My hayfever has been kicking my tail and I’m sick of it. Sick of the sneezing, sick of the nose blowing, sick of the sneezing some more.
This time we discuss going to Open House with our gaze locked, Melissa working from home, The Hudson Original, the Dan Klass dot com blog, ID3 Podcast Magazine, and guys in matching polos and hats.
JUST SAY NO, PEOPLE!
Action Dads will hunt you down. Or, at least think about it on the way to therapy.
This week’s song: Plastik Society by Occupant
Hey Dan…
get some guaifenesin for you nasal junk…
(it’s over the counter, has brand name like humibid or musinex…)
knock it right out…
seriously…
Psyched you made the move to WordPress so that I can finally comment. Drop me an e-mail and I can help you make some tweaks to cut down on the spam.
As far as “action dads” and our kids I’ve always told my wife that if anyone ever hurt our kids that she should hug me good bye because I’d be in jail by the time I was done with them.
Looking forward to the new video cast!
Hi Dan,
I love the podcast. I wanted to admit that I’m one of those “don’t look at me” persons you’ve refered to in your shows. I live in a small Texas town where everyone knows your “bidness”. My reasons for avoiding people are similar to your reason for leaving out the back door of your house. If I say hello, it invites a long conversation.
In my town everyone shops at the same grocery store…I just want to get in and get out…but if I see someone who knows me, they want my life story when all I wanted was to get a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread.
I’m an otherwise friendly person. I have experienced the avoidance of eyecontact you mentioned…There seems to be two types. One, to get in and out of a store with your gallon of milk and loaf of bread…or the stuck-up “you’re beneath me and I can’t been seen in public aknowleding your existance”. I recently went to my 10 year highschool reunion…which was in a goat pasture, no joke…The “popular” kids were still forming clicks. They never wandered accross the room to speak to the underlings…which I was apart of. I only had one person from the “click” speak to me. She asked what I and my husband did for a living. I said “I’m an art director, and my husband is a cabinet maker.” She smirked and replied…”flfff….What a combination”.
Action Dads: Yeah, I’d like to think I would do the Charles Bronson/Steven Seagal thing. In reality, I’m sure I’d be a mess though.
Door-to-door: One of the last “sales people” to come to my door starts “polishing” the brass door handle on my screen door with a 3M scouring pad, saying her product would make it shine. Yeah, abrasives cause a shine for a short time, then the handle starts tarnishing because what she has done in reality is strip the lacquer off of the handle! Grrrr….
Dude… allergies suck raw eggs through dirty socks… or something like that.
I’ve been taking Allegra for the last few years with positive results for my allergies, and have heard tons of horror stories like yours. “Yea, I took blah-de-blah for a bunch of years, and it doesn’t work anymore…” I’ve not hit a bad stretch yet… touch wood…
I have discovered that these projects and parental interactions don’t exist at the same level with Homeschoolers. There was an international day at one of the recen Homeschooler meetings, and all the parents talked to each other and the kids about where their ancestors came from, how they self-identified… etc. It’s more like a graduate student luncheon and less like a junior high school event.
I’ve not yet gone back to any high school reunions, because I don’t want to deal with all the crud therein.
My fear with the spammers and the blog spammers is that the reason they keep posting Viagra spam on your website (and mine) is that some jackass somewhere is clicking on these links. Otherwise, why would they keep doing this.
BTW, Akismet has a plugin for wordpress that works great to block comment spam.
The Two David Chases:A Dan Klass Mystery Novel…
Dude, Dan.
I’m totally feeling the allergies. It happens to me every spring. It bites the dust. My allergy medicines aren’t helping much either. >_>
I reeeeeally hope this goes away soon.
The thing with the don’t look at me person is that after the usually niceties there mind just goes blank and on the inside there thinking “oohh my god what do I say now to that person I hardly know” well my advice is just say something anything because saying something is better than nothing and standing there transfixed on some inanimate object just looks wrong
Telemarketers well there just doing a job of sorts . However my idea is if you want personnel information about me my buying habits likes or dislikes well you can just start and pay for this information. So if you want it that bad pay for it and get rid off all telemarketers.
Hi Dan,
I sympathize with the allergies. My daughter sneezes every morning when she goes outside from March to October. She seems to have allergies to many types of plants that flower at different times. Over the counter medication seems to do the trick. She might disagree.
As both the recipient and administrator of listservs, I am constantly fighting off spam. On listservs at my university they spare us the Viagra sales pitch but we are offered every type of Rolex and other jewellery items available on the market as well as computer software and hardware in “increadible”, “out of this world”, or “one of a kind” deals. My delete finger is getting a pretty good workout on a daily basis.
The new spam of late is sending jpg images so not only are they irritating us to h*** but they are wasting valuable space in our email boxes. They must be making some good money to justify spamming us with such tenacity.
