Tag: cash money

LOL Dodgers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

LA Times: Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, Anaheim, California sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers, completing a 6-0 season sweep; also Dodgers fall out of first place, also Shohei Ohtani hits into a triple play lmao

I said it before earlier in the season when the Angels marched into Dodger Stadium and took all three games, the Dodgers will probably be fine, probably still win the division and are probably still the odds-on favorites to win the World Series, but it was still hilarious to see them get bounced so badly, not only at home, but to the crosstown rivals in the Angels, who are not really a good team.

So it bears repeating that it is again hilarious that the Angels have swept the Dodgers for the second time in the same season, but this time at their own home in Angel Stadium, because a lot of the circumstances have not really changed, but somehow, neither did the result. 

The Dodgers were in first place in the NL West going into this series, and the Angels were many games under .500, and nowhere near contention in the AL West much less a wild card spot.  And yet, when the smoke cleared on Wednesday night, it was the Angels who rattled off their sixth straight win against the Dodgers this season, completing the series sweep of the year; and in doing so, knocking them out of first place in the NL West, dropping them a game behind the San Diego Padres.

I like to imagine that the amount salt bubbling up amid the legions of lifetime front-running fairweather Dodgers fans since 2024 is massive, delicious and of course loud as shit because there’s no more sore winners than Dodger fans these days, which means they’re somehow even more butthurt when they’re losing.

To me, the best part about this whole embarrassing flop was the fact that it was kind of punctuated, when Shohei Ohtani lined into an extremely rare triple play, which was on the verge of being unassisted, had the runner at first not had the brakes and turn when he did.  Even the most valuable and popular baseball player on the face of the planet was not immune to colossal failure, and I like to facetiously throw in the face of sports communities to be on the lookout for yet another FIRST TIME EVER statistic to solely attribute to Ohtani, like being the FIRST EVER player with 250+ career home runs and an ERA under 3 to hit into a triple play at Angel Stadium on a night game – and it’s Shohei Ohtani. That’s it.

Like I’ve said many times, I don’t dislike Shohei Ohtani, I think he’s a rather pleasant guy who hasn’t let his superstardom really to his head too much.  He’s too Japanese to have such a flagrant ego.  It’s just I dislike that the media can’t get off his nuts and have forced his existence down the throats of sports people, to where I’m left with no choice but defiance and playa-hatin’.   And by proxy, the Dodgers, which is awkward because I still love Freddie Freeman more than I care about any of the current Braves roster, but it all boils down to the fact that I enjoy seeing the Dodgers lose.

Regardless, I still maintain that the Dodgers will be fine, and their predicted success at the end of the year hasn’t changed.  They’ll still make the playoffs, and they’re still a high-probability pick to win the World Series.  But anything short of glory, and snarky fans like myself can all call back to these two specific series in the season as symbolic foretelling to why they failed.

lol, get owned Dodgers

Gunther treating the WWE like a day job makes me like him more

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During an appearance, former WWE world champion Gunther was met by a fan who proclaimed to have driven nine hours in order to meet him.  Usually a lot of workers, regardless of if they’re a face or a heel would probably say something along the lines of ehhh that’s an honor or ehhh I really appreciate that or at the very least, thank you. 

I mean, I’m pretty self-deprecating and am really uncomfortable when any sort of praise is lavished onto me, but even I’d probably say something to express my gratitude and how humbled I am that anyone would want to travel a great distance to see me, and of course, thank you.

But nah, Gunther claims to have told this fan:

Do something better with your time.  Do something that actually benefits you.

And the thing is, I don’t get the impression that he’s playing the heel that he is supposed to be in the WWE character alignment chart.  I genuinely feel like that that’s precisely how he felt about the information, regardless of how well-intentioned it was.  Sure, there’s some murky waters on where this quote is coming from, but if I’m a betting man, I’d wager that this is the real Walter Hahn coming through, and that it’s not that he’s probably not appreciative and grateful that people want to see him, but he genuinely believes that there are more beneficial things out there for people to want to do with their time rather than seek him out for a quick meet and greet.

I’ve read/watched some interviews with him in the past, and if there’s one thing that has remained consistent is how often he has voluntarily opined that he was always dubious that he and the WWE would pair together, because he makes no secret that the general WWE style and his style didn’t necessarily align in the past.  He always credits Japan, specifically strong style as being more of an inspiration to him than anyone in the WWE ecosystem, but he seems intelligent enough to know that for the sake of his future and future well-being, there’s no better place to go than the WWE.

