WHOLE laptop, and didn't go off.
b) The alarm on his phone only went off once, then the battery died.
c) His regular alarm clock's hour hand fell off in the middle of the night.
d) He had a dream that he came in to work, so he didn't bother waking up.

Amazing....

The IC was "" <--that close, to being fired just now...

Ole IC's been handing customers 2 copies of their check-in tickets for the last couplea weeks, and I've heard several of them ask "Why do I need 2?" at which point he mumbles something incoherent and adds "we just give you 2.".

Today, another customer stated plainly "I don't need 2 copies of the same thing, do I?" and IC did his normal routine. So, once she had left I decided to ask IC about this...

Me: "I've been wondering why you give every customer 2 copies of that ticket. Is there some specific reason?"

IC: "mumble mumble if they sign 2, they get 2, mumble mumble."
*Note* they do indeed sign 2 copies, one for the register and one to put with the equipment.

Me: "But there's no reason that they need 2 copies of the same piece of paper. Just throw the 2nd one away."

IC: "But I don't want to overload my trashcan."

Me: "and customers don't want you overloading thier pockets, either."

IC: "But if they sign 2 copies, they should get 2 copies because what if they come back and say "I never got a copy of that!" then they could sue us or something!"

Me: "................................................ WHAT???"

IC: "They could come back here and claim that we never gave them a copy of both things they signed and we'd be able to protect ourselves because we know how many we printed!"

Me: "............................................................................................................ WHAT???? How can you EVER prove that you even gave them even ONE copy? All they have to say is "You never gave me anything", not that it'll mean a damned thing since the copy we give them doesn't matter to us at all. It has NO IMPACT on what we do or how protected we are. We have their signed reciept and that's the ONLY part that matters from a legal or business standpoint.
So, we are not giving out 2 receipts at check-in to the customers."

IC: "Well, actually, the owner told me to."

Me: "Then I'll call the owner and set him straight on it. It's ridiculous that you are going to sit here and argue about some made up crap."

IC: "I'M NOT MAKIN IT UP!"

Me: *picks up phone and starts dialing*

IC: *WIDE-EYED* Apparently he didn't think I'd do it....

So, after hanging up the phone with the annoyed owner who stated that no such order was ever given and he didn't understand where that idea would've come from, I passed along the info to IC.

IC: "He changed his mind, huh?"

Me: "No, he didn't change his mind."

IC: "Well, I'll talk to him about it later."

Me: "You do that."

Hooo boy.. This will end up well.

IC blew his 'header gasket' as he put it today. I have no idea what really happened but that's what he said it was.

He's calling an auto repair shop at the moment and just told them that the car was a "'96 accord".

Remember that's what the Id tag in the door says, so that's what it is.

On the same note, he's already spent half the day gone to take care of something with the DA's office, and now he needs to go again to get his car fixed which leaves about 3 hours out of the day that's he's actually been here to do 'something'.

NO PAY FOR YOU!

So, was IC late this morning?

Of course he was! How silly to even assume otherwise.. :)

Only a few minutes though, so not too bad..

Oh woe is to IC....

IC is currently on the phone (on his 4th or 5th call) trying his damndest to get out of 2 tickets he got recently. He got popped twice within 3 days for an expired inspection sticker, on the same road, at the same spot. He's currently trying to get out of it by claiming it was "profiling" for the officer to be on the same road, at the same spot.

I can almost hear the people he's talking with about this laughing inside at his lame attempt to make it someone else's fault.

*****Edit 11am******

He's STILL on the phone trying to convince ANYBODY that it wasn't his fault. I swear he's been through 10 or 12 different people already.

Interesting...

Somehow this blog was flagged as a "Spam Blog" by Blogger's automagically delicious cyber-bots. What's really funny is, this blog with its 12 posts was apparently more spamarrific than the IRB with over 200!

Oh man..... This was ridiculous.

The back door here is a little hard to lock. It's got a throw bolt besides the normal lock on the knob and it doesn't line up too well so you have to work at it to get it locked all the way.

I know this. IC knows this. Apparently today he decided he was tired of having to work at the throw bolt and figured if he slammed the ever-loving-crap out of the door it would help it.

It didn't.

It did however, help my mood when a part of the exit sign fell off smackin him on top of his head.

I didn't say a word, I just sat here with bleeding lip trying to keep from laughing uproariously. After about 10 seconds, I hear this...

