Welcome to Moronitude! I don’t know where you are reading this from but there’s a damn good chance you are reading this while looking out at a bunch of snow as much of the country is in the process of getting hammered as we speak. Which, as is often the case, means that I may also be getting hammered. I love a good snow day day drunk. Just staring out at the vast whiteness, each subsequent sip of bourbon warming my insides a scosche more. It’s pretty terrific.
Unfortunately, I won’t have a real snow day. I’m going to have a work from home day. In the before times, prior to the pandemic, “WFH” were three of the most beautiful letters I could imagine. I’d get to sleep up until 3 minutes before it was time to clock in, roll over and start my day. But now that working from home has become the norm for many (including the fiancée I cohabitate with), it has lost a lot of its luster. I’m going to be expected to get an actual amount of work done, which sucks, and I won’t be able to use my enormous computer with a screen the size of a wall, which also sucks. But it will still be way better than commuting to work during a blizzard during a pandemic, which is just about the worst thing I can imagine aside from doing so while the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl, but that won’t happen because Aaron Rodgers has been to the Super Bowl as many times as Rex Grossman has.
As usual, I’m taking a very circuitous route to reach the point of the opening section of this here newsletter. I want to talk about some of the very strange things that I have done at work. Not the strange jobs, per se, but the goofy activities I have done while employed (or in the first case, in order to secure employment). I’ve broken it down to a Top Five because I’m the kind of person who always ranks everything. EVERYTHING.
Before we get to the list, I wanted to give a quick honorable mention to a couple of the really odd things I’ve done at work that weren’t quite Top Five worthy, but strange as hell on their own. I have had to: change the “made by” date on the sandwiches at a gas station (not changing the sandwiches, just lying about how “fresh” they were), give customers a “substance warning” at a video store, write about [insert D-List celebrity] because they got a new tattoo for the [insert very high number]th time, ask the quintessential American sportswriter Bob Ryan if he thinks a team of tattooed NBA players would beat a team of tattooless NBA players, find out the identity of a woman named “Octobooty” so we could contact her for a future video, drink whiskey directly out of the barrel using a whiskey thief and fly to Chicago to get tattooed at a mini-convention. I’m guessing a lot of people would include most of those in their Top Five, but I’ve done some exceedingly weird things, so buckle up.
5. Protecting God’s Children
For a little while I was a substitute teacher at a Catholic middle school. It ruled. I thoroughly loved doing this job, especially when I got to actually teach history to 7th and 8th graders. That being said, the job started out pretty strangely. In order to be allowed to come in and sub at the school I needed to take a class. No, not my teaching certification, but a little class called “Protecting God’s Children.”
Basically all I had to do was watch a video in a church basement and then fill out some worksheets, which seems pretty normal. But, of course, this wasn’t a normal video. The video, which was shot sometime in the late ‘80s based on the fashion, was focused on what sort of touching is OK or how to spot a child who is in danger, those sorts of things. It included numerous testimonies from survivors of child abuse and recreations of things they had gone though. So, it was pretty emotionally draining stuff, but it was also created by a Catholic company, Virtus. Which means there was a ton of subtle deflection in the videos—talking about how the Catholic church has the same per capita number of abusers as the rest of the world—that made me more than a little uncomfortable.
Then there was the actual experience of this class I signed up for. I had to trek out to the suburbs of New Jersey during a massive blizzard. Most of the people who signed up for the class didn’t show up, so I was watching this video in a room with three other people. And then discussing everything in this very small group. It was easily one of the most awkward evenings of my life. In the end, I earned my certificate, yes, I got an actual certificate, and got to substitute teach. Afterwards it took me three hours to get home in what would have been a 20 minute Uber ride thanks to the atrocious blizzard. Fun!
4. Sending emails back and forth with a soon to be convicted killer
My first full-time journalism job was at this news aggregator called HNGN. Later on I would learn that the company had connections to a cult, but before that I was in charge of the politics section of this website. Most of what we did was second-source news, in other words, reporting on things that have already been reported on with a copious amount of linking out and “,according to the New York Times.” It wasn’t the best job, but it was a toe in the door and it paid the bills.
Somehow I found myself on the Jodi Arias beat. Stories covering the trial of an attractive Mormon lady who got into some kinky stuff before stabbing the hell out of her boyfriend were as valuable as gold for HNGN, we got a bazillion clicks on anything involving Arias. I was bored with doing all the second-source crap and there was not a chance in hell that HNGN would pay for me to go to Arizona, I tried to find a way to liven my stories up. I found Arias’ email address and started writing some emails. While Arias did not have email access, she did have a family member who would relay questions to her, so I struck up a familiarity with this person. We exchanged some emails, I asked some questions and eventually I was given answers from Arias. Considering I had no real proof that the questions actually were answered by Arias and not the go between, they weren’t really that helpful to me, but I did sneak in a couple of quotes into my articles, along with the explanation of how I obtained the quotes. Did this do anything to make my second-source reporting better or more interesting? Probably not! Did doing this very strange thing amuse me? Damn right.
Intermission/Musical Interlude
Ephemeral by Pelican
There is something undeniably badass about heavy music that doesn’t even need vocals. It just hits a little harder, in my opinion. Pelican is probably my favorite band to edit to. Something about their crushing riffs pairs really well with deleting Oxford commas and removing italics because AP Style 4 Life, son. I particularly love this song because of the groove. It’s the rare song that makes you want to bang your head, tap your toe and break out the dancing finger.
