Shake & Bake

The wife and I are going to Talladega this weekend. You read that correctly – we’re going to Talladega. A very generous and well connected individual has invited us along to the race for the weekend and we couldn’t be more excited about it.

This actually reminds me of a brief side story: In my second week of work I was on the phone with someone, trying to put them in contact with one of our contractors. I knew the contractor’s first name was Cal, but on the spot I couldn’t think of his last name so I just said the first thing that came to mind – Cal Naughton. It took me another 20 minutes to realize that Cal Naughton is John C Reilly’s character, opposite Will Ferrell, in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Oh well, everyone needs a little Shake and Bake in their day.

At any rate, let’s face it – I don’t know shit about NASCAR. Hell, I don’t know shit about car in general. So in an effort not to be outed as a complete neophyte, I’ve been talking to all my buddies that do know shit about NASCAR and reading all kinds of stuff on Wikipedia in order to cram as much information into my head as possible. Still, I’m basically a completely inexperienced fraud going into this. I feel like Sarah Palin.

Although, the worst that can happen to me is some driver dies in a freak accident before the race and I'm the only one in the entire crowd that fits in his driving suit so I suddenly find myself behind the wheel of his Chevrolet when my only racing experience has been video games at the arcade, though I can hear a race track from my house if that counts for anything, and somehow I miraculously figure out how to turn the car on AND miraculously get it moving with the help of some very smart and influential advisers in the pit crew, but it doesn’t matter because inevitably at the first turn I’m going to wreck directly into the wall at 150 mph in a glorious ball of flames causing a 37 car accident that results in the cancellation of the race and a billion people in NASCAR nation put me on their shit list and dedicate the rest of their lives to hunting me down like a yeti in the wild.

The worst thing for Palin is, her race car driver is 72 and one more case of melanoma away from the morgue, her race car is the United States of America and her glorious ball of flames is the world. But whatever; it sure will be fun while it lasts…

I’m not really sure how I just went from NASCR to politics, but suffice it to say, we’re excited as hell for this race like two adolescents, all precocious and full of wonderment, hopped up on a bunch of Mt Dew like a couple spider monkeys. Now we’re just praying to Baby Jesus for a good race.

Thug Life Part II

I'm not sure this story will translate and be as funny to you as it was to me, but if there's any hope, you need to read this in the mindset of a 7-month pregnant first-time mother-to-be.

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One of the couples we knew here in Nashville just packed up and moved to Washington DC this past weekend. Having just recently relocated ourselves, we had approximately 1700 boxes we donated to their moving cause. I mentioned to them that I've been missing a pair of shoes ever since we moved here and hopefully one or both of the shoes was in one of the boxes.

So when he called me last Friday, the night before they were going to hit the road to DC, I was hopeful they found my shoes.

"Sorry, dude, we didn't find your shoes," he said.

"Bummer."

"But we did find a gun!"

"A what?"

"A gun!"

"A gun???"

"A gun!!!"

Holy shit! They found a gun in one of my boxes! "Holy shit! You found a gun in one of my boxes!?!"

"Yeah! I'm on my way to your house with it right now."

Holy shit!

Then it dawned on me, "holy shit! You found my gun! I've been looking for that too!"

You see, I do in fact own a gun, but it's nothing more than spring-loaded plastic BB gun. The thing is though, it looks real as shit, which is the only reason I even own it. The logic is that any would-be bad guy that breaks into my house in the middle of the night with anything less than a real gun on his person would instantly be scared away by my real-looking gun. My Plan B if said intruder calls my bluff is a baseball bat under the bed. If the intruder is worth a shit and actually brings a real gun, then I don’t know what my plan is. I guess I hope I remarkably shoot him in the eyeball with one of the bb’s, stunning him long enough for me to relieve him of his firearm then shoot him in the face for real.

While I've yet to have an occasion to brandish the gun with any sort of authority, it has come in handy on several occasions for showdowns with a number of varmint as well as drunken tests of pain tolerance. Even though the bb's are plastic, they hurt like a bitch, especially on bare skin… especially from anything less than 5 paces.

At any rate, after we got a hearty laugh on the phone, I said, "Please tell me you found the gun..."

"Actually, my wife found it... My wife and her mother..."

Holy shit! “Holy shit!”

