Excuse Me, Do You Work Here?

Have you ever been walking through a store and been stopped by another customer who asked if you work there?  I have.  Just the other day, I was browsing for some crafty thing I needed at Joann’s (please don’t tell anyone I shop at Joann’s) when a woman walked up.  “Excuse me.  Do you work here?” she asked.  I, despite a strong urge to play along, told her I did not and she moved on to ask some other lonely schmuck who may or may not work at Joann’s.

While in recent years I have only been asked 2-3 time a year, it used to be a more common occurrence.  Perhaps an older, fatter me doesn’t look like they work anywhere, let alone the place in which I am currently standing.  Perhaps it’s the two children in tow that make me look more like a shopper and less like an employee.

I think it may have to do with the way I shop.  I often spend way too much time in a store.  I wander.  I meander.  I browse.  Perhaps that type of shopping makes me look like I am supposed to be working.

I once asked a woman why she thought I worked at a particular store.  She explained that it was winter and I wasn’t wearing a coat, so I must have a long-term plan for staying in the store (i.e. employment).  That made sense, well at least more sense than the fact I rarely wear a coat in winter.

A younger me would get asked if I worked somewhere every 1-2 months.  Every once in a while, I knew the store well enough I could help the poor, lost soul who thought I was worthy of employment, but more often than not I was just as lost as they were.  The type of store I was in didn’t seem to matter, though I was stopped more often in one particular store.  More on that later.

Orange is my favorite of color shirt to wear.  It’s not my favorite color, that honor is reserved for slightly brighter than street sign green.  But as far as shirts go, orange is the best.  They look great and are always more comfortable than a similarly designed blue, or perhaps black shirt.  My earliest encounter with orange shirts was in high school.  Our school colors were blue and orange.  For PE my junior and senior years, I took a weight lifting class.  Our 'Excel' gym shirts were a fantastic orange with a blue panther across the front (and my last name written in black marker across my back).  A classic look, if I do say so myself.

Another class I took in high school was wood shop.  Mr. Groth’s amazing woodworking skill and teaching instilled a life-long love of tools in me.  As a result, there no store in which I aimlessly wander more than The Home Depot.  Aisle after aisle of wonderful tools I didn’t need and couldn’t afford.  All in my orange shirt…  It’s no wonder I got asked if I worked at Home Depot so often.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

I've been back to blogging for only a couple weeks and I've already forgotten to post.  That's okay because it means the four to seven of you who actually read this will just have to wait until Thursday to read my blog on Wednesday.  At least I'm pretty sure that's how it this works.

What is actually good about my latency is that you don't have to read the blather I previously patched together and was supposed to put up this week.  You'll have to wait until next week for that particular manuscript.  Instead, I've been inspired to tell a story.

It was long ago when I was young and naive.

Side bar.  How the hell do you spell naive?  I've tried nieve, naive, naieve, neive, neieve, nieive, naeive, naeve, naieve, niave, naeive, neive, neaive, pnaieve, mnieve, and knaive, but they all get underlined in red.

Is it because I'm missing some stupid French accent mark? naivú, naivð, now which Alt+### do I want? õôóôñëêaèçèé  There it is.  Good old Alt+0233.  naivé, nievé...

That's it, I give up.  The French, or whoever the hell came up with the spelling for that stupid word can keep it.  Back to the story.

It was long ago when I was young and stupid.  You may be thinking, "But Mike, you're stupid now.  I mean, you can't even spell...," but then you'd stop yourself before speaking because you can't spell it either.

No, this was a kind of stupid that surrounds youth and inexperience.  I'm sure there's a word that aptly describes it, but I don't know how to spell it.

Such naiveté...  Seriously???  I got that one right? I mean, come on.

(Editor's note: Microsoft Word properly shows I spelled it correctly the second time.  The inept spell check in Chrome apparently wants me to type 'naïve' with two stupid little dots above the 'i.')

Such naiveté can be observed on a college campus near the dining hall as unlearned youth wander up to a table to fill out an application for a credit card for the promised reward of a 1-pound bag of M&M's.  Nothing says putting my education to good use quite like the simultaneous formation of an unhealthy addiction to both chocolate and debt.

It also rears its head when said college student attends a Chicago White Sox game (questionable in and of itself) without bringing extra cash or bothering to fill up the gas tank.  Thus, I found myself leaving a crowded parking lot with a yellow light reminding me how stupid I was.  To my relief, there was a gas station a couple blocks South of the park that still bore Charles Comiskey's name.  I parked my car near a pump and went inside to pay.

No cash.  I was stumped.  Here I was on the Southside of Chicago at a rather sketchy gas station, with no gas, and no money to fix that problem.  The only bright side I could find was that if I got mugged, I'd only be out an empty wallet.

Did I mention I also didn't have a phone?  No?  Well I didn't have one of those either.

I talked to the gas station attendant, explaining my plight, but he didn't see, or at least didn't offer any solution.  I paced around the gas station and checked my wallet one more time to make sure I hadn't missed some quantity of cash hidden in a secret pocket.

Then I saw it.  A plastic rectangle I kept in my wallet, though I'd never gotten around to using it.  I pulled it out and asked in the most awkwardly uneducated manner possible, "Do you guys take these things?"

The attendant, who was apparently familiar with credit cards, confirmed they did.  Relieved, I returned to my car and filled my tank, using a credit card for the first time ever.

