It’s Funday Monday!

What a douche.

A few years ago, my friend Barry and I saw this great movie called “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Seeing this movie resulted in two things:

1. It started my own personal cold war with Matthew Broderick. It would have been a real war, but the stupid government wouldn’t let me get a gun because my background check wasn’t up to snuff. Apparently if you accidentally point a realistic looking toy gun at a flight attendant demanding peanuts “now or everyone on board’s going to get it!” one time, it sticks with you forever.
2. It made Barry and me realize that we weren’t really maximizing our potential and living life to its fullest. In fact, while Ferris was faking sick to stay away from school, we were doing everything we could to be at the school because nobody serves hotter, cheaper lunches this side of the soup kitchen, and neither of us likes soup.

So we decided we needed to do something to make our lives a little more fun. Not that Barry transcribing my thoughts that I’ve written on Wendy’s napkins in to blog posts isn’t fun, but sometimes you need a break from the daily grind and sometimes Wendy’s gets tired of you sitting in their dining room for six and a half hours a day without ordering anything.

That’s why we instituted Funday Monday. We were going to go with Monday Funday, but Barry’s brother, a disbarred attorney, told us he thought the senior center in town used that for their Monday bus trips to the fabric store and he didn’t want us to get sued for copyright infringement. We also thought about maybe having Fondue Friday, but that’s probably a bit much to take on until Funday Monday gets off the ground and I think we were both hoping that the other would actually know what Fondue is. I guessed that it was some kind of foreign car and Barry thinks it might be a type of tree.

So Funday Monday is our day of fun and living.

We decided that, from the minute we wake up until the minute the sun goes down, we would maximize every second of the day. That’s roughly 90 minutes, so we have to pack a lot in. Activities vary, but our favorites include:

• Cross-checking my spreadsheet of Bob Barker’s tie color with DVR’d episodes of The Price is Right.
• Running up and down the street alongside the neighborhood cats.
• Finding every book in the library about chickens and telling the lady at the check-out that we’re doing extensive research on cocks.
• Bare-knuckle boxing with homeless dudes over behind the liquor store.
• Taking bus trips to the fabric store with the local seniors.
• Playing a little game we like to call “See it, eat it” where we walk up and down the sidewalk and have to eat anything we see on the ground. (Editor’s note: Barry cheats because he walks with his eyes closed.)
• Head over to the lake and look for beached mermaids so we can bone them.
• Paying kids at the high school money in exchange for their tater tots, because Monday’s tater tots are the best.

I can’t tell you everything we do because “the man” is probably reading this, but I promised Barry my run for President wouldn’t interfere with Funday Monday, even if I got elected. I figure the President is pretty powerful and can take three-day weekends whenever he wants.

Polishing my resume for the job hunt

So a few of you suggested to me that one of the reasons I couldn’t get a job was because of my lack of a solid resume. Of course, none of you have seen my resume, so none of you actually said that to me. Mostly you said it was because of my unrealistic salary demands, my wardrobe consisting mostly of cut-off jean shorts and replica jerseys and my general lack of oral hygiene. Again, none of you actually said that to me, but that’s generally the feedback I receive from people who interview me.

It’s a free country, so you’re allowed to question my oral hygiene, but last I checked the Bible doesn’t say anything about God creating toothbrushes. Why would he give you teeth but no toothbrushes? Think about it. Seems to me that the guy who made teeth would know a little bit more about taking care of them than some guy who works for a company called AquaFresh. This is what happens though when Big Toothpaste gets their hands on those Washington fat cats in Congress.

But I digress. I was reading up online about resumes and how to make them (turns out your birth certificate isn’t your resume), and it seems like an awful lot of work to me. I don’t think it’s fair for a company to expect me to put in work just so I can go interview with them and not pay me throughout the process. I’ve suggested this in various board meetings (that I’ve crashed) but no one seems to be interested in my ideas to get the best of the best to apply. I know I would apply to tons more jobs if I were getting paid $25 an hour to do it.

Still, I need a job and the whole freelance architecture thing still hasn’t really taken off yet despite the fact that I spend a lot of time sitting around and thinking about how to make it work, mostly by playing Sim City. I thought I had a pretty good project lined up when I heard my next door neighbor’s kid begging his dad for a treehouse. I took a little initiative and drew him up some plans for a pretty sweet treehouse/grotto that I could have built for him for about $15,000, but before I could show it to him the plans got thrown away after they got mixed up in my old newspaper collection that my mom threw out.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why do you have an old newspaper collection?” It’s because for a while I thought I had a pretty nice money-making scheme where I would stand on the street corner with a stack of newspapers and yell, “EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!” and peddle headlines from a few years ago as new ones. (Holy shit! The Twin Towers collapsed again!) Turned out those newspaper kids didn’t make as much money as I thought and on top of that old man Carter, the publisher of the local paper, took two-thirds of every nickel I made selling papers and kept it for himself. He also locked me in his basement and fed me nothing but gruel. Even worse, it turns out old man Carter wasn’t actually the publisher of the local paper but just some random old man who locked people in his basement. It all worked out in the end, though, when he fired me because he thought I was editorializing too much in my sales pitches.

Getting back on point, though – my resume. I need a resume. So here it is. Any advice would be welcome, or if you want to steal it and use it as your own, that’s cool, too. Just be warned that you’ll find yourself sorely overqualified for most jobs to which you apply.