Like I said, this is the aforementioned 7-month pregnant first-time mother-to-be and her mother. Understandably they freaked out and called him while he was out running around. I can only imagine that conversation.

“Holy shit! I just found the Horst’s gun!”

“The Horst’s what?”

“Gun!”

“Gun???”

“Gun!!!”

Fortunately he was able to determine immediately that it was made out of plastic but unfortunately he wasn’t the one to find it.

I laughed for quite awhile about that but, oh man, I felt bad.

Now you’re probably wondering how I came across such a weapon to begin with.

My younger brother attended a small liberal arts college in Ohio, and by “liberal arts” I mean “liberally available drugs and booze,” which is why I would visit from time to time. Generally those visits were centered around the Halloween holiday, which is a whole other story entirely. If I’m not mistaken, this particular trip was just some random weekend, and by “random” I mean “drugs and booze were randomly available.”

When I arrived at his room in the fraternity house, he and several of his buddies were conspicuously seated around the room until I closed the door behind me and they all produced various sizes and styles of firearms that were previously stashed down their pants or under seat cushions.

I shit my pants until I found out they were just plastic bb guns because they looked real as shit. One dude had a fucking uzi. I’ve seen uzis in Chuck Norris movies, not college fraternity houses.

They explained the guns had recently become a big fad on campus and a lot of the guys were carrying them on their persons at all times, waiting to barrage one another with a hail of plastic bb’s.

Needless to say, I was fascinated and 3 beers later I was ready to see what a bb felt like on bare skin at 250 fps from 3 paces. It hurt. Like a bitch. Twelve hours later I was walking into Dick’s Sporting Goods for one of my own. 

Old English

I finally met our other neighbor across the street, an old English chap named Ian, a few days ago. I already knew he was English because the other neighbor, Chip, told me, but I didn't want to bring it up and be like, "where abouts in England are you from?" Primarily because you don't want to end a sentence with a preposition, but also because I didn't want him to retort, "I'm from Wales you fucking wanker!"

So after we made small talk for a few minutes I said, "so, I take it you're not from around here…" implying that his accent was neither American nor southern, though I suppose it could have been southern English but again, it also could have been southern Welsh. You just can’t know.

He replied, "No, I'm not. I moved to the States about 23 years ago." That didn't help me out me out one bit because ultimately I wanted to find out what English soccer team he supported and I couldn't do that until he admitted he was English!

So I followed up with, “So where were you from originally?" to which he replied, "England," with a look that suggested, "England you stupid wanker. Where'd you think I'm from? Wales?"

Having finally established his country of origin, I followed immediately with, "oh really? Do you stay up on the English Premier League pretty closely?" with fingers crossed that 1. He is a die-hard Liverpool fan and has the team emblem tattooed on his chest, back or ass; 2. He supports Manchester United, which I’m ok with, and he might as well be on that bandwagon; 3. He follows some other team that preferably loses to Liverpool routinely, like Manchester United; 4. And most of all, he isn’t a Chelsea fan, which is basically the same as having an English accent and loving Criss Angel, Mindfreak.

He replied, "not really."

Not really!?! You're English, you stupid wanker! Soccer is a religion to you people!

I couldn’t possibly have anticipated that response and seriously couldn’t comprehend it. I mean, what are the chances, right? I move to Nashville, TN and my neighbor is a bloody Englishman and I'm thinking I hit the futbol lottery. He probably has a massive satellite dish in his backyard beaming every soccer game known to man right into his living room where he has a keg of Guinness, liters of tea and bushels of crumpets. But no, in reality he's the only Englishman born in the land of the Queen that doesn't watch soccer. Bollocks!

So now my only goal is to show this guy I’m more of an Englishman than he is. I’m going to start by doing all my yard work in a beefeater outfit, listening to the Beatles and quoting Shakespeare. Bollocks!

Youth and Young Manhood

One of our product reps at work took us along with several other engineers in the area out to dinner and to the Predators hockey game tonight. It was a fun time, if you’re into hanging out and making small talk with guys who sell water heaters and other guys who are directly competing for your job.

