Farewell Galaxy IV; We Hardly Knew Ye. Or Used Ye.

The Gormogons Posted on by

Today, the Galaxy IV satellite failed, plunging nearly the entire world’s supply of pagers into an eerie silence. Of course, not that any of us noticed. This only inconvenienced the twelve of you who still have pagers in the world of the cell phone.

You know who you are. The Czar bets you still call them beepers, too. Well, guess what? Your swingin’ 60s mod comsat, with day-glo daisy silhouettes painted on the side and transistors the size of a mouse just took a crap. And you realized, to your horror, that no one has been trying to reach you since 1994.

No more being introduced to some awkward coyote-faced endless talker chick at a party, and after 20 minutes of listening to her trying to remember whether her long ago one-month boyfriend Antoine, the rock climber, preferred a Klemheist to a Prusik, you suddenly clutch your inert pager and exclaim that the entire X.25 to Europe is down and you have to go. Now. No, now you’re going to have to be like the rest of us and simply splash-chuck the remains of your drink right into her canine face and walk away. What, like Antoine is going to hunt you down? He hasn’t seen her since the Plasmatics concert, and now he runs some crampon clinic at the Fort Lauderdale REI, and you know for damn sure that, between tokes, he isn’t wondering about the girl with the donkey voice, and whether she would have liked him better if he only had a pager.

What a tragedy that the Galaxy III or the Galaxy V birds never picked up the immense slack, so that you could continue to swing by Mitch’s retirement party at the Doubletree, pass a note to the concierge to please call your pager number at the front desk, blow into the party, drink four beers real fast, and then duck out of throwing in $20 for your portion because your pager went off 15 minutes into it. “Sorry, gotta run,” you say, putting a dollar bill in the bar druid’s tip glass, “The token ring just jumped down from 16 meg to 4 meg.” No, now you might actually have to remember who the hell Mitch is, shake the poor bastard’s hand, and put in the full Jackson. For once. Yeah, pay for your fair share. See what it’s like.

And pity the shellshocked schmuck who kept his old pagers so that he could walk into Memories on Montrose and Cicero with three pagers on his belt, wearing nighttime black-lensed aviator shades and a Members Only jacket, hoping that the sleek nympho in the Spandex dress rolling her eyes and gathering her belongings into a cartoonishly tiny purse might catch a glimpse of you and think…what? Military operator? Black ops guy? Government hit man? Because those three pagers prove you’re always on call and answerable to only three authorities in the world, thereby taking attention away from your stained Polo shirt and the gut that says the last beep you answered was the sound of the deep fryer at Wendy’s announcing to the world your second order of jumbo-sized fries were about to land on your tray.

Requeiscat in paunch, old Galaxy IV. Yeah, officially you were launched in 1993, not 1963, but your spectacular failure was the better way to go, as opposed to being decommed in humiliation by 2001 because the only guys still using you were Mitch for the pager he forgot to turn into HR on his exit interview, and the backup feed to NPR’s Remembering Margaret Mead in Word Jazz. We’ll call you once in a while from our cell phone.

So You Want To Be A Superhero?

The Gormogons Posted on by

Well, congratulations. Rumor has it you’re interested in fighting the good fight, keeping the world safe from villainy, and cleaning scum from the earth. We need people like you. But if you’re going to be effective (or at least planning on being effective), then you have to know how to play the game. Remember, there’s more to being a superhero than just being a hero. You also have to be super.

Powers

It helps to have superpowers. Most superheros would have it no other way. As it happens, these are pretty easy to come by. If you’re an alien, like Superman, you probably have more than you need right away. If you got your powers in the 1960s, the odds are that you got them from radiation (the Hulk, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the ubiquitous X-Men, and their ilk). Mutants are a big source of supervillains, and we’re lucky to have them mostly on our side. Mind you, if you lack native abilities such as these, you’re hardly out of luck. All you need is some sort of special tool to make the magic happen, like the Green Lantern’s ring or Thor’s lucky hammer. We guess Iron Man’s goofy suit qualifies here.

Mind you, even that doesn’t matter if you’re well-funded. With money, you can become a superb superhero, even if you have no super abilities whatsoever. While Batman and the Green Hornet come to mind, it oddly didn’t work for Ross Perot.

Costume

You need a costume. Even the most meager superhero has a costume. Your costume should be so far funky that it won’t be mistaken for a west coast fashion statement. Capes are normally de rigueur, but quite frankly, we think they have limited effectiveness: if the Flash wore a cape, the windspeed he generates would make him sound like a raspberry blowing past you, and that would be pretty humiliating. Further, if Hawkman wore a cape, it would inevitably entangle his wings. The last thing anyone needs is somebody his size crashing into a crowded intersection from a thousand feet up. And many superheros have completely done away with capes (the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and the Fantastic Four).

Your costume should say something about you or your powers. Batman looks like a bat. Iron Man wears armor. The Silver Surfer uses a surfboard, since JetSkis are unwieldy in space (unlike surfboards). But be careful here, because some superheros stretched this one pretty far, and end up having a superficial link to their costumes: Gambit looks like a risky gamble, Doctor Strange simply looks strange, and it’s a wonder that Wonder Woman still bothers with her swimsuit in this conservative age.

On the other hand, you can be one of the few superheros who have done away with the concept of costumes entirely. The Submariner sticks with a pair of trunks. The Hulk is also a notable example, and it wasn’t until we saw Bill Bixby stealing clothes from a laundry line that we even found out where he kept getting all those pants and shirts.

