Sean is just some guy who lives in the Twin Cities. Updates to this blog are at random intervals.

30 December 1999 - As the waning days of the 1900s continue to quickly pass by, I thought I'd try to get in one final word before the momentous crossing of the threshold into 2000 is upon us. Lately at the place of my work, a lot of construction and remodeling has been being done. When my office building was first built, all the interior colors were mostly drab beiges, yellows, and off-whites, all surrounding neat, orderly rows of gray rectangular cubicles pretty much throughout. Not particularly interesting, but I never really had any complaints about it. But in the past year or two, the company has been putting a lot of money into giving the place a warmer look-and-feel; colored patterns on the carpets instead of boring browns, bright oranges and purples on the walls replacing the whites and grays, interior walls and hallways at non-perpendicular angles or curves, and transparent conference room walls and offices. It's definitely a little nicer around there now, but as I said, I never had a problem with the way they had it previously. Now had they saved some of their money on construction costs and sent it some more of it my way, that would've been something to really cheer about. So anyway, one morning a couple months ago I was walking to my cubicle, and I noticed that they had someone carve out a six-foot section of drywall in one of the busier hallways, and install a little bench, set into the wall. It was facing a huge window that overlooked the parking lot, some nearby houses, and some hills on the horizon. So presumably a couple people could take their lunch there or something and spend their break looking out the window and gazing at the outdoors. I say "presumably", because I never used it myself. And because yesterday I came into work and noticed that after only two months, the bench was gone. And the drywall that had been carved out of the hallway wall had been replaced, and obviously it's going to soon be painted over again. Bench, we hardly knew ye. (I think this might be the definition of having a sucky job. One day your supervisor tells you to "take that blank wall and put in a bench." You spend a couple days doing so. Then less than two months later your supervisor tells you to "take that bench out and put in a blank wall.") But anyway, I must not have been the only one to notice the short and abrupt end of the bench's lifetime. Because right where I saw the empty spot where the bench used to be, someone had written out a note and affixed it to the wall. It read, "Not Y2K compliant." 8 December 1999 - I found an interesting web page today, where you can enter in your birth date, and it calculates the exact number of days that you've been alive. So I type my birthday in, and the web page tells me that as of December 8, 1999, I am 10,084 days old. It's those last couple of thousand that seem to go by the fastest. But anyway, I suddenly remember that I had stumbled upon this same page, or a similar one, a year or so ago, and at that time, I remembered being a little excited about the fact that my ten-thousandth day was coming up. Kind of like the same feeling you get when you watch your car odometer roll over. And even though no one else ever does, I figured that I'd celebrate the big one-oh-oh-oh-oh somehow, maybe baking a cake, buying a present for myself, or maybe bringing in donuts for everybody at work. But on September 15th of this year, the day passed without any fanfare whatsoever. For awhile there I had been looking forward to it, but in the end I just plain forgot. And now that it's too late, I'm feeling kind of bummed. 5 December 1999 - So it's December, and as usual I'm trying to get all of my Christmas shopping done for the year on the same day, so I can get it over with and then won't have to deal with it again for another twelve months. Except this particular holiday season it's a little harder than usual, because now, unlike the past few years, I have a girlfriend to shop for also. What's worse, she refuses to give me any indication of anything that she would like me to get her. "I don't know what I want," Cindy says. "I really liked the present that you got me for my birthday. I didn't tell you what to get then, either." (For her birthday I got her a necklace with a heart pendant.) Fortunately I can employ elementary logic and conclude that, if her not telling me what she wants as a gift results in her getting a present that she likes, then consequently, if this Christmas I get her something that she doesn't actually like, in the future she will start hinting around to me what she wants. And then in the future my shopping distress will be eased somewhat and I'll be happy. However, contrary to popular belief, I'm not a total idiot and therefore I can't actually dare try this strategy. At least not on purpose. So that's why I'm at Target this particular day, agonizing over what I ought to get her. Anyway, after finally deciding against getting her a Sega Dreamcast and NFL2K cartridge ("can I borrow that?"), I'm on my way out the door. But on the way out, I walk by the service desk, and I notice a prominent sign above the desk with the large LED numbers "641". And since it's only half past five, I wonder why their clock is so far off. Until I realize that the sign isn't displaying the time, but rather is one of those electronic "Now serving" signs, where when you get to the service desk you take a slip of paper with a number on it, and they increment the number as they process each customer who's waiting. Now, last time I was at this Target, they had a similar electronic sign, but the old one was only equipped with two digits, thus being able to handle only one hundred unique numbers at a time. So, sometime since I was there last, someone at Target decided that it was worth the time, cost, and trouble to replace the old system with this new one. Apparently someone realized that if there were more than a hundred people waiting in line, not everyone would have a unique number, and then the whole system would collapse. Similar to the now-famous Y2K problem, this was Target's potential "NS1C" problem. Anyway, I guess this story has no point to it at all. Other than to say that if this Target is making allowances for up to a thousand people simultaneously waiting in line at the service desk, I'm not going to shop there anymore. 