Irritating Expressions That Won’t Go Away

Last week, I wrote about Stupid Signs that we sometimes see around town. In our mad rush to get things accomplished each day, we  usually don’t even notice them.

But what about expressions people use that set your teeth on edge? It could be a phrase used by a “talking head” on TV or a speaker at a boring, mandatory work meeting. You might even hear someone close to you throwing them around, but you’re too polite to say, “Please don’t ever say that again. Thanks.”

What am I talking about? I’m talking (or rather, writing) about expressions like these:

1. “At the end of the day…” This one is really old; I remember it from my IBM days in the ’70s, back when my job was processing orders for keypunch and card reader machines. That was ages ago! At meetings, the managers would try to get the masses fired up to sell more products and be nicer to the customers so that we’d all be successful “at the end of the day.”

Can’t people just say, “in the end” and be done with it? Unfortunately, no one ever consults me on language matters like this.

The meetings in the IBM office were incredibly boring.

They should.

2. “It’s all good.” What does that mean? Everything isn’t all good. Oh, no, toilet’s plugged up and my cable was turned off. Son got suspended from school for a week. Don’t worry, it’s all good.

Even Gwyneth Paltrow used it on the cover of her new cookbook:

“It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great.”

Here’s one for you, Gwyneth: Stuff It.

3. “As we move forward together…” You can go ahead and move forward, mister, but I’m on my own schedule. Unless, of course, it means a raise, in which case, I will move forward to wherever we’re going together. Maybe to another meeting or workshop. Together.

4. Last, as a conclusion to my b#t@hing session, I would like to mention some words that should be sent out to pasture permanently. They were pulled from an online customer satisfaction survey from my bank.

I  gave the employees an outstanding rating because I knew heads would roll if someone got less than the highest rating. Heaven forbid the customer service is rated “Very Good” or “Average.”

At the end of the day, that’s not good enough.

Anyway, here are the words that need to be banned:

Don’t be engaging in conversation when there’s a line. Customers don’t have time to chit-chat, you know.

5. “The employee was empowered to help you.”
You’d think just being an employee would “empower” someone to help you, wouldn’t it?

6.“Engaged you in discussions to find out what’s important to you.”
I don’t want to “engage” in a discussion with anyone at the bank, unless it’s to tell me they made an error in my favor, and I actually have a thousand dollars more in my account than I thought. Besides, what about the line of ten customers behind me who are on their lunch hour, tapping their feet impatiently while ”engaging” is taking place at the counter? Engage, my a$$.

7. “Proactively asked about your needs and suggested solutions that would benefit you.” Here’s what I need: a bank that pays more than .0003 interest on my savings account. Can you do that? No? Then don’t ask.

That’s all I have for now, and boy, do I feel better.

It’s all good.

Stupid Signs

“Where has Ermigal been?” has echoed around the globe. I don’t Tweet or keep up with other forms of mass communication, so I’m sure that my absence caused the mystery to deepen. “Is she dead or alive?” folks have been asking.

Well, I’m here to tell you I’m very much alive, thank you, but busy working on a final project for the two-year writing program at the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse. Students are required to submit a polished work of 110-125 pages. It’s due by the end of May  so the heat is on.  However, my blog is important to me, too.

So please excuse the irregular posts.  I’ll be all fired up again soon to write for your entertainment.

This topic concerns “stupid signs” you may have noticed in your daily travels. There are two I’ve seen that come to mind:

1. When you buy something like cat litter that’s too big for a bag at the grocery store, the cashier slaps on a sticker that says, “Paid–Thank You.” Why can’t it just say Paid? Are they thanking you for paying for it instead of stealing it, or for shopping there?

My grocery store doesn’t have labels with a Smiley face or an exclamation mark. I think I’ll complain to the manager about it.

2. This one is from a local business that offers Body Piercing. The last piercing I had was in my ear lobe, you know, the “second hole” that we older women get to feel daring.  If I ever wanted to pierce another part of my body, I would definitely go to the establishment you see below.  It seems to be reputable and safe.  They even have the sign to prove it:

Whew! Glad it’s “professional” body piercing, not “amateur.” That could be rough.

Have you seen a Stupid Sign lately? 

