So, you are one of the first people to read a single word of the 400 page monster I’ve been toiling over for 2 years,
“How I Abandoned a Book Deal with Penguin/Random House, Partied Away the Advance, and Ended up an Online Gig Worker. And How You Can Do it Too!”.
I’m not too far from finished, so I figured excerpts can start soon. This was actually a scene I currently have CUT from the book. I was looking at all these outtakes yesterday and realized this little action portion would be good for this blog. True story from 2018:
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It was Saturday night on calle la setetenta (seventieth street), the big weekly show, the night and place where anything could happen, any deal could be made, any manner of trouble could come walking down the street, preening with temptation. I was sitting under a tree inside a giant concrete pot that made for good sitting and people watching—the same tree under which I’d seen a trans woman beat the shit out of a Colombiano a couple weeks prior, with the man screaming “Ayudamee, ayudaameee” (help me, help meee!) as his face absorbed every blow. She had taken off her red heels, holding one in her left hand, occasionally switching from a punch to a heel strike to the face, inducing winces from onlookers.
Since it was about midnight, and of course, right on the wild wild seventieth, and right outside the triad of bars just a block up the street from my apartment, I figured it had been a case of a tipsy, machismo Colombiano denigrating the trans woman, and getting the surprise of his life. As my friend Alan from New York had said,
“Don’t think one of these trans won’t beat the shit out of you. They’ve taken so much shit during their lives, have so much built up inside of them, you DO NOT want to be the one to make her snap.”
Right now I live in Medellin. the home of Pablo Escobar. Not only do I live in the same city as El Padrino did, I live in the same neighborhood he lived in most of his life: Castilla. I live in the ghetto. Even the majority of people from this city refuse to come to my house, due to the reputation of my neighborhood. But I’m a very friendly guy who loves to make people laugh any way I can, so the people of this hood have taken me in as one of their own. I am the only English speaker within a 20 mile radius, mas o menos.
I haven’t seen much of the legendary violence of this neighborhood, save for one shooting I witnessed literally directly in front of my building in which a young man was hit in the chest five times by a man with a revolver. Drive-by. The victim lay there, blood pooling on his chest, as the police took their sweet time taping off the crime scene. And another time I heard what must have been a shotgun go off just a few blocks away, followed by dozens of cops. I’m not going into many details about the utter insanity that has been the past decade or so of my life: to start, you can read my Wikipedia page to get an idea. The two-part autobiography I’m working on tells the rest. But I figured I should make this clear, because in the future I might make some references– like tomorrow’s post, for instance– that will take place in Colombia, and I wanted to make it clear. Also, there will be some pictures coming of my neighborhood, soon.
Well I found a picture of me holding a stack of big Colombian bills like some kind of playa. I need to get beautiful pics on here
So with this, we needed to get this short informative article in at a tight 150 words or less. The writer first handed in 500 to give you an idea, and it didn’t feel bloated at all. The client wanted these articles very short. I ended up just cutting this way down and rewriting it to get it to the exact word count.
TURNING UP THE HEAT IN RUSSIA
In Russia, a system called “district heating” is used to heat both the radiators and water in homes. With this system, every neighborhood has its own power plant. A system of underground pipes brings heat to neighborhoods. This system has a couple good things about it. For one, there is no chance people will lose heat in the winter due to reasons such as failing to pay their bills. Second, it is cheap for residents. However, there is one big disadvantage. The systems are old, and some have not been updated often. In some plants nearly half of the energy produced is wasted, experts say. Also, a two-week repair job is needed every year. During this period, in summer, no hot water is available in any of the homes being serviced. This means cold showers for all. Now, however, the government is thinking about starting new programs to help reconstruction.
Oops. I guess I should have been writing “certified” career strategist the whole article. Sigh.
So. The Professional Association of Resume Writers and Career Coaches (PARWCC) is just now offering a certification to help military vets in their quest to get public employment. Is this certificate worth 870 dollars?
