On being creepy

On July 24, 2024July 24, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

What you are looking at is the foliage in between our house and the house behind us. There’s a fence buried in there, and until yesterday there was a shitton of broken branches as well. That tree that is more or less in the center of the picture lost a couple of big branches during a storm last week, and while the tree itself is in their yard, the branches all landed in ours.

I don’t want to hear anything about the condition of my lawn. I hate green things. This is known.

So anyway: the way the rules work in Indiana, it doesn’t matter who the tree belongs to; if some shit falls in your yard, it’s your problem. And the branches were still attached to the tree up top but were way too high for us to reach so we had to call out some tree guys. I got an estimate on Monday and they took me by surprise yesterday by calling and telling me they were on their way. I was a little worried that they’d have to go into the neighbors’ yard for part of the job, so I figured it was at least polite to let them know that the work was being done– and, again, given the density of the plant life between our house and theirs, it was reasonable to believe they hadn’t even noticed the branches had come down.

Problem is, because of peculiarities in how my neighborhood is laid out, it’s either a good ten minute walk or an actual ride in my car to get from my front door to their front door. And the guys were on their way, and I’d literally just gotten “on their way” from the dispatcher, so I didn’t know if that meant “five minutes out” or “they’re coming from Dowagiac and they’re gonna grab lunch along the way,” so actually leaving my house to go talk to them seemed kinda problematic.

But lo! Standing in my back yard (I’d been doing yard work, as it turned out) I realized I could hear people in their back yard! A conversation! Multiple people! Okay, cool– I can just talk to whoever that is over the fence, right? No problem.

Well, except for, again, the dense foliage. I walked over to the fence and tried to figure out who was in their back yard. Complicating things: this house has what seems to be a huge cast of rotating teenagers and I rarely see the adults– they either have an enormous family, are constantly letting the kids have friends over, or are fostering a bunch of kids. So it was probably going to be kids in the back yard– and it sounded like teenagers– and, what, do I start the conversation with “Go get your dad”? Or do I just tell them and assume a sixteen-year-old is an acceptable vehicle to deliver the message “there may be strangers in your back yard soon”?

I do not normally suffer from social anxiety– I’m a teacher, for fuck’s sake, I stand in front of people and talk for a living— but I discovered quickly, standing in my back yard, that I had no idea how to begin a conversation with a stranger who 1) would not know in advance that I was even there and 2) would absolutely not be able to see me for a moment or two after realizing I was there and talking to them. I mean, how do you start that conversation?

“Excuse me! Hi, I’m over here, in the bushes. It’s your neighbor!”

(They do not know my name and I do not know theirs. It’s 2024.)

Yeah, it was gonna be awkward.

And then, still not sure exactly what I was going to do, I got closer to the fence and found an appropriate spot where there was at least a chance they would see me.

So, um, I’ve left out the part where they have a pool in their back yard? And I’d heard them but not seen them yet, and there hadn’t been, like, splashing or anything. And what I was greeted with once I’d put myself in a position of being able to see my neighbors was a high school-aged girl, in a skimpy bikini, and what I can only assume was her boyfriend, shirtless and in a bathing suit. He was sitting in a beach chair, and she was … enthusiastically twerking on him.

A whole lot of thoughts went through my head really fast, and I decided that under those circumstances I was not terribly interested in being hi-I’m-in-the-bushes guy. I retreated, as far as I know without detection, and decided that they would figure out that there were people in my back yard cutting down branches when they heard the saws, and that if I actually needed to talk to them, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

And that’s how I got arrested for being a Peeping Tom, your honor.

The end.

In which I tell you nuffink! NUFFINK!

On November 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

I have no idea what that line is actually from, but it’s running through my head.

I met with my therapist on Tuesday. My wife had the day off, since she’s a state employee and it was election day, and when I got home she asked me how it had gone and what we’d talked about. And then she got this weird look on her face and said “Well, unless you can’t really talk about it, or something like that.”

“I’m a blogger,” I said. “I tell 20,000 people what happened to me today three times a day. Yes, I will share my discussion with my therapist with my wife.”

And I did.

And, uh, here’s the problem: I’ve got a hell of a lot I want to talk about, but damn near all of it is embargoed for some reason or another, most of them having something to do with my real life and counting unhatched chickens and various things like that. So instead I’m going to just write this frustratingly ambiguous blog post and leave you with a music video, since ~~it’s Friday~~ no goddammit it’s Thursday screw it you get a Friday song anyway.

Hah. I’m a rebel like that.

ANOTHER!

WHY NOT, ONE MORE

…aaaand I’m spent.

