Too Soon? Apparently.

You know the Aflac duck? That cute little spokesbird for (duh!) Alfac that everyone thought was so cute when he yelled "Aflac!" that they decided to stop using him as much? Yeah, that duck. Well, as it turns out, that's really not a talking duck. No, see they were only pretending to have the duck talk and the voice that we heard was really that of professional obnoxious person Gilbert Gottfried. But now, the duck has gone quiet as Mr. Gottfried has been fired due to making "offensive" tweets about the current situation in Japan.

When do you think people are going to learn that there is a certain amount of time that one must wait after a disaster or mishap before it will be "okay" to mock it? I'm guessing never, as this sort of thing seems to happen whenever tragedy strikes. You know when people make a joke and follow it up with "Too soon?" There's a reason for that! Sometimes, it's just too effing soon. And I guess that it was too soon for Mr. Gottfried's jokes. Speaking of the jokes, let's take a look at what it takes to get one fired as the voice of a duck these days.

Our friends at BuzzFeed compiled the ten "most offensive" tweets before they were removed from Mr. Gottfried's Twitter feed. (Why do people even bother removing stuff that they regret putting online? Don't they know that the Internet never forgets? Nothing is ever erased from the Internet. It's there forever. There's no point. Just embrace it and your ill-advised tom foolery and move on.) I don't know if they're in any particular order and even if they were, I don't know if Number One or Number Ten would be the most offensive. But those are good places to start. Listed at Number One:

Yeah, that's not good. It's also not funny. Not even close to funny. Maybe Number Ten will be better. Let's find out...

Again, not funny. It's barely sophomoric humor. And I realize that it's in poor taste, but are these really enough for someone to get fired over? After all, he is a comedian. (Granted, I've never found him overly amusing, but that doesn't change what he does.) What else? Oh, how about Number Three.

OK, that's not bad. That's kind of funny. I'm not trying to be offensive (because I rarely try), it's just kind of funny. It would be funnier if there hadn't been a horrifying disaster just a couple of days ago. I'll agree with that. But that's the funniest one out of the bunch. Most of them are like this one:

See? That's not only stupid, it's just not funny. And BuzzFeed only has the ten worst tweets that he did. How many were there total? Why did he feel the need to make lame tweet after lame tweet after lame tweet? I don't know, but now he's reaping what he hath twat, as Aflac wasted no time in firing the man. And while I think he could have used better judgment, I don't know that he deserved to be fired for what he twat. He's the voice of a duck. The duck only says one word: Aflac. Good work if you can get it, I suppose. But how many people even know that he's the voice of the duck? How many people even saw the tweets? I'm guessing that the people in Japan have other things to worry about at the moment other than the 140 character random thoughts of Gilbert Gottfried.

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How To Get Fired

I caught a little media blurb over at Media Bistro yesterday about ESPN firing one of their announcers, a one Ron Franklin. It didn't get into a lot of detail, briefly stating that "Franklin was pulled from last Friday’s Chick-fil-A Bowl broadcast after making derogatory comments towards colleague Jeannine Edwards." Now, I've never heard of Mr. Franklin, so I wasn't so much concerned about him as much as I really wanted to know what he said. So I looked into it. I wasn't sorry.

Before I continue, can I just point out an absolutely ridiculous side note? The Chick-fil-A Bowl? Really? Am I the only one who thinks that sounds totally asinine? Is this what we're looking at from now on? Corporate sponsorship that totally takes over the name of the game? There are some pretty silly sounding names out there. It's going to get interesting if we just let them start having their own bowl games (because they can) and naming them after themselves (because they own them and why wouldn't they?). Oh, wait. I just looked up all of the different names of bowl games and this is going to require its own post. I came to that conclusion after learning that there are over thirty different bowl games and one of them is the GoDaddy.com Bowl. And that's not even the silliest. So tune in tomorrow for Bowl Game Insanity, Part Deux!

Back to Mr. Franklin. I went over to USA Today for a little bit more of the story as to what he had said that was enough to get him fired. It seems that this Jeannine Edwards was talking with ESPN announcer Rod Gilmore. Apparently, Mr. Gilmore's wife had just been elected mayor of Alameda, California. (Good luck with that.) At some point, Mr. Franklin joined the conversation and for some unknown reason said to Ms. Edwards, "Listen to me sweet baby, let me tell you something . . . " She claims that he said that "...with a condescending tone." Yes, I think that if we can assume anything from a sentence that starts off with "Listen to me sweet baby" its' going to be that it's in a condescending tone. I got that without any initial clarification, though it was nice to have my initial assumption confirmed.