Please share it in the comments. Thanks!

What I Didn’t Write

This will be short. I hope you’ve missed me in my absence…I’ve been seeking inspiration for something humorous to write about but hit a big, solid brick wall.

I couldn’t make this topic funny, even with a ladder to help me climb over the brick wall.

All last week, I thought I had a great idea but just couldn’t see it through; in fact, I avoided starting it at all and wasted time turning it over and over in my mind.

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The idea was to write a fictitious letter to Wayne LaPierre to propose my  brilliant idea of retired teachers (like me) working as armed guards in schools. That could be really hilarious, I reasoned–we’d work for minimum wage, it would free up the teachers who are working like maniacs to raise test scores, and even though my eyesight isn’t the greatest anymore, it’s good enough–but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t funny. Some things can never be funny.

So I will try to refrain from ranting about the state of affairs concerning gun violence, especially the fact that some lawmakers would even consider not voting. I am trying to be hopeful that we will take the high road as a society.

I didn’t even get to tell about Clarence, the custodian, converting the hopper room into a weapons storage area.

My intent was to point out how ridiculous it is to consider the idea of teachers and other school workers being armed. Unbelievable, and foolish.

If Wayne were my student, he’d be in permanent time-out. Desk-scrubbing, too.

Thanks for reading, my friends.

April Fool’s Day Memories

Things are not always what they seem to be.

Today is April Fool’s Day. There’s a special person I think about every year on this day, and judging by the strength of the jokester vibes I’m getting from her, she’s going to play a whopper of a prank on me today.

Her name was Aunt Louise.

It was 1974.  My friend Connie and I had just started our teaching careers in the same Rochester preschool.  She was renting a room from her mother’s longtime friend, “Aunt” Louise. I needed a place to stay until I found an apartment, so I showed up on Aunt Louise’s doorstep. Did she have any room in her house for me?

“Sure, I’ve got room for one more!” she said in her deep, rich voice, and welcomed me with open arms.

Her own children were off on their own, and she loved having young people in the house.

Aunt Louise was tall–probably five-ten without heels–had beautiful white hair and a dazzling smile. I always thought of her as a cross between Auntie Mame and Maude.  She loved people, and her favorite pastime was to share a dynamite joke with whoever happened to be around.

One April 1st, Connie and I had a brainstorm:  we would play a joke on Aunt Louise. After school ended that day, we begged a grocery store clerk for a stack of square styrofoam trays, wrapped a couple of rubber bands around them, covered the whole thing with chocolate frosting and shook some sprinkles on the top. When the lady of the house came home from wherever she had been, we casually mentioned we’d stopped for a cake on the way home.

“It looks delicious–let’s have some right now!” she said, as if on cue. Out came the teapot, good plates, and silverware. We sat in the living room with the faux cake and accessories arranged on the coffee table. Aunt Louise raised a large serrated knife to start cutting the first piece.

“Reeeeeeeeee!” squealed the knife on the styrofoam. She tried again, with the same result. Then she cracked up laughing. Over the next few days, we’d hear her on the phone, gleefully telling her friends the story about the cake.

Not long after that, Connie and I both moved out on our own; she got married, while I moved to an apartment, one of about fifty-eight different places I lived in during my single days. Though we’d stayed there less than a year, our close relationship with Aunt Louise remained strong, through weddings, children and illness. And the annual April Fool’s pranks continued, escalating in their derring-do each year:

These stocking head dolls were all the rage in the ’70s. Does anyone remember them? Anyone? Please?

Year #2–Made a bunch of stocking-head dolls (scary, no?) and hid them in cupboards, medicine cabinets, and the refrigerator. Aunt Louise claimed she jumped every time she found one.

Year #3–Papered Aunt Louise and Uncle Chet’s car while they were in church on April 1st. She loved it that all her church buddies saw what we’d done.

We had to hustle to cover their car during the church service, then make our getaway. Mission accomplished!

Year #4–This time, we were goin’ for broke; we took the family car, with the help of their son, and hid it down the street.  In its place was a Rent-a-Wreck car, complete with a sign on the dashboard that said, “Hit here for radio.”

They took it pretty well, and their car was returned by that evening. It was worth the price of the Rent-a-Wreck to hear her boom over the phone, “Where is our car?”

