Stuff the boss wouldn’t let us put on the other LogicMaze blog

I recently rejoined the illustrious mass that is Kansas drivers when I purchased a car. In my hiatus, I had forgotten that the bulk of them are crazy. It’s almost enough to necessitate an armor-plated vehicle just to ensure my safety. I actually saw somebody eating and talking on their cell phone at the same time whilst driving. When I say I saw them, I mean I got a very up close view when they swerved, erratically, into my lane without looking. Luckily, Mario Andretti has nothing on me. I deftly avoided an accident in that instance. People like this are prime candidates for license suspension.

The problem is that these people somehow manage to maintain their Kansas drivers license, despite their indifference toward common sense and the safety of others.

Here’s another example: Have you ever seen somebody driving with their left foot hanging out the window? What could possibly put the idea in somebody’s head that it’s a good idea to have a critical appendage like a foot jutting from the window for all to see? Maybe he had to air it out. I don’t know. I couldn’t possibly begin to pretend to know what would possess someone to do that. The point is it’s dangerous. Such behavior is grounds for immediate drivers license revocation in my book. And potentially chemical castration.

That’s the end of my rant, ladies and gentlemen.

So they say.

The question is: when it crosses over into ripping someone off, is it still flattering? Other guys at the office brought to my attention this site. Looking at the site itself, that’s obviously not what I’m referring to as the copying. HOWEVER! If one were to view the source on their site as well as ours. . .well:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="website designer hutchinson ks website design website designer hutchinson kansas mcpherson wichita salina newton reno county kansas web site design shopping cart sell items online">

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Website designer - Hutchinson Ks Website design by a Hutchinson Kansas website designer - 

Serving All of Kansas including clients in Wichita Salina Mcpherson and several other states offers logical thinking, graphic design, website hosting, logo design, search engine optimization, Ecommerce.">

You’ll just have to take my word that ours was there first. If you try to, you can find the navigation links on their site (white on white background, but they highlight red on rollover) and navigate to the contact page to learn that they run out of Miami, but have an office in Olathe. Why, then, would they shoot for Hutchinson in their Meta info? Maybe they answered that question for me: “Your conpetitors….already have an website!” *cough*spell check*cough*

Absolutely they do! Just use their stuff!
Anyway, I’m a total jerk for bagging on these guys, but I just had to. I mean. . .

The LogicMaze crew and some friends are planning on having some fun paintballing here in a couple of weeks. It’s an exciting thought, but I’ve never been. As out of shape as I am, I’m positive that I’m going to prove myself to be physically inept.

This reminds me of the time that we all went whitewater rafting with our friends at Idaho Afloat. Even the most seasoned, skilled rafting guide couldn’t keep me from sinking all of us. The lucky part is that I did it before we got anywhere near the rapids. Okay, truth be told: I flipped the raft getting in. They made me stay back at the hotel after that.

Sometimes when I get a wild hair, I go into sort of a journalistic streak. This week, I really wanted to do an interview. I scanned the newspapers for important stories, where I felt that only one side was represented.  That was when I found the article “Officers on ‘egret patrol’.” I’d link to it, but after a few days, it will get archived and you’ll have to pay to read it. Here’s a link that will give you a little more info on Hutchinson Police vs. Egrets.

Here’s the jist:

Ask the Hutchinson Police Department what Lt. Troy Hoover and Chief Dick Heitschmidt are up to these days, and you’re likely to get a startling answer.

“He’s still out on egret patrol,” the officers’ administrative assistant said.

Egrets have been, for lack of a better word, infesting the Southeast part of Hutchinson for a couple of years now. It’s not uncommon for somebody who lives in that area to find dead egrets on their property, or maybe their excrement. Our police department has been given the seemingly impossible task of keeping this migration of inconvenience from happening.

It’s certainly easier said than done, considering that federal law prevents the police from simply pulling out a shotgun and laying the pests to waste. It’s a shame, because that would probably be pretty fun. I realize that this is going to be a major pain in the arse for those enlisted. Tying shiny ribbons to trees and  deploying owl decoys are just two of the tactics employed.

There’s one major question that was gnawing at me while I thought about this situation: What’s the egrets friggin’ deal, man? I decided that I would get to the bottom of this. There was only one way that I saw to possibly do that: interview the King Egret. That was how I found myself in the lair of the egrets, just off of Lorraine and G street in some poor, unsuspecting sap’s attic. I was surrounded by what I assumed were drone egrets, ready to attack if I made any sort of threatening movement toward the King Egret. Yes, this was journalism at it’s most dangerous.

The King Egret spread his wings, as if to humble me with his not-so-impressive wingspan. I humored him, and politely bowed my head, as I figured a subordinate egret was likely to do. It was time for me to begin my interview.