Locations

Well, now that you have superpowers and a costume, you need a place to work from. Basically you have three choices. You can choose…

  1. A real city. This is what Spiderman does. He opted to stick close to home in New York City, which is convenient given that his sick aunt lives there. We forgot where Daredevil hangs out, but we can always say Detroit. If the city’s rough, move out to the burbs. The X-Men did, living in a nice part of scenic upstate New York. Fortunately, there’s a lot of danger out there, so it works out for them, as well.
  2. A totally fictitious place. Batman is pretty smart to choose Gotham City, since it affords him all the worst elements of New York City without the hassle of paying a city income tax. And Gotham is lucky to have him, given that they haven’t hired one competent police officer since about 1940. Superman lives happily out in Metropolis, which one writer surmised might (because of the proximity of the farming community of Smallville) be either Chicago or Cleveland. Wonder Woman spent some time in Washington, DC, although it must have been difficult to land that invisible plane on the Mall. At least, not without plowing over a few homeless people.
  3. Some other place entirely. The Hulk wanders around, and could be anywhere at any time. The Fantastic Four spend an awful lot of time in space, or in alternate dimensions, which has got to get pretty expensive after a while. If you’re Thor, you get to spend time in Aasgard, which also has the benefit of having some of Wagner’s coolest music (even if the overall Nordic mythology is a little dizzy).

Sidekicks… Yea, or Nay?

Generally, this is up to you, although only a small percentage of the superhero population uses them. Superman and Spiderman have decided against it, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use a helping hand time and again. Even Captain America used that little kid Bucky or whatever, before he realized that the Falcon (or whatever) was not only competent, but in many ways more hip. Generally, though, sidekicks are always needing a rescue, and quite frankly, the one or two clues they spot aren’t worth the trouble. Ironically, the only superhero who ever made good use of a sidekick was Batman, who by all accounts is a loner type. The Czar guesses everyone needs a friend.

Gadgets

You should have these. These can be of two types: cool tools, or headquarters. Spiderman has his special chemical webs which do just about anything a plot contrivance calls for, the X-Men have their Blackbird jet that not only flies in space, but also can go from one end of the earth to the other in a few seconds without melting. Also, a neat base of operations is definitely in order: the Fantastic Four own their own skyscraper (although they could net a fortune by subletting to some commercial and retail tenants), Wonder Woman’s golden lariat (some guys commit crimes solely so she’ll tie them up and make them tell the truth) and even Superman has his Fortress of Solitude, which is up at the North Pole, just down the street a piece from Santa’s Workshop, for which it is frequently mistaken.

But the absolute king of gadgetry is Batman. From his now famous utility belt, to his wide array of specialized vehicles (the Batmobile, the Batplane, the Batboat, the seldom-seen Batcycle, and the never-seen BatVespa), he stashes all of it in his monstrous, eighty-room BatCave. And Batman, like all the other superheros, has discovered the best part of all this: it’s all free! That specialized aircraft you want to use? Sure, it would cost several hundred million dollars, and require years of planning and design analysis from the best aerospace engineers… but only if you’re an ordinary schmoe! When you’re a superhero, none of this unbelievable engineering costs a penny. Ask the X-Men: they smash their stuff up all the time.

Archvillains

Well, now this is what you’re in business for. You have to get yourself some good archvillains to fight, or you’re really no better than the many vigilantes roaming the big city streets, illegally dispensing justice, making a mockery of the police and wearing red berets and white t-shirts. You need a supervillain!

Of course, some thought is warranted here. You can’t just go and get any old person to be an arch-enemy. For example:

  • Good Names include Gor-Klops, Dr. Strangulo, the Astro-Men of Zeptar, Monstrolus, Vokaan the Annihilator, and the Fang.
  • Bad names include Scruffy, Ned, Pushpin Boy, Prancer, the Floor Mop of Doom, Lord Nasally, and Downtown Badboy Brown.

Of course, what you get depends a lot on the decade in which you’re fighting. In the 1930s, you had to fight gangsters and other members of organized crime. Generally, superheros really did help the police.

In the 1940s, you fought Nazis for the most part, and did your best to help out the war effort. In fact, one of the major reasons the Nazis never developed the atomic bomb was because they spent too much time working on Kryptonite.

In the 1950s, most of your time was spent fighting communists. This was a great decade for Captain America, who spent an entire decade fighting the Red Skull, whom any other superhero would have pounded in three issues.

In the 1960s, you generally had to fight mutants, which was interesting because odds were you were a mutant yourself. Radiation produced some great villains, or some great monsters… or you could always fight robots, which were invariably powered by… that’s right… radiation.

In the 1970s, times changed a lot, and you probably wound up fighting racists, rednecks, or computers. The one thing these three had in common was a dislike for the common person. In many ways, this is still true.

In the 1980s, you spent all of your time fighting aliens. This was a banner year for SETI, as species of all kinds were dropping in and eating entire area codes. Who knows how many times the Golden Gate bridge was destroyed. Too bad the superheros didn’t use a Macintosh to defeat them, which Jeff Goldblum proved is far easier once you get it started without freezing.

In the 1990s, your time was spent battling environmental and toxic villains, although aliens are, by and large, pretty popular still. Ideally, the supervillain of the 1990s will be a mutant commie Nazi gangster from space intent on poisoning the oceans. And he’ll be a remake of a 1960s television series.

