"Have we considered the possibility that doctors don't know how to use umbrellas?"

DISCLAIMER: I have nothing against doctors. I appreciate what they do and am sure that most of them can use umbrellas without incident.

I have a couple of work anecdotes from yesterday.

The first involves the extremely tedious and time-consuming task I did for most of the morning. For those of you just joining us, I work for a promotional products company. We sell hats, cups, pens, shirts, etc. Pretty much anything our customers want their logo on, we can get it for them.

Well, we recently sold a bunch of umbrellas to some doctors. Some fancy gift or other. They were nice big umbrellas with a button that opens and closes them, but we had some complaints that the open/close buttons did not work. So, because we have good customer service, my boss took the umbrellas back to have someone (i.e. me) test them.

This was not a difficult task by any means, but after opening each umbrella, I had to repackage it in not one but two protective sleeves. I did about fifty umbrellas and it took me nearly three hours. And get this. They. All. Worked. We had two that were defective. Possibly the very two that caused the complaint in the first place. I have to hope that they tried more than two before claiming they were broken.

So I can't help but think, maybe they were doing it wrong? I don't know. Doesn't seem possible, but there's that old truth that sometimes the smartest people lack basic common sense. Or the ability to open and close an umbrella. With a button.


A functional umbrella 

Two protective sleeves


My other work anecdote for the day is about another sweet junk email one of my co-workers received. This one is not poetic by any means. It is a straight-up scam, but I love the way it was executed. Read for yourself:

ATTENTION: MADAM
Our Ref: 423/909 Date: 4th April 2011
RECONCILIATION / REMITTANCE COMMITTEE

I am assigned by the President, Federal republic of Nigeria , Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to look into the plight of foreigners who were dupe in the cause of retrieving their money from Nigeria . This action taking by His Excellency is born out of enormous complain from foreigner complaining that they were dupe out of their hard earn money by some unscrupulous Nigeria in pretends of helping them.
His Excellency decided to take action on the issue because of the embarrassing status that that has cost this country internationally.
It was on that note that I was drafting in to look into the issue and subsequent recommend further actions to the federal government, however, according to his Excellency, those who genuinely carry out authentic contracts in this country without being paid will be paid immediately. Those that their money was not release from the commercial Banks for one reason or another will also be release. Furthermore, I want to advice that, you get all the necessary documents ready as we will ask of it before any action could be taken.
Do sent your reply to me immediately for further action
Yours truly,
Mahmud Yayale Ahmed
Secretary to the Government
Federal Republic of Nigeria .

That was sent by the Secretary to the Government, so you know it's legit. I love that they think that by piggy-backing off the old Nigerian prince scam, they can trick people into being scammed in exactly the same way. The brilliance of it is that it only targets people who fell for the original scam and are, thus, exponentially more likely to fall for this one than someone who doesn't make a habit of sending all their financial information to strangers over the internet. Most people will see through it immediately, but you're always going to have people that go, "Yeah, I want my money back. President Goodluck is such a nice guy for doing that for me."

So if you or anyone you know lost some money in the Nigerian prince scam, you can contact mariotorres@interclan.net (<-- the address from which this email was sent). I'm sure he'll help you with that.


On an unrelated note, I really like this Adele CD. And I try not to hold it against her that she is only two months older than I and already has two Grammys.