15 November 1999 - So, congratulations to my friend Tom, whom as of last Wednesday is now the proud father of a baby boy, Nathan Thomas Johnson. Nathan is an okay name, I guess. It wasn't one of mine, though. Needless to say, for the past few months, Tom, Tom's wife, and myself had spent a lot of time thinking up potential names for the new child. Though I strongly suspect that the input from a particular one of the three of us was given considerably less weight than the other two. I'm starting to get older; a lot of my friends seem to be starting their families lately. In addition to my friend Tom, my friends Brian and Nikki have a child due in four months, and now I've just heard that my friends Leif and Rebecca are expecting as well. My main problem is, no one seems to like the names that I come up with. For example, I figured that with a bland last name like "Johnson", the first name of a new child needs to be particularly memorable. "Johnny" would've been my first choice. "Johnny Johnson." A new movie coming out soon inspired another of my picks, "Ichabod". No one names their kid Ichabod any more. Meanwhile, out of nowhere "Dakota" is suddenly a hugely popular name. I like "Ichabod" way better than "Dakota". Isn't Dakota an Indian word meaning "huge flat expanse of dirt"? Anyway, I made a few more suggestions. I'm not sure I got to "Wolfgang" before Tom basically stopped listening to what I was saying. But even though my suggestions all struck out with Tom, I've got lots more friends of childbearing age. For example, it's been pretty well established that our mutual friends Brian and Nikki would never have gotten married if it weren't for the actions of me and my friend Rajiv. Therefore, it's only logical that they should name their firstborn child after us. Obviously "Sean Rajiv Tieman" would be good if it's a boy, and perhaps "Rajiv Sean Tieman" if it's a girl. Over the last couple years a guy that I used to work with had a couple of daughters. The first one was named "Emma", and the second they named "Abby". When he first told me the name of his newborn second daughter I immediately noted the vowel/double consonant/vowel pattern going there. "Yes," he admitted, "we thought about that, and that was kind of a factor in the naming decision." So I assume that this means that when he finally has a son, he gets to name it "Otto". Or perhaps, "Iggy". But he hasn't yet. Perhaps it's just as well. As for my friend Leif, I haven't started campaigning for any baby names yet. I probably should start soon. Actually, what I really need to do is start campaigning for the name I have in mind for the future child of my friend Randy Green and his wife. Even though he and his wife don't actually have any children on the way, and as a matter of fact aren't planning to have any anytime soon, I probably need to start as soon as possible regardless. Because the name that I have in mind for the newborn might require several years of persuading: "Soylent". 18 October 1999 - I'm quite the considerate boyfriend So I'm back in Wausau, spending the weekend with Cindy. On Saturday night we go out to dinner with our friends Brian and Nikki, and afterwards the four of us are in my parents' dining room getting ready to play a new game that they've brought. So we clear off the table to lay out the game board and all the cards and everything, and it turns out the dining room table is kind of grimy and dusty and has a few crumbs and stuff from the last meal eaten there. I immediately get up and go to the kitchen to get a towel to clean up before we play. As I'm coming back with the damp cloth, Nikki comments, "Well, I see that you're a lot better at cleaning off the table here than at our house. At our house, Brian is pretty bad at doing that kind of thing." Glad to be one-upping my friend in the tidying-up and therefore also in the general couplehood department, I wipe off the table with the towel. "There," I say, finishing with a flourish. "So I'm way better than Brian, huh?" "No, you're not," Nikki answers, "because instead of picking it up with that rag, you've just dumped it all right onto your girlfriend," and I turn to see that Cindy has stood up and is busy brushing off all of the crumbs and food residue that, obliviously, I've just pushed right off the table and onto her sweater and into her lap. Oh, well. Cindy's been going out with me for almost five months. I would guess she's probably gotten used to me always doing this kind of thing by now. 11 October 1999 - It's several years before the present, and me and a group of my best friends are down in the basement of my parents' house, playing a role-playing game called "Call of Cthulhu". If you're unfamiliar with role-playing games, let me just say that they're games where one person in the group has knowledge of the entire scenario that the others are playing out, and all the other players just pretend that they're characters within the plot of that scenario usually trying to achieve some goal of some sort. The goal usually varies with the particular RPG that you're playing; for example, in the well-known "Dungeons and Dragons" game, usually the idea is to just go around and kill monsters and collect treasure. However, our favorite game is "Call of Cthulhu", which is a horror-based game based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and set in the twentieth century. It's a little more intellectual and complex than D&D and many other of the fantasy games. When playing Cthulhu the idea is usually to solve a mystery of some sort, perhaps searching for a kidnapped child, or investigating the cause of a mysterious suicide. And being a horror-based game and everything, the outcome of the game often ends up in the brutal, gory, unholy slayings of most of our characters. Sounds fun, huh? But actually, it is a lot of fun. And on this particular day my friend Nikki is running the scenario, and we're all playing characters that are frantically searching for a friend of ours who abruptly disappeared the evening before. One of our only clues was that the last time we saw the missing girl, she was heading off to see the travelling circus which had just come into town that evening. And for some reason which I no longer remember, the clues that we had gathered so far strongly pointed at the circus's own clown troupe as being somehow behind the disappearance. It might've been something that we overheard the clowns saying, or maybe our characters had found a shredded cloth fragment of a clown suit in some remote woods or something. Anyway, our characters were now canvassing the circus grounds, wondering if we could find an eyewitness that could tell us whether the clowns had been acting suspicious lately. And, inspired, I have my character approach one of the circus workmen, a man who has probably been in a position to observe the clowns' actions all day long. "Okay", I say to Nikki (my friend who is running the game), "I go up to the workman and ask him if he's noticed the clowns at all that day." Nikki says, "The workman answers, 'Yes, I have, they've been here for several hours, entertaining the patrons. Why do you want to know?'" "Those clowns", I say, "did you see them doing anything funny?" [I'll pause briefly here to wait for those of you who haven't yet gotten the joke.] I'm sorry, but I just absolutely love that line. Even if (which is apparently the case from telling other people this story) nobody else in the world does. We played this particular game at least three years ago and I'll never forget it. In fact, I'm actually somewhat saddened that I may never again in my life experience the joy of sudden revelation in making another witticism as divinely inspired as that one. But oh, well. Note: For those of you readers who need closure, I think at the end of that game all our characters got cut up with chainsaws by a bunch of insane clowns. 