In which I eat lunch and make it a post again

On December 30, 2014December 30, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy12 Comments

d023d_o-YUMBO-570-570x330 I swear, every time I eat at Burger King, it turns into a post. Every single time.

Two things, before I start: first, I used to work at Burger King. It was, in fact, my first job. Now, when you work at Burger King, particularly if you work at the Burger King I worked at, which had an unofficial policy that you had to be a pretty girl in order to work a register, you’re going to spend a lot of time behind the grill. What this means is that your entire life smells like grilled meat after a while. It also means that the people who work back there will do just about anything on their lunch breaks to avoid eating burgers. So I’ve been perfectly aware that the ham and cheddar (American? Probably American, actually*) sandwich was a secret menu item of Burger King’s since forever, even if I don’t ever order it. That said, when they brought back the “Yumbo,” making it official, I thought to myself damn, I used to eat a lot of those back in high school, and cravings took over, they way they do. Here’s the second thing: If you happen to follow my Twitter feed you may remember my asshole cat preventing me from eating them last night; he was unable to do so today.

Anyway. I begin every reference to Burger King by pointing out that I don’t eat there often; I have in fact not eaten Burger King since the last time I posted about it. Maybe once, but not more than that. The drive-thru experience is just too goddamn creepy even before you get to me not actually liking their food very much. So as I’m pulling up to the drive I’m sorta mentally preparing myself to be aggravated for the next couple of minutes. Burger King is all about SERVICE!!!!!!! to a degree that is actually incredibly off-putting, and I can’t believe that their corporate douchebags haven’t figured it out yet.

So you can imagine that I was thrown for a loop when my interaction with the cashier through the speaker begins with her shouting “Whatchu hungry fo’?” into her microphone. There’s a moment of sorta shocked silence where I’m struggling to keep myself from laughing, and a second or so later, she just says “Hi!”, and I swear I can detect a note of embarrassment at the other end of the conversation. I don’t think she meant for me to hear the first bit; call it a hunch.

Anyway, here we reach the second problem with ordering food from Burger King today: I am a grown-ass man, and I don’t really want to say “Yumbo” to anyone. There is a delicious menu item at Denny’s that is called “Moons Over My Hammy,” and to this day I have eaten it several times and have never once said it out loud. I point.

“I’d like two of the ham and cheese sandwiches,” I say, and pause for a second. “The Yumbo?” she confirms. “Yes,” I say, and finish my order. She proceeds to tell me no less than three times in the next thirty seconds that I’ve made a “good choice” with my lunch today, which appears to be a new, unnecessary wrinkle that the overlords have added to the script.

Hey! Burger King! I don’t need your cashiers to validate my lunch choices. I need them to record my order accurately, bring it to me, and charge me the proper amount and give me the proper change. That’s it. I don’t give a damn what they think about what I ordered, and furthermore it bugs me that you feel the need to make them reassure me about them. This is bullshit.

She asks my name. I lie. We’ve already had this conversation.

I pay the lady at the first window without incident, other than her being super happy that I report that I am well when she asks me how my day is. The woman at the second window manages to call me “Luther” four goddamn times in the process of giving me my food. Fucking stop it! It’s not folksy or friendly or whatever the fuck you think it is! No one fucking talks like this. It’s fucking weird and you need to stop.

And then I get a look at my receipt, and this is the point where this moves from me having idiosyncrasies to this shit being actively offensive. Look at this:

Motherfuckers.

At this point you have crossed a fucking line. “Ultimate service” is getting killed for someone. That phrase has a very fucking real and very fucking specific meaning in American culture. Putting yourself between someone else and a bullet is “ultimate service.” Not handing me a fucking bag of french fries. I don’t want your “service.” I want my fucking food.

I am at the point now where I cannot wait for this corporation to die. I seriously can’t. I’ve scratched my ham sandwich itch; I’m done. Burger King has the ugliest corporate culture of any corporate entity I ever have to deal with– hell, Wal-Mart doesn’t offend me as regularly and specifically as they do– and I have to be done with this.

(How were the sandwiches? Delicious, obviously; it’s ham, cheese, lettuce and mayonnaise on a toasted bun. Kinda hard to fuck up. But, still, fuck this; I’m not eating at BK again and I look forward to dancing on their ashes. It can’t be that much longer.)

* This alerts me to the fact that I don’t actually have the slightest idea what the difference between “American” and “Cheddar” cheese is. They are, to me, effectively interchangeable, but I doubt that’s actually true.

