The Mark of the Butterfly

I ordered a Butterfly Knife over the weekend. You know, the kind that you flip around in some sort of gymnastic fashion in an effort to give the "I'm so dangerous that I don't care if I cut off all my fingers with this contraption" look. Although they were probably standard issue for any street gang during the Eighties, I don't think anybody has actually bought one in the last ten years. The printed invoice even said: "Thank you for your purchase - welcome to 1987."

Why I decided to order a butterfly knife astounds me even now. I'm not a knife guy, I don't like violence, and I've never been in a single situation where any knife would have come in handy. It certainly isn't anything practical; nobody would order a juicy T-Bone at Black Angus and say "Make the steak medium-rare, potatoes on the side, oh, and hold the steak knife, I've got something better."

As cool as they may have been a few decades ago, rarely did they grace the silver screen as a "Whoa this guy is a bad mother, don't mess with him" kind of weapon. But imagine if Crocodile Dundee would have said, "That's not a knife... This is a knife" and proceeded to flip his butterfly knife around for five minutes, long enough to bore his would-be attacker into leaving to find a victim with less of an accent.

Or imagine if Dirty Harry delivered his famous quote: "Do you feel lucky? Punk? Well, do you?" While mercilessly chopping his own fingers into oblivion in an effort to flip his shiny blade around.

The only people that actually used these knives were the unworthy enemy ninja clans that systematically got beaten up by Chuck Norris. It almost makes you wonder if spinning them emits a high pitch frequency that attracts action heroes to come beat the living snot out of you.

Like I said, I'm not a knife guy. I'm not any kind of weapon guy. I don't own any knives, guns, whips, stun guns, or anthrax. My armament collection consists of a .38 caliber stapler and a deadly assortment of ninja throwing socks. I have no idea what I'm going to do with a butterfly knife after I get tired of shredding my fingers into stumps.

Perhaps I'll frame it on my office wall underneath the quotation: "This is the knife that caused Jean-Claude Van Damme to throw me through a window." It should make for an interesting conversation piece, so long as everybody realizes that I'm one bad mother, don't mess with me...

How To Sell Cellular Phones

As anyone in the retail business will tell you, a career in sales makes for a great combination of interesting stories and small paychecks. They'll probably also tell you that selling is an art - what they won't tell you is that it's the kind of art that you can buy at Walmart under the guise of "Big Mouth Billy Bass."

I sell cellular phones, which means I can provide an inside scoop into the retail sales process... it also means I cry myself to sleep.


Step One: Dress for Success
Proper work attire is key to being a good salesman, so it's best to find the nicest shirt and tie that you have, press them to perfection, then spend a good five minutes making sure that you've got them tucked into your pants in a way that won't "Ruin the lines." I don't really know what "Lines" are in clothes - with the exception of the barcodes on the tags - but apparently it's important to not ruin them. I've found it's best to iron your clothes while you're wearing them to make them look crisp, my suggestion is to use a good steam iron on your shirts, a dry iron on your pants, and good Hickory stick to bite down on to offset the pain.

Step Two: Show up
Perhaps the biggest key to racking in great sales is to show up to work. I'm still unconvinced, but they did do a study, and who can argue with those?

Step Three: Dress for Success part II
Roll your sleeves up, loosen your tie, and untuck half of your shirt. You want to look like you've been so busy selling stuff that you've had to compromise your attire just to deal with customers by the thousands. Having a coworker punch you in the face is a nice finishing touch.

Step Four: Customers
ALERT! People are coming your way, with what appears to be a look of "I want to buy something from you right now!" Stay calm and don't panic, they'll be able to smell your fear. If you have a name tag, your best bet is to rip it off and act like you're just a customer yourself. Toss out phrases like "Sheesh, these guys don't have anything," or "This place is a dump, I'm going somewhere else." With any luck they'll pass you up and you won't even have to make eye contact.

If for some reason the customers see through this, your next option is to start speaking a foreign language, preferably one that doesn't actually exist, while pointing at your genitals.

Step Five: Lunch
You've undoubtedly worked up quite an appetite with all of this dressing up and avoiding people, time for a little food break. I find it best to take these about 15 minutes after showing up, and about every 30 minutes thereafter.

