Speaking of businesses and their signs, there’s a dry cleaner down the street from me that I pass every time I go to get groceries. Just a little shop in one of those typical strip malls, flat front, glass door with two big windows flanking it. The place has put a large neon sign in each window, big custom jobs. The window on the left has the name of the place, Morelli’s Cleaners, spelled out in glowing neon. The right window, in an advertising move I can only describe as bold and daring, has the message “Customers welcome.”

Y’know, that is such a welcome change from most businesses that actively try to chase shoppers out of the building as soon as they set foot in the door. A company that welcomes paying customers… Refreshing.

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There’s a car wash place near my house called Sparkling Touch. It’s one of those places where you get out of your car and they drive it through the automated car-wash alley, then a bunch of men wipe the car down with sopping wet towels at the end and spray some vaguely fruit-smelling mist on your carpet. Pretty typical stuff.

Out front, though, they have a large sign that features the name of the place and then a customizable message area, one of those white ones with the horizontal slats and the big, plastic black letters. You see them all the time. The thing about those type of signs is, the letters can fairly easily slide around a little, left to right. So it is with this sign. The message they put up to entice passers-by to stop in was “Enjoy the Sparkling Touch of full service.” But either through happenstance or hooligans, the letters have shifted and now say “E njoy the Sp arkli ng Touch offull service.”

I don’t normally enjoy awful service, or worse, offal service, I don’t care how much it sparkles.

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Saw a sign on an automated moving gate yesterday, the kind of sliding, chain-link, motorized gate you always see blocking the way at pay parking lots. The sign featured a black-and-white illustration of one of those hapless ball-headed stick guys who are always getting crushed/sliced/mangled by things being slammed between a drawing of the gate and a drawing of a wall. Next to him were the words “WARNING! Serious injury or death may occur from moving gate. Gate may move without prior warning.”

Okay, let’s take these one at a time. Serious injury or death may occur from moving gate. I know what they mean, but it sounds like it’s saying that moving the gate, even a fraction of an inch, will cause your untimely end. “We know you want to get your car out of here but… well… take your chances.” Then there’s the fact that the gate may move without prior warning. Ignoring for the moment that it sounds like gate has a habit of suddenly lashing out and slaughtering families without provocation, I’m more interested in that phrase “prior warning.” By definition, doesn’t a warning have to be prior? If it comes after the event, it’s no longer a warning. It’s the difference between “Bob! Look out for that forklift!” and “Damn, Bob, that thing messed you up.” I’m not entirely sure what sort of prior warning they expect the gate to give. Little loudspeaker that makes an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would be so kind as to back up, for I am about to move for no reason and, should you be near me, I will do my level best to scissor something off of you. Thank you.”

I suppose the real question is, should they reword the sign or make a gate that doesn’t randomly fly around and kill people? Enh, sign’s cheaper.

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So I’m getting ready to microwave up a Healthy Choice french bread pizza for lunch and, before pulling back the top of the box as per instructions, I notice something. Next to the large picture of a cooked pizza on the front of the box, in small type near the bottom, were the words “Serving Suggestion.” Serving suggestion? What exactly are they suggesting? I mean, I’m appreciative that the Healthy Choice food company is looking out for me, offering helpful suggestions as to how I should serve their products, but I’m not sure what the suggestion is. It’s just a picture of a pizza. What’s the suggestion? Cook it first? That seems like more of a necessity than a suggestion. Put it on a plate? There’s no plate in the picture. Use a fork? Slice off small pieces? Serve cheese side up? Do not sprinkle with broken glass? What?

I briefly considered calling their consumer hotline, but I was afraid that asking an underpaid person who had to deal with stupid people all day long “What should do I do with this pizza?” would lead to all sorts of unsavory answers. Besides, I was hungry, so I just cooked it up and ate it my normal way: bare-handed and standing over the sink. I would offer that’s an equally valid serving suggestion, but I’ll agree it wouldn’t look as good on the box.

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OK, I’m sure we’ve all seen street signs like the one above. Fairly common, right? The baffling thing to me is, most times when I see them, they’re lying on the ground, still attached to their metal poles because someone has driven over them and knocked them down. I understand accidents happen but… this is a sign that specifically tells you to drive around it! Do not drive on this area. That’s the very clear, unmistakable message of this sign. There’s an obstacle here. Go around. So how do people keep driving over these things? Are they driving around in the dark with their headlights off and their eyes closed? I envision them driving along, squinting, trying to make out the vague shape floating in the darkness ahead, peering through the windshield as it gets closer, a little clearer, almost have it… oh crap!

You don’t see stop signs or speed limit signs plowed over and lying on the side of the road. Crosswalk, yield, do not enter, no passing zone, all safe. But the one sign that tells you clearly to give it some room gets run down with astonishing frequency. Come on, people, there’s other ways to rebel.