The point is, it’s as if he treats his WWE career like a day job, where sure, he will give his best efforts to the company, do whatever it is that he’s told in order to make as much money as he can in the time that his body can perform, but when the day is over, he will not bleed WWE and be the kind of guy that will be synonymous with the company, ten or twenty years down the line.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a high on Gunther, and I admit that I was not on board when he first showed up in NXT UK, as Walter, looking all doughy and with man tits, and I was not on board with him ending Pete Dunne’s UK championship reign.  I thought his style was excessively stiff, and I couldn’t get over the physical eye test, that this guy was being booked as such hot shit as he was.

But then he had matches with Tyler Bate, carried the fuck out of Joe Coffey, and then the match with Ilja Dragunov in an empty COVID-era BT studios, changed my mind, at just how talented of a worker he was.  He showed up to NXT in America and had great matches with Tommaso Ciampa, and then eventually passed the torch to Dragunov in the highly anticipated rematch.  Then he arrived on the main roster, but in much better shape, and over the months, would improve physically as well as find his groove working main roster.  He won the Intercontinental blet, held it for over 600 days, and proved that he could have a good match with pretty much anyone and I was already a fan by now, and has further ascended in the company hierarchy, where he’s just barely removed from having lost the World heavyweight championship for the second time.

And the whole time, he’s been treating it like a day job, and absolutely nothing more than that, and I really love that that’s the vibe he gives me, because for some reason, I really appreciate guys who operate like that.

One commenter, than more commenters as the story began to circulate, said one thing that stuck with me, and served as the impetus to this whole post, was along the lines of how Gunther was the WWE’s equivalent to Nikola Jokic, the Denver Nuggets’ wunder center, whom it’s so obvious that the NBA is his day job, and that he wants nothing more than to be home in Serbia, raising his horses.  A ton of jokes were had within the last two weeks where footage of him sobbing with happiness at one of his horses winning a race, compared to when he won the NBA championship for the Nuggets, and then basically asked at the press conference when he could go home.

Andrew Luck is another guy that treated his career, as an NFL quarterback, as a tedious day job, that I loved the way he conducted business.  He clearly sat down with mom and dad with a tall glass of milk at the kitchen table, and drew Venn diagrams and wrote down career pros and cons lists and landed on NFL quarterback at being the most fiscally beneficial for the long term.  Otherwise, when not playing football, he was far the fuck away from the sport.

But yeah, Gunther is totally just like Jokic and Luck in the sense that he might be an outstanding wrestler and does give his full effort to the business, but when the day is over, it’s not his passion, it’s not his end-all, and he probably has some interests he’s way more into than wrestling.

A while back, I remember seeing a video of Gunther dancing at his wedding, doing an Indian dance (Bhangra?); of course an athlete of his talent is probably doing it correctly and not looking like an idiot, but the most notable thing about it is the massive smile on his face.  Now I’ve seen a lot of Gunther over the last few years, and he’s had some heel-ish smirks and smiles in his promo work, but there ain’t ever been an instance where he’s had such a genuine or happy looking look on his face as he is dancing with his new bride. 

Man didn’t give in to any sense of elation at winning the NXT UK championship, or when he won the Intercontinental championship, or even when he defeated Damian Priest for his first WWE World title.

WWE Superstar truly is his day job, and the fact that this attitude bleeds out into how he interacts with fans, I fucking love it.  This whole mentality of his only serves to make me like and appreciate him more, and I can imagine that he’s definitely going to be one of those guys that retires way earlier than he would be physically capable of doing, and we will absolutely not see him again, except during his Hall of Fame induction, or any overseas shows where you also know the E had forked over a hefty fee in order to entice him to show up.

So if we are Gunther fans, aside from the fact that we should probably be doing some more productive things with our lives, we should probably appreciate him to the fullest while we have him, because I have a feeling he’s definitely going to retire earlier than lots of balls-to-the-wall professional wrestlers will.

Imagine if your work bonus were based on how much you ran

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BI: Chinese paper company bases annual bonuses on running milestones

Apparently this is a story back from winter 2023 that came across my radar recently, but it doesn’t matter.  My knee-jerk reaction was that this was something I would probably dominate pretty easily, and I could become rich on bonuses, but after reading through the article a little more thoroughly, I come out this with more mixed feelings.