Keep in mind that under no circumstances should you EVER pay for your own lunch, or even eat with your coworkers. You can try the usual means of litigating money from your peers, such as: "A refridgerator just fell on my brother - can I borrow some money?" or the more popular, "Remember that time you got herpes from the one-legged prostitute from Guatamalla? Well I do, and I need five bucks." If you come up short, just 'borrow' some products as you leave and sell them to pawn shops along the way.

The important thing to remember when borrowing money is to never mention "I'll pay you back," that way they can't hold it over your head. If it slips out accidently, just don't actually re-compensate them and you'll be fine.

Step Six: The Attitude of a Winner
Stay positive, find your happy zone and stay there. I find the best zones are usually in the break room near the microwave.

Step Seven: Inter-Office Competition
Don't be fooled into actually working because your employer is offering killer bennifits to the "Winner" of some contest, because these aren't going to be anything you'll actually like anyway. Think: "Hey Bob, you sold more phones than anybody in the company last month, here's a three-sizes-too-small t-shirt with our company logo on it... but remember you can't wear t-shirts to work, (wink)."

You are better off by simply mocking those that actually take such competitions seriously; or better yet, sleep with their wives.

Step Eight: Going Home
It's best to leave at least an hour early, preferably when a frantic coworker asks you an important question. Just say, "Good question! Wait right here, I'll find out the answer and be right back."

Step Nine: Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Wake up the next morning, spray your underwear with cologne, and repeat steps one through eight.


Rock on.

A Year In Review

Recently I've had quite a few requests to mention what I've been doing with my life. Admitedly I'm not the greatest 'keep in touch' kind of person, so in accordance with the whole New Years thing I figgured I'd jot down a quick summary of Lee's 2004.

January: With the exception of my Dad's birthday, January has never really been anything spectacular in my mind. In fact, it's kind of a depressing month when you think about it. It's much like a bouncer at a night club at 2:00am - an undeniable reality check that the holiday fun times are over and now it's time to stop having fun and get back to our normal, hum-drum lives.

Febuary: What's up with a month that can't even decide how many days it should have in it? The only saving grace this month has is my mother's birtday, which is smack dab on Valentine's Day.

March: Yay - March Madness in College basketball. Oh wait, I don't like basketball, it's typically as much fun as watching paint dry. One nice thing about the basketball season is that I play the drum set for the Boise State teams; the bad news: March wraps up my final season at Boise State, and thusly might mark the end of my days as a drummer. On a positive note my old band, Danger Baby, talked about getting back together as a four piece and even wrote a couple of songs in preparation for the 'come back'.

April: At this point I was wrapping up my final semester as a Grad Student at Boise State. I finished an internship with the Health Department and was taking care of all the loose ends. Unfortunately, I ended up dealing with a fat retarded (but tenured) professor that gave me a "C" for my hard earned internship on account of being late - even though I had the paper with her handwritten deadlines (that shows I was actually EARLY getting my assignment in) as evidence. Instead of admiting that she made a mistake she handed me a less than desireable grade... and probably celebrated by eating a box of doughnuts.

May: I Graduated with my Master's of Public Administration. That's pretty much it for this month.

June: My roomates and I all moved to south Boise. Kelly bought the place and invited all of us to move in with him and keep the same roomate group going. It's a killer house, lot's of fun times.

July: This marked the last time I worked for Boise State as the Aquatics Coordinator. Over the summer I ran a learn to swim program for kids, which wrapped up at the end of this month. Boise State is now officially in my rear view mirror.

August: I spent the better part of this month living off my Boise State pension and looking for job. The job market in public administration was pretty slow, so on a whim I decided to take an entry level position selling cellular phones; which is ironic in and of itself because I really HATE cellular phones.

September: A crappy month spent selling even crappier cellular phones. On a (REALLY) good note I managed to get my hands on a sideline pass to the Boise State home football games, which I still to this day treasure like a pirate map.

October: Halloween.

November: Thanksgiving.

December: The most exciting news all year, some pro-level musicians in Portland, Oregon, invited me to play drums for them. It does require moving, but it's an offer I simply can't refuse. Now it's just a matter of lining up the ends to get over there and start rocking. I also spent a couple of days in Memphis, TN to watch Boise State play in the Liberty Bowl (once again with a free pass, plane trip, food, and lodging courtesy of the Kieth Stein Blue Thunder Marching Band). Oh yeah, Christmas was also fun.


And that pretty much wraps 'er up. On with 2005...


Rock on