This and that

I was standing at the checkout line at Walgreens last night, buying some milk, AAA batteries and sugarless gum, and I saw something that caught my attention.

There was a black woman in front of me, probably around my age, and she was buying a couple of CDs from the $2 bargain bin. I noticed that she bought one entitled “Motown Favorites”, and then she plopped down “The Best of the Moody Blues.”

Well, that surprised me. Even white people think The Moody Blues are kind of square. I thought that maybe she didn’t know what she was getting. Maybe she likes the blues, and she thought it was a CD full of sultry blues tunes that would set the mood.

Perhaps she went home, lit some candles, and told her husband she had some special music for them and popped it in the CD player. But then they were unable to truly get in the mood because by the time they got to the spoken part at the end of “Knights in White Satin,” he had taken the CD out of the player and stomped on it until it shattered.

But who knows? Maybe she’s a big Moody Blues fan. Maybe she met the man of her dreams at party while “Tuesday Afternoon” played on the radio. Maybe she hears “In Your Wildest Dreams” and gets the urge to rip off her smock and dance in the rain. As they said in Raising Arizona, it’s a crazy world. Somebody ought to sell tickets.

Sure, I’d buy one.

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Here are a few random snapshots from a day at the office:

I overheard this conversation on the elevator:
Guy 1: They need to get their ducks in a row.
Guy 2: They don’t know anything about ducks. They are ducks.
Guy 1: Ducks that don’t have any feathers.
Guy 2: We need to teach them some things about ducks.

Honestly, I don’t think they were actually talking about ducks.

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I’m not really one for talking on the cell phone while in the bathroom. Today, a guy walked in the bathroom while in the middle of his conversation, sidled up to the urinal next to me, stared peeing, and never missed a beat. And I could tell that he was talking to his wife. Then he didn’t even bother to try and disguise the flush. That’s a big bowl of wrong, is what that is.

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I’m going to buy the woman in the cube next to me a new CD. She listens to the same one every day, loudly, and it apparently only has a few songs on it. I swear I heard “Dancing in the Street” six times in one day last week. I wonder if she’d like The Moody Blues?

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I was on a conference call where somebody used the word “apple-carting.” He said, “We are apple-carting our communications approach.” Other terms used during the call included “50,000-foot view,” “organizational agnostic” and “economies of scale.” Then the guy said, “We’re going to try to limit these meetings to two hours, because after two hours people begin to lose focus.” Two hours? I was surfing the Web after two minutes. Thank God for the mute button.