Language being more complicated just to sound nice. Click
here for a great excerpt of
snobbery from WSJ.
$6 dollar Cokes not worth the experience of the French
cafe.
Hyphenated first names
Government subsidies to U.S. French teachers to promote pro-France propaganda
35 hour work weeks mandated by law
French class, which has caused many youths great pain;
the ill-effects can linger even after several years
Gerard Depardieu
Pansy food, especially cheeses that don't melt well.
Le Car
Air France pilots refusing to speak English, to the air
traffic control tower, creating unsafe situations due to
other airplanes not understanding. See here for a WSJ story on this.
Jean-Jacques Beineix, proponent of protectionism for the
French film industry.
****** Click for Special
Bonus Quote from a French tourist in Las Vegas on the
Flooding of July 1999!******
Here are my top 12 tips
for when you have nothing to do at work:
Take a trip to a new bathroom to do
your business. You may find a nicer one than is on your
floor that you'll want to return to when you need that
extra special experience. If male, pick a floor such as
HR that is predominately female and vice versa to
increase the odds of a cleaner environment.
Internet is obvious, but surfing wisely is not easy.
When reading newspapers, quickly copy and paste stories into a word document
with no formatting. This limits the time on the net and allows you to read
your collection of stories all at once while appearing legitimate business
memos. I recommend your local paper plus the Wall Street Journal and The New
York Times. Always hover over alt-tab, use small fonts, turn off animation
(and pictures if you don't need them), and use small toolbar icons with no
text and put on one line with drop-down menus with the address bar by itself
on the next line. Set task bar on autohide, so web page is not shown even
when another window is up. You can also print out the news, but I like to
save paper usually unless I plan to take the reading for lunch.
Bring an apple. When ready to eat,
get up and wash it in the sink. Go back to cube. Eat. Get
up to throw in break room garbage so not to stink up your
trash can. Go into bathroom to wash hands. Go back to
cube, get mug, go back to break room, fill up at water
cooler to wash out the acidic taste of the apple. This
can kill a good 15 minutes if you have your technique
down. Extended version has you washing out your mug for a
couple minutes.
Email a bunch of people throughout
the day so you will always have some conversation going
on.
Check your home voice mail a couple
times an hour.
Check your stocks once a minute
during market hours. Make some trades if you have the
money or want to day trade. I recommend Datek Online.
Check your mutual fund prices,
updated at 2:50pm on Yahoo.
Check the weather, updated at 4:00pm on Yahoo (for
San Francisco, at least.) Watch the Weather Channel's Doppler radar when sever
weather hits.
ALWAYS leave the premises for lunch. Even if you bring
your own or get something quick, enjoy the outside and read a book or get
some exercise.
Keep a Excel file recording daily statistics of your
lunches with graphs and analysis. This will give you
something to do after returning from lunch and make you
look forward to getting back to update the file. In
addition, you will enjoy planning out your lunch right in
the morning when you get in.
Engage a co-worker in conversation
beginning with "You know, it doesn't feel
like a Wednesday today." This will be sure to start
an exchange for at least a couple minutes, maybe more as
others overhear and join in.
Sign up for
online and/or regular consumer surveys.
Here are my top 12 reasons why I despise McDonalds:
Commercials that are repulsive like the one where the 5-year old kid who
has a single mom for whom he scrounges up change from the house and buys a
29 cent hamburger to cheer her up on her birthday when no one will celebrate
with her.
Incredibly slow special orders when I used to go as a child made me the
scorn of my brother who blamed me for the extra time it took for our food
to come out.
Portrayal in ads of inner city youths gaining respect from their peers for
getting a job at the Mc.
That Mc smell stinks up any enclosed area.
That scam promotion where you had to buy a full-priced drink and fries to
get the discounted sad Big Mac.
Chicken McNuggets use the same meat as Slim Jims, but without the spices.
Special "Chinese Chicken" feature is simply McNuggets in a Chinese
take-out box with "apricot sauce."
Fake Shake.
Mcs around the world give the US a bad name.
Hasn't had a meaningful new menu item (that is good) in my lifetime, compared
with Wendy's which comes out with innovative tasty items frequently.
Eric's First Fries.
It physically sickens me to think that somebody purchased this item.
New ad (9/99) where kid asks his dad if he can get a Happy Meal and then
sees this even younger kid getting a happy meal so the kid feels embarrassed
and then touchingly orders a Big Mac like his dad (because he's a big boy
now) signifying the passage of time and that "he is really growing up
so fast." Let us hope that "his first Big Mac" does not become
a standard milestone in Americans baby books. Upon viewing this commercial
again, I notice that when the kid asks for the Happy Meal, the dad gets this
look like his kid is a fairy or something (sort of like telling your dad you
want to start up ballet instead of football and he says ok, but is suspicious)
and becomes so proud when he orders the Big Mac like his old man. Actually,
the after-Big-Mac look could be construed as relief that his son isn't on
the sissy track in life.