So for the new century, what sort of supervillains will we have? It’s too soon to tell, but if all supervillains are personifications of What We Most Fear as a society, there are three possibilities: (1) People Who Use Harsh Words; (2) Smokers; and (3) Cody Gifford.

Get A Life

Secret identities are essential. No superhero goes around telling people what his day job is. Even the Hulk has enough sense to run and hide from the media. Millionaire Bruce Wayne owns some companies, although it’s difficult to envision how he has time to run them. Tony Stark, when he’s not busy being Iron Man, manages to run his own Stark Enterprises in a similar manner. Peter Parker is an ordinary teenager who (like most teenagers) sticks to walls. A good identity is a must! It keeps the taxman off your back for unreported income, and it always helps to have a nosy neighbor almost discover your secret every five issues.

You don’t have to go to amazing lengths, either. No one has figured out Clark Kent, have they? Who would suspect that a skinny, awkward, nerdy guy with big glasses has immense and almost frightening power? Nobody! Except maybe Bill Gates.

Be A Role Model

Please! Superheros aren’t dumb. In fact, you always have to have a good line for the occasion! After you dispatch a bad guy, it’s a tradition to have a really bad pun ready. Hung a guy from a lamp post? “Why don’t you hang around until I get back?” Rope a guy up like a coccoon? “I’m afraid you’re tied up for a while!” Cook a guy up in a pan with corned beef, potatoes, and a little onion, black pepper, with an egg on top? “Let’s hash this out over breakfast!” It’s best to inspire your fans with good quips. However, a dumb comment never works. If you swap fists with your evil twin (which you don’t need to get, by the way: they turn up on their own), never say “Hey, you’re unbelieveably stupid looking!” On the other hand, don’t be an egghead or an obscurist. Don’t flip your opponent upside-down and remark “Hey, you’re as inverted as an E♭+6 is to a Cm(maj)7,” unless a jazz musician is your sidekick. Or your only reader.

Also, kids look up to you. Showing up with a half-smoked cigarette has been tabu since the mid-sixties. And it has never been acceptable to show up for work drunk. Nobody trusts an incontinent, drooling guy in a cape with slurred speech… even in the heart of DuPont Circle.

Shazam!

Now that you’ve got all this down, get out there and fight some crime. This page should have given you plenty to think about, and whether you’re The Dark Talon or Pink The Merry Tailor, you have to just bite the bullet (perhaps literally, if this is your super power) and smash some villains. But please! Don’t get an attitude just because you got some profressional pointers at this site. Batman and Spiderman have saved the world countless times, but even they stop to bag the odd purse-snatcher or burglar.

And you’re tougher than them, right?

A Little Trouble in the Lab

The Gormogons Posted on by

The “Skynet” project had a little trouble today. Luckily, GorT was able to use his time/space traveling subroutines and transferred the project into the 8th dimension for safe keeping. We’ve shelved the multi-rotor flying automaton concept for a bit later. ‘Puter is still shaking his head, now with a “I told you so look” on his face.

Coffee: Empires, Tazo, and the Grateful Dead

The Gormogons Posted on by

Grounds for an Empire

The Czar is not a coffee drinker. By absolutely no means: he doesn’t even like the taste of the stuff, since it tastes like some mild acid-based solvent that somebody left the top off of for about three weeks, and is now so stale that you would expect an elderly neighbor to offer you in hardened candy form. But we really don’t care for that analogy. Plus, the Czar is not sure why someone would offer you stale, solvent-based candy. It’s best we move on.

Anyway, we really don’t like it. But we are not repulsed by it either: in fact, the smell of fresh-brewed coffee is a Very Good Thing. If you try to imagine the smell of it right now, chances are pretty good you can indeed almost taste it. As far as the caffeine piece of it, we obtain other sources. Notably soda. The Czar can easily down a couple of cans in no time flat. Of course, we don’t mean the soda’s flat… merely the time. We digress yet again.

So this little Seattle-based company decided that coffee must be The Next Big Thing, and began appearing every place where they could find three square feet of space… Body Snatchers-like. And lo, the Starbuck’s empire became reality.

Boy, were they right. Within seconds of opening any Starbucks, hordes of khaki-wearing minions start loitering nervously in front, mobbing the tables, reading pulp novels and sipping weird bean blends out of these tall white canisters so large that, we swear, if they had a dome-shaped top, people would be throwing trash into them.

It’s so bad that when a construction company starts doing the exterior of a future Starbucks… or any retail place shaped vaguely like one… the coffee army shows up and starts camping out. It’s like some Grateful Dead caravan, with its own microeconomy and subculture. And there they are, with their sweater-vests, designer sunglasses, and cell phones all milling about wondering when they can get a Bahamanian Jerk Bean blend and a gargantuan muffin with sugar crystals on it the size of dice. Does it matter that it’s months before opening? Not really: even if it dawns on them that they aren’t likely to get served, they just walk seven more feet to the left and find another Starbucks.

Why You’re Wrong

You can’t order anything in Starbucks without being wrong. It’s true: whatever you order, they correct you. It’s like the counterpeople simply like to counter people. Just remember, they are informed, the customer is always wrong.

“I’d like the double decaf mocha twist frapaspresso lattacino, please.”