The Pros
Be Among the First
It’s a new certification, targeting an underserved group. As of this writing, a few lesser organizations have followed PARWCC’S lead and are putting out Certified Veteran Career Strategist Certification of their own, with one shamelessly charging 2400 dollars. An underserved niche in the career coaching world, it could be priceless to get in now, before this becomes oversaturated like the general resume writing industry (every writer, including yours truly, has resume writing services advertised). There are something like 3 million vets in the country, on top of their family members who would quickly be referred to you if you did a good job for the vet, totaling out to somewhere around a 7 million count client pool. That’s a healthy number of clients. And you’d be pitching in that crowd mostly alone, few other pesky writers in sight! You may get in early with a name and reputation as the best veteran career strategist!
Advertising Ease
Vets tend to stick together in groups online. You see vet forums, vet groups, vet meetups. This is priceless: you can target those groups for guerilla advertising, as opposed to relying on Google to find your demographics scatttered all over the place and target them one by one. Honestly, this and the above pro are about equal in potential ROI. The fact that there are two pros this huge is about enough to call this a “yes, it’s worth it” (oops, spoiler warning).
It Might be the Kind of Job You Actually Enjoy
First of all, Certified Veteran Career Strategist requires all the skills and duties of a career coach: making those conference and phone calls, going over paperwork with the client, searching for job matches as posted, rewriting resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and at times, playing a little unofficial therapist. Then on top of that, these are vets: there is a notorious trust barrier between vets and the rest that you’d have to become adept at breaking down. Those unofficial therapy sessions? Well, depending how you look at it, either much more exciting to listen to, or much more traumatic. And, you’d be giving back to your country; serving those who have served you. With all this, you may have yourself a recipe for actually having some fun while earning that title as the best veteran career specialist out there!
The Cons
There’s a Reason This Certification is Just Now Emerging
It’s often said that there is a wall of mistrust between vets and civilians, and it’s true. I just experienced it myself while talking to the people behind the Career Veteran Strategist program (long story). Vets will often attribute the worst, least charitable intentions to you. You’re going to have to break this barrier down before even getting them to talk to you, which won’t be easy.
Brand New, No Track Record
While it’s a plus that this is brand new territory with little competition, it’s also a minus. Will getting this certification really be worth your money and time? And speaking of which…
You’re Not Just Paying For This Certification
First, you have to become a member of PARWCC, which will set you back 127 dollars. Then, as far as I know right now, you at least have to get either a resume writing certification at 300 dollars, or a career coach certification at over a thousand, before you can plunk down 715 dollars for your veteran career coach cert. That’s, at minimum, 1200 dollars with tax, and two certification courses to complete. Not a small investment
The Conclusion
I’m thinking about it. If it weren’t for the required PARWCC membership and the prerequisite course (s), I’d be signed up now. It could be a great opportunity, but it won’t come cheap.
Inspiration often comes from strange places, and for the Mexican artist Pedro Linares, that place was his near-death bed, in 1936. Dying at age 30, he found himself trapped in a scary dream world full of mountains populated by demons. They were mostly red demons, with horn-cropped heads. Others looked different— so scary Pedro could not even describe them upon waking. Luckily, he survived both the illness and the nightmares, and began a mission to share his visions with the world.
Pedro had been making art since childhood, mostly crafting judas monsters for the world-famous painter Diego Rivera, husband of yet another world-famous Mexican artist: Frida Kahlo. The judas monsters were red carton demons that people burned during Holy Week in Mexico. All of the art that Pedro made was made of “papier mache,” a cardboard-like material made of paper strips, held together by a mixture of water and starch. So, when Pedro set out to bring the red demons from dream to reality, it was natural for him to use papier mache. They gained the name alebrijes. At first, they weren’t popular, as people considered them too scary.
Then, Pedro began making the alebrijes more colorful, which caught customers’, as well as the art world’s, eye. Soon, Pedro gained the reputation as the best artisan in Mexico, and thousands of other artists began imitating him. Diego Rivera himself bragged that no one could make alebrijes like his student, Pedro. By the end of his life, Pedro received the National Arts and Science award in the Popular and Traditional Arts category, the highest award for artisans given by the Mexican Government.
Pedro’s death in 1992 didn’t bring an end to his colorful, nightmare vision. Instead, it made the alebrije style even more popular. Over his life, he had personally taught his method and style to many aspiring artists, and people who had never even met Pedro adopted and made variations of the style. One such artist is Susan Buyo, who makes alebrijes with more human-like features, making them less scary. Another group of artists making alebrijes today stick a little more closely to the classic design: Pedro’s own children.