On that password protected post…

On October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Photography6 Comments

So my son, who has been obsessed with scarecrows lately, just spent a while outside playing his “stand by the tree and pretend to kick hats” game. Only this time he did it with the straw hat we’re using as part of his Halloween costume on.

I thought it was cute. I took a picture of it. And then, after making sure that certain identifying details like my house number weren’t exposed in the picture, and after thinking about it a bit, I posted it on the blog.

There aren’t that many pictures of my son on here. There are a couple of posts specifically dedicated to parenting that include pictures, but in general I try to err on the side of not posting pictures of him here unless I have a reasonably good reason. I felt like this picture was cute and funny enough that it was worth it.

And then, an hour or so later, I got a Twitter notification that an online newspaper website was sharing some of my content. “Oh, cool!” I thought, going to look, wondering which of my recent posts they were sharing and sort of hoping it was the series on school clothes.

It was the picture of my son that I’d shared.

It was listed under “Adult.”

Now, I’m willing to believe that the category was a mistake of some sort, or even possibly auto-generated based on some sort of ‘bot trolling the site– I do use an awful lot of profanity around here, right? But it was a picture of a three-year-old in a silly hat standing next to a scarecrow. And I understand how the Internet works, too, and how once you put something out there what people do with it isn’t really up to you. Hell, once I tag this post it will probably auto-populate something with a picture of him in the links at the bottom of the page. And in some way I actually sort of appreciate whoever it was that shared the picture– these sites don’t pull their content out of nowhere; someone had to submit the picture for inclusion, and then an editor thought it was cute or funny or something and slotted it in. And I appreciate both of those things.

But still. No thanks. Even without the “Adult” issue, there are nearly nine hundred damn posts on this blog– I think #900 will come tomorrow, and this may well be it if I’m wrong– and I think I’d prefer it if any posts that get shared out off of my own little corner of the internet not be pictures of my kid.

The password is my real name, by the way. No caps, shortened form, no spaces.

This may be another idiot parent moment; I dunno. But nonetheless:

what is this I can’t even

On May 30, 2014May 30, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

Did I just have to, as part of a job application, digitally certify that I wouldn’t provide any genetic material to the people I’m asking to hire me? What the actual fuck is this nonsense? How about you make the interviewers not ask for genetic material? I feel like that might be more effective than making me pinky-swear that I won’t give them any.

(As if. I walk out of interviews if I find out that there’s a piss or blood test required to get the job. You do not have a right to know the chemical makeup of my blood, thank you. If I’m impaired at the interview, don’t hire me; if I show up impaired on the job, fire me. Incidentally: I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, so there’s nothing to find. I’m just not going to prove that for you.)

I did not, by the way, have to digitally sign an affidavit stating that I’ve never been convicted of a sex offense. Just FYI. You see where their priorities are, apparently.

I thought the personality test the other day was as weird as this was going to get. What’s next, do you think?

In which I wasn’t mad until you apologized

On January 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized11 Comments

I haven’t talked much about the Great Target Data Breachenationing of 2013, mostly because, honestly, I haven’t been terribly concerned about it– I was one of the ones theoretically affected, because there’s a Target basically in my back yard and I shop there all the time, but I also generally keep a really close eye on my bank account and so I would have noticed any suspicious charges basically immediately. I feel like for the most part Target has behaved as a relatively responsible corporate citizen while all this has been going on, my bank hasn’t made the decision to fuck me unduly like some other banks did; no big deal, right?

I got an email from Target a few days ago; so did my wife and so did, very likely, a whole lot of you, offering me a free year of credit monitoring as a way to make amends. I’d love to know how much coin Target had to shell out to make this happen or if Experian is just figuring they can make it up on the back end by convincing a shitton of new customers to keep going after that year is up. I don’t currently have any kind of credit monitoring turned on, although I have in the past, and I’m considering taking them up on their offer. The email is, generally, very apologetic about the whole affair, and it appears that they’ve located a seventeen-year-old (of course it was a teenager) in St. Petersburg who wrote the malware that made the hack possible.

It didn’t hit me until yesterday that, at least for me personally, there’s sort of a big question hanging over my head about the whole thing, and that question didn’t come to light until I got that email:

How the hell did Target get my email address?

I have never ordered anything from Target.com. Target doesn’t ask for emails as a part of doing business. I have– and I checked, and since I use gmail my email archive goes back to forever— never received any emails from them before. I don’t have a Target credit card, and never have, and certainly didn’t in December when the breach happened. We had a wedding registry with them six years ago, but that was with my wife’s email; mine wasn’t on it.