16 September 1999 - This is something I just read, off of the ABCNEWS.com news website: [Physicist David] Melville is preoccupied with what he regards as the most dangerous event in human history: an experiment, scheduled for November, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. Brookhaven has a device, called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, that has the world's physicists tremendously excited. Scientists believe they can use the collider to duplicate the conditions that prevailed milliseconds after the Big Bang, when the universe consisted of a primordial soup called the quark-gluon plasma....The only problem, according to David Melville's panicky e-mail, is that, "It has been theorized by Steven Hawking that from this quark-gluon plasma other forms of matter are also produced. The most dangerous being a black hole." Should this occur, according to Melville, "The black hole would first eat its way down toward the center of Earth and consume from the inside out. It would not be a good time to be around to see this. In the end ALL of Earth would be consumed." That's just swell. Just when I've finally found a girlfriend. 12 September 1999 - When I first started working at my current job, I spent my lunch break with a different group of people than I do now. They were good guys and everything, still are in fact, but when football season rolled around, it seemed that a lot of them would spend the entire lunch break talking about their fantasy football teams. Now, I'm as big of a fan of the NFL as anybody else, and I'm especially eager to talk about the wins and woes of my favorite team, the Green Bay Packers. But in my opinion there was nothing more boring then listening to some fantasy owner drone on about the performance of their team last Sunday, their "fantasy" team, called that because after all, it doesn't actually really exist. That was, of course, before I became one of them. So that's fair warning for you non-football fans out there; I strongly suggest to those of you that you quit reading now, and come back next week or next month when I think of something else to write about, for example, like what happened after I sprayed "Off!" on all my house plants to kill the bugs that were living on them. Or maybe some anecdote about the latest problems with my golf game. Or perhaps even my complaints about how hard it is sometimes to open those little ketchup packets. Anyway, if you're still actually reading this, I'm guessing that there's a possibility that today, the first day of the 1999 regular season, you might've caught a game or two on the tube. And if so, there's a good chance that you probably saw the devastating injury that occurred today, during the Patriots-Jets game. New York quarterback Vinny Testaverde, whom many expected to lead his team to the Super Bowl this year, went down with an Achilles tendon rupture, and now he's going to be out for all of 1999, taking his own and most likely his whole team's championship aspirations for this season. And what's especially tragic is that Vinny wasn't even tackled on the play that he went down. He was just standing there on the field after handing the ball off to the running back, planted his foot wrong, and went down, completely untouched. It was as if the finger of God just came and struck him down. Well, it wasn't the finger of God. It was me. Because, it seems that I have a certain gift. A gift enabling me to destroy promising football players. Via my fantasy football team. I've been playing in my fantasy league for five years now, and every single year my first-round draft pick has been a bust. And I don't nail the players just anytime, either; I get them right away in the season, usually the first game or two. Four years ago, my first year of trying fantasy football, I happened to draw the number one pick, and so I selected San Francisco quarterback Steve Young, who had just come off his best year ever and was the number one pick in a lot of fantasy leagues. He got injured near the beginning of the season and was out for more than half the year, making his statistics for 1995 wholeheartedly mediocre. And the 49ers haven't been the same since. The next year I played conservative and decided upon a solid running back in the first-round and selected Chris Warren of the Seahawks. For the past several years he had consistently run for a thousand-plus yards, and in the last two seasons he had scored eleven, then sixteen touchdowns for that year. Four weeks with him on my team and he was sitting on the Seattle bench. He certainly hasn't been the same player since. He's now at Dallas as a backup not getting any playing time. Probably next year he'll still be working in Dallas, though maybe for the Golden Arches instead of the Cowboys. In 1997 I figured enough was enough and picked Jerry Rice in the first round. He hadn't missed a game in twelve years and held the record for playing the longest string of continuous games in the NFL. So I figured he and I were pretty safe. He was on my roster for approximately an hour that season before an injury sidelined him and then he missed the next fifteen games. Sorry, Jerry. Last year, still believing that I was merely a victim of circumstance and coincidence, I was stupid enough to actually brave choose a Packer in the first round. So naturally that's why Dorsey Levens got injured in week two, of course was basically out for the entire season, and the Packers' then had no running game in 1998 and therefore did not make it to the Super Bowl for the first time in three years. Brought down an entire franchise. Never will I pick a Green Bay player again. And now, it's 1999, and it's still only the first week and my star quarterback, the position expected to score the most points for my team, is gone for the season with no chance of coming back. And that illustrates that my gift is getting even worse with time. When I got Steve Young, four years ago, at least he was only out temporarily and managed to come back near the end of the season. At least Chris "Would you like fries with that" Warren wasn't actually physically injured, though his career certainly was. But Rice and Levens did get hurt, experienced strong physical trauma, and they both missed almost their entire seasons. It's getting worse because this year Vinny wasn't even my first-round selection. This year it was Randy Moss, one of the reprehensible Vikings, picked just so at least I'd experience some modicum of satisfaction when I see his leg break. And he will...I guarantee that he surely will. So my gift is now getting more than one player at a time. His injury is tragic, but Vinny should count his blessings; he won't be playing