Only now, in retelling this story, did I realize my true blunder in this adventure.  It was not the lack of cash or my unfamiliarity with credit cards.  It was my failure to remember the association that first provided me with the credit card that may or may not have saved my life that summer day.

I should have bought some M&M's.

Dreams

I had a rather vivid dream last night.  I hopped a bus to a creek on the North side of Springfield and started walking up the creek.  Reaching the first bend, I started searching the creek bed rocks for Indian arrowheads.  My first few finds that looked suspiciously like arrowheads, but I decided they weren’t.  Digging deeper near the bank, I found a trove of treasure.  There were eight to ten knives carved out of rock.  A few were broken, or only partially carved, but many were pristine.  I gathered my finds in my arms and climbed out of the creek.  I stopped quickly to examine some sort of Bob Ross game that had been lying in the creek, but decided the knives were enough and headed back to the bus.

The bus was a self-driving and I was the only person on board.  I laid my ancient knives on a seat and worked on packing them into my backpack.  As the bus worked its way in the general direction of home, though on the far East side of town, other people began to board.  A rider mentioned their stop and it caught my attention. 

“This bus goes all the way to Jacksonville?” I asked. 

She confirmed and I began worrying about which stop would let me out closest to home.  The road names didn’t make sense to me and I was having trouble reading the schedule.  I finally decided there was only one left, which I missed.  I tried to use the ‘Stop’ button beneath my window, but the driverless bus wouldn’t listen and pulled onto the interstate.  A short jumble of exits and turns later and I was awake, safely in my bed without having to walk across town to get home.

It's no surprise I would dream about Indian arrowheads.  I really love old artifacts and fossils.  I have a small collection that includes numerous crinoids, a trilobite, a fish, a piece of dinosaur bone, and a small lump of petrified sloth poop.  Geodes dot my collection, as do other small fossils.

My greatest fossil find was about the size of a coconut.  It was a coiled snake with its head raised, ready to strike.  The detail was amazing, right down to the impending doom written in its beady eyes.  I have no idea how it formed, but it was truly beautiful. 

A few months ago, I sat down at my computer to work.  An hour in, I thought about my new fossil find, deciding I should show it to my wife when she got home.  But where was it?  My brain skipped for just a second, before settling on the unpleasant truth, a truth I literally exclaimed aloud.

“No!  It was a dream!”

Spreadsheets Galore

I am what you might call a nerd.  Not your run of the mill goofy glasses and squeaky voice nerd (though I have learned the guy at the glasses store two years ago failed to get my glasses adjusted correctly and they don't sit straight on my face).  Instead, I find myself to be a nerd semi-disguised as a “well-adjusted individual.”  Could you read that straight face, because I couldn’t even type it without giggling at its absurdity?

But seriously, I like football, chili, and cage fights.  No one could possibly think I’m a nerd.  But then you see me with all my nerd friends sitting in a game store playing Magic: The Gathering.  Cat’s out of the bag (which is bad because I’m allergic to cats).

It gets worse. I have spreadsheets.  I have one for the budget we seldom stick to, one to track my mortgage payments, a Magic 8-Ball, a Magic event record tracker (one for in-person events and one for digital games, of course). There are the inventory tracking spreadsheets I’ve created for various areas at work and the spread sheet I keep to test new excel functions, should I ever need to go back and use something I once took the time to figure out.  That one is filled with really important things like custom functions and concatenate (which smooshes multiple cells text into one).

I did a quick search... I have 595 spreadsheets at work (technically 2,144, but some are just data storage) and 181 at home.  How many do you have and are you nerd enough to even figure that out?

Did you know I once set up a spreadsheet to calculate upgrade bonuses for an entire MMORPG so I could make the best decisions when spending my hard-earned gold?  Yeah, that was the game I had to stop playing at the request of my wife because I was getting up at 3 AM to bank my gold.

It gets even worse.  I taught myself to write macros and VBA (which is apparently a semi-Excel-specific version of Visual Basic.  It all started so innocently, wanting to copy something repeatedly or add a line at the top of a page and copy in formulas.  But it was never enough.

One day I sat down with a burning question.  Could I create a button in Excel that moved my cursor to a different cell with the click of a mouse.  Apparently just clicking on the cell had become too mundane; I needed a stronger drug.

Once one button worked, it seemed obvious to create one for each of the four normal-person directions (diagonals are overrated).  The next most obvious question was whether or not I could restrict the movement to a certain area, followed by tracking where I had been, and numbering the cells in a semi-random manner.  It was almost as if I was trying to program some sort of game in Excel.

Hours and hours (and hours [and hours]) of properly nested formulas later, I have a fully functional Choose Your Own Adventure game.  Well, it’s fully functional only in a nerd’s sense of the word.  There are 225 rooms you can wander into, of which some 30 have story lines written for them.  But the programming works.  That’s enough to be considered fully functional!

Perhaps someday I will find the time and, more importantly, the inspiration to write stories for a couple hundred more rooms.  In the meantime, I am providing you a Beta test experience!  That’s right.  You can try my non-nerd created, spreadsheet-based, Choose Your Own Adventure-esque game.  So what if the story-lines repeat themselves.  Do you have what it takes to escape the dungeon, or will you find yourself dying a horrible death. There’s only one way out.  And whether you make it out or not, you can always enjoy my spectacular usage of concatenate!

Here is a link to the game.  Try it out and let me know how you do in the comments below.

Excel Choose Your Own Adventure 

(If it doesn't load on the next screen, you can click the download button.  You may have to allow macros.  Don't worry about the macros; I wrote them all myself and they are safe.)