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OK, someone explain this ad for Göt2b hair care to me. I mean, I get the basic gist of it. Dr. Mannequin there in the middle has slathered his hair with weasel entrails or whatever they put into this hair gunk to make it give off pheromones, and the surrounding women are so overcome with lust and passion because of it that they’re all battling to be the first to gain his greasy affections. Makes sense in a Madison Avenue sort of mentality. But what is the deal with these women? How do you explain this?

First, you have the dolled-up contractor there on the floor, who has apparently broken through the wall with her solid-gold sledge hammer, and now is too exhausted to walk over to our unguent-slathered Romeo and is reduced to crawling the rest of the distance.

Meanwhile, Punk-Girl appears to be throwing a seven-dollar latte onto Prep-Girl (dressed in her practical horse-riding attire) who is fighting back with a riding crop, both of them so intent of battling each other that they appear to have forgotten the oily reason for their duel, or even how they came to be in a laboratory environment in the first place. Behind them, Classic 1960s Barbie Doll Girl is rappelling into the lab on tied-together bedsheets from, I assume, her bedroom, which through a truly bizarre set of architectural errors is located directly above the lab.

Then we have the, I don’t know, Native American twins who have somehow managed to beat all the other girls to the punch and are already rubbing the doctor’s beefy luxuriousness. Maybe they’re lab assistants who forgot their coats today.

And he’s oblivious to it all, despite having concocted this goo to generate exactly this sort of response.

Now, I’m all for odd ads. You have to step out of the mainstream sometime to cut through the rest of the advertising clutter and make your message heard. But shouldn’t you actually have a message? Or at least one that makes sense? Sure, when you’re starting from a premise that involves smearing your head with squirrel offal, you’re going to have a rough time of it, but you could try a little harder than just packing some models into push-up bras and lo-rise shorts and calling it a day. I mean, they obviously put some forethought into this photo shoot. You don’t just have gold-plated sledge hammers lying around; that’s a custom job right there. And I doubt these girls just happened to show up for the shoot dressed like this. Women don’t wander around in outfits like this anywhere outside of my imagination. So they planned for the ad to turn out like this, and I’m just trying to figure out why.

And yes, I do demand a coherent plot from my hair-care ads. I feel it makes me a savvy consumer.

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Note: All names have been changed to protect the stupid.

Now that I’m safely out of my last job and have moved far enough away that they can no longer get hold of me, I can tell you about some of the insanity that went on in that place. And quite possibly one of the biggest balls of crazy in the building was a woman named Josie.

Josie was an older woman, easily in her 60s. She was kind of short and portly, with a frizzy white puffball of hair and a gravelly voice that she loved to exercise any chance she got. There were no short conversations with Josie. If she started talking to you, you might as well pull up a chair, ’cause you were in for the long haul. Now, to this day, I’m not entirely certain what Josie’s actual official job title was. I asked around and never got a satisfactory answer. She was married to another employee who’d also been there since the dawn of time, so I guess she sort of had built-in tenure. Still, she did stuff to earn her paycheck. She watered the plants. She handled the shredding duties. And she apparently decided at some point that it was her responsibility–nay, sacred duty–to badger everyone about keeping the place clean.

Understand, we had a hired cleaning crew that came in every night to straighten the place up. No excuse to be a slob, I know, and we weren’t a messy bunch, but we did have people to handle this sort of thing. But Josie had decided that it was up to her to make sure the place remained spotless in between visits by the cleaners. Her main weapon in that regard was The Sign. Josie put signs on everything she felt was in her jurisdiction. “DO NOT LEAVE DISHES IN SINK!” a sign would scream at you from above the faucet. “PUT DISHES BACK IN CABINET!” a sign directly next to the first sign would say. There were signs on the microwave, the coffee maker, the utensil drawer, the plants (”DO NOT MOVE! DO NOT WATER!”), the chairs in the break room (”DO NOT REMOVE CHAIRS FROM BREAK ROOM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!”), and pretty much anything that held still for more than five minutes and Josie decided fell within her sphere of influence. These were her halls, dammit, and she was going to keep them clean.

Of course, I knew none of this the first time I crossed her path. I’d only been on the job for about two weeks. I’d never met, seen, nor even heard of her. So I was rather surprised one morning when this gray-haired little troll waddled into my office and brandished a dirty bowl at me.

“Is this yours?” she asked with no preamble. I looked up and was confronted with a plastic Tupperware bowl that looked to have some oatmeal detritus in it. I’m not used to having strange women assault me with filthy servingware, but I tried to be polite.