The TL;DR is that in order for the employees of this paper company to get the maximum bonus of 130% of their annual salary, they basically have to run about two miles a day.  Extrapolated to a month, that’s 62 miles, which means in a year, they’re at around 744 miles. 

I have confidence that I could tackle two miles a day, since I basically did that when I was at my probably physical fitness peak, and was running around 3-3.5 miles a day five days a week.  I don’t run nearly as much as I used to, but when I do, it’s more than two miles, and I think if I set a goal of two miles daily, I could probably do it, but then there’s something about obligating myself to such a thing because there’s an incentive at the end of a very long annual road, that makes me feel like I’d probably get sick of it eventually, and really begin to resent running more than I already do at times, because it’s no longer about my health, but it’s also in order to gain a measure of financial benefit.

And as much as I came into this post full of confidence and cockiness that I’d absolutely slay it, the reality is that 744 miles a year is really quite lofty.  I’m pretty sure it was only at my peak did I ever come close to hitting that mark in a single calendar year, and this also leaves very little margin of error for sicknesses, emergencies, the general business of life at times, and if you miss a day or three, then the backlog becomes daunting, and then everything falls apart in the end.

There are secondary and third-tier bonuses, but they’re not nearly as lucrative as nailing the primary bonus, and I have to imagine nothing would be more demoralizing if any of these Chinese guys finished out their year with like 735 miles logged, and fell short of the big bonus on account of a vacation, injury, or some other variable that the whole challenge doesn’t leave much room for, Chinese work ethic not withstanding

Yeah, I think I could probably do it, maybe once, but then be all sour and not wanting to do it again another year, because it would have killed my general sense of importance of running.  But the thing is, this isn’t something that I would have to do, because at my current, American job, I already get an annual bonus that maybe wasn’t exactly 130% of my monthly intake, but it was close, and I got it simply for, doing my job.

I didn’t have to run 62 miles a month and 744 miles a year in order to gain it, and frankly I think that’s the whole point of a bonus is to reward those who do the grind with a little bit of coin at a set time of year, to where people could feel like they have some discretionary income for once.  Making employees have to do something they might not be open-minded to in the first place seems cruel and well, very Chinese, as far as expecting extra effort in order to receive incentive, as opposed to more American ideals of rewarding those who put in the work daily.

Digging deeper into this story, there’s all sorts of gray area as far as the requirements go; sure, the information is tracked presumably through fitness trackers and watches, but those things can be easily manipulated, especially in a cheating-friendly culture like China.  There’s also no clarification if walking is allowed, or if it specifically has to be running.  Unless there are specific running zones or treadmills in which the running has to occur, I have to imagine these employees are probably all cheating like motherfuckers in order to meet their mileage requirements and they’re all succeeding at meeting their marks.

I also love how the article’s choice of words make sure to point out that the boss of this company, as far as his own physical prowess:

My business can only endure if my employees are healthy,” said Lin, who claims to have scaled Mount Everest twice — once in 2022, and another time in 2023.

“Claims” as in even the writer of the article doesn’t believe his own physical capabilities and the slight shade implied that he is subjecting his employees to monetary hostage-held physical activity while not being held to the same standards himself, seeing as how he’s the owner of the company.

It’s funny that it’s a paper company that all this happening with, because it seems very much like a Chinese version of The Office kind of thing that Michael Scott would subject his team to incentive-based physical activities, all under the guise of, healthy employees are happier employees, not while realizing he’s making their lives miserable.

But on the flip side of things, the snark they’re getting from Weibo users, makes me understand why companies like this probably create initiatives as such:

You’d have to run two miles a day to meet the monthly target of 62 miles. So the company wants their staff to be track athletes?”

Say you’ve never run in your life without saying it – two miles a day in the grand spectrum of things isn’t really much.  If people still utilized step counters, they’d probably realize that most able-bodied people probably clear 3+ miles a day just with ordinary activities; again, not sure what the specific criteria is on the bonus challenge, but clearing two miles a day isn’t that difficult.  I’m basically living proof that two miles a day doesn’t make a person a track athlete.

