Every year, Mike asks me to give him a Demotivator’s built-it-yourself calendar for Christmas. Every year, I order one for him, adding a few custom dates for his entertainment. He likes factoids. This year, he asked for a factoid for every single day.
And somehow, I agreed to do that. If you add all those little nuggets of information together, I essentially wrote, rewrote, or edited 10,920 words. The average novel is 55,000 words. In the three days after I finished shopping for Christmas, but before Christmas, I sat my ass in this seat in front of this computer and produced 20% of a novel or about 40 pages of text. My ass hurt when I was done.
The calendar arrived today. Yes, I know it was late for Christmas. I realize that, in fact, it was late for Mike to benefit from the first day of information. Poor guy. He had to go back to work last week and missed six whole mornings of excitement when he could have discovered the 300 characters of information that I gathered just to enlighten him.
Here’s what he missed:
January 1 - 22% of all New Year’s resolutions fail after a week. 40% after a month, and 60% after six months. You might as well give up now.
On New Year’s eve, I asked Mike if he was going to make a resolution and he said, “Probably not.” He couldn’t even commit to not making a resolution. Whereas, I noodled around with resolutions like: write every day; finish at least one book; try to be nicer; and find ten minutes to myself in the morning. Yeah, essentially, I made four New Year’s resolutions and already I’ve broken three of them. I’m in the 22nd percentile. Pathetic.
January 2 - One percent of employers allow their people to take naps during work hours. Your company isn’t one of them, is it? I’ll bet you don’t even have a ping pong table.
Mike and I both occasionally suffer from insomnia. He could use a little cubby where he could catch twenty winks some days. Twenty minutes lost doesn’t sound productive, but a nap could make 6 1/2 more hours much more productive. I know. I get to go back to bed almost every morning after Mike and Nick head off on their merry ways. I am more productive and much nicer after I’ve gone back to bed for enough sleep. (Refer to January 1, resolutions.)
I’m going to skip January 3. Meh.
January 4 - Something is messed up in the United States. Harvard accepts 8.9% of all its applicants while Walmart only accepts 2.6%.
Nick is applying to colleges for next fall. I really fear for a world with statistics like this. But we didn’t want him to work for Walmart anyway. Not really.
January 5 - Look out. You are twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine than by a shark. Now, you’ll hear the Jaws theme song every time you walk into the break room.
I could imagine that would have a lot to do with the likelihood that you’d get mad and hit the vending machine when your Snickers bar got hung up on that little auger that is supposed to spiral and drop your snack. Don’t be that dude who hits the vending machine. Just don’t. Mike really isn’t that guy so I’m not too worried, unless he’s the guy who stands next to that guy. I used to work in an office that had a wicked vending machine that cheated someone almost every day. There was this guy who watched and waited for you to slap the machine and walk away in disgust. Then, he’d pull out change, select what you just selected, and be gifted with two Snicker’s bars. Everyone hated that guy. Why can’t vending machines go after people like that?
That’s enough for now. You get the idea. In a perfect world, I’d be able to credit the people who researched all these wonderful little bits of information like the fact that there are black rings around Uranus. If you wrote any of the factoids I repeated for the first week in January, please let me know and I’ll credit you where credit is due.
I should tell you that they don’t pay me to advertise for the Demotivators products. But I was totally excited that they sent me an extra calendar with Mike’s delivery. The cover on my new calendar says, “The sloth is my spirit animal.” That’s so perfect for me. Maybe I need to go back to bed for a while.
Thank you for listening, jules