At once, she rolls her eyes, shifts her weight to her other foot in disgust and says, “Do you mean the double mocha decaf twist frapaspresso lattacino?” with her voice lilting mockingly on the last syllable.

“Um… yes,” you say, having lost total control over the exchange, although you’re darn sure she told you the opposite yesterday.

“A grande?” she asks, much in the same way a parent talks to a child who just “mailed” all of the rent money through the slots on a sewer cover outside.

“Yes,” you meekly reply, having no idea what size that really is, although you suspect it’s bigger than you can physically ingest.

The Sale, Wherein the Czar Slits His Own Throat

Let us share with you a true story. The Czar is standing, literally, in the center of Lambert International Airport in Saint Louis, waiting to meet up with a someone arriving later. Like nearly every day in the Gateway City, it’s hot and muggy. We’d spring for a beer, thank you, but by FAA regulation, all alcohol in an airport must cost over ten bucks.

So the Czar looks for an alternative, and discover there’s a Starbucks behind us. We realize that they’re not too likely to jack up their prices any more than they already do, and walk over. Plus, there’s no line. This actually shocks us.

The Czar looks up at the overhead board to get an idea of what we might want. Toward the bottom, there’s a section titled “Iced Tea,” and below that a goofy name like “Tazo.”

“May I help you?” she asks cheerfully, eagerly awaiting to see how she can trip us up.

“Yeah, I’d like an iced tea.”

“We don’t have that.”

We glance up at the board, half-expecting to see that menu choice dematerialize before our eyes. “Okay…” we say very slowly.

She grins, knowing her triumph. “We do have Tazo. It’s an infused brewed tea blend, with select spices, served chilled.”

The Czar stares directly at her. “That is an iced tea.”

“But it’s different,” she says, gleefully pointing her finger at the Czar, as though he was some Renaissance Pope arguing with Galileo.

“Okay,” the Czar sighs in defeat, “I’ll have that,” and pull out a couple of dollars.

“What size?” she asks, realizing her immense fortune at being able to potentially humiliate us twice in one transaction.

“What sizes do you have?” we ask, realizing perhaps we could minimize the ridicule she must surely be documenting to her manager as a step toward promotion.

“Tall, Grande, and Veinte,” she sighs, realizing that victory is not so easily won with this one. Blast, she thinks. She was just forced to hand us the answers.

“What’s the smallest one you have?” we ask.

“A tall.”

“Your small is a tall?” we ask, incredulous.

“Yes. The next largest is a grande.” It occurs to the Czar their medium is grande, which of course means “large.”

“Well, I guess a tall then.”

There! We wanted a small iced tea, but was denied. Instead, the Czar was forced to buy a tall tazo… and in turn, she hands us a small iced tea. We pay for it, and return to the gate where we’re waiting.

The Czar is pleased to report, it was a darn good cup of iced tea.

Afterthoughts

At this point, though, the Czar is pretty much forced to speculate as to what goes on in the mornings at a Starbucks. Immediately before opening, the manager has the staff rearrange the signboard, just to confuse the regulars. “I want that split shot skinny replaced with a skinny shot split,” the manager hollers, as staff furiously scramble to scramble the signboard.

The bags are ripped open, and the marble fudge cinnamon biscotti and marshmallow pecan muffins and the host of other confections designed by computer spill out. They’re neatly arranged to be as scary as possible, and the doors are opened.

Lo, and they begin filing in. There they all are: the guy who sits there, staring zombie-like over the top of his low-fat latte, wondering what on earth happened to his free time as he plans to spend the next three hours here. And there she is… that woman that just clenches her teeth and nods grimly as her friend complains incessantly about how morale is so low at work ever since they insisted on staff showing up regularly. There he is… the guy in his 30s trying to look much younger and much more wealthy, sitting in his J. Crew ensemble wondering why nobody has noticed him looking at his expensive watch every couple of minutes. Oh, and here’s the woman that always insists on coming in wearing the clothes she slept in, dragging behind her some recalcitrant dalmatian who’s wondering why they just couldn’t sleep in some Saturday.

And they all sit there, sitting, reading or talking, and spending a lot of time staring. And they glance at their watches and pagers, their left leg bouncing incessantly up and down like a sewing machine.

We can’t help but think, as we bit into a pastry that’s as soft and tooth-crackingly moist as particle board, that if we just slammed our mighty foot onto the floor, these people would all snap.

Look at them! They’re one loud noise away from screaming, tearing their hair out, and diving through any convenient plate glass. These are people who honestly, and perhaps pathologically, believe they’re relaxing right now. In reality, if they were any more tense, you could strum them.

So we shake our head, and turn to the register just in time to see the counter person sniff and ask someone, “Do you mean the half-shot double steamed mocha?”

How To Fail In Business

The Gormogons Posted on by

There’s very little devoted to the topic of ruining your own success, so rather than join the millions of people trying to make you rich (and themselves), the Czar thought he’d show you business slouches how to really shoot yourself in the foot.

Why would you want a business to fail? We’re not sure, but it’s evident a lot of business owners do. Who are we to question? Either way, we’ve compiled a short list of sure-fire tips for nosing her right into the dirt, and make yourself a true ensign of industry.

Note: a helpful, easy-to-remember glossary of business terms will not be readily found at the end of this page.