These requirements would be considered excessive even for sporting school students. It will hurt their knees. Depending on one’s age and physical condition, it could also trigger acute heart failure,”

Disagree.  Two miles a day would be frankly pretty minimum for those focused on athletics.  I mean look at Manny Pacquiao, man probably ran upwards of 10 miles a day during his boxing peak, and that was in the tropical Philippines no less.  Sure, depending on age and physical condition there are risks, but in that case, don’t do it.  It’s for a bonus, and not for actual wages.  But I do think it’s funny how this user specifically zeroed in acute heart failure as the primary concern, and not exhaustion, dehydration, or any sort of tears or breaks, very typical Chinese worst-case scenario mentality there.

Either way, it’s not a perfect system, but at the same time, I don’t hate it.  If this, or any company offered a physical activity bonus on top of existing annual bonuses, I would definitely be all over it and be in it to win it, but if I also didn’t want to burn myself out, the secondary +30% your monthly wages for half the distance doesn’t seem so bad, and would be a sorely welcome bump in pay that I’d definitely be all about.

Heat check: Kelsey Plum’s fan interaction

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: debates churn over WNBA star Kelsey Plum’s conduct when encountering an autograph seeking fan outside of the team hotel

My knee-jerk reaction when I saw this clip, was along the lines of lmao, the WNBA hasn’t ever had fans since before Caitlin Clark that their players have no idea how to conduct themselves when it comes to interacting with people who want autographs. 

I didn’t think the fan was overstepping any boundaries beyond being an obvious autograph seeker-slash-reseller, but it didn’t sound like he was being a pushy dick, and I thought Plum’s reaction and conduct were unnecessarily rude and combative, which led me to immediately think about how ironically funny it was that she probably just wasn’t used to there being such an interest in women’s professional basketball, and her going off the deep end as a result.

But I’m also a man, and I understand and can see both sides to the debate.  Women have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to respect in athletics no matter how much they excel at the crafts in which they apply to, and so many men in the world are just fucking creeps, so I don’t really blame many women for having their shields up by default, especially when it comes to seeing men, looking for them specifically.

Autograph seekers-slash-resellers aren’t exactly the most savory people in the world, but they’re one of those things that comes with the territory when it comes to being a professional athlete and/or a celebrity.  Some people want autographs because they’re fans, and there are unfortunately people who want autographs because they see them as a way to make a quick buck.

It also doesn’t help that like 100% of them are dudes, which they already have one strike against from women, being men, but then they’re doing something that is most likely for selfish purposes which doesn’t help.

The fact that this story is a story goes to show that the WNBA has garnered more interest than it did a few years ago, and although I imagine that a lot of its players have grown to resent the Caitlin Clark train, she clearly has helped bring an increased level of focus onto the league as a whole, to the point where autograph seekers are now seeking autographs from other players.

Who really knows what was going on in Plum’s head at the very moment of this interaction.  Maybe she was having a bad day, the Sparks were coming off of an L or something, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.  But I do feel like coming out firing with criticism probably wasn’t the best approach, regardless of if anyone feels she should be grateful that people have grown to care enough to want autographs, regardless of their motive.

Honestly though, Kelsey Plum kind of had it easy with this fan.  Female professional wrestlers have it way worse, with creepy wrestling fan incels not only doing the exact same thing, hanging out at hotels, but also following them at airports or public places, with a few having been noted to following them in parking garages.  Plum having a guy waiting outside the team hotel, in daylight, around other people, maintaining a stationary, manageable distance away when asking for autographs is nothing on the creep scale in comparison.

My personal conclusion is that Plum was in the wrong on this one, she could’ve been a little more polite and not come out guns blazing.  Her criticisms potentially make future fans think twice about trying to have an interaction with her or any WNBA player, and those fans could be the little girls and women that the league is trying to inspire.

Perhaps if more people get interested in the WNBA, the lesser we’ll see such weird and uncomfortable interactions between their players and potential fans.

CAITLIN CLARK CAITLIN CLARK CAITLIN CLARK PAIGE BUECKERS PAIGE BUECKERS PAIGE BUECKERS lol

Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Athletic (paywall’d): MLB players complain about how hard their lives are because they have to work all summers

Honestly, I didn’t intend on actually reading the article, because the quotes in a teaser post were all I really needed to get all hot and triggered and ready to lay blast onto a bunch of overpaid professional athlete man-babies.  But I clicked the link in order to get the URL to link to, and must’ve gotten lucky or something because the paywall didn’t come up before I could copy the whole article, paste it into a document and actually read it after all because fuck paywalls.