football in 1999, but at least he's still alive. Because one of these days my gift is actually going to kill one of my players. It's just a matter of time. And I can't have the death of a football player on my conscience, even if it were a Viking. No matter how much I like to participate, I'm going to have to give up fantasy football for good. It's the price I'll have to pay. And Vinny, since you won't be playing for the Jets this year, you'll probably have a lot of free time on your hands. You may even be in your wheelchair in front of a computer reading pages on the web. If you are reading this, please believe that I'm genuinely sorry. It's a terrible injury, you did nothing to deserve it, and I sincerely didn't mean for me to do this to you. And if you'd need me to send you a few bucks, let me know. It really is the least I can do. 14 July 1999 - A quick tip that some of you may find useful: If you come home from a vacation, and turn on your computer, only to find that after sitting idle for more than a week, instead of booting up and loading Windows, the only thing that happens is that an ominous line pops up reading "Hard drive error", even after several repeated attempts, you might want to try the following. Carefully disconnect all the cords from the CPU box, slowly remove the box from it's location on or within your desk, hold the CPU about an inch or two above the floor, and then drop it. The result is that 1.) the loud sound it makes as it hits the floor, "THUNK", will prove to be of great satisfaction after an hour of frustration unsuccessfully trying to get the damn thing to start right. And 2.) in my case, afterward, the computer actually started booting up correctly. You're welcome. Note: Sean hereby absolves himself of any responsibility of the resulting consequences for any readers who actually follow his advice. 29 June 1999 - So about a month ago I was sitting there at work at my desk, just minding my own business, when an official Corporate Communication e-mail comes across the network. And, as usual, it's full of official-type employer stuff, such as the latest on who's been promoted, upcoming new employee services, which of the numerous lawsuits filed against the corporation have just been won, et cetera. And as usual my eyes quickly and vaguely gloss over everything, and I'm just about to click "Delete", when suddenly I happen to notice the following lines subtly hidden within: "We are pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Midwest Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Eagan to offer beverage-vending services. The new 20-ounce bottle machines and 12-ounce can machines will offer an expanded line of the most popular Coke products. New locations are also being identified for the placement of additional machines. (Pricing will remain the same.)" This is puzzling at first, because though it sounds vaguely like a Welcome New Development for we employees, it's a little odd because we already have many Coke machines, so adding new ones really isn't much of a change. And that we'll still be being charged the same substantially-over-wholesale price for the soda. But suddenly, given a little thought, the horror of it all suddenly strikes me. This is just their devious and underhanded way of telling us that due to the new agreement, we won't be getting more choices of Coke products but that theyll be removing the machines dispensing Pepsi products. My God, that means no more Diet Mountain Dew! You see, I really have no opinion in the eternal Coke vs. Pepsi debate. One brand of their sugar water really doesn't stike me as particularly better than the other. Their multi-millions spent on advertising is pretty much wasted on me, other than causing me to wonder exactly who it was and when they decided that cola flavor was supposed to be the dominant flavor in the soft drink industry anyway. Why did cola end up winning out over orange, for instance, or grape, root beer, the citrus drinks, that indescribable Dr.Pepper/Mr.Pibb flavor, or anything else for that matter? No one else seems to care about these kind of issues, but believe me, I do. It keeps me up at nights. But anyway, returning to the subject at hand... Of the myriads of soft drink flavors that are available, my favorite by far is the green-yellow citrus drink variety. Mountain Dew, Surge, Mello Yello, I like all of them. And of these, Diet Mountain Dew the most, since it's the only one of these drinks that come in a diet version thus allowing me to somehow help contain my fatness level to a barely acceptable degree. And since I don't drink coffee (and why millions of people the world over overwhelmingly seem to prefer to drink something that to my palate tastes exactly like dirt will be the subject of a future article in this forum), Diet Mountain Dew is pretty much all that I have, and I drink it morning, noon, and night. A lot of it. Enough that I once one day found an article from USA Today proclaiming that Americans drink on average 1.6 cans of soft drinks a day. And I e-mailed it to all my friends laughing at the blooper in the headline where they obviously misplaced the decimal point. Well, needless to say, after reading the announcment I immediately went around to all of my coworkers appraising them of the horible news, where their sympathies took the form of a gamut of responses, running from "Who cares?", "I always drink Coke anyway", and "Don't you actually ever do real work around here, Sean?". Anyway, it's a month later, and the Pepsi-product machines have been removed, and so has my work supply of Diet Mountain Dew. And there is no acceptable Coke-compatible version of Diet Mountain Dew to switch to. Mello Yello and Surge don't have diet varieties, even if the new machines would carry them, which they don't; all they have is Coke, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Sprite, and that vile Fresca. Nevertheless, within a few weeks I was able to find a few others like me, sympathizers with my cause. "What happened to the Diet Mountain Dew?! What is this, Russia?!" is our rallying cry. We're a small minority, but an extremely vocal one, and determined to get results. Our first tactic was to go to our managers and complain directly, but unfortunately that has been fruitless so far. The problem is that the company is getting a special deal from Coke now they've agreed to get rid of the Pepsi machines and they're saving a lot of money, the sell-outs. I thought about pointing out that the company is losing quite a bit of money in programmer hours just because Diet Mountain Dew deprivation is causes me to just sleep in my cube until about eleven a.m. or so, but my performance review is coming up so I'm inclined to wait before making that particular point. So now, some of us have resorted to schlepping cases of Diet Mountain Dew into our cubes every Monday morning or so, and going to the trouble of getting ice from the machines in the cafeteria. But that would be admitting defeat, and I'm not