  • Put as much stress as possible on your call-center people. You’ve probably heard of these people, because in addition to working for you, they deal with your customers directly. Ideally, you know you have customers as well. Anyway, when the customer calls your company’s phone number—to order “goods and services” (as the economists call it), or “stuff” (as you most likely have mentally reduced it to)—they talk to your call center representatives (“those phone people”). Because of this, you’ll want to make their jobs, their lives, indeed, their very essence completely miserable. You can do this by changing procedures on them frequently, giving them a 1980s-era ordering system that breaks down anytime someone uses a photocopier elsewhere in the building, rotating new managers on them every month, and as little useful training as possible. Then, order them to increase sales by 35%. These elements are ideal for creating a good customer interaction:

    Customer: Hi. I’d like to order a…
    Call Rep: Shut up.

  • Destroy morale at all costs. One thing to look for is how employees decorate their cubicles (those roofless holding pens, which are as close to a useful workspace as an empty cardboard refrigerator box is a “time machine” to a five-year-old). You can learn a lot about employee morale levels from their cubes. Cat posters are ideal. If an employee has a poster of a basketful of kittens and a “Smile” caption, things are good. If you see an employee with a poster featuring a frightened cat hanging from a branch, with a caption of “Hang In There,” you have a morale problem. If you have an employee displaying a skinned, bloody cat carcass nailed to a wall with a caption of “I Hate This Place,” you’re indeed well on your way… especially if it’s not a poster. Low morale causes turnover, which raises training and recruiting expenses astronomically. Plus, the resultant labor deficit overloads the remaining employees to where they begin quitting. So low morale is a good weapon for destroying your business. The best way to accomplish low morale is to treat your employees like you think they’re imbeciles. Do this by offerring tenth-percent raises, denying training classes, and producing as many restrictive policies as possible… then, balance that with utterly insulting incentives, such as a “You’re the best” certificate printed from PowerPoint clip art on a crummy laser printer, or perhaps a pizza day every third August, and a work-from-home policy which you should promote and advertise like crazy until you cancel it two days before it was supposed to start. Bad morale, you see, produces all sorts of good business-killing results.

    Customer: Hi. I’d like to check the status of my order.
    Call Rep: Yeah? When I was seven, I wanted to be an astronaut.

  • Eliminate, or at least flip, the corporate vision. Once, in ancient times, no one bothered with corporate visions. Life was pretty simple: you opened a business, competed on the strength of your products and services, and reaped huge profits. Then, the whole Quality scam kicked in, and all work stopped so companies could write mission statements. Of course, there’s really only one mission in business: To make enormous piles of cash for the investors. But today, you see all sorts of idiotic fluff-haiku sloganism from companies; ultimately, it’s evident which one was written by the CEO, because it’s blindingly obvious (“To be the leader in our industry”), and which one was done by a committee, since it’s group-think babble (“To develop an efforts-driven matrix ownership, manifesting in career-oriented reward sponsorship and quality focus engineering”), and which were done by the corporate visionary, because it’s some weird Zen koan (“Results. Efforts. Tomorrow. Where do you hear the thunder?”). Start promoting this stuff in your own company, especially at the departmental level, because a great way to stifle ingenuity is to confuse vision with distraction:

    Customer: Hi. I’d like to place an order, please.
    Call Rep: Uh… I guess we still do that. Let me check.

  • Layer management. It’s tough to find work for all those people, right? After all, you just bought another whole company, and at least 60% of them have functions identical to people in your parent company. You can’t fire all of them, frankly, because that would be painfully smart. Well, if you really want to louse things up, start promoting them to middle management. That way, they’ll add rolls of red tape to previously brainless procedures, harmlessly eat up their own time in endless meetings, and work on their resumes, which totally solves the problem. You can even have a couple of them reorganize operations, so that new org charts are handed out with every paycheck. Adding management improves the company’s intellect in the same way adding water improves gasoline:

    Customer: Hi. I’d like to place an order, please.
    Call Rep: I’d love to, but my manager is shaking his head no.

  • Eliminate the human element. Customers like your sales reps. They actually love your receptionist. And they even are impressed by the complaints department. Therefore, you want to eliminate that bond of trust at once. For this, there is no better tool than voice response systems. This is different from voice mail (which is actually useful) by making your customers thoroughly disassociated with their prospective purchase. Typically, the voice response bit involves a perky woman’s voice who talks to you like you’re the idiot. Usually, these give you totally ambiguous choices, so that a customer spends twenty minutes waiting on hold before your one remaining call center rep even gets a chance to answer.

    Customer: Hi. I’d like….
    Voice Response: Thank you for calling. For vendor purchasing, press 1. For operations buying, press 2. For business sales, press 3. For all other calls, stay on the line. <dial tone>

Could you effectively employ all of these ideas? Yes, and even a math-poor ox like yourself can see how quickly each adds up to your perfect recipe for failure. By using all these methods together, you do create the perfect plan for disaster:

Customer: Hi. I’d like…
Call Rep: Please hold while your call is transferred to our nearest competitor. Thank you, and have a Quality Day.

Raising the Dead

The Gormogons Posted on by

As we know, having the dead around your place can become a tad inconvenient. And in our ongoing effort to provide you the best there is to be had by people like you, we’ve put together a few useful tips the Gormogons have found regarding raising the dead.

Use these in any order, really, but don’t get too carried away. Remember that results may vary, and we can’t be held responsible for any… um… unforeseen difficulties… which might arise.

