Tag Archives: drugs

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. CVS. They’re getting great acclaim for making the decision to stop selling cigarettes. It’s their business, I say God bless if that’s what they want to do. I’m left wondering if they’re also planning to stop selling Coke, Doritos, Snickers bars, and all the other items on their shelves that have been identified as cancer causing, bad for you, or just socially “inappropriate.” Let’s be honest with ourselves at least. CVS is a drug store. Their whole raison d’être is selling medications, many of which themselves can cause untold amounts of harm even when taken as directed. Call me cynical, but I don’t see them taking a principled stand in the name of public health so much as I see them making a public relations and marketing move.

2. Bugs. No, not the kind of creepy crawlies that sneak into the house and needs dispatched with the closest available newspaper, magazine, or shoe. I’m more agitated by the kind that live in apps and cause mysterious and damned near impossible to track down battery drain on my phone. Thanks to these gremlins, I get to spend a few hours backing up everything I have on my phone, tricking the thing into believing it’s once again fresh out of the box, and then reinstalling each app one by one so I don’t accidentally reintroduce whatever power hungry gremlin resided in the old version. For a device that “just works,” I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time poking around under the hood to keep things humming along without the need to recharge it every four hours.

3. Passwords. It took me five attempts to log into my own damned website today. That’s mostly because two days ago the site forced me to create a new one. It couldn’t be any old password, of course, but one that was at least eight characters included upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, special characters, hieroglyphics, quadratic equations, and the square root of pi rounded to the nearest non-repeating decimal. I get it. Internet security is important. It’s so important that apparently the best way we can manage not to lose all our secrets to the Chinese, or the Russians, or the NSA is creating the illusion of a random string of characters. If security is as important as the internet thinks it is, can someone please explain to me why we’re not using retina scanners, fingerprint readers, blood samples, or something, anything that would be more convenient than needing to remember a new 742 character password every third day?

September blahs…

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It seems that late september back in ’07 was the tip of the iceberg in my ongoing mission of living a better life through the liberal use of the medical arts and sciences. Join me, won’t you, as memory lane leads everywhere from a Memphis emergency room with a presumed heart attack to a run down office in a rough part of town where they do drug screening for Uncle Sam. Maybe it isn’t the most exciting topic I’ve ever nailed to the door around here, but I think it’s pretty damned funny… especially in hindsight.

We’ll be making our way into October next week, so enjoy what’s left of September 2007 now. And don’t forget to comment if you’ve ever had a heart attack that turned out to be just a really bad case of gas. Happy Sunday!

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Anyone who is surprised that cocaine killed Whitney Houston. Instead of banner headlines on the news sites, maybe “Well, duh” buried on page 10 next to the ad for weekend specials at Donny’s Pancake House and Truck Stop would be slightly more appropriate.

2. People driving on a weekday afternoon like they don’t have a place in the world to be. I get that not everyone flies out the door at the end of the day at a dead sprint like I do, but still I’d think if you’re on the road during what approximates rush hour in northeastern Maryland you’d have some place you were trying to go. Apparently, though, there are a sizable contingent of people who are just out to have a look the scenery. In a Tharp administration, these people will be subject to targeting and neutralization by armed Predator drones circling high above major commuter routes. Sure, this might cause some additional delays, but at least those slow downs would have a legitimate reason for happening.

3. People who show up to things unprepared. I can’t throw down with the best slackers around when I set my mind to it, but one thing I never do is show up to a meeting or other activity without having a reasonable command of the subject matter. It doesn’t take that much effort to do your homework ahead of time. There’s a special place in hell reserved for people who wander in and waste two or three hours of your life because they don’t have a clue what’s going on around them.

4. It takes Friday entirely too long to show up every week. I think That one is pretty much self explanatory. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to start my three-day weekend. And in case you’re wondering, no, that last part does not annoy Jeff.