As I left the game and walked to my car, I passed by the front of a church where a homeless man was sitting on the front steps. I did exactly what you’re supposed to do when it comes to the homeless – ignore the problem like it doesn’t exist. So I kept my head down and eyes straight at my feet. But as I walked by, the man yelled at the top of his lungs, “FUCK YOU, BOY!” I honestly wasn’t expecting that but I have to say, it made me smile and in some weird way, it made my day. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intended result, but whatever. Still, I maintained my composure and kept walking right on by. A man, his wife, and their 12-ish year-old son were following about 10 yards behind me and as they passed the front of the church, the homeless man yelled at the top of his lungs, “FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” Truthfully, after my encounter with the man, I was expecting that, but I was not expecting what the non-homeless man did next. He got in the homeless dudes face and yelled, “What did you say!?! You better watch your mouth, man!!!” A scuffle ensued in which the non-homeless man grabbed the homeless man by the his collar an yelled again, “watch your mouth!”

I was completely shocked by this turn of events, but I was thinking, seriously man, let’s look at this objectively: This dude is clearly without a home and empirical evidence would suggest he’s without his mind as well. Let’s at least afford him the liberty of shouting out a few curse words if he wants. There’s no harm in that, especially if he has the balls to do it on God’s doorstep. Besides, between the two of us non-homeless people here, I feel like I have more of a bone to pick with the guy than you do. After all, he called me a boy, and I’m not a boy; I’m nearly 30. It’s not like I got in the guy's face and was like, “What’d you say!?! I ain’t no boy! I’m a man! I’m nearly 30, here’s my ID! I demand you show me some respect you homeless piece of shit! I’m a grown adult and you should not be talking to me like that!”

You know what? Next time I’m at a bar and they ask for my ID, I’m going to be like, “Fuck you! I’m a man! I ain’t no boy! I’m damn near 30!” We’ll see how quickly that gets me a beer. 

A Series of Unrelated Stories

I frequent a little urban grocery store around the corner from the office where I pick up lunch or snack items throughout the week. It's small but has just about all the essentials. Today I passed through the beer section (no, I was not buying beer at lunch... my flask was already full) where I noticed all of the six packs were wrapped in clear packaging tape. Confused, I noticed a sign declaring the tape necessary to cut down on shoplifting. Shoplifting? My first thought was, "what on earth is the world coming to? I realize the economy is in the shitter and The Bush That Cried Wolf is at it again, but people are shoplifting individual bottles from six packs??? Good lord!" My second thought was, "why on earth didn't I think of that when I was in college when I was without a fake ID/poor?" It would have been far easier to heist a few 12-ounce bottles than a huge 40-ouncer. My buddy and I each only had one pair of pants and one sweatshirt big enough to conceal a shoplifted 40. It got really suspicious really fast when we hit the one grocery store in town every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday night wearing the same clothes every time. We tried to get creative once by switching outfits but that was even worse, primarily because I was 6-foot tall and he was like 5'-2". We would have been better off just going to all the parties dressed like girls; then we could have had all the beer we wanted. For free. Ah, man, if only I knew then what I know now.

--

We went to see a concert at the Ryman Auditorium the other night, which is THE music venue here in Nashville. The show was amazing, not least of all because of the venue. At one point between songs the singer was like, "for this next song I'd like to bring out my good friend Andy Miller to help us out."

I was really excited that some famous local guitarist or banjoist or fiddlerist was going to come out and blow the roof off the place. Instead, the most awkward teenage-looking stoner kid came ambling out onto the stage holding a tambourine in his hand. A tambourine! He spent the duration of the song just shaking the fucking tambourine with this look on his face like, "I can't believe they talked me into this shit. No one can even hear this goddamn thing. I look like such a douche bag up here. This was so not worth that shitty pot they gave me backstage." When the song was over he just walked off stage never to return.

This whole thing has really been bothering me the past few days because I can’t figure out if the band brought the kid out on stage ironically, in which case I would find that hilarious, or if they truly brought the kid out to contribute his tambourining skills to the song. If it was the latter, how did that come about? Were they sitting in rehearsal when their stoner-fast-food-gopher-buddy idly picked up a tambourine and started banging it against his leg and the singer was like, “Hold up! Hold up! Is that a tambourine? Fuck yeah man, that’s exactly what we need! Hey, Billy! Start shaking that thing after the fourth bar and then just shake the shit out of it til you can’t shake no more! Let’s ROCK!!!”