Published on McSweeney’s again. I’m sorry, but this time I didn’t spend half an hour hand-deleting all the advertisements. They’re not too invasive. This is the sequel to “Do You Like Me? Click Yes or No,” with Bobby a precocious high school senior now. Just to show I can also take on the button-up academic voice.
THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ROMANTIC LETTERS PRESENTS THE FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON HOW TO TELL SAMANTHA I REALLY LIKE HER
Theme: To Pass Her a Note, or to Digitally Approach Her? That is the Question. Date: Today after school. Venue: My house. Keynote speakers: Whoever can give me decent advice.
I cordially invite all friends and experts in the study of romantic letters to join me after school for the first annual ASRL conference. This year’s theme: Should I just tweet at Samantha like all the other guys, hinting that we should chill one day? Should I ask for her cell number and slowly take it from there with old-fashioned texts (à la my fifth grade Alice debacle)? Or should I take the plunge and give Samantha an actual note made of paper to really let her know that I like her like her?
I can’t mess this one up.
EPISTOLARY PROBLEMS ON TEMPORAL PLANES
ASRL members and other romantic studies professionals are invited to think about persuasive methods by which to make Samantha my girlfriend. This problem has gained prominence since the beginning of the school year, as we are now seniors and will soon be going away to college— Samantha will be lost forever if I don’t make a move.
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart,” Wordsworth once wrote (as Ms. Connor told us this morning). But how should the performative utterance be considered vis-à-vis Samantha? Should I actually fill a real piece of paper with my heart’s breathings, physically pass it to Samantha, and risk looking like a complete weirdo? Dating praxis suggests that sappy-ass gestures should be avoided in the early stages of relationships, but isn’t Samantha the kind of girl who would consider a handwritten note to be sweet? Since we sit next to each other in AP English, wouldn’t a letter be thematically conducive to jocular Ask Out models? Do I dare go so far as to quote Keats in the letter, or maybe even try to write her a poem myself? Do you think my poem would be shitty and fatally lame? Tell me the truth.
Content and Context: Exactly what should I put in the note? Samantha has beautiful eyes, but should I mention that? Would it be better to wait until I’m actually gazing into Samantha’s eyes at some point before I call them beautiful, assuming I ever get to that point?
I’m thinking it would be lame to tell her she has pretty eyes in the note, but fine to do it in-person.
Hesitation in the Samantha Narrative: If the best way to approach the Samantha problem is to allow the narrative to flow conventionally—sans the note—am I then at risk of Dave Pearson moving in and blocking me, since everyone knows he likes her likes her, too?“No one writes like Hopler. And no one ever will.” —Katie Ford
The Role of Women in Samantha Studies: Women are awesome, and Samantha is awesome. Dating theory and Mom suggest that I will meet many other awesome women as I grow older and that I should therefore not stress this Samantha thing too hard, since there are likely “other Samanthas” out there for me. But is the conclusion of this theoretical framework really just a total lie meant to dupe me into a lonely death?
FOOD, LODGING, AND OTHER CLAIMS
Will not be covered.
SUBMISSIONS
Please submit proposals for engaging these questions, as well as for how best to compose the note in the event that I decide to go that route. All proposals should include:
A title and an abstract of 450-500 words.
Author’s name and contact information.
C.V. with relevant girl experience highlighted.
A Statement of the Author’s Estimate of how likely it is that Samantha will simply laugh at the note and post a pic of it on Instagram, thereby ruining my entire life.
Well, before you buy an item, or a service, you prefer to get a sneak peek at what that item/service can really do for you, right? Go around and kick the tires on the car before buying it, as they say. In that spirit, what I’ll be posting is my writing, some unpublished, some already published, to give you an idea of the range of voices and modes I can enter into. I pride myself on being somewhat of a chameleon when it comes to writing: I love taking on different voices and styles as needed, from that of a 19th century adventurer writing in a journal, to a modern day editorial as found in a tech journal, to scientific papers, I’ve taken on just about everything, as you’ll be seeing. Let the fun begin, soon!
