Happy New Year?
So.
Now it's 2006. You know what that means?
No, it doesn't mean that I'm going to make some big, earth-shattering resolution that will never cause so much as a bubble in the bathtub. Fuck that.
It means that now I'll finally be used to marking everything as 2005, and it's going to take me until fucking May to get it right.
Over the Holidays, I fucked up my hand doing something really dumb and pointless that I don't even want to discuss here or anywhere else, needless to say that I will never do it again, because having lost the goddamn use of half of my right hand has made me nearly completely fucking useless in just about everything.
I also discovered that now that I have an extended family (i.e. Brothers- and Sisters-In-Law), I have discovered something that really has never crossed my mind before. The idea of Cheese and Meats by mail.
Being that I never had any siblings, and that for the most part, my family with a few exceptions was all within a 100-mile range, things like Birthday and Christmas gifts were all generally exchanged face-to-face. When you have family who lives upwards around 1500+ miles away or more, this becomes a difficult task. Also, since everyone lives so far away, getting someone the "perfect gift" is kind of a tough thing to manage. So, apparently the proper thing to do is to send Food By Mail. The easiest of these are the famed Holiday Gift Packs from various meat and cheese distributors. I knew they existed, but I had never really been on the receiving end of one until last year, and this year, we received four or five...maybe six. I'd have to check.
The thing I noticed was the fact that when you look at the catalog or the pictures in the online store for said things, the gift packs look huge. Enormous. It looks like blocks of cheese the size of your fist and sausages that belong in a porn movie. However, when the items are actually received, you realize that the picture should have the same warning you see in your car:
"Objects in photo may be smaller than they appear."
That huge brick of cheese that you were planning on hollowing out and putting a couch and a recliner in is suddenly 2 inches long and a half inch wide and sealed in the thickest plastic known to mankind. The sausages are the size of a toddler's genitalia, not that I look at that sort of thing. Sure, the cheese and the sausages are of a decent quality, but you really don't get into the whole "sharing with your family" schtick going on when you have barely enough cheese to put on a stale cracker (included in the Gift Pack, subsequently) and the sausage kind of smells like a cross between the dumpster behind Bob Evans and a beer fart.
I know it's not really the sender's fault, so you can't yell at them. Besides, that kind of goes along with the whole "looking a gift horse in the mouth" thing. But you'd think that the companies who send this shit out would be a little more in the holiday mood. Give us a little more, guys. It's not like we're asking for a 20lb block of cheese and a sausage the size of the Washington Monument, but at least make it worth the money. Charging $60 for a couple of slices of cheese and a summer sausage that looks like Henry got his thumb caught in the packing machine is kind of bullshit. You're sort of cheating the buyers here, since it really isn't what it looked like in the catalog. Plus, you don't have to send it in a Handcrafted, Daniel Boone Comemorative Box, just shove it in cardboard like everyone else does and overnight it. Plus, the price almost never includes the shipping cost, which I think is kind of cheap, too.
Stop ripping off my family, you fuckers.
And give me a sausage that John Holmes would tear up over.
Now it's 2006. You know what that means?
No, it doesn't mean that I'm going to make some big, earth-shattering resolution that will never cause so much as a bubble in the bathtub. Fuck that.
It means that now I'll finally be used to marking everything as 2005, and it's going to take me until fucking May to get it right.
Over the Holidays, I fucked up my hand doing something really dumb and pointless that I don't even want to discuss here or anywhere else, needless to say that I will never do it again, because having lost the goddamn use of half of my right hand has made me nearly completely fucking useless in just about everything.
I also discovered that now that I have an extended family (i.e. Brothers- and Sisters-In-Law), I have discovered something that really has never crossed my mind before. The idea of Cheese and Meats by mail.
Being that I never had any siblings, and that for the most part, my family with a few exceptions was all within a 100-mile range, things like Birthday and Christmas gifts were all generally exchanged face-to-face. When you have family who lives upwards around 1500+ miles away or more, this becomes a difficult task. Also, since everyone lives so far away, getting someone the "perfect gift" is kind of a tough thing to manage. So, apparently the proper thing to do is to send Food By Mail. The easiest of these are the famed Holiday Gift Packs from various meat and cheese distributors. I knew they existed, but I had never really been on the receiving end of one until last year, and this year, we received four or five...maybe six. I'd have to check.
The thing I noticed was the fact that when you look at the catalog or the pictures in the online store for said things, the gift packs look huge. Enormous. It looks like blocks of cheese the size of your fist and sausages that belong in a porn movie. However, when the items are actually received, you realize that the picture should have the same warning you see in your car:
"Objects in photo may be smaller than they appear."
That huge brick of cheese that you were planning on hollowing out and putting a couch and a recliner in is suddenly 2 inches long and a half inch wide and sealed in the thickest plastic known to mankind. The sausages are the size of a toddler's genitalia, not that I look at that sort of thing. Sure, the cheese and the sausages are of a decent quality, but you really don't get into the whole "sharing with your family" schtick going on when you have barely enough cheese to put on a stale cracker (included in the Gift Pack, subsequently) and the sausage kind of smells like a cross between the dumpster behind Bob Evans and a beer fart.
I know it's not really the sender's fault, so you can't yell at them. Besides, that kind of goes along with the whole "looking a gift horse in the mouth" thing. But you'd think that the companies who send this shit out would be a little more in the holiday mood. Give us a little more, guys. It's not like we're asking for a 20lb block of cheese and a sausage the size of the Washington Monument, but at least make it worth the money. Charging $60 for a couple of slices of cheese and a summer sausage that looks like Henry got his thumb caught in the packing machine is kind of bullshit. You're sort of cheating the buyers here, since it really isn't what it looked like in the catalog. Plus, you don't have to send it in a Handcrafted, Daniel Boone Comemorative Box, just shove it in cardboard like everyone else does and overnight it. Plus, the price almost never includes the shipping cost, which I think is kind of cheap, too.
Stop ripping off my family, you fuckers.
And give me a sausage that John Holmes would tear up over.