Here’s a transcript:

Me: King Egret, let me just thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate this, and I want to get to the bottom of the bad blood between your kind and my kind.

King Egret: Let’s just get this done quickly. I’ve got females presenting outside.

Me: Right. Of course. So I guess my first question is: What gives?

King Egret: What gives?

Me: Yeah. What’s the deal with you guys all comin’ up in our business and poopin’ on our stuff? Why Hutchinson?

King Egret: What do you mean ‘Why Hutchinson’? This place is great! I mean, we tried Burrton, but. . .it’s Burrton.  We like it here. The property tax isn’t too high, you’ve got that awesome zoo in the park and you have five Subways. Five!

Me: You. . .uh. . .like Subway, huh?

King Egret: We also dig going to the Cosmosphere. Entry is free to Reno County residents, so we’ve gotta live here.

Me: Oh, come on! There’s no way that they let you into the Cosmosphere.

King Egret: Bet me?

Me: No. . .  So what do you do to occupy your time while you’re here in Hutchinson? Besides make a lot of mess and noise, that is.

King Egret: Well, a couple dozen of us have taken to opening payday loan stores. One of them pretends like he’s a kangaroo. He says that kangaroos are ‘more presentable,’ but I take that as a disrespect to his species.

Me: As you should. . .  So, how do you feel about local law enforcement’s efforts to scare you away from the regions of town that you frequent.

King Egret: I’ll tell you, I don’t like it one bit. They shouldn’t be able to do that, because, from what I understand, I have diplomatic immunity.

Me: You are referring to the federal law that prevents law enforcement from killing you?

King Egret: Exactly.

Me: Wouldn’t you rather live somewhere that you’re more welcome?

King Egret: We’ve made our decision. The people of Hutchinson are just going to have to learn to tolerate us, like in Alien Nation.

Me: Wow, that’s an obscure reference.

King Egret: You like that?

Me: Yeah.

King Egret: Look, I’ve got things to do. It’s been nice talking to you and all, though. Tell me where you live, and I’ll make sure that we don’t poop on it.

And just like that, my interview with King Egret ended. He flew away, letting out a great. . .whatever sound egrets make. I don’t know that my interview gave us any insight of how to get rid of these pests, but it definitely helped us understand why they’re here.

We work hard here at LogicMaze.

Well. . .most of us do *cough*Scott*cough*

Anyway, I feel that we are all due for a vacation. To keep things fair while deciding what we’re going to do for the vacation, I devised the ingenious plot where each of us creates a potential vacation itinerary on Google Maps, and posts it here. We will then pick the best one.

Here’s Mine

Let’s see if anyone else gives this a shot.

Throughout the internet there are any number of “awards” that one’s site or blog can earn. The truth of the matter is that if you want an award for your site that you can post on the home page to appear more distinguished, you can just make one up. Who is seriously going to check it out?

Seriously, though, one of our clients: Boys and Girls Club of Hutchinson has recently received word that they have won Gold in the Website category of the 20th annual Boys and Girls Club of America Marketing and Communications Awards Program. That’s a mouth full, so let me break it down: bgchutch.com (which we designed) has been recognized as the best out of all of the Boys and Girls Clubs in the same budget range. The prize for that is $1,000.

Needless to say, we at LogicMaze are pretty psyched about this. The fact that we have been able to help Boys and Girls Club of Hutchinson not only by helping them represent themselves online, but also by helping them earn recognition from their peers makes us feel like we have contributed to the cause more than sufficiently.

If you were to ever meet up with one of my friends and ask them about stupid things that I’ve done in the past, you would undoubtedly have to clear your schedule for the rest of the day to hear a good chunk of the stories. I generally never did anything extremely dangerous like jumping onto moving cars or anything like that. Stupid: yes Ballsy: no.

Ranking up as one of my more dangerous evenings would be a couple of years back on the 4th of July. I had a friend whose parents owned some land in the North part of town, and we all got together for an amateur fireworks display. Needless to say, mixing a good-sized group of young (but legal) people, booze and fireworks isn’t the greatest idea ever had. Everybody surprisingly behaved well.  Somebody brought some big/expensive fireworks, and we had a pretty good show going.

Unfortunately, the show ended long before the party did. What we basically had was a large group of slightly inebriated people in an open space with a large assortment of small to medium sized fire crackers: bunker busters, black cats, Roman candles, etc. An inevitable war broke out: everybody scrambling in every direction avoiding and throwing lit fireworks at one another. It was during that melee that I realized how tiny and potentially harmless (don’t stick them in your eye or anything) the black cats were. Someone would throw them at my feet, and I would just step on them and let them go off. I still have the shoes to this day, which is indicative of how little damage they did.