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Bill Legarm
Address withheld (no way am I giving you creeps my address – unless you’re a lady – then we can talk)
Phone number withheld (see above note)

 

Experience

January 1997-February 1997 | Assistant cafeteria worker

Worked here as punishment for repeatedly calling science teacher a witch (True, by the way. How else could he have built a full working volcano in our classroom?); Washed dishes; Cleaned up trays; Ate leftover scraps for money; The story about the pickles in the back room is totally untrue and not why I got fired.

April 2001-April 2001 | Communist hunter

Rounding up communists for fringe organization in Michigan; Was responsible for the arrest of 14 communists, mostly children; Fired when group found out about my refusal to acknowledge a united Germany – also I don’t know what a communist is.

November 2001-December 2001 | Mall Santa

Point of clarification: By Mall Santa I mean Front Yard Santa. The company that hires the Mall Santas didn’t hire me, so I got my own costume and set up in my front yard. In hindsight that wasn’t the best idea, but if attempting to bring joy to the neighborhood is wrong (and, according the arrest warrant, it is), I don’t want to be right.

July 2005-May 2006 | Stalker

Long story short, apparently the girl I thought I was dating wasn’t actually dating me. More on that in a later post. Still, this counts as a job because I got a hold of her bank account number and so I was kind of getting paid to do it.

September 2008-present | Freelance Architect

Designing and building buildings for major cities and corporations. My designs can be seen in various places including in my head and scribbled on public restroom walls, which is where I do my best thinking.

Education

All my life | Street smarts

You could hire somebody that reads books and has a degree, but do they know how to make a weapon using some rope, a piece of gum and a medium Frosty? Neither do I, but while they’re reading and getting degrees, I’m sitting around in my underwear watching MacGyver. Who do you think is going to figure it out first?

Skills

• Bob Barker trivia
• Opening Excel on my computer
• Watching Knight Rider
• Driving exactly 7 miles per hour over the speed limit
• Playing the Flying W on the guitar
• Really good at I Spy
• Boiling water
• Pretending to be Jason Bourne
• Eating ravioli
• Huntin’ commies
• As a general rule, if Ronnie James Dio can do it, I can do it better

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By the way, I completely agree with you. I have no idea how I haven’t been hired yet.

 

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I’ve got to make some money

I might not be as dashing as the man on the cover, but I'm close.

In a perfect world, there would be no crime or war and I’d be able to Taser people with my mind. As it is, I have to stun them instead with my vast knowledge of Hollywood Squares and my ability to list every color tie that Bob Barker wore during his last 500 episodes of The Price is Right. I’ve got it all on a spreadsheet if you’re interested.

Unfortunately, neither of those things are “marketable skills” and they fail to impress employers when featured on my resume. So somehow I need to acquire some sort of valuable training but I can’t because the stupid community college won’t accept me because technically I didn’t finish high school. In reality, I did finish high school, but they wouldn’t let me graduate because I failed all my classes, which is stupid. I was there. I put in my time.

So I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do since my mom is insisting that I start paying rent to live over the garage. And since my freelance architecture business is growing a little slower than expected I just don’t have a regular source of income. All of the places I’ve applied to have fallen through because they refuse to meet my salary demands, even though $75,000/yr. is an awfully reasonable request if you ask me. Stupid Burger King.

I applied for a job in my friend Barry’s electronics start-up business and he seems like he’s impressed with what I have to offer but just doesn’t have the resources to hire me. Once he makes his first sale, though, he’s going to revisit my resume and see if maybe I can help out building high-definition TVs or something. I’d kind of like to build rockets for him, but he said that’s a little later in his business plan and he’d like to hire an astronaut to help out in that department. But he assured me that if I became an astronaut, he’d be totally down with me joining the yet-to-be-created rocket science department of his company.

That’s a great fall-back, really, but I just don’t know if I have that kind of time, especially since my mom has already started advertising the garage sale to sell all my stuff this weekend. I looked around on-line for some fast-track astronaut classes, but the only ones that I found never called me back even though I gave them my credit card number. Joke’s on them, though, because my card is maxed out to its $450 limit.

Ultimately, though, I don’t really want to be an astronaut. Space freaks me out with all those stars and dead space monkey corpses floating around up there. I just don’t think it’s a very safe environment for someone like me, and on top of that I’m incredibly fair-skinned and it would be a bad idea for me to be that close to the sun. Also, NASA gets mad at me when I call them and ask, “How big is Uranus?”

If you don’t think that’s hilarious, you’re dumb.

Looking back on high school, I did have a meeting with my guidance counselor once, and he asked me what I wanted to be when I was older. When I said I didn’t know, he told me to figure out what I was passionate about and strive to make a career out of it. That’s easy since I’m really only passionate about one thing and that’s mangoes. I found some nice land and tried to start a mango farm, but that ended quickly once Mr. Jenkins found out I had covered his backyard in mango trees without his permission. On top of that, I had accidentally planted apple trees because I don’t actually know what a mango is.

The longer this plays out, the more I realize the community college is my only real option. If I could just show my mom that I’m committed to getting a real job someday, maybe she’ll let me stay. So I’ve started courting the president of the community college in hopes that if I can get into a relationship with her, she’ll let me in despite my “poor academic record” and “questionable criminal history.” (Those are exact quotes from my last rejection letter.)

So far she hasn’t returned my advances, however, and recently she informed me that she was not interested and that her husband worked out. Little does she know that, while I don’t work out now, I finally figured out how to put together that bench press I bought two years ago and I plan to work my way up towards using it by doing a series of light curls and three to five push-ups per day for the next two years. So I’ll be pretty ripped some day.

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