For a while I worked for an edutech company. My job was to come up with articles for foreign students to read, and then formulate questions to test their comprehension. Only one answer was correct; circle it! Here is a short sample of a test I wrote:
Shipping Container Living
As far back as the 1950s, people found ways to use shipping containers— steel boxes used to transport items on ships— as homes. Lately, however, shipping container homes are gaining popularity. This is because movements that promote living with fewer necessities—“minimalist” movements, such as the “tiny home” movement— have risen in popularity. Some people think shipping container living is minimalist housing at its best. However, some experts say that container-living is not good minimalist living. There is more steel in a shipping container than necessary for a living structure, because containers are built to survive rough seas on ships. By melting shipping containers to liquid steel, many small houses with wood framing could be built from just a few containers. Also, steel containers need a lot of HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) materials for comfortable living. These utilities would leave little overhead space given a container’s low ceiling. (150)
What do “minimalist living movements” aim for?
Living in tiny homes like shipping containers.
A more 1950’s-like way of simple life.
Living with resources that are easily transported.
Surviving with less resources wherever possible.*
What challenge does HVAC pose to shipping container life?
So. While working for the U.S. Transportation Security Adninistration I secretly ran a whisteblower blog. It’s a long story. You can read my Wikipedia entry for more. Anyway, this post was re-published in a book along with well known writers, called “Airplane Reading.” So here is the article free– the only place it can still be found for free online.
The Things They Ran Through the X-Ray
Jason Edward Harrington
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The Transportation Security Administration often likes to give you a weekly photo-laden rundown of things that passengers have accidentally left in their carry-ons, mostly intended to give the impression that they are successfully combating some sort of existential threat to our way of life, as their 8 billion dollar budget purports to be doing.
Much more interesting, however, are the dirty little day-to-day occurrences that don’t fit into boring, anodyne governmental accounts of life. These are some of the things they ran through the x-ray.
In talking to officers around the country, it became clear to me in my time at TSA that at most large airports there is an inevitable account of a TSA officer who has run him or herself through the x-ray and subsequently been fired for it. It seems this is usually done out of sheer boredom. Some of these stories are substantiated by termination documents (a FOIA request could probably bring them to light for anyone so inclined).
I have been told by several people that a TSA screener looks much like you would expect it to on a TSA x-ray screen: an enormous orange blob with a black blotch where his or her badge is. So always remember that at some point, at least a few of those solemn-faced TSA officers confiscating your peanut butter have appeared as large orange blobs running through the x-ray.
Cats look like orange turkeys on the x-ray screen. How many cats and dogs I’ve seen run through the x-ray I cannot tell you. Cats far outnumber dogs. For some reason people just think it’s alright to run a cat on through the x-ray. Possibly because cats are less vocal about things than dogs.
Babies also occasionally end up on the x-ray belt. I’ve heard occasional rumblings of babies going all the way through the x-ray machine, ending up as a little orange blob on some x-ray operator’s screen, and I’ll tell you, I would not bet against it having happened. But personally, I’ve only seen and heard, first hand, about close calls. These occasional close-call placement of babies on the x-ray belt usually result from highly confused international travelers so thoroughly perplexed and flustered by the neurotic, collectively 9/11-traumatized, pathological nature of American airport security— all the fussing about shoes and commands to get inside full body scanners and esoteric liquid rules that make very little sense throws them off— and so they are understandably unsure of what it is they are supposed to do with their baby. Do they take the baby out of the stroller? Submit it to make sure it’s carrying less than 3.4 ounces of liquids? Submit the baby for a radiation check? Hand the immigration and customs paper work over for the baby? Taste the baby to prove that it’s not poisonous?— American airport security can be pretty baffling for anyone, so imagine what it looks like to someone from rural India. So it’s actually understandable that the occasional baby has been placed on the x-ray belt.
Pilots and flight attendants are exempt from the liquids rule, and let me tell you, dear passengers: the amount of alcohol that airline crews drink is staggering. Bottle after bottle of hard liquor and wine and champagne is revealed on our x-ray screens when flight crew comes through. Most of us have, at one point or another, asked the flight crew, “having some fun tonight, huh?” laughing nervously, and then adding, with a hopeful tone, “afteryou land the plane and are in the hotel room, right?”