I can think of one way and one way only that they might have it, which is that I applied for a Target field trip grant for the DC trip this year– but that wasn’t attached to any bank or debit card information, and the address and phone number I provided them was my school address and phone number, so even if they’re cross-matching databases the address and phone number wouldn’t match what they (might?) have through my debit card. They could, maybe, have done a match with my name and town and made an assumption– but that itself assumes that they’re willing to have a pretty fair number of false positives, and also that they’re working their asses off to collect and consolidate customer data that they have, in turn, then never used until this data breach. If they got it from my bank, I kinda feel like my bank ought to have told me that, and they didn’t.

I find myself more curious about how they got my email than I am about how the hack was able to happen. I don’t know if that indicates skewed priorities on my part or not. And maybe if you’re going to send a giant email to millions of people about how your data collection process got screwed up and compromised, you include a line somewhere about how you got the information that allowed you to contact them in the first place.

In which I’m talking about sandwiches again and also fuck Burger King

On December 22, 2013December 21, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy12 Comments

Hands-free-Whopper-holder-introduced-by-Burger-King I don’t eat at Burger King very often– maybe once every three or four months, and generally only when I either have no other options or am sick to death of all other available food options. Given that the side of town I live on has a multitude of places to eat, this just doesn’t happen very often. I don’t dislike their food, mind you, but over the last few years the company has sort of taken on this air like they’re padding around in circles and looking for a place to die– the menu has always changed massively every time I go there, they’ve renamed things, added a bunch of food that I don’t recognize, and always, always changed their fries from the last time I was in there.

Luckily, one of the very few things that they haven’t fucked with is the chicken sandwich, or, as they’re calling it now, the Original Chicken Sandwich, perhaps to drive home the whole hey, look, this is actually the same as the last time you came in here back in 2005 thing. I had a craving tonight, and since I was at OtherJob all day I knew I was on my own for dinner, so I stopped at Burger King on the way home.

(Sidenote: Subway’s Big Hot Pastrami Melt, on flatbread, with provolone cheese, pickles, and dijon. Delicious. This is my new shit. I love pastrami but unfortunately I live in Indiana and it’s much more difficult than you might imagine to get ahold of– even the couple of delis near my house rarely have it available, so Subway introducing a pastrami sandwich was seriously the good news of the week. Unfortunately, the Subway on my side of town is a big pain in the ass, or I’d have just had two of these today, one on the way to work and one on the way home.)

Anyway. Back to Burger King. (I swear I don’t usually have fast food twice in a day, but Saturdays are annoying for eating right.) I pulled into the drive thru and rolled down my window. The aggravation starts immediately, because Burger King is now using some sort of canned introductory message in the drive thru now; some sort of hypercorporatebullshit robotic cheery “HI HOW MAY I MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER BY SERVING YOU WITH MY SERVING AND YOUR FOOD AND MY SERVICE” thing.

I do not require service from anyone. I want you to make me some food and I want to pay you for it. You are literally serving it to me in the sense that you are handing it to me, but that does not make you my servant. You are not going to serve me today. You’re gonna sell me some damn food. I don’t know why that word bugs me so much but it does. Also, it would be nice if it was a person talking to me and not a damn robot. Can we not trust our employees to say “Hi, welcome to Burger King, can I take your order?” anymore?

So there’s that, but it’s a common annoyance so I ignore it. I request my chicken sandwich and then all hell breaks loose.

“May we have your first name for the receipt, please?”

I was literally shocked into silence for a second. I seriously couldn’t process what the hell I’d just been asked. You want my what? Why the fuck– what–

WHAT?

I lie. Reflexively, damn near instantly. Make up the first first name that comes into my head; it’s not my damn name. Why the fuck do you want my fucking name? For the RECEIPT? Why the fuck does the receipt need my goddamn what-the-fuck name? This isn’t fucking Starbucks, you assholes, I’m in a goddamn drive thru.

I seriously wish I had just refused; I regularly refuse to give my ZIP code or phone number during transactions– it just took me by surprise too much and threw me off my game. If the drive-thru in question hadn’t been one of the type where there’s no escape once you’re in it I seriously might have left.

And then they’d printed my goddamn name on the receipt, which is a piece of paper I’m never looking at again. Except it wasn’t my name. I paid with cash, by the way, entirely on purpose because fuck if I’m giving you assholes any more information about me at all at this point. I don’t know why this bugs me so damn much but I’ll be damned if I’m handing over any personal information about me of any kind to buy a fucking three dollar sandwich in a drive thru. In fact, I won’t be handing them three dollars anymore, either; it ain’t like I like Burger King enough to overlook the fact that they’re deliberately freaking me the fuck out in the drive thru now.