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The most important thing you need to take away from this post is this:

Stop what you’re doing right now and please check to make sure your voter registration is current. If you’re not registered, get registered; you have little more than a week to get your application in. If you are currently registered, I strongly encourage you to request an absentee ballot, especially you folks up there in the swing state of Ohio. You can avoid the long lines on election day and you don’t have to worry that your vote won’t get counted because the electronic voting machine that was made by the same company that contributes thousands of dollars to one of the political parties is going to mess it up.

Here are the websites for both the Franklin and Davidson county Boards of Election:

http://www.nashville.gov/Vote

http://vote.franklincountyohio.gov/

Not surprisingly I have very strong opinions about this election but I won’t subject you to those opinions here, except in the most passive-aggressive and cynical snippets here and there, but I will say that my strongest opinion is that everyone needs to vote. If you’re unsure about what to do to get registered, where to go to vote, how to vote, or want to know more about any of the issues, just send me an e-mail and I’ll be more than happy to help out. 

PR5

I feel bad that I haven't been keeping up on writing about Project Runway on the blog, especially after I went into exhaustive detail about how awesome it is. The truth is, this season really kind of sucks. That's not to say it isn't still interesting, because it is and I'm still watching every week, but that's mainly just because of Heidi and Tim. What I mean is, all of the designers really, really suck. There are a few that are decent, like Korto and Leanne, but the rest have been absolute rubbish. Jerell, for instance, will make it to the final three and Bryant Park where I fully expect his fashion week runway designs will be costumes from the set of Where the Wild Things Are. Just look at this "hat" he wears:

What a douche-lick.

Kenley needs to get smashed in the face with a tennis racket. Not only have her designs gotten progressively worse, she's gotten progressively more annoying. Rather than work on designing new fashions she needs to work on designing a new voice. It's so grating, like a blender grinding up gravel. Her avant-garde design was the worst. They say "avant-garde" translates literally to "advance guard." Personally I think it translates to "unwearable." 

She actually had the audacity to stand up on the runway and defend this piece of shit. She was like, [imagine blender grinding gravel] "it is so avant-garde, no one's ever seen this before!" Bullshit. I've seen it before:

+

I'm just glad Stella and Blayne are finally gone. If you recall, Stella got eliminated when she tried to introduce her signature leather into a design for Diane Von Furstenberg. First of all, leather is not a signature. There are only three cases when you're allowed to wear leather: 1). When you're riding a motorcycle (or scooter… ok, not when you're riding a scooter); 2). When you're the lead singer for a rock band from the 80's; 3) When you're the lead guitarist in a rock band from the 80's. If you play bass, drums, keyboards, saxophone, rhythm guitar, banjo, cymbals, triangle, cow bell, whatever, you need to be in denim and cotton. No leather for you. Secondly, who the fuck is Diane Von Furstenberg? Sara was incredulous when I didn't know who she was, "what!?! You don't know who Diane Von Furstenberg is!?! She only invented the wrap dress!" The what? "The wrap dress!" The wrap dress? I'm pretty sure the first Homo erectus to skin a woolly mammoth and don its fury coat invented the wrap dress. I'm also pretty sure the Scottish perfected the wrap dress, circa the 13^th century. Have you not seen Braveheart?

Stella came back, along with the rest of the eliminated contestants to help out the remaining contestants in the avant-garde challenge. Blayne received the Stella kiss of death when they were randomly matched up but truthfully he was one swatch of neon fabric away from getting booted every single episode and his time ran out much later than I expected. Their avante-garde creation was more of an avant abomination. You can even see the look on the model's face is like, "I can't believe I'm wearing this shit. This is going to destroy my image as a coke snorting anorexic/bulimic emotionally detached model/no-other-career-aspirations-yet-I'm-fortunately-very-photogenic model."

While the designers have been a huge disappointment, it's the judges that have been sucking it up even more as usual. How is it that they share the exact same opinion on every garment that comes down the runway? What is this - Fox News? No one can have an original opinion of their own, choosing instead to recycle the same talking points over and over while they pat each other on the ass? They actually all agreed this dress was a winner:

What the fuck! Have you not seen Braveheart!

T

Jay-rolling?

Today I watched a man in a wheelchair with only three wheels (it was missing one of the front casters) willingly and knowingly roll out into the middle of a crosswalk when the red hand on the crosswalk sign clearly indicated that it was not appropriate to be crossing the street, causing traffic in both directions to come to a complete stop on his account. I was terrified and powerless to do anything about it and thankfully all of the motor vehicle operators were able to avoid the guy who just went about his merry way. 