When the battle fizzled out and entertainment began to run short, an idea occurred to me about how to maximize the wow factor of the few fire crackers that we had left. In no time at all I was setting them off in my back pockets as I ran. It looked pretty funny, somebody was taping it, but I’ll be damned if I know where that footage is. Eventually, I graduated from back pockets to the bill of my hat. That looked scarier than it was. It was loud, but I couldn’t feel anything but pressure on my hat. The one that really got me was the shirt pocket. The bunker buster popped, burning a whole in the inside lining and outside of the pocket, and singing the small patch of chest hair that I lovingly refer to as my Halflehoff.

After it was all said and done, nobody got hurt. The only casualties of the irresponsible use of explosives were my shirt, hat, pants and Hasselhalf (that’s right, I switched the pun around). This doesn’t mean that nobody could have gotten hurt. Which brings me to the point of this rambling: don’t be stupid.

You guessed it right from the headline: I packed up some clothes and a gun, and went on a safari here in the United States. On my safari, I hunted such game as whitetail in Pike county, Illinois, waterfowl in Kansas, and the dreaded Colorado Hippie

I used Google Maps to illustrate my epic trek. Check it out.

Amidst a failed attempt to expand and the countless lawsuits that it resulted in, MitchHole Storage has announced that they are going out of business. I recently got a chance to sit down with the owner and find out what the deal was.

So, Mitchell, it looks like your plans of expansion didn’t exactly work as you expected.

Is that a question? Did you. . .did you just ask me something?

Well I think that there was an implied question. . .

Well, I don’t see it.

What happened? I think that was the intended question. What happened?

Well, I was looking to expand my storage facilities to accomodate private vaults and government records storage -

Wow, government agencies actually contracted you to store their records?

Actually, I would just sort of get a hold of the documents and store them, I plan to bill the agencies later.

So you basically just stole government documents?

Why is everything so negative with you?

I’m not being negative, I just -

No, you’re always down on me, man. “Oooh, you can’t just take government documents without asking and bury them in a hole. Oooh, you can’t just dig in other people’s yards without asking.”

Didn’t digging in other people’s yards get you sued, and ultimately cause the demise of your fledgling company?

Always so negative. . .

Anyway, you’re closing the doors of MitchHole Storage for good, right?

That’s right, and I’m having a going out of business sale!

I’m afraid to ask, because I think that I might very well know what the answer is going to be, but what do you intend on selling? Your shovel?

Are you kidding me? I have a whole inventory of items to sell down there.

You mean the stuff that other people paid you to store down there?

Exactly

That’s OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF. It’s illegal to sell OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF without their consent. Have you thought of that yet?

Always so negative. . .

 ********

I had my fill of the interview, and could see that somebody was in desperate need of some nappy time. I plan to follow up on the status of MitchHole Storage and it’s vigilant owner in around 15 years, when he is released from federal penetentiary for the theft of top secret government documents.

We at LogicMaze are always interested in finding new ways to make our operations here more efficient, if even a little bit. A countless number of steps have been taken on a countless number of occasions to change the basic routine to make things go a little bit more efficiently.

I’d hate to sound like the jerk taking all of the credit for it, but. . .well. . .I’m sort of a guru on that sort of thing. I think that my latest idea is going to be the end-all be-all of great strides toward maximum efficiency:

Installing a pneumatic tube system!

Ok, I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know for sure who in the office first suggested the idea. I can’t handle the guilt of taking the credit. We’ve actually been kicking this idea around for some time. I think that it’s actually an adaptation of Cody’s idea to hardline the coffee from the pot in my office directly to his office, to which I explained that the maintenance and cleaning of the line might prove a grueling and disgusting task. Good idea though.

Back to the actual tube system.

Here’s a common scenario here at the office as illustrated by an instant message transcript:

1:08 PM  Scott – Hey, do you have the folder for {name omitted to protect the innocent}?
1:08 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – I don’t know, let me look.
3:51 PM  Scott – ?
3:51 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – ?

3:52 PM  Scott – Dude, I asked you if you had that folder like three hours ago. What gives?

3:53 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – Who says “what gives?” these days?

3:53 PM  Scott – Do you have A.D.D or something?

3:54 PM  Mitchell the Coolest – So?

As you can see, the file system can be somewhat of a hassle. The folder could be in a number of places like my office, Cody’s office, Tamara’s office or, sometimes, the file cabinet in Tamara’s office.

That’s the beauty of the pneumatic tube system! Regardless of the location of the folder of interest, it can easily be transferred from one person’s possession to the next by doing little more than putting it in the tube and pressing a button. No more getting up and walking to things. Who needs that?

In an effort to really drive this idea home, I went ahead and drew out a diagram of the convenience to come. I was reluctant to draw this out, though, since I’m kind of a really good drawer, and now everybody around the office is going to be asking me to draw stuff for them. I don’t like all that pressure.