New Years Resolutions...

... Really?

Happy New Years... Eve...'s Eve...

 

 

Disappointed with where your life is going? Well, remember that earth moves fastest in its orbit near this time, (Perihelion) so you won't stay where you are now for very long... Technically... In space...

 

 

And if you like where you are now, well... Have fun anyway!



1337 Communication Skills

Everyone spends their teen-aged (Pronounced / Teen: a 'jed/) years being told about how adult life will be filled with hardships and responsibilities, but most of the time they just think, "It can't actually get that bad." and mosey along... Little do they know that all this time, they've been carefully shielded from the End of carefree innocence. One day, all plans fail and they find themselves face to face with their worst fear:

Dealing with customer service agents on the phone.

First you must endure one of the Trials by Music, such as

• The Trial of the Endless Flute Solos.
• The Smothering of Smooth Jazz
• The Hypnotic New Age Ascension of Infinite Peacitude
• The Desperate Attempt to lure teenagers in with Electronic Music

Once your brain has been melted into a puddle of Befluted Ooze, they will abruptly interrupt (Say that three times fast) your woodwind trance with "Soothing" messages about how much they value your time... As they flagrantly waste it...

 But the main problem is that, at the end of the day, many American companies have made a fatal mistake. Looking for any possible way to save money, they ended up outsourcing jobs to people who don't have the one qualification they should have: That they speak the native language of their customers.

As an equal opportunist, I believe that anyone should be allowed to do a job, with one caveat: (And this will be a big cave to eat...) They need to actually fulfill the one qualification for that job. Lots of foreigners speak better English than the average American. But it seems like we never find those people in Call Centers.

 Somehow it gets worse. Sometimes people are still too expensive to pay, so you design robots to represent your company instead. A great sounding idea... You can almost picture the "Soothing" robotic voice of Siri in your head, guiding you seamlessly through the efficient and streamlined process. The American government tried to do this for Obamacare. The problem is, as funny as it sounds, the government of "The most powerful nation in the world" still doesn't have as much money for this as Apple does... Apple isn't 18 trillion dollars in debt.

So now it's one step beyond outsourcing a job to people who don't fulfill the only requirement for it... Now you've programmed a machine to do one job that it apparently can't do! You'll hear, "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying" over and over again, but what you'll want to tell these companies is, "I'm sorry, I don't understand WHAT YOU WERE THINKING."

I have a Midwestern accent- An accent reporters all over the country are trained to speak in because it represents the median point in American accents. If a computer can't understand that, who exactly is it programmed to understand?

Then comes the Quest. (A quest from which you are unsure you will return, and if you do you will certainly not be the same...)  Because sometimes confusing you over the phone isn't enough for these people; they want to juggle you between the phone, the internet, and their store. (Between the Ox and the Gray Ass, as it were) You have to find a code you were never given (No doubt originally found inscribed on a Chinese Tablet in the back of El Dorado) and then have to enter in all your personal information online (Including your uncle's first dog's maiden name) only to find out that the process can't be completed on the mobile app and you have to go to the store to get the required code to give you administrative privileges to your own account. You would assume that once in the store you could finish everything right then and there, but no... Now, you have to finish this on their website, but not the mobile app, and it must be on a PC or tablet... Make sure your 28 digit code is right, otherwise you'll have to then call them on the phone, only to be told that they can't help you over the phone and need you to come in... And the cycle continues.

Searching for photographic evidence to document our quest, we turned to our trusty assistant: Google Images. He informed us that call centers are brightly lit, futuristic buildings with open floor plans, staffed by a beautiful cast of multicultural men and women with perfect teeth:

In reality, however, we know that most of them probably look more like this:

Cheer up, depressed looking Indian dude... Some day they'll transfer you to one of those 2024 style skyscrapers on Mars, with all the perfect teeth!

Unwarrented Tips of the Iceberg Lettuce

Ok, so I don't know if you've been out to eat or grabbed burgers or the like lately, but EVERYWHERE, all receipts now ask for a tip...

You go to get Chinese take out, they ask you for a tip... You order pizza and pick it up YOUR SELF, they ask for a tip. You leave a tip for your waiter in a restaurant and go to pay up front.... And they ask you for a tip!!!

Starbucks also asks for tips when they make your $4 coffee... Bartenders want tips on $5 mixed drinks and $4 shots...

If you are ringing me up, that is not a service! You deserve no tip!

You are making one drink. That's what you do. You are not walking over to my table and checking on my wants every few minutes, your one function (which I already paid for) does not warrant a tip!

It makes me think of the Lifehack fails, where they said you should pay $20 to the bartender so they give you good service. But this is implying that waiters and bartenders should refuse to be good at their job unless you bribe them in addition to the salary they're already getting paid by their establishment. This is very weird. As opposed to simply good service, which will inspire you to want to tip them anyway.

If I tip a pizza delivery boy, why the hell would I tip the lady working the register when I go pick the pizza up myself?

And how do I evaluate how good of a job they did pressing two buttons?? 10% or 20%?

Garrr

Close Encounters of the Stupid Kind

This happened.

I was in a cafe the other day, minding my own ((Ocassional) damn) business, when a man asked for permission to sit across the table from me. Now, this is already a dangerous situation- One which is unideal, but you can't refuse without being rude. So I informed him that, as far as I knew, this was still a free country and not my Starbucks. As I'm putting my headphones in my ears, universal langauge for "I don't want to make small talk.", he begins commenting on my macbook and how nice it is. I told him I wouldn't really know because it's my wife's, and I'm downloading something for her Dietitian's exam. He then asked if my wife was a Dietitian, to which I replied, "That's what the test is about."