She tried to retaliate by leaving an old toilet on my lawn with a bunch of daffodils in the bowl, but it didn’t top the car theft.

Their loaner was beat up but it “got you from Point A to Point B” as the ad claims.

That was our last year of April Fool’s jokes; Connie and I got busy with our own families, and April 1st came and went without ceremony each year.

So here’s to playful pranks among family and friends, and the memories we cherish from them.

There’s still time!

Now go make someone’s day special with a little April Fool’s Day high-jinks.

And beware of friends bearing cakes.

Norovirus Temporarily Strikes Down Rising Humorist

Dear Faithful* Ermigal Fans,

Just a note to let you know I’ll be back in full swing soon. The dreaded Norovirus stomach bug hit my family like a busload of senior citizens at a free buffet.

I felt awful and had no strength.

It really put the kibosh on any funny stuff for a few days.

While I was bedridden, I did chuckle weakly at a book a good friend loaned me:

All I could manage was a little “heh-heh” at this, I was so weak.

But the more I read, the stronger I got. Remember Norman Cousin’s advice to laugh yourself back to health? He did it by watching The Marx Brothers!

Marx Brothers by Yousuf Karsh, 1948 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe Life’s Just Not That Into You was written in 2007–not hot off the press but a great satire of all kinds of Self-Help Guides. I recommend it highly if you’re under the weather, or if you just want a witty book that will entertain you.

Do you, Esteemed Reader, have a good humor book to recommend to others should they need a little laughing gas? (Oooh, why did I mention gas?)

Please share your suggestions in the comments.  Thanks! Stay tuned for more falling-down-funny stuff very soon!

* If you’re not a faithful reader, I don’t want to know about it.

Dinosaurs Have Feelings, Too

I was looking forward to taking a walk down memory lane.

Last week, my daughter and I headed up north to Oswego, my alma mater, for her graduate school interview. She’s scheduled to finish college in May–yippee!–and will study to become a school psychologist. I dropped her off and headed to the fancy-schmancy Campus Center, or whatever they call it, to kill some time, get some breakfast, and read the newspaper. I found a cozy area off the main dining area and grabbed a booth to sit in for a while.

After I’d checked the obits to make sure I wasn’t in there (lol) and finished the Word Jumble, I glanced around at the Panera-like setting.  Students sat alone or in small groups, on laptops, smart phones or talking about professors they had.  Not one of them was reading a newspaper. They won’t know what’s going on in the world. Maybe they don’t care.

Heading up to clean my tray off, I was delighted to see labeled slots for recycling paper, plastic and metal. However, when I saw an easel with a    3-D display of “recyclable” and “trash”, my head started spinning; was my coffee lid plastic, or trash? how about the coffee cup? A nice young lad came to my rescue, and I shared with him that I had graduated from this same school thirty years ago, and now my daughter might be attending. “It’s a little emotional,” I told him, “even though I was a mediocre student.”  I wondered if they still had nickel Beer Blasts in the dorms. They’re probably at least a quarter now.

I took a stroll around; it was a gleaming, state-of-the-art building, nothing like the dreary Student Union I recalled. Stopping at a Women’s Group fundraiser table with pink cupcakes for sale, I visited with a young woman who told me of meeting Lilly Ledbetter when she spoke there recently. She told me how inspiring Ms. Ledbetter was, but all I could think about was making a snide remark on the stereotypical cupcakes and that Women’s History bookmarks would have been a better choice. I quickly bought a cupcake and moved on.

Back in the cafeteria, I met up with my daughter after her interview. Her friend, a student there, wanted to have lunch with her.  He was on his way over.  ”Tell him I’ll treat him to lunch, ” I offered. “He wants to go to this Mexican restaurant.” She looked uncomfortable. “Oh, well that would be fun,” I said. “Um, just the two of us are going. Can I borrow some money?”

How silly of me. Of course, no dinosaurs are allowed. I settled down to read my book.  It felt strange to be in a place where I had spent four years of my life so long ago, separated by a curtain of time.

When we got home, there was a flyer from Oswego about the upcoming fortieth reunion.

I lost a decade.

Probably from the nickel Beer Blasts.