  • First of all, try waking the dead. Call their names loudly, and see if they respond. Remember, it’s critical that you don’t confuse the dead with people who are merely sleeping. Ask your local coroners about how embarrassing this is. If they don’t wake up and demand an explanation, try banging pots and pans. Be careful: the Chinese used to frighten away solar eclipses with this same method, but you have to pick one methodology and stick with it.
  • Wake your own dead. If you get extremely loud and irritating (Nine Inch Nails works well if this is your goal… ask our neighbors), someone nearby may scream at you that you’re waking the dead. If in fact you are waking their dead, apologize. While a noble goal, remember that this may not fit in well with their plans, and inconvenience is something the enlightened person strives to avoid.
  • Avoid magic rituals. Many dark arts feature rituals and incantations which allegedly return the dead to life. This, of course, is likely a waste of time. There is no evidence whatsoever that such practices will work, and if you’re going to raise the dead, you should at least attempt to do so in the most scientific manner possible.
  • Voodoo is best left to professionals. If you’re a fully-qualified houngan, raise the dead carefully. Remember that zombies technically don’t count, since we’re not talking about raising the undead. But if you’re going after bigger game, and you’re no expert, you’ll need more than a few chickens or snakes to do it right. Houngans are very particular about their techniques, and don’t take well to interlopers who think they can hack it. Don’t be like the Czar’s friend Brian, who thought he knew everything after reading an FAQ, and wound up irritating a local “specialist,” who enacted a small price on Brian. If you’re ever in Chicago, stop by the Lincoln Park Zoo and visit his cage. Brian will be happy to demonstrate what happened to him (and he never did succeed).
  • Electricity was a popular approach at the end of the 1800s, but never panned out. Massive voltage might have brought Mary Shelley’s monster back, but quite frankly our own research succeeded only in stinking up the place worse. And the bill! It would have been cheaper to run an air conditioner in every window here for a full year. If anyone’s interested in an old Jacob’s ladder (worthless for raising the dead, by the way, but the Czar was naive), shoot us an e-mail.
  • Contrary to popular rumor, repeated watching of C-SPAN has the opposite effect. If you have C-SPAN on, you run the risk of becoming dead yourself.
  • Reincarnation is a powerful consideration. If you believe in reincarnation, you’re probably only going to louse things up, and really frustrate a few people. By the way, if you do believe in reincarnation, could you explain how the world’s population has consistently gone up in the last thousand years? Where are all these new people coming from? Can they be trusted? You should fear everyone.
  • Take notes. If you’re successful, it helps to be able to reproduce the feat, especially if you expect to be believed. Witnesses don’t always help. If you startle the dead back to life, be sure you write down what you did (firecrackers, cold water, pictures of Shelley Winters, etc.), so that other people can benefit from your findings.
  • One question most people ask the Czar is: “Is it ethical to raise the dead and charge money for it?” The answer is yes, provided you don’t charge the recently reanimated. They probably lack the funds to compensate you and since they didn’t expect your service, it’s rude of you to demand it. Remember the relatives might not appreciate you reviving “Uncle Slither,” and they might balk at paying. Then what will you do? Our advice is that if you plan on charging next of kin for this service, get their agreement to pay in writing. The Czar can’t stress this enough, as the recently-returned tend to freeload for months at your place unless you get someone to take responsibility for them.
  • If you mistakenly raise the wrong person, apologize. Manners go a long way here. You don’t like being roused from sleep, so imagine how they feel.

Well, no doubt there’s something in these tips to offend pretty much everybody. We hope that if you’re planning on raising the dead, you do so responsibly. Remember to be professional: dress well, and speak clearly. Extend every courtesy to your clientele, and try to network with other necromancers. Not only will they cover for you while you’re on vacation, but in many cases, they’ll be the ones reviving you in a few decades. Have fun, and above all, remember to floss!

How To Get Kidnapped By Aliens

The Gormogons Posted on by

It’s all the rage, kids, isn’t it? Once a side-feature of tabloids, even mainstream, real-news-only publications (such as The New York Post) are discussing the subject of alien abduction. According to some polls, more than 100% of all Americans have been kidnapped in the last twenty minutes, and those who haven’t are in a constant state of denial.

Rumor is, airport traffic control personnel find blips of alien craft on radar screens all the time, but are subject to intense cover ups, so that we never hear about them. Personally, were that true, you’d think there’d be more flying saucers routed into each other than there apparently are, but hey… perhaps that’s covered up too.

Anyway, if you haven’t been abducted by aliens, you’re clearly not hip, and probably live in a trailer park and eat Spam out of the can. Then again, these are the type of people who most frequently call in abductions. So, in an effort to make you popular, here are the Czar’s tips on getting yourself abducted.

Be Attractive To Aliens

Never be a scientist. Sure, you can come close and be a successful horror writer like Streiber, but nobody trusts a chronic fiction writer. A bit of the “cry wolf” problem, eh? The late Carl Sagan, for example, was never abducted, although he would have been an obvious choice, just so he could explain their technology to them in terms they could understand. Further, Frank Drake was never abducted, either, but would very much like to be, if only to prove that formula of his one way or another. Other scientists have been notably unkidnapped, such as Dr. Joyce Brothers, although there is some theory that she is, in fact, an actual alien.

Don’t be too popular, either. People trust celebrities, and consequently would not be good choices: celebrities blow whistles on such operations, and would be disastrous for any secret abduction program. However, there is a rumor that the B-52s were abducted in the early 1980s, but not for scientific experiments… hey, even an alien has to party.