Finally, I was intrigued by the irrepressible sexual hunger that compels the passengers of this great nation to bring vibrators, dildos and other assorted sex toys aboard the plane with their carry-on luggage. I know that the people of this great nation are strong and have within themselves the capacity to overcome irrationality. I know that they are capable of not being menaced by “an endless series of political hobgoblins,” as Mencken once said—the hobgoblins that the TSA assures them are the cause of their peanut butter confiscation and privacy compromises—due to the fortitude displayed in their bravely pressing on; exposing themselves to the risk of having me rummage through their bag and pull out a large sex toy.
I recall one time I did a bag check on a man from Detroit, once the auto-making capital of the world. Having been informed by the x-ray operator that there was a bottle of water in the bag, I pulled it out and quickly sensed that something was slightly off. Then, I realized what it was: there was an enormous dildo rubber-banded to it. I then had an epiphany, spreading over me like a sunrise, beautiful and exhilarating: he wanted me to have to deal with the dildo. He did it on purpose. In rubber-banding that dildo to the water bottle he knew we would target, he seemed to say:
“Yes, I have a dildo, federal officer. Even after the horrors of 9/11, I am still alive; full of vitality, love, sex and, later tonight, that large dildo rubber-banded to the water you are about to confiscate from me. That bottle of water, bought with hard-earned American dollars to relinquish my bodily fluids, so as to make me strong and keep the wheels of commerce of this great nation turning. In taking my water, I want you, federal officer, to know that the terrorists have won, and that you are complicit. I want you to see my dildo. To hold it in your hand; to know that I, as well as my fellow passengers and countrymen, are strong and resilient.
That we, the people of this great nation, can, and will, snap back, like that rubber band.”
Remember Cracked.com? I say remember because it seems their readership has dropped significantly. I used to write for Cracked. A lot. I also edited a few articles for them. Copy and pasting this from their website was so annoying, with two ads per list entry to avoid, that I will only post one other Cracked article in my sample stack here, since it was a column, and few people ever got to write a first person column for Cracked. It also shows a unique skillset. Well here it is: my most popular Cracked article ever, at about 2 million views, and also the most fun to write: The 7 Most Impressively Lazy Employees of All Time.
Chances are you’re doing it right now: Slacking. Procrastinating. Reading this Cracked article with your cursor placed on a work-related tab, prepared to click away should your boss walk by. We’ve all done it at some point — but there are a few people who have taken the time-honored tradition of slacking and raised it to levels of epic proportions.
People like …
7 State Employee Skips Work Every Friday … for Almost 20 Years
The Job Description
Besides having the honor of sharing a name with a failed presidential candidate, Howard Dean was the food services director at the Department of Correctional Services in New York, running a facility that provided meals to 57,000 inmates. For nearly two decades, Dean put your tax money to good use by tirelessly feeding the hell out of those inmates, day in, day out, eight hours a day, four days a week.
Wait, what?
Four days a week? Oh, that’s right — Howard Dean didn’t do Fridays. Ever.
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And Thursdays were the company “nap days.”
The guy didn’t just skip one work day a week for 17 years without telling anyone: To avoid getting caught, he also charged his employer (you know, the U.S. government) $240,000 in gas money for some nonexistent trips to and from the state’s Food Production Center. And because pretending to travel long hours by car can get pretty exhausting, he also got paid for 75 bullshit hotel-room stays at the Quality Inn. All in all, Howard Dean’s 17-year streak of three-day weekends cost taxpayers half a million dollars.
The most unbelievable part of this story? The fact that nobody noticed.
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“That’s Howard — he’s invisible near weekends, due to a gypsy curse.”
In fact, all of this came to light only after Dean’s retirement, when someone in administrative noticed that the $57,381 in state pension money he was drawing may not have been going to the most deserving of candidates. A criminal investigation was launched, and Dean admitted submitting tons of fraudulent time cards. We’re not sure what’s going to happen to him now, but at least he can rest assured that wherever he’s going, he’ll be well-fed.
6 Bored Secretary Turns Laziness Into an Art Form
The Job Description
As a sales coordinator for Sheraton Hotels in Elkhart, Iowa, 25-year-old Emmalee Bauer was responsible for providing secretarial and administrative support, reporting directly to the director of sales and marketing, and handling all group inquiries either generated by the direct sales associates or by other booking channels — riveting stuff. You could write a 300-page book about how boring this job was. While pretending to do it.
So that’s exactly what Emmalee Bauer did.
Wait, what?