IC: "All I did was shut the door and the exit sign broke." (Like I wasn't sitting 10 FEET AWAY AND HEARD THE WHOLE THING!)

Me: "You did quite a bit more than just shut it."

IC: "Well, I was just trying to make the lock work."

Me: "Ripping the door from it's hinges was going to help something?"

IC: "Well, it didn't work."

Me: "I'd say not."

Jeeeeeez....

Here's a taste of what my day is gonna be like...

IC: Ok, my car is a 1997 model car, according to my insurance but the sticker inside the door says October, 1996. If I'm gonna buy parts should I buy them for a '96 or '97 year car?

Me: ....... The sticker on the door tells you when it was made, not the model year.

IC: But if it was made in 1996 shouldn't it BE a '96?

Me: .............. Not necessarily. Vehicles always come out a few months before the actual calendar year starts.

IC: Well, I'm gonna buy parts for a '96 since that's what the door sticker says.

Me: You do that.

Older stuff...

Over the past few months, IC has bedeviled himself to all the employees of our company. I'll try to give you the lowdown on some of the things he's managed to foul up in one post...

1) He has a habit of always having the answer to whatever problem is presented.

One such problem was a sale that didn't ring up properly. IC tried to ring it up using a customer's old credit information and it didn't go through but it did post as a credit to the account. We didn't notice it until the customer had left, so we couldn't re-submit it. Myself and another employee were brainstorming on how to remove the erroneous charge and set the account straight when this happened.

IC: "You know you can just ring it up again using the credit card on file, right?"

Me: "IC, I know with your 2 weeks experience using this system that you've got it all figured out, and I'm so glad I have you here to tell me how to work it but I think I'll use my 5 years experience instead. (Using 'credit card on file' *which we never do* is what got us into this mess...) So, we figured it out without his expert guidance and everything worked out fine.

2) The 'know it all' thing strikes in many ways...

IC was tasked with going through all the old equipment that customers left behind or just didn't want back and removing anything worth using or keeping in the shop. A good portion of this work was taking hard drives out of old computers, wiping them clean and testing them to see if they were any good. To do this you hook them up to one of our test machines as a slave drive, test it and then wipe it. It's fairly simple. IC, using his self proclaimed expertivity (I just made that word up...) ended up destroying both test machines by choosing the system drives instead of the slaves for wiping. Then, while we were trying to right his wrong and recover the first of them, he went back there and stopped the recovery process thinking that it was doing the wrong drive. WE set it up, and WE know what we're doing. Sheesh.
Beyond that, once we started on recovering the second machine he went back to his 'job' on the first one and proceeded to do the EXACT SAME THING AGAIN!
Now, these machines hold customer data that we recover or make copies of for them when we need to do hard drive work on their machines. Losing all of it would be devastating to both us and them. We chose at that point to take him off that duty and found something less destructive for him to do.
*Note* Throughout this process he proclaimed his innocence at doing anything wrong and blamed everything and everybody but himself.

Late again.... 8:34am

I'm waiting for the phone call. I really don't want to answer and hit the big ole "Ignore" button instead, but I've gotta hear what the excuse is this morning. I hope it's a good one...


------------

8:58am and still nothing.

------------

9:11am - IC just called, sounding like he was still asleep so I told him to stay home till Monday. the excuse was his alarm clock "just didn't work for some reason".

I feel a little let down...

Another compulsive bit of insanity...

One of the other items from yesterday that IC got hooked on was something called "Brown's Gas" or "Brown Gas". It's kindof a poor man's way to make hydrogen gas basically, by hooking up leads from your car battery to a tank of water which then produces HHO out of H2O. IC spent another couple of hours researching this, then stormed back to the shop to tell me all about it.

IC: "MAN! Do you know about Brown gas?"

Me: "Yup."

IC: "It's SO awesome! They've got a kit that anybody can put on thier car and get like, 200 miles per gallon!"

Me: "No. They don't."

IC: "Yeah, I just read about it. They did it to police cars and the mayors car and everything in some city somewhere and they're all getting 200 miles per gallon!"

Me: "No. If someone had actually come up with that kind of kit, it would be all over the news by now and everybody would be buying one."

IC: "Not really. Because if people don't believe in it, they won't buy it. That's what they're told, that it doesn't work, so they don't buy it. It's the big oil companies and the tv stations that do it. That's what they said."