yet prepared to do that. Some of the more militant of us are planning on a bout of civil disobedience in the coming months, and failing that, armed insurrection. Because, dammit, we're talking about my God-given right to drink Diet Mountain Dew in the workplace. So what that in the past couple of months I've saved a couple hundred dollars in change from the pop machines. And that my morning caffeine headaches seem to have ceased somewhat, and the occasional pains in the pit of my stomach due to excessive carbonation have completely gone. It's principle we're talking about here. 3 June 1999 - So my new Dodge Avenger isn't so new any more, and I'm having trouble getting it to start. Sitting in my garage, it turns over perfectly fine, but the engine doesn't seem to fire. And I check the odometer, and I am not making this up, it reads 35,990 miles. So even if I do somehow get it started, the very act of getting it to the dealership where I bought it will expire the warranty. Sigh. Using my total repository of automobile repair knowledge, I thoroughly analyze the situation, weigh all the possible causes of the problem and various solutions remedying the situation, and then decide to remain in the driver's seat and just try to start it again, because that's pretty much the only thing I can think of to do. Again the car doesn't start, so I try it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Because dammit, I am not going to lose to my own car in a battle of wills. And amazingly enough, after about twenty minutes of trying, inexplicably, the car starts right up. Hey, problem's solved! Relieved, I drive to work, whistling, and forget about the incident completely. And thereafter, the car starts up and drives fine. Until about two weeks later, when the same thing happens again, this time in the grocery store parking lot. This goes on for several months. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the car acts perfectly fine, but once in awhile, at seemingly random intervals, the car is reluctant to start until after many minutes of trying. And I can't figure out anything in common for those situations when it won't run, something, anything that would possibly be a clue to the cause of the problem. Sometimes it happens when it's hot outside, sometimes when it's cold. Sometimes when it's been in my garage all night, sometimes when the motor's only been off for a minute or so while I filled up with gas. Sometimes it doesn't happen for several weeks, sometimes it happens twice on the same day. When it's dry, when it's raining, in a box, with a fox, whatever. Totally unpredictable. I ask someone who knows more about cars than I do, which would be pretty much anyone, but specifically my father. My dad, who as it happens drives a Ford, says helpfully, "Your problem is that you didn't get a Ford." I go to my friend Brian. "Your problem is that you didn't get a Volkswagen," says Brian, whom, coincidentally enough, drives a Volkswagen. So finally, I do go ahead and take it to the dealer, which I know is going to be useless, because I know the problem isn't going to happen while they have it. Of course it won't. The ethereal combination of stars and planets isn't going to align for me in any situation where the car not starting would actually be useful to me. "We couldn't recreate your problem," the auto mechanic-type dude says, "and we started it successfully 257 times." And I'm gratified with this information, because I'm probably going to be charged at least a C-note for them not fixing the problem and at least they took the trouble of keeping an exceedingly accurate count for me. However, in an effort to locate the problem, they did equip my car with a "Co-Pilot", which turns out to be a little box with a button, and the box is apparently wired to the computer components in my car. I'm supposed to drive my car around for a couple weeks or so, and whenever the problem occurs again, I'm supposed to push the button and then take the Co-Pilot to the dealer where they can look at what the box recorded and then figure out what the problem is. Well, anyway, the problem still hasn't happened again, so right now I still have this Co-Pilot attached to my car. And my friend Randy is fascinated with it. He examines the box, with its single button, with some amusement. "Hey," he grins, "I hope you made sure they didn't connect this box with your car's self-destruct mechanism!" Funny joke. I actually had that deactivated long ago...I kept almost confusing it with my garage door opener. 19 April 1999 - It's Thursday morning, and I'm at work, and since it is Thursday morning that means I'm sitting at a conference table with about twenty of my co-workers at our weekly meeting. Our group leader, Julie, is going down a long list of work-type stuff, and suddenly she gets to a single bullet that just reads "October 12, 1999--". "So," Julie pauses dramatically, "I'll bet none of you know what that date is." "Sure I do," I interrupt, immediately. "Columbus Day." It just popped into my mind. Julie looks up and smiles. "You're kidding, right?" Why would I joke about that? "No," I answer. "It's Columbus Day. You asked if we knew what day it was." "You actually know when Columbus Day is?" And I'm genuinely surprised. Granted, Columbus Day isn't Christmas, but the date of October 12 isn't that obscure, is it? But perhaps it is. All my life, I've had just one real talent: an incredible ability to retain useless trivia. And I mean really useless. The diameter of the planet Jupiter? 88,000 miles. The first and last monarch of the nation of Albania? A guy named King Zog I. The atomic number of the element promethium? Sixty-one. Most populous U.S. city without either an NFL or MLB franchise? San Antonio, tenth-largest. All of this, plus countless more pieces of data I can spout off from memory without ever having to look up. This special ability I have does absolutely nothing for your social life, and gives you no special talent for actual practicable knowledge, like changing a flat tire, or figuring out where you left your keys. It does make you a whiz at Trivial Pursuit, however. But that has limited application. "Sean, okay, now you're just scaring me." Julie says. And I'm glad that I didn't go to the trouble of mentioning that although October 12th is the actual anniversary of Columbus's arrival to the New World, nowadays the observed holiday of Columbus Day is always moved to a Monday in order to create a three-day weekend for federal workers. "Well," continues Julie, "the real reason October 12 is on the list, is to make the happy announcement that one of us will be going on maternity leave that date." And she waves toward one of the women in our group. So apparently with my little harmless comment not only have I reinforced my reputation for obnoxiousness, I've also managed to step on what should've been my co-worker's special moment. Oh, well. Anyway, after the meeting, later that same day... I'm over by my friend Randy's cube, describing the latest CD that I've just gotten. "You wouldn't like it, though," I say to him, for my friend is of a more conservative bent than I. "It's kind of punkish." "Why?" asks Randy. "Who is it?" "It's The Offspring," I tell him. And our department secretary, who's twenty years old and whose cube is right next to mine and Randy's, makes a pleased exclamation. "I've got that one too. I love that CD!" she looks at me and grins. "I've just been listening to that one on my PC here, over and over and over. It's great!" Not that that little bit has anything to do with the first part of this story. But I just wanted to point out that although I may lack all the social graces, waste people's time in meetings, and display an annoying tendency to broadcast irrelevant trivia, at least I still happen to be in tune with what the kids are listening to nowadays. 