As soon as Bauer realized that her job in sales coordination was not a good career fit for her, she did what most people in her situation would do: She began spending her entire workday writing about the fact that she wasn’t working.
This method of procrastination turned out to be extremely effective, since the act of enthusiastically typing on her work PC about how much she hated working totally created the appearance that she was, in fact, working. She was effectively being paid for moving her fingers eight hours a day.
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“Good job on having hands, Emmalee. Keep it up.”
Thus, the 300-page Laziness Journal was born. That’s 300 pages in single-spaced, regular-size font, not in bullshit “biology school paper” format. Day after day, Bauer came into work, sat down at her computer, opened her Laziness Journal file and mused on the subject of being a slacker while appropriately avoiding any of the work she was being paid for. An excerpt from the book:
“This typing thing seems to be doing the trick. It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important. I am going to sit right here and play Elf Bowling or some other nonsense. Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon.”
Apparently playing Elf Bowling was not a safe way to goof off at work, because Emmalee Bauer was eventually caught and fired, with her Laziness Journalcoming to national attention during her unemployment hearings. Yep, she actually had the nerve to go before a judge and appeal for unemployment benefits after writing 300 pages full of reasons why she didn’t deserve them. On a work computer.
We don’t know if Bauer has published her book yet, or if she ever will. For all we know, entire sections of it could be at the same level as Jack Torrance’s novel in The Shining.
Except in this case, the “All work” part wouldn’t really be accurate.
5 The Japanese Ministry of Procrastination (and Robots)
The Job Description
The Japanese agriculture ministry is responsible for overseeing the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries in Japan. We would be indulging in a tired cliche if we told you it is also in charge of giant robots fighting with one another, so we won’t say that … even though, for a while there, it looked like it totally was.
Wait, what?
Between 2003 and 2007, an alarming number of the ministry’s employees spent considerable amounts of work time on something completely unrelated to agriculture, forests or fish: Wikipedia edit wars. Most of them about the popular anime and toy series Gundam.
Giant robots: Way more exciting than trout.
Within that four-year period, one employee alone contributed 260 times to the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry on Gundam. Five other employees were verbally reprimanded for repeated contributions to other Wikipedia articles on subjects such as Japanese movies, local politics or typographical mistakes on billboards. Granted, if there’s one government that should pay more attention to what’s on billboards, it’s probably Japan’s, but this was still pretty ridiculous.
he Gundam guy was apparently the worst, but he was by no means the only one suffering from a severe case of Wiki-fever: Together, various other employees in the same ministry contributed to a total of 408 Wikipedia entries while at work. That’s more pages than the website of the place they worked in seems to have. It got to the point where the minister of agriculture himself, Tsutomu Shimomura, had to step in and clear up what had apparently become a common misconception, publicly stating: “The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam.“
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“That would be the transportation ministry. Come on, people.”
If we told you Joseph Winstead was the laziest mailman in the world, you’d probably assume he dumped the mail in trash cans instead of delivering it, or maybe took it home and burned it in a fire pit (like this guy used to do). You’d be wrong. Winstead went much further than that. He figured out a way to stay home all day, not even touching the mail he was supposed to deliver: fake jury duty.
Wait, what?
In October 2003, Winstead was chosen for jury duty. He actually served on the jury for a couple of months — getting a paid leave of absence from his job to do so — but quickly found out that there were many days when the jury did not meet. It was on these days that Winstead realized another thing: His bosses didn’t seem to notice the difference between the days when he was actually serving on the jury and the days when he was just sitting at home, getting paid to eat Doritos.
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We, the jury, find this chip delicious!
And so, for the bulk of an entire year — 144 workdays in total — Winstead enjoyed a paid vacation from his job as a mailman, probably keeping his co-workers convinced that he was trapped in a yearlong version of the plot of 12 Angry Men.
Winstead’s scam went on without a hitch that first year, but then, since he’d done such a bang-up job the first time around, he was called for jury duty again. A huge fan of pushing his luck to unreasonable limits (and not so big on the whole “honest work” thing), Winstead decided to give his scam a second go. But this time, his supervisors realized something funny was going on and launched an investigation that ultimately led to Winstead being sentenced to prison. He was also ordered to pay the Postal Service $38,923.95 in compensation, a fair numerical measurement of how much his story pissed the jury off.