He then asked where she worked, to which I responded, "A hospital, as most people in the field of Dietetics tend to work." I looked down at my screen and kept minding my own business as he continued, "Oh you probably drink soy milk and don't eat meat"(???) I could only assume that he could only assume that because of my beard and long(ish) hair that I was some sort of hippie... An obvious enough conclusion to a vietnam veteran- Yes, that's right, this man was a veteran, as shown by the hat he was wearing, which very blatantly informed the whole world of his veteran status. This is important later.

I politely laughed and responded, we drink regular milk and eat meat, because it's important to have a balanced diet. Looking vaguely disappointed that I was, in fact, not a hippie, he grunted and went back to his paper. A few minutes later, a college-age kid walked up to him and asked him about his hat.

After asking the kid about three times to repeat his question as if it was the most unfair thing in the world, he barked "I don't want to talk about it" despite the kids continued pleas to be regaled with "his story", and resumed his paper. 

Apparently this man was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the amount of social interaction he had just encountered. (Maybe he hit his social quota for the day after our conversation) Previously, he had been socially underwhelmed, which is why he had wanted to talk to me- But now he had lost the perfect balance of "Whelmed" and was clearly in the Dangerzone once again.

It makes me wonder, though, why would you wear a hat or a shirt with something attention-grabbing and interesting like that, as if you want to broadcast it, and then tell off anyone who tries to talk to you about it? Did he not own another hat? Did he need to be wearing a hat at all? So that's how I learned that people with multiple hats do not frequent Starbucks.

Entre le bœuf et l'âne gris

Christmas Xmas is in the air- The "Holidays" are approaching... Don't be offended... It's around this time of year that we start to sing a lot of the same hymns and carols- Which is great, they're great. But sometimes you'll be standing there, in the church, and suddenly everything goes quiet... What just happened? You look closer at your hymnal and realize that all at once, the entire congregation got confused on whether or not they were allowed to say, "Ass." (And don't even get me started on hymns that mention bosoms...)

There are two really popular hymns in particular where, every year, if you listen closely, you can hear it happen every. Single. Time. The easiest one to get away with is, "Good Christian Friends Rejoice"- The tempo is fast enough that you can just kind mumble through it and half ass it.

Speaking of half assing it, whoever wrote the Little Drummer Boy (In the ancient year of 1941) took the initiative and wussed out BEFORE everyone else by replacing ass with lamb. That gets a JAM certification of: "Lame!"

 

But then there are slow hymns like, "What Child is This", and the line always ends up going something like

 Situations like this call for unquestioning bravery and an absolute refusal to half-ass. You just have to go forward and sing the line without hesitation. And then laugh at everyone else as they stumble along it. That's the only way to sing Christmas Hymns.

 

There are some other, more obscure hymns that do this too, such as the French "Entre le bœuf et l'âne gris" or "Between the Ox and the Gray Ass", which sounds like their version of between a rock and a hard place. But at least the French know that gray is a distinct color from blue!

And then there's the oddly suggestive "In the Bleak Midwinter", which deserves quite a bit of attention.

What exactly is going on here?

 

I don't even know what to say to explain just how awkward this hymn is. The one-two punch (Teaching children how to count and punch people at the same time, both very valuable skills) of weirdness from this verse alone is just staggering... I'm very glad it doesn't get sung a lot. There's only one other Christmas carol I can think of that's more awkward than this one, (In the Ending of The Year) but it's literally too explicit to talk about on the JAM. (But it is hilarious) The JAM is a semi-family friendly blog, after all. (Which means it's friendly to the families of truckers)

 

And there ya go. Tune in next time when we fulfill our Blogal Duties by having an obligatory post about how consumeristic Christmas is these days. But right now I have to go out and get all my Christmas shopping done.

 

Anyway, I leave you with this deleted scene from the Nativity, featuring the amazing Spider Manger:

Life Hack Fails

Lifehacks. Some people look them up to increase their efficiency and simplicity. Some other people (Me) look them up to make fun of them. Let's do that for a while.

... And then you'll spend another $20 every time you go to a bar.

 Now you can have a place to hold... A single bagel! Congratulations!

 There are very few purchases that this would make better, and a whole lot that this would make worse.

... And, now you have a birthday card.

And, now they also have to get through the additional stress of having someone tell them to laugh at whatever is stressing them out.

JAM! research has proven that this can cause a stress increase of up to 70%.*

(*This study was conducted by two of our own two staff members, who of course agree with us.)

That vacuum cleaner was actually a rejected droid from the latest Star-Wars preview.

Always a good idea to lessen your total speed when being chased by dangerous (If rarely encountered) predators. #Florida Problems

Personalized... In the most generic way possible. This is the Lifehack that keeps on giving- You could personalize anything this way!

Because we can totally just throw random percentages on things to make them more scientific.

 1. Nebulous citation of "A study"

2. How do you calculate the exact percentage of someone's mood, anyway? The JAM! staff recently tested this, and found anywhere from a 1-27% increase in mood. (As directly opposed to a 95% increase in mood while readying the JAM!)

3. Also, now you have a picture of food. Congratulations.

 Quick poll: Are you pro or anti date-rape?

... And be a complete douche!

 For all the people who have run out of other reasons to have sex.



 For all the people who haven't thrown these out sometime during the last 20 years.

 If you're too far away to unlock your car, what are you going to do with it after you unlock it anyway? Does Bruce Willis need your car to save his pregnant wife from the Insane Clown Posse or something? (In which case, Bruce Willis could open your car faster than you ever could anyway) 

 Alternatively, save yourself the trouble of using a printer (Printers are the DEVIL!) and just learn to measure with a ruler.

So that you can lower your immune system and keep the sore throat going indefinitely. This is a lifehack for people who like being sick. At least you'll never have to go to work again! The MOST sick days!

Works great if you don't have any kids!

And that's all, folks!