The guy went on to roll himself up an unbelievably steep hill, several points at which I was thinking, "holy crap, I don't think he's going to keep going up..." But again, I was powerless to do anything because I was actually standing at the aforementioned crosswalk waiting for the red hand to turn into the white humanoid to allow me to cross the street. Fortunately he made it to somewhat of a landing partway up the hill where he could rest and in one of the most heartwarming scenes I've ever witnessed, another man came up to the guy and offered to push him the rest of the way up the hill. 

I'm glad everything turned out ok for the guy but I found the whole ordeal had caused me a great deal of anxiety as my heart was racing and I had started to perspire as I was stuck at the crosswalk. I don't want to sound insensitive, but the whole time I was witnessing this I was thinking to myself, “Dude, I don’t know how you ended up in that wheelchair, but I could venture an educated guess.” 

That’s all. 

Funny or Die

Those around town are all too aware while the non-Nashvillites out there may not be aware at all, that almost the whole of Nashville has been out of gas since Friday.  I’ve never seen anything like it: entire gas stations roped off with yellow caution tape while dozens of cars lined up down the street at random gas stations that still had some petroleum left to offer.

I find a great deal of irony in all of this. The shortage was precipitated no doubt by Hurricane Ike and the disruption of the refineries in Texas, but a major metropolitan area like Nashville should never have run out of gas. I can just see the oil executives now, sitting around the boardroom, scratching their heads and wondering how this all happened. Meanwhile, millions of barrels of crude oil are not making it to their destinations because down on the pipelines all over America there are dozens of old school pipeliners standing around with their thumbs up their asses not doing a lick of work because they’re too busy laughing at their jackass intern project manager who doesn’t know where the hell he is or what the hell he’s doing and instead he’s just running around looking for a bathroom or at least a goddamn tree so the doesn’t piss his pants because he wasn’t wise enough to go before they left in the morning.

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The latest issue of Rolling Stone is all about the new age of comedy and they mention several very humorous websites. I encourage you to check out this one and watch the handful of short videos entitled Drunken History. The premise is quite simple – some average individual gets wasted off their ass then tries to tell a story about some historical event while being filmed. The film maker then hires some real life actors to act out the story verbatim. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/68f23e244b

Caution: This is only work appropriate if you have headphones. 

Oh Boy

Like I said, after working for the pipeline for a few weeks I got pretty diligent about managing my bathroom breaks so I didn't get caught in the middle of a cornfield again. As I came to find out, even that wasn't always foolproof. 

I ended up spending a lot of time out on the pipeline, and several times on my own. As I mentioned, it wasn’t easy being some punk college intern telling the hardened pipeline dudes how to do their jobs.  Believe me when I say I wanted to be buddies with these guys more than anything and not because I wanted or needed their friendship but simply because I needed them to like me in order to work hard for me in order to get the job done. If I learned anything working for the pipeline, it was how work gets done – from the bottom up.  I didn't want there to be any perceivable economic or social differences between us but the reality was, there couldn't have been more of a difference.

One of the biggest differences was actually pretty simple – pipeline workers wore yellow hard hats, while project managers wore white ones. So every time I set foot on site in my white hard hat, it was like I was shouting, "Hey! I'm a douchebag that doesn't know shit about shit but I'm going to college right now while you are stuck in your yellow hats doing manual labor. I'm going to go home to a frat house where we're going to have a keg party with chicks and beer and you're going home to your wife and kids and mortgage. Right now the only thing you and I have in common is we both drink Natural Light."

It was miserable.

One time I spent almost an entire day on the pipeline by myself in my stupid white hat. When I had enough I got in the car and headed back to the office. Almost as soon as I hit the road I realized I had to go, and it was going to be a long drive. The problem with working on the pipeline is, the pipeline is always in the middle of nowhere. Short of pulling off to the side of the road, I was going to have to make it to the office.

By the time the building was in sight, it was almost too late. I whipped the car into the parking lot like a scene from Gone in 60 Seconds, and ran in through the front door. The stupid office had like 15 floors and I was on the 10^th. Running up the stairs wasn't an option, but waiting for the elevator wasn't much better. It was so bad I couldn't stand still so I was doing one of those awkward pacing/dancing things in the lobby until the elevator arrived. The elevator was even worse and all I could do was walk around in a tight, fast circle like I was chasing my tail.