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The jury’s suggestion that the defendant should be forced to “eat a bag of dicks” was sadly dismissed.
Forensic scientists may not be as sexy or as explosion-surrounded as TV has led us to believe, but their work is still pretty damn crucial to that whole “justice” thing we’ve got going. As a 24-year veteran of an NYPD forensics lab, Mariem Megalla was responsible for conducting the sorts of tests that help police find dangerous criminals and keep innocent men out of jail … as long as those tests didn’t involve walking too much, that is.
Wait, what?
Megalla’s extreme slacking caused an all-out nightmare in New York’s legal system in May 2010, when thousands of court cases were thrown into question after an NYPD internal affairs investigation discovered that Megalla often came into work with a distinct “not in the mood for doing science-y things” attitude. More specifically, she was caught switching the labels of suspected drug samples just to better suit her needs — her needs being “not having to walk all the way over there.”
Megalla’s work also involved appearing in court and testifying in front of a judge, a part of the job she reportedly was fine with, since it could be performed while sitting. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne stated that “Right now, it looks a lot like either sloppiness or laziness.” The NYPD is still waiting on the lab results to find out which one it was for sure.
As a result of the ensuing shitstorm, every forensics case that Megalla has ever been involved in has to be reviewed, all the way back to 1986. That’s thousands of ongoing cases and prior convictions that could be overturned, all because of one woman’s laziness.
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“I’m only here to look good and deliver one-liners. Clipboard? No idea.”
As operator of the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Ga., from 1996 to 2001, Ray Brent Marsh was there to honor the wishes of those who wanted to skip that pesky postmortem decomposition process and go straight to the “ashes to ashes” part, reliably carrying out his cremation duties and providing journey vessels for the remains of loved ones passed.
Or not.
Wait, what?
Turns out that, in Marsh’s words, the cremation oven was “broken” — meaning that, for five years, Marsh saw no other viable option besides dumping the bodies he was supposed to be cremating in various locations in the crematory’s backyard. Oh, and what did Marsh put in the urns that went out to the families? Concrete dust.
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When a propane delivery truck driver happened to notice the unusual number of decidedly noncremated bodies lying around the property, he alerted the authorities (with his horrified screams, we’re guessing), and the jig was up. A total of 339 corpses were discovered in the crematory’s backyard, 100 of which were never identified because of their advanced states of decomposition. Hundreds of grieving families lost their loved ones all over again.
During the ensuing trial, Marsh offered no other explanation for his negligence, presumably standing by his original excuse of the cremation oven being “broken.” The only problem? Someone actually tested the oven and found it to be largely in working order. Not to mention that, even if it had been completely broken, he could have just called someone to fix it. You’d think that within those five years of smashing concrete and not cremating people, he would have had a spare moment to sit down and pick up the phone.
As state employees of the Office of General Services, Louis Marciano and Gary Pivoda were supposed to provide on-site maintenance and janitorial services in the Empire State Plaza garage in Albany, New York. The OGS website explains that the agency has “developed expertise in centralizing critical support and service functions leading to more cost-effective government,” which says absolutely nothing to us. Apparently, Marciano and Pivoda themselves weren’t too clear on what the hell it was they were supposed to do, because we’re guessing their official job description didn’t mention drugs, board games or a secret underground lair.
Wait, what?
Every day from 2004 to 2009, Pivoda and Marciano would show up for work and immediately descend into the secret “man cave” they had fashioned for themselves in a tucked-away maintenance room within the garage facility. That was the easy part. The hard part was deciding what to do next: Light up a joint …
. watch Office Space for the umpteenth time or play some Yahtzee. Yep, besides stacking the place with drugs, junk food, a TV and a DVD player, Pivoda and Marciano also made sure to keep plenty of board games — you know, as a way to keep themselves occupied. Needless to say, all this excitement usually left them pretty spent.
Ninety percent of the security tape looks like this.
The closest thing to actual work they ever did was when Pivoda hopped into their state-provided car to deliver drugs to other state employees. Investigators found a scale for weighing marijuana inside their secret room, which authorities dubbed “the man cave” because apparently they have a horrible opinion of the entire gender. Once they were exposed, Pivoda was sentenced to one year in prison and Marciano to five years’ probation plus 250 hours of community service.
Notes from the Amazon by Jason Edward Harrington 