Me: "You give money to televangelists to get healed. Don't you."

IC: *looks thoughtful for a split second* "Well, no. But I think I can get one of those kits and I'll prove it!"

Me: "You do that."

The feeding...

It's. Frightening.

Every minute that food is devoured there is some extra noise going along with it. The most irritating of them all is the litany of "MMmm" "MM" "MMM"'s. It's fairly normal to give an approving "MMM-mmmm" when you START eating, but all the way through? Toss those in with "SO good" mumbled in between a few times, and all the munching, slurping and smacking and you've got ole IR with a little something extra!


That's it. I'm buying a gun.

So IC's got this issue...

Compulsiveness. Bad compulsiveness. Like, pit bull style.

One of the things he got on today (yup, the first of several) was cell phone watches. He spent the better part of 2 hours looking them up on the internet (he really doesn't have much to do yet) while yelling out the specs on everything he was finding. Much like IR, he peppers normal speech with unnecessary exclamations such as "SO awesome!", "SO cool!" etc etc. So he found this one he really liked (I could tell because he went quiet), spent a little bit reading whatever he could about it, then trotted back into the shop to tell me about it. Now, I'm working and have no time for this happy horseshit, so at first I ignore him as he starts...

IC: "Dude! Did you hear about the new cell phone they've got?
It's SO cool!
It's a WATCH!
It's got games, touch screen, 3 bands, ebook reader, GPS, SO awesome!, and the talk time, get this, is TWO HUNDRED HOURS!"

Me: Turning slowly from my desk... "Two. Hundred. hours."

IC: "YEAH! It's SO awesome!"

Me: "No."

IC: "Dude! Seriously! Two Hundred Hours! I just read it on the internet, I swear, two hundred hours!"

***Something else about IC. If it's on the internet, it's DEFINITELY true. You all think of it as a joke, but he honestly believes it!***

Me: "No. You understand a normal cell phone, even a very good one, has about 200, maybe 300 MINUTES of talk time? But you're gonna tell me that a watch, with it's little watch battery is somehow 10 times more efficient than those?"

IC: "Don't ask me how they did it, they just did!"

Me: Turns back to my work with a heavy sigh.

Late again this morning....

This is gonna be a major theme on this blog, just watch...

So, at 8:40am this morning, IC comes busting up in the shop as if a chupacabra is chasing him and breathlessly describes the HORRIBLE traffic out there.

IC: "Dude, I know I'm SO late, but did you see the traffic out there? It's backed up all over the place!"

Me: "I went through all of it about 30 minutes ago and there wasn't much of anything to speak of."

IC: "Well, now it's REALLY bad!"

I looked out the window as we're on a particularly busy stretch of road, and there wasn't a car in sight. Hmm.

And this time it was.....

Yesterday morning IC was late again. His phone call at 8:40am (8:30 is report to work time) went something like this...

*Ring*

Me: "Hello?"

IC: "Hey. It's IC. I'm gonna be.. well, I'm already late but it's gonna take me a little longer because I locked my keys in the house."

Me: "Is the stove on too?"

IC: "Huh? No, I just locked the keys in there. I gotta find a way to break in to get'em."

Me: "O-o-o-o-o-k."

*Click!*

When he got to work (about 8 minutes later, and he lives about 10 minutes away, hmm...) I asked him what he broke to get his keys. He answered by explaining that he broke into his neighbor's apartment, climbed into his attic and broke through the partition between the units.

Holy Shit. Even though it DIDN'T happen, it's the thought that he so casually described breaking and entering and destruction of private property as if it was something normal.

Left the WHAT on??

I had to make this the first post, only cause it's the funniest. IC works at the counter in the shop I manage, and is habitually tardy getting to work in the morning. The usual excuses are either "I just woke up." or nothing at all. Well, a few mornings ago I got this call. I'll type it in exactly as it was said...

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's IC, I'm running a little late cause I just wo.. I left the stove on at home and I have to go home and turn it off. So that's why I'm late, cause I have to go home and turn the stove off. Can't believe I left the stove on, but I'll be there as soon as I turn it off. OK?"

"O-o-o-o-o-k. (suppressed laughter)" *click*

I'll swear here and now that I haven't heard anyone use the old stove routine for probably 20 years.