Hi Dan,
I just started listening to your show and I listened to it this evening at 12:00 and listened to it all the way through. So show 74 is the one to which I lost my the bitterest pill virginity. Anyway I thought your show was pretty funny and I like the observations you make about life but what prompted me to write was that I laughed hysterically, uncontrollably and unreasonably when you started making the “oooohhhh” sound that the remodeling salesman made. Holy crap I don’t know how that’s so funny but it just is and I promise to listen to each and every one of your shows from here on out and comment afterwards (so you know I’m listening) if you could somehow fit that “ooooohhh” noise into some of your subsequent shows.
Thanks,
Andrew
Dan:
Lovely show.
It’s hard to strike a balance between not trying to treat another person badly (especially one who is just trying to make a living selling stuff door to door or on the phone) and trying to live an uninterrupted life.
In California, I think you must be taken off the call list if you say: “Please take me off your list.” So that’s the first thing I say, as well as: “Thanks for calling and have a good night.”
Of course, if the kids are screaming, my wife’s not home from work yet, and the telemarketer calls, I’m usually rude as hell. You see, after hours with the kids, juggling dinner, demands to play Crazy Eights, and so on…I have, well, a lot of rage to give and the person who bugs me first usually gets it. Actually it’s better that the telemarketer calls rather than the wife gets home.
henry
PS: It’s sweet that you are all working out of the house now. However, in the future, you might want to think about renting a tiny little space somewhere in a cheap neighborhood for office work.
I have been having a really awful week. I wont bore you with the details, suffice to say lots of crappy things happening to make feel blurk. Last night I decided to treat myself to an hour away from the chaos (both at work and at home) and went for a walk to a local coffee shop. I allowed myself the added pleasure of episode #74 as accompaniment.
By the time I got to your description of the salesman setlling himself down on your front porch I was laughing so hard coffee was dribbling out of my nose. I honestly don’t remember the last time I laughed as much.
You have a true gift for storytelling Dan. Thanks for the cheer up.
Hey Dan,
Great great show. Loved the flow of the whole thing.
I agree with the policy of NO! when dealing with phone solicitors. Here’s what I do with them:
I listen attentively and politely for about 15 seconds – giving them every reason to believe that I’m a prospective buyer – then I say something like “Can you hang on? Someone’s at the door.” They say “Sure!” and then I just leave the phone off the hook for the next half hour or so.
Not only does this give me the satisfaction of wasting THEIR time and inconveniencing THEM, it also cuts down on the number of other calls they can make.
Fight the good fight, Brutha.
Akismet is great for WordPress spam. Works for me.
My wife says I’m rude, but I hang up on/walk away from any and all people selling things before they get the third word out of their mouth. I once said to a guy on the phone “guess how many things I have purchased over the phone? Answer 0” I don’t care if you are selling the elixir of life, I don’t buy over the phone.
Dear Dan
Thanks for a lovely show, man. Just great.
So professional, yet so unemployed. What’s the world coming to?
You are having a danish fan i Bruxelles.
“how can i change my mind about being broke?!?”
…i had to pause this one to recover. great line, superb show!
thanks,
aron
/budapest, hungary/
First time poster. Love the show. Quite a varied flow.
From the title of this episode, I thought you were advocating “Just say No” to going to Parent’s Night. Not very “Action Dad”. More like, to paraphrase Cush, “the Anti Action Dad”.
You don’t suppose that people’s avoiding eye contact with you had anything to do with the fact that you were streaming fluids from every (visible) orifice do you?
Okay, I know. They were doing it with everyone else, too. Jenny makes a good point about the barrier against UCI (unwelcome conversational involvement). A lot of surface chatter is pretty inane, not very interesting and difficult to escape politely. Better to be a little rude to everyone than have to choose between boredom and a lot rude to one person?
Andrew: good thing that, when you lost your BP virginity, it just so happened you were (necessarily) already on The Pill… ;^)
“How can I change my mind about being broke?” Sounds like a good straight line for someone of Tony Robbins’ ilk. Change your programming to increase your income or whatever.
I’m sure by now Chris, David and CC have convinced you to go with Akismet to attack your spam. It’s taken out over 500 spammers from my site in the last two days.
I’ve been enjoying TODCP, but you need to come up with a name for it or it’ll be an acronym forever.
I also really like hearing Melissa sit in with you. This is coming from somebody who is allergic to “couplecasts.” Your comfort level works.
I’m finally getting caught up on listening to your show. In regards to comment spam and WordPress, I agree with everybody above who mentioned Akismet but I also like to use Bad Behavior. While Akismet was blocking the 120 pieces of spam I was getting daily from showing up on my blog, I was still getting 120 pieces of spam a day. With Bad Behavior added into the mix, my spam count has dropped to 3-5 a day.
nice boy)) Thanks, Dan for sharing your life posts!