But the TL;DR of the whole thing was apparently an anonymous (of course) poll went out to all MLB players and apparently the query of what the biggest misconception about the lifestyles of baseball players was a hot button topic, because it spawned this entire snowball rolling downhill to where it became an article, and snarky broggers like me use it as fodder to air out my own grievances with the wealthy complaining about first-world problems.

More than 130 anonymous (of course) players basically were quoted with some absolutely asinine and tone-deaf lines about how hard their lives are, despite the fact that the league minimum this season is $760K.  And almost every one of these quotes is easily rebuttable and can chalk up to the fact that some privileged millionaire is complaining about things that most anyone that wasn’t a professional athlete would gladly switch places with in order to just get a taste of.

And for the sake of my own amusement, I’m going to take guesses and switch in names of all these anonymous baseball players, because frankly it’s probably not that difficult or too far off to identify who’s been saying some of these idiotic quotes.

Our life is awesome, but it’s not as easy as people think it is,” one National League pitcher Zack Wheeler of the Phillies said. “I don’t know if fans realize that when we say we spend more time with our teammates than our families, we’re not exaggerating. It’s not even close. That’s why I say if you want to be a good dad, a good husband, it’s not easy.”

As both a husband and a dad, I’ll admit there are times in which I’ve felt the want for some general freedom from any sort of attachments.  From what I’ve gathered from all sorts of professional athlete autobiographies I’ve read in my life, I’m sure a lot of pro athletes on the daily probably aren’t complaining about the general nature of getting to be alone and unattached when they’re on the road for 3-4 months of a season. 

Frankly, I bet the underlying message between Wheeler’s remarks is the fact that it’s hard for him to be a husband and dad when he’s home, because he’s all used to being among bros and the team and struggles to turn it off when he’s actually home.  And if that’s the case, that’s more a matter of his maturity and priorities than it is baseball being hard

Continue reading “Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard” →

I’m pretty sure basketball is nothing like slavery, bro

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: NBA guard Dennis Schroder, exasperated by how many times he’s been traded in his career, likens the process to ‘modern day slavery’

Fewer things inspire me to get on a keyboard and pound out some words like professional athletes complaining about well, anything, considering the fact that they’re all overgrown man-children who get paid exorbitant amounts of money to play children’s games at an extraordinary level.  And in this case, we have NBA player, Dennis Schroder, whom jaded from witnessing one of the most lopsided and surprising trades in the history of professional sports, decided to air out his frustrations and compare the stress of being traded to being the modern day equivalent to, slavery:

It’s like modern slavery. It’s modern slavery at the end of the day,” Schröder said. “Everybody can decide where you’re going, even if you have a contract.

First, I don’t think Dennis Schroder understands what slavery really is.  As defined by Merriam-Webster, slavery is:

1a: the practice or institution of holding people involuntarily and under threat of violence
1b: the state of a person who is forced usually under threat of violence to labor for the profit of another

Last time I checked, NBA players, like all other professional athletes are usually not under the threat of violence, and furthermore, are actually paid wages in order to perform their trade, which in the case of Dennis Schroder, is to play basketball.

I didn’t know who Dennis Schroder was, and I was tickled by the fact that he actually spent five years in Atlanta.  But I figured that he must be some scrub who has been hanging onto a career in the NBA and has mostly been living on league minimum salaries, which by the way, the NBA absolute league minimum is still $1.1 million dollars, and more for guys who have the years of experience that Schroder has, which is to say that being an NBA player pays at the very least 1.1 million times more than what slaves got when slavery was a thing.

But in fact, Dennis Schroder himself has actually cleared the vaunted $100M mark as far as career earnings go.  In spite of my initial thought that he had to have been some scrub, he’s apparently not a bad player, having averaged 14 points and nearly 5 assists a game as mostly a backup point guard, which are pretty above average numbers in my estimation, and seems worthy of the $100M he’s earned in his career thus far.

But such adds to the absurdity of a guy that’s made this much money to be making the dumb comparison of trading players being akin to slavery, and adds to the narrative of the bullshit tone-deaf chasm between professional athletes and ordinary citizens of the world.