Be human. Very few dogs, cats, dugongs, or dingos report abductions. Maybe they are abducted all the time, but aren’t intelligent enough to realize their subconsciouses have been tampered with. Could be: the Czar had a dog who had serious memory lapses; and one of our buddies has a cat who can’t account for a lot of his behavior.

In addition to being human, there are some other qualities you should have to be attractive to aliens.

  • Be rural. Aliens hate crowded cities, and can never find parking; if you live by yourself off in the outer suburbs or in rural America, you’re ideal.
  • Don’t be too smart. Aliens hate well-read individuals, who might shrug off a genuine abduction as nothing more than a waking dream, a flashback from just one teeny hit of acid at a party ten years before, or a harmless and brief microseizure in the neocortex. Boy, what a waste of time that would be!
  • Don’t fall for the notion that an alien species would have evolved under a vastly different ecology from ours, and therefore could not possibly look like the very-human description of little guys with big heads and black eyes. Ignore the fact these totally alien creatures look more like us than chimpanzees do, with whom we share 96% of our DNA.
  • Be open-minded! It helps if you are open-minded to different ideas; not just alien abduction, but bone up on astrology, pyramid power, fairies and elves, and crystal healing. Aliens have very little time for people who live and work in the real world.

Be Polite When They Show

Show some courtesy when they do show… remember, they won’t come screaming out of the sky at unbeliveable speeds, and they won’t take you up to their ship with powerful technology that would require a lot of massive energy sources which would interfere with reception for counties around you (or parishes, if you’re in Louisiana). No, they’ll appear out of thin air, without a sound, take you up with no apparent means, and whisk you off to their ship without a trace, and certainly without disturbing your neighbors. Be sure to show them the same courtesy.

Have cookies. Aliens like cookies, and it’s the sign of a good host to offer them some. For heaven’s sake, people leave cookies out for Santa, and we know there ain’t no Santy Claus. Yet, no one ever thinks to do the same for real house guests. And for heaven’s sake, offer them good cookies. These guys have traversed thousands of light years, and aren’t in the mood for those stale, generic vanilla wafers. Get the name brand stuff.

Don’t offer them milk until we determine if they’re lactose intolerant. After all, if they can travel space with transeinsteinian technology, they certainly have weapons to match, and nothing encourages a person to use them openly more than intestinal cramps.

It’s okay to be excited at meeting the aliens, but remember the little guys hate flash photography, and definitely don’t jam a camcorder in their face. Try to be subdued, and find a creative way to remember this historic meeting. Most people capture the moment by burying it into their unconscious so far that only wealthy and glamorous hypnotists can drag it out them by a combination of suggestion and encouragement.

Avoid making fun of their last names. Or their first names. Or whatever the name of their homeworld might be. They don’t seem to have much grasp of spoken languages, and they do the best they can with telepathy. And since they can use telepathy, and you can’t, it’s definitely rude to snicker. Although, ya gotta admit, some of their names are downright silly.

Mi Casa, Su Casa

Now, remember that they’re nice enough to take you up into their ship, which they only reserve for the vast majority of Americans. It helps to remember that you’re in somebody’s home.

Don’t be pushing any buttons, and don’t be swinging on any levers. If you spill something, apologize and offer to clean it up. Smile politely when introduced to others, and don’t shake any three-fingered hands (they’re not big on arm-around-the-shoulder stuff or back slaps, which makes them rather like New Englanders).

Compliment their art work, provided you don’t make the big faux pas and accidentally compliment a piece of equipment. Think how uncomfortable you’d feel if you welcomed a visitor into your home and he got all excited by your sink nozzle.

Play along with their strange rituals. They’re nice enough to follow some of yours; you should follow some of theirs. Let them gather around you, let them shine lights at you, stick objects up your nostril, or slice bits of skin off you. They’re just being friendly, even if it is a little different. Believe me, it’s certainly no stranger than Greenwich Village, and think about how much time you’ve spent there!

And respect their traditions. When they drop you back at your place, and they usually are nice enough to give you a ride back to your own bed, simply repeat the gesture by pushing one into a chair and shoving a grape into his nose. It will be warmly appreciated by them.

But be down to earth, too: let them borrow a couple of CDs (anything by the B-52s, especially Good Stuff, which has a lot of inside jokes they love), maybe a video tape (funny hint: they even like to watch blank tapes!), or some earrings or a shirt or two. They’ll bring it back in the same condition they took it, and they’re quick to let you borrow some of their stuff, like time dilators, light cones (the Czar knows one guy who’s got a bunch!), or other trinkets, like those crazy toroid sporans they buy but never wear.

Ya’ll Come Back Now, Y’Hear?

You may be tempted to rush off to the press with your amazing tale, but remember how the popular media mucks everything up (remember Independence Day… no one wants to sit through another one of those). Just sit back and await their next visit, although you might want to tidy up a bit. They don’t eat lint, for goodness sake.

Make yourself accessible for follow-up visits. Leave your doors and windows unlocked at all times, and don’t stay up too late. Don’t get a satellite dish: the aliens frequently confuse them with radar dishes, and will be reluctant to park right out front.

Ways to Amuse Yourself At An Airport

The Gormogons Posted on by

Here’s some fun things you can do at an airport which will not only amuse you, but will also have the added topspin of getting you very urgently arrested.