Fuck.

In which I’m too bored to be angry

On June 11, 2013June 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

ostriches-head-in-sand

It’s an odd feeling to not be mad about something that you know that you ought to be mad about.

I’m weird about my privacy. If you have access to my Facebook page and you go look at it, it’s going to be a very few posts up at the top and then nothing but posts about what I’ve been reading after that. I generally delete anything else after a couple of days. I’m scrupulous about not using my real name anywhere on my blog, right down to the point where I’m probably going to change the username soon to pull my initials out of it. This is, admittedly, mostly because I’m a teacher and am not terribly interested in my students discovering my writing online. But I’m also genuinely not interested in strangers being all up in my shit; a friend of mine (who, it should be pointed out, I’ve known for ten years, met online, and have only seen in person *once* in that time) once referred to me as “the most online-active paranoiac she’s ever known,” and it’s not an unfair description at all.

I should give a damn about PRISM. The idea that the government is literally spying on us and tapping into our electronic everything should make me mad. The Fourth Amendment should mean something.

I don’t. It doesn’t. It doesn’t, and it hasn’t for decades.

I’m interested in privacy issues, particularly as they relate to futurism, and I talk about them a fair bit. My last real post on Xanga was on the surveillance state, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that I really believe privacy is still a thing anymore. The bit that George Orwell never got– and who could have blamed him?– was that we were going to cheerfully hand over any semblance of privacy to corporate and governmental entities so that we could post cat pictures and look at porn. Big Brother didn’t have to watch; we handed him a camera and posed. I’ve known– put “known” into quotation marks if you like– that the government was spying on electronic communications for as long as I’ve been logging into anything, so… twenty years now, give or take? The fact that it’s confirmed now doesn’t mean anything to me. We’re surprised about this? Verizon has location data on me basically 24/7/365 and they’re not sharing that with anyone who asks? C’mon, now. Of course they are.

It’s not that I think they should be able to do these things; they clearly should not. It’s that I see absolutely no way for the genie to go back in the bottle, and the forces that are destroying the concept of privacy in this country are not, in and of themselves, necessarily specifically malevolent. We get stuff, for lack of a better word, in return for our privacy; the spying isn’t gratuitous. Combine that with Americans’ generally supine attitude toward the government in every area except our guns and a healthy dose of “If you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear” and you’ve got our current situation in a nutshell. It’s only gonna get worse once facial recognition technology gets more accurate and publicly available. I can either get used to it now or go nuts; I’d kinda prefer to not go nuts.

(Sidenote: no force on Earth can make me buy an Xbox One despite owning and really enjoying both previous iterations of the Xbox, and the main reason is Microsoft’s apparent belief that it’s okay to insist on putting a device in your living room that watches and listens to you all day, every day and cannot be turned off. Apparently that’s where I draw the line. Government, okay, fine, whatever. Toys? No.)

The thing that’s sticking in my craw is the partisan affiliation part. “IF THIS HAD HAPPENED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION YOU’D BE SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER!!1!!1ONE!!,” part of my brain is screaming. And when they called it Carnivore and not PRISM, well, I did. But a curious thing happened; five years or so of basically being completely furious about everything all the fucking time kind of drained my ability to get pissed off about politics. (Some of you, who didn’t know me during the Bush administration, are shaking your heads. No. This is absolutely and undeniably and clearly true. The fact that I still possess the ability to get pissed off about stuff is nothing compared to what I was capable of in 2004.) Plus, hey, conservatives, this is what happens when you give your guy unlimited power to do bad shit. (Cough*drones*cough) Our guy gets in power and then he can still do the bad shit you let your guy do. I don’t want either of our guys to be able to do this thing, but now that they can, no one will ever stop. That’s why it was a dumb idea, see.

So, yeah, I’m probably being inconsistent here. I think I can make a reasonable case that it’s me being older and, if not wiser, at least less volatile, and not strictly a partisan politics thing, but if you want to blame it on that go ahead; I’m a grown-ass man and I suspect I can handle it.

One more thing: speaking of privacy concerns, I went ahead and let WordPress tell Facebook about yesterday’s post, a policy that I might continue and I might stop doing depending on how it ends up affecting my ability to talk about whatever the hell I want on here. The result, possibly coincidental but probably not, was fifty hits on a blog that isn’t a week old yet. Fifty hits was a good day at the peak of the original Xanga MKF. Granted, only one person left any comments, but that’s a hell of a traffic leap from the three or four visitors a day I was getting before now. It’ll be interesting to see if it keeps up today.