Holy shit, theme sweaters...

It’s that time of the year again. Yes, it’s theme sweater time again. This is the time of the year when women in offices all over the world start to wear theme sweaters. It is fast approaching Halloween, and that is when round number one kicks into high gear. You can go into any place of business and see middle aged women wearing sweaters with pumpkins, ghouls, and goblins splashed all over them. And then we progress of course to Thanksgiving where there are turkeys, pilgrims, and even sometimes Indians seen on these atrocious wastes of wool. And then of course, the crème de la crème of theme sweaters. Christmas season. Holy shit, Christmas season. From the time Thanksgiving ends, until we go on vacation for Christmas, there is a cacophony of Christmas sweaters all over the place. Trees, elves, Santa, JC, reindeer, sleighs, and jingle fucking bells all over the place. Oh my God, it needs to go, go right into an incinerator along with any kind of velvety stretch pants that these women tend to wear with said Christmas theme sweaters. Now bear in mind, these are women, who I might have mentioned before were middle aged, but I take that back, some of them are younger than I am. The only person who should be wearing a theme sweater would be like an elementary school teacher whose kids would dig that kind of thing, or maybe some sort of grandmother. But a 33 year old young mother? I think not people, I think not. Middle aged woman? Yeah, well, maybe, but then again maybe not. It just shouldn’t be allowed in normal every day society. I would call for a ban on them, but there is that whole freedom of speech thing that we have in the United States. Then again if I were President…

I guess it is their garish quality that steams me the most. The bright colors, the smiling elves, the bearded bespectacled Santa, carved pumpkins, pilgrims with black clothes and hats, and so on and so forth. I guess they wear them so that they’re happy and all, but damn it all, if I want to have a bad day, how can I have one with a theme sweater staring at me across the conference room when I’m in a meeting? Is that really proper business attire anyway? I mean, even on the most casual of days, is it OK to wear a theme sweater? Maybe I could get a ban enacted on them in my workplace. Yeah, that would be sweet. Get the plant manager to ban theme sweaters because they’re distracting to other people, and when others walk by with them on, you have to shield your eyes for fear of being blinded by their brightness and bling. Which brings me to another point. If you are wearing one of these affronts to good fashion do not, I repeat, do not attach anything to them. These things would include but are not limited to; jingle bells, ribbons, sparkles, rhinestones, and essentially anything else that Dolly Parton wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Theme sweaters do not require extra things hanging off of them to call attention to them. They’re already getting enough attention as it is. Leave it be with the nice little snowman making scene that you have on there already.

There is one woman that I work with that has worn a theme sweater everyday for the last week and a half. Not the same ones mind you, but different ones. It’s been almost 8 business days, and she hasn’t run out of Halloween sweaters yet. What’s funny is that she’s wearing Halloween sweaters paired up with a short skirt and some knee high boots. This isn’t something that you’d normally see. Part raver, part grandmother? Then at the start of this week she was joined in her sweater wearing compunction by another co-worker of mine, who so far is going strong on just 2 days. I doubt she has as many as the first woman, but we’ll never know. If you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space (and if you haven’t, you really should), the kind of overweight woman who is sort of the office manager in that movie, that is the perfect depiction of woman #2 (not the part time raver, but the second sweater wearer on the grassy knoll). She is sickeningly sweet, and is always in charge of things like the monthly Birthday roundtables where you round up everyone who has a Birthday in whatever month we happen to be in, and they all sit in a small conference room with the plant manager airing their grievances over stale muffins, week old pastries, and warm Mountain Dew. This is normally held at like 5 in the morning for some reason, most likely so that attendance is kept to a bare minimum, and then the plant manager won’t have to answer any actual questions. Instead he gets tossed softballs like, “Can we get another Coke machine for the cafeteria?” No. Next question. “What do you see as the possible economic future of this facility as it relates back to the general economy of North Carolina at large?” Oh, hey, I see our time is up, thanks for coming in. Normally, those sessions will go something like that. It sort of reminds me of a Presidential news conference where the reporters get to ask the President questions, but he never actually directly answers one, and just sort of tap dances around the issue and the question and you leave feeling like you should have gotten something out what just happened but you really feel violated deep down instead. That’s how Birthday roundtables go at my workplace. I went to one of them when I first started working there, haven’t been back since. You do get a free t-shirt though, so that would be something. Nah, still not worth it. It’s probably a theme t-shirt anyway, as a matter of fact, I know that it is a theme t-shirt. Meaning, it has a little company slogan and message on there. Something like, “Birthday Roundtable June 2005”. Yeah, don’t need any of that going on in my closet. It’s bad enough in there without cluttering it with another useless t-shirt. That would be like getting yet another t-shirt from a bike race.

The company that I work for is interesting. Interesting in the fact that of all the places that I’ve worked in my short working lifetime since graduation college, and even jobs that I had in high school, the general theme of workplaces in the past has been kind of like, “Work hard, and you’ll make gains, and get raises in your pay rate.” With this place it’s like, “Work hard, we won’t give you any more money, but we’ll constantly remind you of how good you have it even having a job.” You know, this isn’t the way to motivate the work force. What sucks for the general population of folks working there is that they don’t really have any other recourse, or anywhere else to go. They’re more or less a captive work force, with nobody to represent them, or speak for them as a whole. Don’t even mention the word “union” in North Carolina, you’ll get run out of town on a rail and or tarred and feathered. I hear complaints all of the time from the folks that I work with on the production floor. They want me to bring them to our plant manager, and sometimes I make mention of these things to him that I hear people talking about, but to no avail. I’m completely ignored as much as the rest of the work force out there. Well, except for the one time I complained about the bathrooms being dirty. They took some action then to clean the piss off the floor, for about a week. And now it’s back to the way it was before, which is to keep it filthy and smelly. And that’s for the so-called “office” bathroom. The one for the folks who work out on the production floor is about 10 times worse than ours. Now after all these years of my father preaching about how the unions stood up for the working man, I can see where he’s coming from. Sure there are unions that have become corrupted with power and money, but there are still unions out there doing good work for the general laborers who built this country, and who are still building this country. How did I get into this topic? Especially when I started out this entire thing by bitching about theme sweaters. Yeah, I have no idea either.

There is another thing that has been niggling at me for awhile. It’s China. No, not the plates and saucers, but the entire country. With so much manufacturing in China right now, and them holding sway over the US with a huge trade deficit and holding onto a lot of our debt (thanks GWB!!); what happens when the communist party leadership of China decides that their idyllic society has had enough of the outside world, and then want to close their borders to all foreigners? What happens then? I’ll tell you. We will be up shit creek without a paddle, or even a boat really. We’re screwed if that were to happen. Also; what would happen if say Taiwan decided they wanted to really be free from the mainland? China hurries their military forces into position, invades Taiwan, and do we stand by and let this happen? No, we’d have to protect Taiwan as we said we would in case of Chinese invasion. Once again, we’d be screwed. The Chinese in the recent past have done some pretty evil shit. Human rights abuses, taking over Tibet, and the list could go on and on for a long time I think. Why are we doing business with them? And essentially, we started the juggernaut that is now Chinese manufacturing and business back in the Kissinger / Nixon days of yore.

OK, started off light, ended with a dreary sense of the world under Chinese rule. How is that for running around the block without looking where you’re going? Speaking of going, it’s time to go to bed. I hear the sweet song of the bed calling me to it again. I love bed, especially this time of the year when it’s getting chilly out there and you can jump under the covers and feel the cool of the sheets. It’s good stuff, and the simple things in life that are all good.