10 April 1999 - So, this evening, for the fourth time this week, I've gone out to eat rather than taking the trouble to cook. Out of sheer laziness, I'm not afraid to admit. I've just washed my dishes, and I certainly would hate to get them dirty again by putting food on them, for God's sake. But anyway, usually that would mean that I've eaten Chinese food four times in the past seven days. I really love Chinese food. I bought a townhouse several months ago, and one of the reasons I liked my particular one is because despite Eagan being about 99% residential, there are three Chinese places within walking distance of my home, and four more lying directly on my short drive home from work. Plus there may be even a couple more that I don't know about. However, I can't indulge my penchant for broccoli and beef right now, because Monopoly season has begun. And for some unexplainable reason, I love playing McDonald's Monopoly. You'll never catch me buying any Minnesota scratchoff tickets at the gas station, pulltabs in bars, or picking any Powerball numbers, even when the prize goes up to $250 million and half of my Minnesota friends are driving thirty miles to a convenience store on the Wisconsin border "because it's always one of those damn Cheeseheads that win it." But come March, I eagerly trade Leann Chin's Peking chicken for a Super-Size Extra-Value meal and an opportunity to get four game pieces, one of which has the potential to get me a complete color group and therefore, a Nintendo 64, a vacation for four to Hawaii, or even possibly the ultimate grand prize, a million bucks. And I do eat the hamburger that comes with it, too. As I said, I'm not sure why this particular sweepstakes attracts me so much. I think it might be the gradual process of collecting the game pieces. The excitement of a big lottery, for example, is just over too fast--they call the numbers, and you've lost, that's it. However, with Monopoly, I see that I've got Atlantic, I've got Marvin Gardens; I'm two-thirds of the way there and it'll take just one more order of hash browns that will get me Ventnor Avenue and I can already feel the steering wheel, accelerator and leather seats of my new red Corvette convertible. Of course, the people at McDonald's, being extremely devious in designing their little promotion, did not just leave to the vagarities of chance the possibility of hordes of people just happening to collect all three of any particular color group. If they did that, this summer Lake Minnetonka would be jam-packed with sport boats each containing sport boat owners all of whom happened to get a hold of each one of the Greens. No, it probably hasn't escaped the attention of anybody who's played this game that one of the properties of each color is a lot rarer than the others. But, therein lies my edge. You see, previous to this year, I had a problem. Say that this evening I picked up a St. James Place. Normally, I would have no way of knowing whether this was one of the common ones, or if St. James Place was actually the elusive rare piece, only one of the one hundred twenty-five in the entire world, and it just happened that I hadn't yet eaten enough Big Macs to know that New York Avenue and Tennessee were the common ones. So I would be forced to buy lots of extra-value meals to find out for certain. How tragic it would be to obtain a St. James Place, and throw it away, thinking that there were millions of others just like it, when in reality it was the key to a state-of-the-art home entertainment center? However, due to nefarious sources that I cannot name here, I've discovered the secret. The one method, presumably previously known only to a few select McDonald's executives, of looking at a game piece and instantly knowing whether it's one of the prizewinning properties or rather just one of the mere common ones. And I'm willing to share the secret with all of my readers, if you promise not to reveal it to anyone else. Ready? Prepare to shield your computer monitors from any nearby eavesdroppers. This is it: the rare property is always, alphabetically, the last one in the set. So for example, of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, it's Kentucky which is the rare one. (Except the rule is broken for the dark blue group. Of Boardwalk and Park Place, it's the former which is the prizewinner. I can understand why they did this though. Park Place is Park Place, but Boardwalk is Boardwalk. In the real board game of Monopoly, Boardwalk is the Big Kahuna. With a hotel, its rent is $2000, several hundred more than anything else, and therefore it's only this property that must translate to a cool million in the real world. But trust me, this is the only exception, all the other color groups conform to the rule.) So that's the secret, and I've shared it with all of you. You're welcome, and armed with this knowledge I bid you good luck the next time you feel the urge for a quarter-pounder. Perhaps I can also tell you of another revelation I've had: the one secret that will always enable you to win if you end up playing that "Ten Chances" game on "The Price of Right". But I'll save that for another article. 26 March 1999 - So I've just finished playing two hours of doubles at the tennis club that I go to, and I'm standing in front of the pop machine in the lobby, going through my pockets seeing if I have enough change to get a Diet Coke for the drive home. And I notice that one of the tails of the quarters that I have in my pocket looks a little unusual; instead of an American eagle, it's the image of a guy mounted on a galloping horse. And because I feel that it's good for my ego to enrich my life with such minor victories, I exclaim out loud to everyone who happens to be in the room, "Ooo! I've finally gotten one of those new Delaware state quarters!" Usually whenever I make an outburst like this, I always get a loud, enthusiastic response from everyone interested, in other words, no one. But this time as it happens, a woman who is sitting near me actually responds. "Yeah, that's right, they have those now," she answers. "And I heard next month they're going to start making the Philadelphia ones." She's pretty near right, but I'm incapable of letting something like that just go. "Well, you mean Pennsylvania," I answer. "They're making a quarter for every state, five states per year, in order of admission to the union, and the next one is after Delaware is Pennsylvania. Philadelphia isn't a state." She pauses for a few moments, thinking. "No," she finally says, shaking her head. "I'm pretty sure my friend told me Philadelphia." Well, I guess I stand corrected. 