Anyway, these are pretty inexpensive, which is good, because you’ll likely need a small fortune for bail money.

Drink a bottle of tequila, and then lay down on the moving walkways and look at the ceiling go by. When you reach the end, simply roll over onto the other one. This will be seriously cool.

When security is distracted, place a bag on the conveyor belt and walk away before anyone realizes you did it. In the bag, you should place an alarm clock and some ordinary road flares. What a riot! You’ll do serious time, for sure.

Have a large assortment of Civil War characters paged to the courtesy phone. Ask for J.E.B. Stuart, Robert Lee, and so on. If the services representative is a history major, simply comment on his or her obvious and unexpected employment success.

Start petting your suitcase reassuringly, and talking to it like a nervous dog.

Step onto the baggage carousel and ride it as far as you can. Just before it heads back into the restricted area, step off and move onto the next one in line.

If you’re at a small municipal airline, go up to a ticket desk and request an unbelievably exotic ticket, like round-trip tickets to Kathmandu. This works even better if the airline is really tiny: good indicators would be names like “Des Moines Regional Airlines,” “DC Beltway Airlines,” or “5th Ave To 8th Ave Airlines.”

If a fellow traveler asks you how to get to the baggage claim area, give him very specific directions on how to get to the air traffic control tower.

How To Haunt A House

The Gormogons Posted on by

Or, Lessons in Being a Ghastly Ghostie

Well, the Czar is already scared, and he knows what’s coming. You talk about scary! Well, frankly, there’s nothing spookier than a haunted house, and we oughta know… we’ve been haunting them for years. And sometimes we scare ourselves, we’re so good. But it is a lot of fun, much like anything scary is (such as roller coasters, skydiving, and getting mugged), so we thought we’d share with you our sure-fire ways of haunting a house properly. And if you like it, drop us a line and let us know some of your scary ideas.

First of all, choose a good house. We recommend one with a lot of people in it, since an empty house is, well, kind of slow. You sort of have to make it count, then, and you wind up using all your best material up front. Best to have a house with a lot of people, because then you can pace yourself.

Do you want to be really noticed, right away? Pick a house with a dog. Dogs know about ghosts, and this can be a great intro. Rather than jump right in with frightening the bejeezus out of people, try warming up first. Make the dog bark at empty walls, or better yet, slowly walk toward the dog. Nothing looks neater than seeing the family dog walk backwards, fur up, and growling at thin air. Talk about an intro!

A house with kids is all right, maybe. We generally avoid it, because if you’re feeling a little poltergeistish, the kids usually get blamed for some of your best work. And kids today are too clever: they start setting little traps for you. If you like kids, then by all means have fun. We recommend shaking their beds, making their window shades shoot up, and opening and closing their closet doors at night. But whatever you do, don’t do anything cutesy, like move their toys around, squirt water at them, or shove them from behind. Do this, and the kids start seeing you as their play pal, and then there’s no chance of getting work done.

Go after the wife whenever the husband’s not home. It’s hysterical, because he never believes her. Try creaking floorboards when she’s by herself, rearranging her kitchen knives, or for an absolutely primo scare, wait until she’s quieted down for the night and then flush the toilet. We generally avoid the stupid goblin tricks, like saying “Mommy!” in your best child’s voice and then rolling a bowling ball down the stairs.

General scariness can be handled by confusion. Go down to the circuit breaker and then start switching the circuits on and off like mad. Strive for the strobe light effect. But don’t overdo it: only do this for a few seconds, and then switch every circuit back on as if nothing happened. The husband will likely go down and look the first couple of times, but don’t do anything more that night! After the third or fourth time, guaranteed, he’ll call an electrician to come look at it. And then, when the electrician is by himself, scare the pants off him. It doesn’t matter what you do, really, from sticking screwdrivers in the wall next to his head, to manifesting yourself as a bloody skeleton… the goal here is to get him to run out of the house screaming.

Another good hell-raiser is to make the faucets drip blood. It’ll require a little setting up beforehand, but it’s worth it. Make sure the whole family sees it. If blood makes you queasy, go for black or green slime; and if you’re really in luck, they’ll call in a plumber for you.

Poltergeist phenomena is a great showcase. Start small, so they don’t get too terrified. At dinner, flip a plate. During TV time, keep changing the channels every couple of minutes. Nothing too much! Over time, you can start moving furniture around if your back holds out.

When they’re gone for the day, at work and school, don’t think that you can rest. There’s plenty to do in an empty house, too. Start by changing the thermostat a couple of degrees up or down (it annoys Dad), and get to work by loosening the light bulbs and tilting the pictures. If they have a dog, you’re in luck. You can spend the whole day chasing Pebbles around the house, knocking over furniture and giving the dog a complex.

Remember to be polite. Real ghosts don’t do that attempted murder nonsense you see in the movies. Don’t try to drop pianos on people or push them over railings. And be professional: don’t be looking through the shower curtains at the family member of choice. Nobody tolerates a naughty ghost.

And don’t get in good with the family. Nothing is sloppier than a ghost who winds up eating dinner with the family and baby-sitting the kids. If they wanted that, they could have invited an in-law over. Stay scary.

By now, you should have a ghastly host of ideas. And remember, when they put the house up for sale, it’s up to you whether you want to make the house look sweet and innocent for the next family, or… well… sometimes you can’t resist blasting the real estate agent during a walk-through.

Happy haunting!