Categories
Travel

Trip to Boston – 1995

On Saturday, February 4, 1995, a huge snowstorm hit Boston shutting down the airport.  On Sunday, February 5, 1995, I flew out of Memphis to Boston for a week of training. We had no issue on the flight.  It was when we got off the plane that the issues began.  As we approached the baggage pick-up area, the doors to the outside opened. A blast of air came through the doors that was colder than any that I had ever felt.  My first thought was that I didn’t want to go outside.  We soon caught a cab.  Our driver was a man with dark skin that we assumed was an immigrant because of his accent.  I’m not sure what language he was speaking on his radio.  It sounded like he was saying, “Ju ju ju ju ju ju.”  We never heard a word that sounded like anything else.  He took us to the Four Seasons Hotel where our training was being conducted.  This hotel was next to Boston Common, the oldest city park in the United States.  

Categories
Restaurants

Blue Cheese Please

I go to lunch with a few of the guys at work from time to time. There are some people who seem to have issues when they go out to eat no matter where they are at.  Our friend Jim is the one in our group that always had issues. Some people bring these things on themselves, but Jim is not one of those people. Jim is always polite with the wait staff and pays attention to their questions.  There is never any confusion about what he has ordered.  But if something is going to go wrong with an order or the service, it always happens to Jim.  If anyone gets a dirty fork, it will be Jim.  If anyone has a dried lemon seed baked onto the inside of their water glass, it will be Jim.  He had these things happen when out with us.  It was like he was a magnet for bad luck at a restaurant.

Categories
Restaurants

New Sandwich Shop

Bellacino’s was a new sandwich and pizza shop in town.  The guys that I usually went to eat with during lunch at work decided to try it out.  We walked into the shop and started reviewing the menu over the counter.  If you wanted a sandwich, it looked like you could either get a half or whole sandwich.  It wasn’t clear how big the sandwiches were.  It wasn’t like at Subway where you get a foot-long or 6-inch sandwich.  They didn’t have any samples of the bread where you could easily see what the sizes were.  And unfortunately, anyone who was already eating in the store had ordered pizza.  So we were flying by the seat of our pants on what to order. 

Categories
Work Pranks

Work Pranks – Slowing Down Speedy

One of my co-workers in my department is obsessed with getting away from work as soon as possible.  He has a reputation for running over people between him and the back door.  He tries to get to work as early as possible to get a parking place as close to the employee entrance as possible.  On days when he had to park next to what he considers the best parking spot, I have seen him move his car during lunch over one spot just to get the better spot. One day some of the people in our department decided to slow him down.

Categories
True Stories

New Year’s Eve at Benihana

Years ago, we had a large group of friends who decided to go to Benihanas for New Year’s Eve.  Three couples from Jackson, TN were meeting three more couples from Memphis at the Benihana in Memphis.  We had enough people to fill a Hibachi table to capacity.  They had a special New Year’s Eve meal deal going and everyone in our party decided we would get it.  I don’t remember exactly what all was included with the special, but it did say it included fried rice.  We arrived late enough that we would be seeing in the new year at our table.  

Categories
Work Pranks

Work Pranks – Call Forwarding

Call forwarding is a nice feature that I rarely use for the right purposes at work.  It’s nice if you are relocating to someone else’s desk for an afternoon, especially if I’m expecting a lot of calls.  But I never remember to turn it on when it would help.  Of course, that doesn’t stop me from using it pull a prank every now and then.  A few years ago, I decided that it would be fun to set call forwarding on some of the conference room phones to a target person at work.  I would be in one of the conference rooms after a meeting, sitting next to a phone and I would engage the call forwarding to my favorite target before I left. I would do this at random times and in random conference rooms.  I never heard any feedback about how this prank when.  Except the last time I did it.

Categories
Work Pranks

Work Pranks – Email Virus

When I worked for a previous employer. I was going to be off work for about a week.  I wanted to check my email from home.  This was long before having email access on your phone or being able to remotely check email from another computer.  I saw that the email program that we used had “rules” that you could establish on new emails in your inbox.  For example, I could have emails from my boss go immediately into a folder for messages from him.  The feature that I wanted to play with would automatically forward emails to someone else.  I decided to use this feature to forward emails to my personal email address.  This would get me the information that I wanted while I was away from work. 

Categories
Work Pranks

Work Pranks – Autocorrect

Names have been altered in this story.

Years ago, I read an article in a business-related magazine that told how to use autocorrect to add your signature to Microsoft Office documents.  In addition of the autocorrect feature automatically correcting errors like changing “nad” to “and”, you can add words that aren’t already in their library. You can even have it replace a series of characters with a picture.  Their example was having it replace your initials with an image of your signature.  I considered adding this feature to my computer but was more interested in the possibilities of using this for a prank.  

Categories
Work Pranks

Work Pranks – Lubriderm

At a previous employer, I worked with several other guys in a lab. Bob was one of our fellow employees that everyone disliked the most. He was lab worker who was most likely to disappear when things got busy.  He would go out on the plant floor to collect samples and be gone twice as long as anyone else in the lab.  He had been there longer than most of us.  Everyone in the lab seemed to get along with well except Bob. If anyone was going to be the target for a prank, Bob would be that target.

Categories
True Stories

Drinks at GG’s Family Restaurant

When I was in college, my friends and I would often make late night runs to restaurants that were opened all night.  One night my friend Mark suggested we go to a place called GG’s.  It was a locally owned diner in a building that was previously a Sambo’s chain restaurant.  The Sambo’s had closed because of the racially insensitive name and imagery used in the stores.  I only remember going to this place once when it was Sambos and maybe once before this after it had changed names.