I burst out of the elevator doors, ran into my office, dropped all my shit, and headed straight to the bathroom. I shared an office with two other interns and they were like, "hey, how was the pipeline?" but I was in too much of a hurry and wanted to say, "I can't talk right now, I have to pee really bad," but all I got out was, "can't talk pee!"

I burst through the bathroom door to find almost every position was already filled like a goddamn meeting had just let out or something. Four urinals and 2 of the 4 stalls were occupied so I b-lined it directly for the last stall. I threw open the door where I came upon a scene of ungodly gruesomeness. Whoever used the stall last failed to flush the toilet and unless he ate a small cow, I had to assume he shat more than he actually digested. If I didn't have to whiz so bad, I probably would have thrown up right there.

I didn't have the luxury of time to adjourn to the other open stall so I just instinctively reached my leg out and hit the flush lever with my foot. I regretted it as soon as I did it though because the water, rather than going down the toilet like it was designed to do, started to come up the toilet bowl with the aforementioned fecal matter in tow. I was hoping it was just temporary but to my horror the water didn't stop rising. It just kept rising up and up and up and quite literally in slow motion. So slow in fact that I had ample time to say a prayer to God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus and baby Jesus to stop the fucking water. They didn't respond.

With all the time I had to observe the situation, I could do nothing other than stare at the oncoming disaster. As the water crested the rim and began to spill to the floor like a cascading waterfall of fecal infested liquid, all I could do was say out loud, "Oh. Boy."

I quickly backed out of the stall to avoid to atrocity and that's when I realized the poor sonofabitch in the next stall over, completely unaware of the proceedings next to him, and completely vulnerable to the wraith of the advancing water as he was sitting on the shitter with his pants down around his ankles… on the floor.

If you could have taken a Polaroid of my face at that time, it would have been pale white, mouth agape, eyes bulging, and sweat pouring off my brow. If you could have taken a recording of my thoughts, they would have been, "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

When he realized what was happening, all he could do was kick his legs up and exclaim, "Oh shit!" Exactly.

Oh man, I felt so bad.

But not bad enough to stick around. The only good part of the whole situation was it temporarily took my mind off the impending explosion of my bladder. With that back at the forefront I ran out of the bathroom and up the stairs to the next floor. Suffice it to say, I made it, but just barely. After that I wandered into some empty office and used the phone to call the building maintenance department. I was like, "uhh… one of the toilets in the men's restroom on 10 is clogged," then quickly hung up the phone and got the hell out of there.

--

I often think about that poor guy in the stall with the shit water all over his pants. I think to myself, "What Would John Do? I can only conclude that if it had been me, I would have cut my business short, walked out of the bathroom, walked down the stairs, walked out of the building, preferably through a side door, got in my car, and I would have driven home as fast as I possibly could. Then after I threw my pants, belt, socks and shoes in the garbage, I would spend every waking moment for the rest of my life searching for that low-down dirty sonofabitch that flushed the clogged toilet in the stall next to me.

The First Rule of the Pipeline is…

Starting this new job got me thinking more about some of my old jobs. As I've previously alluded to, I had several internships in college, one of which was at the aforementioned ladder company (in retrospect, I should have pushed harder for the internship at the mattress company), while the other was with a prominent oil company. I know, I know, I know. This comes as a surprise to many of you that now know me as a bleeding-heart, eco-friendly, petrol-hater. I can assure you during my stint with the oil company my eco and political views were barely in their fetal stages and I simply did it for the experience – and by "experience" I mean "money." Basically I recognize working for the oil company was like a skeleton in my closet, like if I were a politician it would be the equivalent of the time I did heroin before I decided I wanted to be president someday.

Similar to my experience at the ladder company, I was entirely unprepared for the maturity and responsibility necessary to work for a large company, not to mention a large oil company. All that really means is, everything I did during the internship was horribly awkward and traumatizing at the time, but looking back now it's all hilarious and ridiculous.

I did two separate six-month stints with the company – one working in the pipeline division in northwest Ohio and the other in the tank farm division in eastern Kentucky.