12 March 1999 - It was a few months ago when, from nowhere, I received the following in an e-mail message: Hey Sean, This is going to be really awkward but I have the same name that you do. I was actually looking for my father's brother's address and I sort of stumbled across your site. Write me back if you have time. Sean Sandquist Now, you can imagine what kind of reaction this evoked in me. Deep-seated anger and resentment, needless to say. For years I had casually assumed that I was the only Sean Sandquist in the world. There are lots of "Sean"s, and certainly a fair amount of "Sandquist"s, but it seemed to me that "Sean Sandquist" had pleasant, mildly alliterative feel to it, and the fact that the moniker was an unusual blend of Irish and Scandinavian etymology made it likely that it was unique on the planet. And I had an understandable feeling of pride for this. Maybe, I suppose, those of you with boring, humdrum names, like "Randy Green" or "Tom Johnson", for example, may have difficuly comprehending this. Hell, if your name is "Tom Johnson" you probably already have three neighbors on your street with your name, and any chance at a modicum of nonconformity in your life was pretty much snuffed out at birth. (And, by the way, I mean no offense to my personal friend Tom Johnson, just in case he's reading this. Or for that matter to any of the other twenty million Tom Johnsons out there.) But anyway, with the arrival of a single e-mail, my once orderly universe was shattered forever. And there seemed to be little I could do about it--the hasty assumption of a pretentious middle initial wouldn't help me in this case; it turns out we're both "Sean R. Sandquist"s. And although a thought fleetingly crossed my mind to have the pretender, ahem, eliminated, even disregarding the moral implications, first, I really didn't know how to go about that sort of thing, and second, as the only other Sean Sandquist in the world I would undoubtedly be fingered as the obvious prime suspect. So there was nothing to do but exchange a few more e-mails, and find out more about this person. And I slowly came to realize that this Sean v2.0 was a relatively pleasant fellow, a student out East, and it certainly wasn't his fault that his parents had stolen his name from me. So I've now come to accept the fact of his existence, and can now grudgingly admit that there is indeed room in this world for two Sean Sandquists. But I'd like to warn you ahead of time, if in the near or distant future, you hear of a Sean R. Sandquist earning notoriety, for example of one emerging as a great writer, or saving dozens from a burning building, or perhaps being nominated Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I think you can assume that it's me. And if you see my name in, say, a pornographic chat room, well, assume that it's him. 7 February 1999 - It's been almost a month since I've last had an appointment, so I'm sitting placidly in the barber's chair while Joyce, the stylist whom I've been going to ever since I've moved to Eagan, works on me. And she's examining right above my forehead, where over the past year I've been undeniably getting noticeably, ahem, thinner. "You know what," she remarks, "it's really only a small surface area up here that you're losing hair. You really should think about giving Rogaine a try." I'm so glad to hear that the woman whom I'm paying to make me look beautiful has pretty much given up and is now urging me to resort to drugs. "Or," she continues, "you know what the main active ingredient in Rogaine is? It's basically the same thing as peppermint." Really. "So, maybe you could always try that instead." And before I can help it, a horrible image immediately leaps to my mind, of me at home, all the shades drawn, desperately lounging about in my living room with a bunch of Junior Mint halves stuck to the top of my head. Yep, I'm shuddering too. After all, even if [as a friend tells me] it's possible for one to obtain peppermint in leaf or oil form as opposed to slicing up boxed candy, what kind of culture do we live in, where a perfectly average, red-blooded American male might feel compelled enough to lose his sanity and go to such desperate measures to conceal the absolutely normal and inevitable signs of the fading of youth? Just because I'm no longer eighteen, and that my hairline is slightly higher than it used to be, is no reason to cast off all semblance of human dignity and to try rubbing on my head a substance that is, after all, supposed to be food. At least, not yet. 25 January 1999 - Winter has finally come to suburban Minnesota, and its arrival marks the end of the tennis, golf, and inline skating seasons, and usually introduces the Sean-mostly-sits-around-the-house-and-watches-a-lot-of-television season. But that's not completely all, this winter, because this January I managed to join a volleyball league. And I'm not ashamed to say that my particular team may easily be the most untalented group of software engineers that spontaneously decided to organize themselves into a sports team for no apparent reason. We dubbed ourselves "Spiked Punch", and let me assure you that that particular name is quite appropriate for our little assembly. It's not unusual for teams like ours to establish a tradition of going to the bar after every match to celebrate, win or lose. However, the tradition of also going to the bar and celebrating before every match will be ours alone. But, in any event, despite our awareness of our limitations, we've set the goal for our inaugural season to win at least one match. Not one game, mind you, but one match. Since a match is best of three, that means that not only do we actually have to win two games, but we have to win two games on the same night. Lofty goals, I know, but it's the only way to insure excellence. So our first match was scheduled for last Tuesday, and arriving at the gym, with our untapped skill and rookie enthusiasm fired up for the challenge, we promptly blanked our opponents 3-0 in an incredible upset victory. Astonishing! The Twin Cities got three inches of snow that evening, and the other team didn't show up. So they forfeited. On the way home, we played "We are the Champions". 17 January 1999 - So it's the 1998 football season, and after one big victory after another, everybody in Minnesota is absolutely convinced the the Vikings are going all the way to the Super Bowl. Vikings flags sprout on top of cars everywhere, "Purple Pride" towels are hung up in everyone's cubicles at work, and "fans" are suddenly constantly wearing Randy Moss and Randall Cunningham sweatshirts and jerseys. Where previous to this year they'd probably never bothered to watch more than two or three games on TV all season. And what's especially irritating is the indescribable hubris of them all. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune sports page has been adorned with a gold-and-purple "Road to Super Bowl XXXIII" header for months now. Friends of mine altered their vacation schedules around so they won't miss the January 31st game. Dozens of local sports magazines have been issued boldly proclaiming "The Vikings' Super Season". Half of the Twin Cities TV commercials jumped onto the bandwagon in the hopes that their inevitable march to victory will boost sales. In one that I've seen approximately 827 times, an especially unattractive Minnesota woman wearing trademark purple horns and gold braids sticks her face into the camera and sings, "We're goin' to Miami!" And since Minnesotans remember the past two Super Bowls, share a division with us, and can be a very jealous and resentful people, they concentrate all their gloating and smug glee on any and every Packer fan they can find. Like me. Over and over. Not that I am bitter. Well, this afternoon, at the NFC Championship game at the Minneapolis Metrodome, in overtime, the Atlanta Falcons defeated the Minnesota Vikings, 30-27. And I'm listening to the game on the radio, and immediately after Morten Andersen kicks the game-winning field goal, the blatantly slanted Minnesota announcers spend a few moments expressing their shock and dismay, and then cut to commercials. And the first thing on is an obviously previously produced advertisement of a local sporting goods store, which congratulates the Vikings on clinching their NFC championship, and invites the listening audience to come to their store this week and stock up on all of their Vikings' Super Bowl XXXIII merchandise. Hee. 10 January 1999 - So it was about ten degrees below zero a few evenings ago, and since the only people that would be out would be Minnesota people too insane or stupid to come in from the cold, I was contentedly settling back in my living room, fireplace blazing, seeing if there was anything decent on the tube that night. And on the Bravo channel, I discovered they were airing the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five, which happens to be a really good book. Now, normally I'm wary of books made into movies, because pretty much without exception the Hollywood people have transformed some of my favorite novels into mediocre-to-poor flicks (e.g. Nightfall, 2010, The Firm, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Sphere, actually, insert everything Michael Crichton ever wrote in here). Nevertheless, I decided to give the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five a chance. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the movie was actually quite good, and actually followed the novel pretty closely. Which, as any admirer of Vonnegut writings would have to concede, is a difficult task. Vonnegut's works are often fantastic and very nonlinear on the surface, but in addition also can have themes that can run pretty deep. Slaughterhouse-Five is about a plain, ordinary man named Billy Pilgrim who just happens to travel back and forth in time throughout the events of his life. And whose lifetime also happens to includes a period after he was abducted by aliens and stored as a zoo specimen on the planet Tralfamadore. However, what Slaughterhouse-Five is really about is World War II and the Allied firebombing of Dresden. Anyway, one of the last scenes of the movie is shortly after the bombing, where more than a hundred thousand people have been killed, and Billy Pilgrim and a bunch of other American prisoners of war have been put to work, clearing the debris, tagging and burning the dead bodies, and so on. And among the debris one of Billy's POW friends finds a worthless little ceramic knick-knack, which he pockets because it's a replica of a statue that his wife had at home but was accidentally broken. And then he's immediately seized by some German soldiers and shot to death, as punishment for looting. Nice, huh? But the point of this narrative is that the movie ended shortly thereafter, and there seemed to be nothing on television afterward that seemed worth watching. So I decided to slip in a videotape where I had some old, random stuff still on there, and found an old "Voyager" episode that I had once recorded but not yet bothered to tape over. And one of the guest stars of the show was Eugene Roche, who just happened to be the same actor who had played that guy that had just gotten executed. And just because of that, I suddenly felt better. 1 January 1999 - Season's greetings, everyone! Like most people around this time of year, I've had a very busy several days, and finally I've gotten a chance to get home, kick back, and relax a little bit. And in no particular order, I'd like to share some of the things I learned over this past holiday season. It's a good thing to be at home on Christmas Day with your family, opening presents and spending time with them. Even if most of you do spend it passed out because your dad poured a lot of vodka in the orange juice when your mom wasn't looking. During your vacation, sometimes it's fun to just do something spontaneous, like on the spur of the moment you and your friend getting up and driving five hours to Chicago to catch the Bears-Packers game. It's possible for an enterprising individual with extra tickets to make an awful lot of money from people who show up at the stadium to the sold-out game at the last minute. Driving a total of 1400 miles over the course of four or five days can be very tiring, especially when driving a lot of it in the early hours of the morning. So, when you find yourself starting to fall asleep while driving, one good way to stay awake is to pop a CD in and force yourself to sing along with Fastball's "The Way" at the top of your lungs. Over and over again. Ten times. If you went to Wisconsin, but you live in Minnesota, nobody but you will care that the Badgers are playing in the Rose Bowl this New Year's Day. On the other hand, if the Vikings manage to win the NFC Central away from Green Bay, and you're a Packer fan, expect to get an average of three or four e-mails a day friendly reminding you of that particular fact. After coming home from visiting the family, turning on the furnace after the house has been cold for a week may cause your carbon monoxide detectors to continuously emit false alarms. Or, this will probably be the last article I'll ever post to this page. And finally, live life to the fullest, and try enjoy this New Year's Eve celebration as much as possible. Because if you are a software engineer, for the sake of saving civilization as we know it, be pretty certain that you're going to be spending next year's event at work. Have a happy new year!