Oh, but if you're thinking it stopped there, it did not. "Edwards says she told Franklin not to address her like that." That seems like a fairly reasonable next step, considering that they were in the work place. But then, in a move that doesn't seem like a fairly reasonable next step, considering that they were in the work place, Franklin replied, To which Franklin said, "OK, then listen to me a-hole."

I'm sure it's wrong of me, but I laughed when I read that. Who the heck says stuff like that? To your co-worker no less! Don't get me wrong. There were plenty of co-workers that I would have loved to have said that to. (And I wouldn't have started out with "sweet baby" either. Nope, I would have gone straight to a-hole!) But that's the first rule of having co-workers. You don't call them a-hole to their face. While you're working. With them.

And even though he was fired, I'm under the impression that he was fired because he wasn't apologetic enough. Actually, he wasn't apologetic at all, as Ms. Edwards says that he did not apologize to her. The guy is 68 years old. There's a point in people's lives where they stop feeling like they either a) need to apologize, or b) care to apologize. Mr. Franklin is clearly past both of those points. And it won't matter because I'm sure that someone out there will hire him to do whatever it is that he does sometime in the near future. Hopefully they won't mind being called an a-hole once in a while.

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Inappropriate Field Trips

Sometimes I think it'd be kind of nice if those who were morons had to wear a sign letting others know that they're morons. It saves others the trouble of having to find it out through some sort of unfortunate event orchestrated by said moron. Even if that were the case, I don't think that there would be enough of the signs to go around to everyone in this story who deserves them. And there are several. Where to begin, where to begin?

I guess we could start in Dayton, Ohio where, according to WCPO-9 reports that a first year high school marketing teacher has resigned after taking four female students on a rather inappropriate field trip. To a gay male strip bar called Club Masque. Oh, yeah, and they managed to get served alcohol while they were there. (Happy Hour is from 5-7.) Um, what was that?

Holy crap! When I was in high school, I kind of remember that we went to a museum once. I definitely remember we did not go to a gay male strip club. That did not happen during my high school years. (Now that I think about things, it might be one of the very few things that didn't happen during high school. What can I say? I spent a lot of time venturing outside the confines of the institutional learning environment. Future, shmuture, it was totally worth it.)

Who does this? Well, let's start with the students. Can you blame them for getting to go to a bar? WITH their teacher? I don't think you can. There were four of them and 3 were 18 and the other one was 17. Nope. Can't blame them at all for wanting to go to a bar. Wanting to go to a gay men's strip club? That might be one worth looking into. But I suppose if they just wanted to check out some slippery young guys who weren't going to be hitting on them, a gay men's strip club is just the place for that.

Now, the teacher is a 47-year old (and definitely old enough to know better) one Lori Epperson. (I have looked all through the tubes that make up the Internets and I could not find a picture of this chick. Thanks, mainstream media. Thanks for that.) She resigned on Thursday after being placed on paid leave. (Paid leave. One of the strangest punishments of all time. "We're not making you come to work, rather, we're making you not come to work AND we're still going to pay you! I hope you've learned a lesson!" I'd say! I've learned to do things that get me paid leave more often! How cool is that?!) She fully admits that she took the students to the club and she also fully admits that, in hindsight, it was not the most brilliant move of her brand new academic career.

In a letter that she wrote to her supervisors, she explained that it was the students who had wanted to go to the bar. She wrote "...that she didn't agree with the girls wanting to go to the gay establishment, but if they were to go, she thought she should go with them." I see. That seems like an odd choice to make, being as how Epperson was supposed to be the adult in this scenario.

Oh, but I shouldn't get all judgmental on her and just assume that she's irresponsible or mentally challenged or anything like that. She took precautions before chaperoning this escapade. She wrote in her letter, "I talked with their parents to get permission which they did give. I assured them there would not be any drinking. I also made it very clear to the girls there would not be any drinking. They agreed." Oh, for cryin' out loud? Really?

Really. Good thing that you made it clear with the girls that they weren't to drink. Sure. That's going to happen. Yeah, it didn't. But there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for how the girls, one of whom was Epperson's daughter ( ::::sigh:::: ), managed to consume shots and cosmopolitans. (Were they playing 'Sex in the City'? Cosmos?) She wrote that "...the girls asked to go to a different part of the bar and when she went to look for them they had run into someone they knew...that person gave the girls shots and cosmopolitans. When she learned what happened she immediately took the teenagers home."

So, you take four students to a gay male strip club that serves alcohol because you feel if they're going to go there anyway, that you should go with them to...what? Keep them in line? Look out for them? Whichever or whatever it was, letting them roam freely about the bar was not going to accomplish your goal or whatever you call it. Because as we all know, any teenager who says that they're not going to drink alcohol when they've just been taken to a bar isn't going to drink alcohol.