One thing you need to understand about the pipeline is, there is a monumental difference between working for the pipeline division and working on the pipeline. As a lackey intern working in a nice office building I was working for the pipeline division. As a hard-nosed union worker getting down and dirty in the trenches making 8 bucks an hour, the manual labor guys were working on the pipeline. The difference in working for and on the pipeline is basically like the street cred difference between watching Boyz N the Hood and actually killing like 9 people in a drive-by. Walking into that situation as a snot-nosed college kid just waiting for the next Caps tournament at school was a ginormous wake-up call.

My boss was a cool dude but he was working hard and fast on his way up the corporate ladder and had neither familiarity nor association with the guys working on the pipeline. My mentor, on the other hand, was an old school Vietnam veteran that had worked his way up from doing manual labor on the pipeline to sitting in a comfy office, which is the ultimate in pipeline envy. Like when Jay-Z went from selling crack in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn to CEO of Def Jam Records in Manhattan.  

My mentor took a liking to me, but you'd never know it because he never spoke. Basically I was on a need-to-know basis with him and I didn't need to know anything. In my very first week on the job he was like, "let's go."

"Where are we going?" I asked terrified.

"To the pipeline."

What? Where on the pipeline? What are we going to do when we get there? I'm scared.

So we climbed into one of the company Ford Tauruses (Tauri???) and set out for the pipeline. No conversation. No radio. Just driving. We drove for nearly 2 hours, 90% of which was spent on practically unmarked country roads getting further and further from civilization.

I gathered that we had arrived at our destination when he said, "this is it."

What's it? We're in the middle of a goddamn single lane road in the middle of goddamn nowhere. We haven't even seen a farmhouse in like 10 minutes.

But to my shock and horror, "this" wasn't exactly "it" yet because then he pulled off the goddamn single-lane country road and started driving across a fucking cornfield. I'm not exaggerating this one bit. We were driving in a Ford Taurus across a fucking cornfield. When we reached what appeared to be the furthest point from anything else on the planet, he stopped the car and turned it off. Oh man, I was so scared. I thought for sure he was going into a Vietnam flashback and he was going to be like, "so, Charlie, we meet again. How about I give you a 10 second head start? You start running into the jungle there, and I'll count to 10 before I open up on this gatling gun. How do you like that, Charlie?"

Instead we just sat there, for like 20 minutes. Finally he announced, "I have to take a leak."

What??? Where?

He got out of the car, walked to the back, and took care of business right there.

Oh man, this is so messed up…

Worst of all, I had to pee too.

He got back in the car but I didn't want to whiz out there, so I just sat for as long as I could. If ever there was a time for the phrase, "you should have gone before you left," it was then and there.

Another 15 minutes went by while we waited. For what? I didn't know. Finally I couldn't take it any more so in my biggest big boy voice I said, "I have to take a leak," got out, and went to the back of the car, carefully avoiding the puddle. I was standing back there just thinking to myself, "man, this is so messed up. What the hell are we doing here, man? You're standing in the middle of a cornfield right now not knowing what the hell is going on. We just want to go home, drink a couple 40's, and call it a night..." If that wasn't messed up enough, standing there doing my business, I looked up and was like, "What? The? Fuck?" as I saw a car driving across the cornfield directly towards me. "No way, man. No way this is happening right now…" But it was. To be clear, I was standing in the middle of a cornfield; no other signs of civilization for miles and miles; taking a leak; and a goddamn car was driving across the cornfield directly towards me.

I was still standing there when the car pulled up in front of me and two grizzly looking dudes got out of the car.

The look on my face had to have said, "Uhhhh…." While the thought in my head was "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I suppose to a certain extent I was glad they weren't both wearing black suits like it was some crazy messed up scene from the X-Files, but that was just a small comfort at the time.

Old Boy jumped out of our Taurus and met us at the back of our car and made some introductions, standing amid two puddles. The two new dudes were guys that worked on the pipeline and they looked like it. The ensuing conversation went like this:

Old Boy: "So this is the spot."

Pipeliners: "Right here?"

Old Boy: "Yup."

Pipeliners: "Alright then."

Me: Where the fuck is the spot and what the fuck is happening here?

We walked around for several more minutes through the cornfield, periodically going through the same conversation:

Old Boy: "Here's another one."

Pipeliners: "Right here?"

Old Boy: "Yup." 

Me: What??? Where? What are we doing here???

After about 30 minutes of that, we shook hands, got back in our cars, and drove out of the cornfield and back to the office. That was it. No shit.

The next six months was a lot of the same, though I became much more conscious about going before we left the office for anything.