Now Hiring Public Storage Employees

To keep up our high standards at Public Storage we ask you meet the following qualifications:

• Completed 4th Grade (Unless you have a letter of rec from your 3rd Grade teacher.)
• Willingness to forward customers on to another middle school drop out without actually helping yourself.
• No computer skills needed.
• Heavy Breathing while customers wait on the phone and you wrastle with the computer you don't know how to use.
• When asked for a phone number offer only 9 digits. If asked what the last number is say, "That's all of them."
• You don't have to know how to work a modern credit card machine. We still use that old slidey kind with carbon paper.
• When using the card slider try and break the customers card if possible.
• Don't worry about knowing how to run a fax machine. If a customer asks for a fax tell them you don't have a fax machine even though you list a fax number on your website.
• Don't worry if you don't know what a website is.
• On site: When all else fails suggest they call corporate.
• Corporate: When all else fails suggest they call the site.
• When confronted with the never ending cycle of forwarding calls: sigh deeply and ask the costumer to hold. Hopefully they'll hang up. If they don't, after 15 minutes, tell them you are going to transfer them to your supervisor who is actually the first person they talked to who forwarded them to the site manager who transferred them back to corporate. Remember to place customers on hold for 5-10 minutes between each of these steps.
• Remember our motto: "The customer is always frustratingly interrupting my do nothing job."
• Personal hygiene optional.

RIP: "Working Hard or Hardly Working?" Eulogy for a dead joke.

Once before I retired/buried a joke, the annoying camo joke "I can't see you, where'd you go?"

Today another joke is being retired, and by retired I mean retired like a horse is retired to a glue factory. This joke is so overused it's become hackneyed, cliched and very vexing.

Somebody sticks their head into your office/cubicle/mad-bomber-shack and says, "Hey! You working hard or hardly working?" This is usually the office Alec Baldwin who takes it upon himself to keep tabs on what everyone else is doing instead of actually working himself. In it's most evolved form, this one liner is accompanied by "the wink and the gun." Where you wink and point one finger at the victim of your lack of creativity. Getting the combo of bad joke and wink/gun is probably what made you want to become a mad-bomber in the first place.

"Working hard or hardly workin'?"

Yes, you've said it before, I've said it before, everybody's said it before. Ergo, it is DEAD! A large part of the reason I like to put jokes out of their misery is that the quality of person who says it has dropped below acceptable standards. Whoever said that joke the first time was probably a comic genius. Then it got out into the public and the quick witted picked it up and repeated it. But now its been in syndication so long that even the dim-witted have learned it by rote memorization (even if they don't know what it means it always gets a polite chuckle, which, for the dim, is enough.)

Recently a man who I can't name but I think of as "that meathead" popped his head in and shot this one off and I thought, this joke deserves better. So, much like Cervantes killed of Don Quixote to prevent lesser writers from writ ting bad stories about him, I'm putting an end to "Working Hard or Hardly Working."

But I can't leave you with an empty spot in your already shallow joke reservoir, now can I? So I'll provide a few replacements. I guess the intent of this joke is two fold:
1) Be rude and point out that for the 1/10th of a second you walked by somebodies office they don't appear to be working. (THINKING IS WORKING!)
2) Cement in someones mind that you know some clever word play, or are a jerk or something.

So here are my replacement jokes. You poke your head into somebodies office and say:

• "I heard putting your on the feet desk helps prevent heel spurs, do you have heel spurs?"
• "Behold the habitat the endangered North American sloth, he's a beauty."
• "Quick the boss is coming! Look busy!" Then quickly pull out of view and wait for a frantic shuffling sound from inside.
• "Hey you bum, I make more money than you."
• "Is this a bad time? I know if you don't get to daydream about ninjas for an hour each day your doctor said you'd have a seizure."
• "So you're the one working on that big 'How You-Tube Can Save our Company' report I've been hearing so much about."
• "Don't pull a muscle buddy." (This is my fave due to its brevity. Also you can substitute words for buddy to change it up. Try: champ, slugger, and bossman.)

And if someones asks you "Working Hard or Hardly Working" just shake your head and quickly draw in a hiss of breath and say, "Didn't you hear?" Shake head slowly. "That joke is dead." Stand up put one hand on Alec Baldwin's shoulder. "It came as a shock to me, too." Hug. "Let it out. Let it out." Tell them to read my blog.

"If I was: an astronaut"

If you are like me you are 6’ tall and named Trey.

Also, if you are like me you wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. I thought about it a lot. You probably did too. Being weightless, the effects of zero-g on projectile vomiting, and how do you sleep in space?

Well, like most kids you probably never did anything about it. You just dreamed and sat on the couch. But not me! When I turned 18 I drove down to Houston and walking into the NASA building.

The receptionist said, “Welcome to NASA, how may I help you?”
I said, “I’d like to be an astronaut.”
She smiled and said, “Lots of people want to be astronauts. Why should we choose you?”
So… I stood on my head and drank a glass of tang.

Sadly, this did not impress her and I never became an astronaut.
But if I was here is what I’d do. First, I’d spend an hour or so floating and spinning. Then after spinning I’d probably throw up. Then I’d say the Space Monkey blew chunks and make him clean it up.

Then I’d probably be tired and try to take a space nap. I’m always hungry when I wake up so I’ll eat all the Space Monkey’s banana’s because, lets be honest, what’s he going to do about it?
Then right before we land I’ll call in and say, “Houston… we have a problem!” and hit a few panic buttons. Because I think those stressed out NASA guys would appreciate a good laugh.


ps. I'm 6' tall at 7am and 5'11'' at 10pm, but I think in a zero-G environment this wouldn't happen.