Command Set Four
(and other various trespasses)
FULLY ARMED POPULATION
From this day forth, there will be no more restrictions against citizens carrying weapons. I will maintain the laws that say criminals and ex-cons can not own/carry/use guns but I really don’t expect them to obey, they’re criminals. The age rules still apply. Kids with guns is a bad idea although I did consider it. I was going to go the other route and say only my troopers can carry guns and anyone else with a gun will be shot on sight, but that doesn’t work, criminals will still hide and use guns. It also makes me look bad by killing off people.
So, the real solution is to arm EVERYONE and to encourage them to wear them openly like the old west. I’m sure the criminals are less likely to mug the little old lady at the ATM if they thought she might be packing heat. With every teacher having a shotgun in the classroom, there might be less school shootings.
Now of course, as soon as you start a law like this, there will be a rash of gun related deaths. Young punks trying to show off, trying to be tough. Good, we need to weed these people out anyway. The intent here is to allow the citizens of my world to protect themselves against these morons. It’s easier to protect yourself when the bad guy is lying in a pool of blood.
THE CAL RIPKEN RULE
Professional athletes have become soft. They sit the bench at the slightest injury. These guys get paid to play a game. It is the dream of every child in the back yard or in the alleys. Overpaid jocks that have come to believe their own hype.
If this keeps up, we are going to start firing these wimps. We’ll go back to the days where pitchers threw for the entire game, back to “ironman football” where the same men played offence and defense, back to when people played the sport for reasons other than the paycheck.
Crashing your plane into a building to avoid being fired by Steinbrenner is … OK, even this is beneath me. I’ll stop. Wait, wait, I have a Thurmon Munson reference to make… Shut up man, stop it… OH GODS, THE VOICES!!! Stop the bad man from making the insensitive jokes!!!
COMMERCIAL REPETITION
I am officially tired of being inundated with commercials for the same company one right after the other. Especially when they use the same intro/outro. I thought nothing could get worse than the “Brake Depot” commercials where they repeat the same line over and over but this is progressively worse. The same company and most often, for the same product, grabs consecutive timeslots for airplay and for three minutes, I get to hear about the wonders of “Brand X”. Same music, same actors, same lawyer-friendly tag line.
Hey Mr. Madison Avenue, we get it, repetition sells. Repetition is an easy way to get brand recognition. We get it. But there are those of us out here that are now so sick of hearing about your brand that we are going to vomit every time we see or hear about you. Is this really what you want? You can’t go around making people so sick of something that they are becoming physically ill. Not in my empire you can’t.
Commercials for same brand can only be seen once every 20 minutes. This includes subsidiary companies mentioning the name of the mother-brand. No, you can not break down the hour into 3 segments and play the commercial last in segment 1 and first in segment 2. OK, revision: There must be a 20 minute buffer between commercials for the same brand.
MEDICINES THAT KILL
As long as we are covering commercials, I’ll put a stop to another problem that has been plaguing the arena of network TV. Pharmaceutical companies have to make a choice. Either make a perfect medicine, or take your chances with the stupid people. No longer will we be subjected to a 60 second commercial where 10 seconds are what the medicine does and 50 seconds is the disclaimer where it tells you the possible side effects.
“This pill will relieve your headache”
“Caution, may cause; drowsiness, dry mouth, bad-hair days, rectal bleeding, incomplete homework assignments, warts, severe diarrhea, incest, bedwetting, wife beating, Windows BSOD, scabies, ingrown hairs and death. Consult a doctor before taking (more, less or equal too) the recommended dosage. Consult a priest if swallowed. Not for use in humans. Must be disposed of in a level 5 HAZMAT facility. Please enjoy our product responsibly. Good luck.”