I get that he’s probably frustrated that he’s been traded five times in his career and has had to move now, eleven different times, but that’s all part of the deal of being a professional athlete.  You are nothing but an asset, no matter what management tells you, and when the day is over, you are available to be traded and dumped and moved on a moment’s notice, if the needs of the business outweigh the needs of the asset.

The Luka trade was almost like a league-wide reminder that nobody is untouchable, on top of all other analytical reasons why it’s potentially one of the most lopsided deals in history, but the fact remains nobody is untouchable.  Schroder may be on his eighth NBA team, but there are all sorts of guys way more talented and famous than him that have been bounced around as much as him if not more.

Hall of Famer, Moses Malone has played for nine.  Future Hall of Famer, Vince Carter, played for eight NBA teams in his career.  Apparently, the NBA record is some dude named Ish Smith, who played 14 years in the league, and played for 12 different franchises, having been traded six times.  And even he still cleared $44M in career earnings, galaxies apart from what Kunta Kinte made in Roots.

In all fairness, Schroder quickly realized the colossal fail of what he said, and tried to walk it back some and acknowledge that he makes a lot of money and is blessed to be able to do what he does.  But speech has no undo button, and the media that recorded him will always have on record of him making his completely absurd remarks.  And comparing the woes of being traded as a professional athlete to slavery is about as big of a fuck up as there can be, but he’ll be lucky that the media is still mostly all over the Luka trade to give him any attention beyond the knee-jerk reaction.

It’s my birthday, where’s my free shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you’re one of my zero readers and have known me for while, you probably know that I don’t make much of a deal of my birthday at all.  The lower the expectations I have for them, the less I can be disappointed if they’re not met, so I typically try to treat them like any other day of the year, except people typically try to be a little bit nicer to me.

However, the one area in which I do have expectations are the litany of companies in which I have accounts with, or they at least have my email address in exchange for offers, news and occasional free shit; when my birthday rolls around, yeah, I am expecting some free shit, in the realm of some free and/or discounted food.  Even if everyone I know makes me feel inconsequential and invisible on my own birthday, I can still usually take solace in the fact that I can wander off and get a free meal or cobble together some free food from all the places where I’ve willingly volunteered some personal information with.

That is until this year, where it seems like everywhere where I’d hoped to have gotten any sort of offers from, have been circling the wagons and playing defense with free birthday shit.  This isn’t to say that nobody’s giving away anything, it’s just the shit that has been offered, if anything at all, have been way less impressive than in previous years, and at this point, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to be able to fill my stomach on free food, unless I want to go into a diabetic coma afterward.

A few years ago, my favorite burrito joint in the city used to straight up offer up a free burrito on my birthday, one that I always went out of my way to cash in, because fuck who am I to turn down a free Willy’s burrito?  A year ago, it was a 50% off burrito, which I still redeemed, because fuck who am I to turn down a discounted Willy’s burrito?  However, this year, at the 11th hour I might add, the email finally comes with this year’s offer, and it’s for but just a free side guacamole or side queso, and I’m like wtf.  Chips are inconsequential when it comes to my desired burrito meal, and this year there’s no burrito at all attached to the offer.  Pass

Other restaurants where I frequent enough to have apps on my phone, because I embarrassingly order from them frequent enough to warrant it, all I’m getting are offers for free desserts.  I mean, I have a ridiculously high status with Chick Fil-A, and they’ve yet to give me fucking anything at all, and I’m wondering if they’re going to spring something up on my actual birthday, as if I weren’t trying to plot out my day to maximize how much free shit I can redeem.

You know it’s bad when Starbucks is the only company to offer up something of decent value, which is the customary free drink, no strings except that it can only be redeemed on the actual birthday instead of the week, or the month of, as it used to be in the past.  Of course I’m going to redeem this one, seeing as how this year I have the luxury of my birthday falling on my work from home day, so there is even the remote possibility I might be able to chill at a Starbucks to enjoy my free drink while working remotely.

Otherwise, all the other companies in which I’d hoped there would’ve been free shit, all fucking fail.  I don’t ask for a lot in my life, and I don’t have a tremendous want for any material things.  All I really want on my birthday is some free food and not get aggravated too much, because anything else is mostly unreasonable and likely to not happen and disappoint me, and I don’t want to be disappointed on my birthday, no matter how much I try to tell myself to treat it like any other day.

F for all the companies that I generally pour my money into that won’t give me anything substantial on my birthday.  You’re all disappointments with your stinginess.