“Uh, no, sorry,” I said and attempted to return to work, figuring the matter closed. She was looking for the owner of the bowl. I was not said owner, therefore our business was concluded. As I said, I didn’t know Josie yet.

“Because it was in the sink,” she informed me. She appeared put out by this, although it seemed to me to be a perfectly logical place for a dirty bowl. I can understand her being cheesed about it being in the cabinet, or the fridge, the closet, maybe, but the sink made sense to me.

“Is that not where it goes?” I asked, not realizing the magnitude of the mistake I had just made.

“Dirty dishes need to be washed. I have to keep this place clean and I don’t have time to follow around cleaning up after you.” I wanted to point out that she wasn’t cleaning up after me, since the bowl wasn’t mine, but she was just working up steam and wasn’t about to be derailed. “You can’t go leaving dirty dishes in the sink. If it’s dirty, you need to wash it. I have too much to do without having to clean up behind you. So if you use a dish, you need to wash it, and then put it back in the cabinet. It’s my job to keep this place neat and I can’t be always doing your dishes.” And on and on it went, the same basic message, repeated various ways.

And again, I had no idea who this woman was. This was a complete stranger who had barged unannounced into my office and was hectoring me about a dish that I had never seen before she shoved it under my nose. I began to wonder if a crazy homeless woman had somehow gotten into the building and wandered into my office. That made more sense than a rational fellow employee berating me about a dirty bowl.

Eventually she wound down, apparently running out of different ways to say the same thing. She stood glaring at me, seeming to expect something. Frankly I was at a loss. “Uh, might be one of my co-workers’. I’ll ask them when they get in,” I tried.

“You do that,” she said. “Because it’s not my job to clean up after you–”

“Got it,” I said, trying to head her off before she lapped herself and started her diatribe all over again. “I’ll ask them.” That seemed to be good enough because she turned and shuffled out, giving me a suspicious, angry look the whole way. I can only assume that she then went from office to office, asking anyone who happened to be in the building if the bowl was theirs and giving her speech, regardless of the answer.

When my co-workers did turn up a little later, I asked if there was a crazy woman on staff who would be upset about a dirty bowl in the sink. “Ah, you met Josie,” they said knowingly. They didn’t seem too surprised by her reaction. Ultimately, the bowl turned out to belong to my co-worker, Jennifer, who got the exact same speech I got when she claimed ownership of it. Jen apologized and dutifully washed the offending dish, getting an earful the entire time. When the bowl was safely stored in Jen’s backpack (she had brought it from home the day before) and Josie had run out of air, the crisis seemed to finally have been averted. There were no more dirty dishes in the sink and all was right and good in the world.

Until the day we used the Christmas tree skirt. But that’s another story.

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In the teaching/training/motivation fields, you often hear the phrase “the carrot or the stick” as the basic choice for reinforcing a lesson. And I’ve never really seen this as much of a choice. Seriously, have you ever tried to beat the crap out of someone with a carrot? It’s hard! Thing’s got no reach, no heft, tends to break too easily. Your arm’s going to get tired long before any lesson’s going to sink in. The stick’s kind of a no-brainer.

I think it’s time we change this to “the stick or the brick.” I like to have options that make sense.

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From the safety instructions that came with my fiancée’s hair dryer:

#7. Never use while sleeping.

As soon as I figure out how to actually do this, I’m going to give it a try. I like to live dangerously.

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Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died yesterday at the age of 69, leaving behind a legacy nearly unmatched in the gaming world. Not only did D&D shape an entire generation of gamers (and ensure they’d spend their formative years being ridiculed and subject to countless wedgies), but its core gameplay, ruleset, and conventions can still be seen in modern electronic gaming. Odds are good without D&D there would be no World of Warcraft. That’s right, WoW players, you’re one of us now.

At the risk of painting myself as a nerd–oh, hell with it, I am a nerd–I spent a few years playing D&D back in high school. I’m not going to say it was a formative force in my existence, that I didn’t know myself until I became a paladin, but it was a lot of fun, engaged me creatively, and let me use and expand my imagination in a way standard games never could. Plus there was a great sense of camaraderie in it, sitting around a table with your friends, creating something on the fly, and feeling just a little exclusive because of it. It was a nice little nerd oasis, where you could get together with like-minded individuals and just be your geeky self for a while, have some fun. It was quite a far cry from today when any jackass with a headset and an Xbox Live account can curse you out without ever leaving his house.

Even though it’s been many a year since I last tossed a d20 or looked up a THAC0 table, I still have a soft spot in my heart for D&D and its creator. So rather than some cheesy line about resurrection spells or missing his saving throw, I’ll just say rest in peace, Gary. And thanks.

Incidentally, the guys over at Penny Arcade have, in their own words, a “semi-tasteful” tribute up to Gygax. Give it a peek.

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