Biff Rambles On About … Resisting a Rest, Just Walking a Ways, Alleviating Leaves, and Heartfelt Work Instructions

 

In my continuing efforts to get back into the habit of writing regularly, I decided the easiest path to take was one of my patented rambling posts.

I am all about the path of least resistance.

This philosophy of life was handed to me when I was a wide-eyed freshman in college, taking my first class in basic electronics.  My professor at the time assured all of us hay-chewing rubes that electricity always takes the path of least resistance.

That point was not lost on me and so I said, “I tell you whut.  If’n that there’s good nuff fer ‘lectricity, then it’s good nuff fer me, too.”

[It’s important to note that I said this with a Mississippi accent, for that was where I was living at the time.  I have since escaped and have adopted a Texan accent to attempt to blend in with the natives here.]

So that is why tonight I am choosing to write one of these here rambling posts rather than something that takes effort or research or something important to say.  So please bear with me until I get back into the groove of writing.

Or find something important to say.

But that might be quite a wait.  I recommend just going with this post for now in as much as it is the path of least resistance at the moment.

 

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It has been a relatively quiet week here in Biffville (population:  atrophying).

Last weekend I participated in a 5K charity walk-a-thon.

It wasn’t my idea.  I mean, I love to walk as much as the next person, but as soon as someone puts a number on it, it suddenly seems daunting.   An example to prove my point:

Dialog #1:

Bob:  Let’s go for a walk!

Jane:  Yes!  Let’s!  That sounds like fun!

Dialog #2:

Bob:  Let’s go for a 5K walk!

Jane:  Are you on crack?  That’s like walking to Albuquerque!

(Bob and Jane appear through the courtesy of United Artists.)

Sometimes these events are even called “fun runs”.  This is laughable.  The people who call them that do not seem to realize that “fun run” is an oxymoron.  The two words are mutually exclusive.  They fall under a corollary of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

You can have fun, or you can run, but not both.

So some of your wiser event coordinators get around this by calling them “walks for charity”.   I have suggested that they call them “Schlepping for Shekels”, but my suggestion was ignored by the committee.

So … yeah … I walked 5 kilometers last weekend.  It’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds.  It turns out that 5K is only about 3 miles, which your average human can walk in about an hour (less, if being chased by dogs).

My forefathers used to walk that far to get from the front porch to the outhouse.  With wild dogs to incentivize them to pick up the pace.

I, on the other hand, only walk that far over the course of, say, 3 or 4 days.  And without wild dogs to encourage me.

My forefathers would be quite ashamed of me.

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The day after walking a 5K I decided that I could no longer put off raking up the front yard.  It seems that, while I was away for Thanksgiving, every tree in my neighborhood shed their leaves spontaneously.  Some sort of arboreal alopecia, apparently.

So I returned to find my yard covered in a blanket of brown leaves about 6 inches thick.  Frustratingly, very few of them were from MY tree.  Most of them were from neighbor’s trees as far as three blocks away.  But when the city is handing out citations for unraked lawns, they don’t give a fig where the leaves are from.   (Ironically, there were also a few fig leaves in the mix in my yard.  Heaven knows where those came from!)

So, yes, a mere day after walking 5 kilometers (I like to mention this a lot in case any of you missed it), I had to get out and rake up about 17 trees worth of leaves.  Actually, I didn’t rake them up.  I put the bag attachment on the mower and “vacuumed” them up, mulching them at the same time.  The leaves were so thick that I had to stop every 4 or 5 feet and empty the bag into the 30-gallon paper lawn bags that the city insists we put our yard waste into.

Before it was all said and done, I’d filled up twenty of those suckers!  For the math-impaired, that is 600 gallons of mulched leaves!  I’m not sure why we measure yard waste in gallons, but there you go.  Probably for the same reason we measure charity walks in “K”.

I think we should measure yard waste in square yards (it only makes sense), and, just to make it more interesting, we should measure charity walks in furlongs.  Tell me THAT wouldn’t make charity walks more exciting!  Especially if there was a straightaway just after the last turn.  Just don’t break a leg while walking it.

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The week since then has been quiet in comparison.  My walking has dropped from the “kilo” down into the “centi” range.  The yard has not needed to be re-raked.

Work has been both highly stressful and unbearably dull.  How’s THAT for a paradox?  It’s the only place in the world where you can fall asleep while clutching your heart.  And even then they just say you died of boredom.  It makes the worker’s compensation investigation go much smoother.

“Oh, no,” say the company representatives to the Worker’s Comp investigators.  “He most certainly did NOT die of work related stress.  He died of self-inflicted boredom.  We believe his heart was simply too unmotivated to continue to beat on its own.”

And then, on the “Recommendations” page of the Worker’s Comp investigator’s PowerPoint report are two bullet points that read:

• Implement on-line course for annual employee certification in how to perform CPR on themselves in the event of Boredom and Apathy Related Medical Incidents and Events (BARMIE)
• Periodically send out cryptic emails implying that workforce reductions may be in the offing.

 

Now THAT will certainly get your heart pumping!  Never underestimate the effect that fear has on the workforce.    Remember:

A scared employee is a productive employee.

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Okay, that’s enough rambling for one post.  If I make this much longer, I’ll soon have written about 5,000 words.   And that will be like a 5K charity read-a-thon.

And nobody wants that.