I also appreciate that a band named Pelican doesn’t use a vocalist since pelicans lose their vocal cords as they mature. #Science
3. The Great Wall of Porn
During the early 2000s, I worked at a porn shop for about four years. Nationwide Video was a Chicago-based video store with four locations, three of which trafficked the regular video rental biz. The fourth store, the one that I worked at, was labeled the “Hot N Nasty Annex.” If you came into the store and stayed downstairs you would look at the dusty shelves filled with movies nobody had any interest in watching (we had an entire shelf of “Airheads”) and be led to believe that Nationwide was about 4 minutes away from going out of business. But if you walked to the back, turned the corner and walked up the stairs you’d be in for quite the surprise—the largest adult film selection in Illinois!
The upstairs was truly sprawling. No matter your sexual proclivities, we had the perfect film for you. We also had a life size Xenomorph wearing panties, a coke machine that I chilled Old Style in on numerous occasions and a bunch of house plants to make the place feel nice. Of course, none of that was noticed by the customers who were there for one thing and one thing only—sweet, sweet smut.
When I started working at Nationwide I never imagined that there would be regulars. Boy was I wrong. There were people who came in every single day and rented anywhere between 1-6 videos, usually veering closer to 6, each time they came in. Our regulars knew every single video that was on the shelves, thus when New Releases came out twice a week they knew what time to show up to get first dibs on the new spank films. It was a problem. They were like hyenas. It was nearly impossible to get the videos onto the shelves with so many of these idiots getting in the way.
We had the perfect solution—a wall. If we built a Great Wall of Porn to stop the riff raff from getting into the New Release section, we would be able to do our work in peace. Plus, if you kept them out of the area it was sort of hilarious to watch them mill around for 20 minutes. So what we did was take all of the spare video boxes we had lying around—it turns out when people buy porn they often only want to take the video cassette home so that it’s easier to hide—and tape them together, creating two eight foot high curtains. We then used the curtains to close off the entry to the New Release section while we got the videos ready. People would be completely dumbfounded by it, trying to work their way around it as they searched for some magical entryway that would allow them to get in there. Think of it as Platform 9 ¾ for perverts.
2. Whoop Whoop
My first major magazine writing assignment is probably still the single strangest one I’ve ever had. After watching the following infomercial I had an idiotic idea.
I went to the Gathering of the Juggalos. It was… ridiculous. I saw Gallagher buying drugs at 4 in the morning. I watched multiple people have their scrotums stapled to chairs. Ron Jeremy asked me if I was “the Jewish guy he talked to last night.” [I was not] I learned that Vanilla Ice actually does put on a damn good concert. And I talked to a ton of Juggalos and learned many of them are actually pretty cool people.
I went into the experience ready to make fun of people and have a laugh. And while I did laugh at a bunch of the idiocy going on around me, I ended up having a really fun time despite it being something I would most definitely never, ever do again. If you want to read the story, here it is.
But going with the theme, it’s absolutely wild that I went to this thing FOR WORK.
1. Trump Tattoo
One of these days I’m going to write about this in far more detail than this, but for now I just want to approach this strictly from a work angle.
‘Twas the day before April Fools Day 2016 and we were sitting around the Inked office trying to figure out what we should do for a prank. We came up with many ideas, eventually deciding upon two: an article about how Disneyland was going to ban visible tattoos and an article about some moron who got “Trump” tattooed on his forehead and then went to Trump Tower to take selfies. You all know which of these two articles I ended up working on.
We used to have people tattoo in the office from time-to-time, so we had most of the things that one needed to do a tattoo. We had stencils, we had tubes, we had needles, we had gloves. What we didn’t have was a machine. So when we set everything up for the “in process” shots, one of my coworkers held the tube with a needle in it up to my forehead. He ended up poking me in the process. Thankfully, I didn’t end up with a sharpie dot in the middle of my forehead.
So we got the shots of the in process to look fairly good, it’s pretty darn near impossible to fake the swelling/reddening of the skin that comes from actually getting tattooed, but this was passable. Then came the part that I dreaded most, going to Trump Tower. I was pretty convinced that somebody would knock my ass out. And looking back on it 5 years later, yeah, somebody should have knocked my ass out. I would not blame them one iota.
The thing I forgot about was that this was New York. A dude with “Trump” tattooed on his head wasn’t going to be enough to get people to turn their heads, at least not the locals. I took some photos waving an American flag outside of Trump Tower before getting run off by one of the security guards. Two or three people stopped me to ask if it was real, one old lady called me “a fucking imbecile” but that was about it.
When I got home I quickly learned how extremely difficult it is to remove Sharpie from a moron’s forehead. It turns out that exfoliating is not pleasant.
The next day we put the two articles up. My boss and I had made a gentleman’s wager over whose article would drive more traffic to the site. It was a landslide victory… for the Disney article. We drove some clicks with the Trump tattoo, but not many. It was a failure that nobody would ever know about. I went through a ton of work to do this crazy/stupid thing, showcasing true Moronitude, if you will, and it was all for no avail.
Then, in September 2016, this happened:
I have since seen a ton of different memes using the photo and I’ve read thousands of really, really mean comments. It’s all pretty hilarious to me, although I’d be lying if some of the comments weren’t a little hurtful. I’m mostly just annoyed that I didn’t win the bet.
I’ve done plenty of weird things for work and I’m sure I’ll end up doing plenty more. Thank you for reading this week’s Moronitude. We’ll be back next week with the normal old format. Tell your friends!