Fuck all that, I’d rather have the headache. And these erection pill commercials tell you to see a doctor if erections last longer than four hours. If you have to take pills to get it up, once it’s up, I’d imagine you want it to stick around as long as possible right? 70 years old and I’ve got four hours of raging hard-on? I’m not going to the doctors, I’m going to the strip club! But no, why don’t you listen to the disclaimer that tells you to stop the party…
Most of this has come about because of stupid people. Dipshit X takes a mega dose of sleeping pills and then fires up the bulldozer in the back yard to do some landscaping. Of course, he falls asleep and sues the sleeping pill company for injuries and damages. Now, we all get the “Do not operate heavy machinery” warning on damn-near everything. Well, remember that, in this new empire, we are not allowing any more frivolous lawsuits and due to several other mandates, stupid people themselves will become quite rare. So lighten up on the disclaimers, you’re scaring us.
INCOMPETENT ENGINEERS
About 130 years ago, back in the 1998, I was a telecom technician. I was good at what I did, so were my co-workers. I had a desire to move into design and engineering because it’s what I like and what I went to college for. When the position opened up, I got in. Now you have to remember, this is telecom engineering. Basically laying out 2D line drawings. This was not what I call ACTUAL engineering where higher math skills are used daily and people die when you don’t do your job right, but they call it engineering so I go with it. I may not have been the best at playing the engineer politics game but the field techs always got what they needed. I came up through the field and I know what can and can not be done in the field. I know what looks good on paper doesn’t always look good when put into the real world. Building a prototype in the laboratory is no match for knowing the real-world applications.
Now that I am a tech again, I wish I had engineers that knew what the real world looks like. In a lab, your 3 pieces or equipment in the 19″ rack may look great for the company newsletter. Everything running at clean angles, all the cables secured… but out here, that pretty picture grows into a clusterfuck! You can NOT fill the entire cabinet with equipment (all 42 mounting spaces in front and 16 mounting spaces in the rear) have 3 separate plug strips (primary/alternate/building) and expect to be able to maintain this stuff. Why? CABLE!!! There is a cascade of cable on each side of the cabinet about six inches in diameter. I can’t move the cables to the side because you wanted it in a locking cabinet (everything we connect to is open-air) and I can’t move the cables inward because there’s a huge-fuck-all industrial power strip on each side. You wanted to save the footprint space so we went to 19″ racks instead of 23″ racks. So now, a 5 minute job of moving cable x from ‘A’ to ‘B’ takes almost an hour. And then I get to hear it from you about how it shouldn’t take so long just to move a cable.
I have a friend who told me a great story. He was working in a machine shop and the smart-assed engineer came down and asked for some aluminum spacers. The tech asks for the sizes and the engineer says he wants them 2″x2″x4″ with a 1/4″ hole through the middle. He says, “OK” but after he gets back to his work station, the tech sends an e-mail to the engineer asking for more specific details like which face he wants the hole through. The engineer responds in a sarcastic e-mail about how he just wishes technicians would do what they are told and let the engineers deal with the real problems. A week goes by and the engineer is pissed. He wants to know why the tech hasn’t finished the spacers yet. The tech says he’s finishing up the last one now. When asked why it took so long, the tech produced the e-mail from the engineer that specified, 2.000″H x 2.000″W x 4.000″D with 0.2500″diameter and 4.000″ deep hole at center of the 2.000″ faces. “2x2x4 is not the same as 2.000×2.000×4.000. Just doing what I’m told sir.”
College coursework will only get you so far. From now on, any engineer in any field needs to do time in the field seeing what the real world looks like.
LEADING EXTRA LETTER A’s
In relation to the earlier rule of taxation on extra letters such as Pointe instead of Point, I have a new variation that is also a problem. Companies that name themselves AAAAAAAction Transmission or AAAAAAAlex’s Used Cars. I know they do it to get listed first in the phone book but I don’t like it. I refuse to call any of them because I find it to be a blatant advertising gimmick and I refuse to fall for it. From now on, you want extra A’s, they better mean something. AAA can get away with it because it’s an acronym but to be honest if I were to go look them up, I’d probably open it to the T’s for Triple A as everyone calls it now. Aaron and Aardvark is OK because they are legitimate words. I’ll “grandfather-in” ZZ-Top but no more of this bullshit. I’ll give a grace period of three months for everyone with some BS name to change it to something normal. After the grace period, I’m burning down any business I see that breaks my rule and executing the owner.
Leave a Reply