As long as you're looking.

But enough about the Teacher of the Year for a moment. Can we just go back to the part about how she talked to their parents and got permission? I'm having a hard time believing that really occurred unless she was speaking strictly about herself. After all, one of the girls was her daughter! She could have had a full blown conversation with herself and gave herself permission to take her own daughter to a gay male strip club. Yeah, that's it. That counts (in her world) as "talking with their parents". Sure it does.

But at least she gets it right in her letter where she says, "I accept the consequences and believe I should not be in the environment where I make a negative impression on kids." And you are correct. You should definitely not be in that environment. And I'd like to commend her for figuring this out before she had even completed her first full year of teaching. No sense in wasting everyone's time. Get it over with and get out at the beginning. Perfect.

I've never really understood it when teacher (or just adults) want to be "friends" with their students, or with kids in general. Friendly, I get. Friends? Not so much. (Those of you who know me personally can just pipe down. I can hear you laughing from here, so knock it off!) Students, kids, they both have plenty of friends. They don't need any more friends. What they need are people who can set a decent example for them and who can be someone that they can trust if they need someone to talk to or if they need someone to not take them to a gay male strip club.

But you know, with all of the other stories that you tend to hear in the news these days, I guess I should just be thankful that she didn't have sex with any of them.

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The World's Biggest Sink

When I have to start things out like, "Doesn't this sound familiar?" or "Here we go again" you know it can't be good. No, in fact, you pretty much know that, once again, a product of some mutated gene pool has fulfilled their destiny. And this case is not exception.

Remember the moron (aka Timothy Tackett) that took a bath in the Burger King sink? It was his birthday and, for some unknown reason, he felt that the most appropriate way to celebrate his birthday was to strip down to nothing and hop in the utility sink and utilize it that way. Not good. Not my expectation of "having it my way" if ever I were to lend my patronage to a Burger King.

With that vivid image fresh in our minds, let's make our way over to Anderson, CA. Anderson, population 11,000, is about 10 miles south of Redding, CA in northern California. I don't know a lot about Redding thus, I know even less about Anderson. But I know that a town with a population of 11,000 is no place that I'd turn for a day of excitement, I'll tell you that. I'm guessing that it was that factor coupled with a slightly less than average intelligence quotient of two, make that three, three teenage girls who decided to take a bath in the sink at a KFC. Then, taking a page straight from the glorious conveyor of stupidity, the Internet, they posted the photos where? On MySpace, that is correct! (Hey, you're getting good at this!) Oh, how I bet their parents were just beaming with pride!

Rub-a-dub-dub, three dips in a tub! Behold!

"A KFC manager said the young woman who quit expressed an interest in taking a bath in the sink, but the manager told her not to do it." Well, might I just start off with give that manager a raise! She told her not to do it! Congratulations! Funny, but really, I would have expected nothing less than her telling her not to do it. I actually would have expected a little bit more, perhaps something along the lines of, "Are you effing nuts?" But I'm glad that the manager told her not to. That's definitely a step in the right direction.

Next, um, "Expressed an interest in taking a bath in the sink?" OK, first of all, why would that interest someone? "You know, I've been working here for quite some time. I'm very familiar with all of the various parts of a chicken, which ones are tasty, which ones not so much. I've concluded that parts are parts. But all of my knowledge of the delicious flightless fowl aside, you know what has really started to interest me during my time with the Colonel? That sink over there! I'm really interested in bathing in it! Who do I talk to? Who's in charge of things like that?" Good Lord....Aim high, sweetie. Aim high.

But, second of all, why would you express that interest to anyone at all? I'm sure that there are plenty of us (Translation: All of us) who have an interest in "something" that is, say, not mainstream. Whether it be grape jelly on your cottage cheese or goat lovin', everyone has a quirk or two. And that's the great thing about being human. We can realize that these quirks are just that...quirks! And we can keep them to ourselves once we realize that, hey, if someone finds out about this, I could be mocked and ridiculed for at least a good hour and a half. (It's the Internet age. Nothing lasts forever. The whole world is ADHD now. An hour and a half is at least a lifetime for someone.) So why you would ever mention that your interested in public restaurant sink bathing is beyond me. Unless you're a moron. Oh, I get it. OK. That makes sense. Onward...

You know how when you're in a job interview and they ask you the question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I'm going to make a public plea to those young, budding morons and beg them to not go with, "Well, my goals are really....heyyyyy! That's a nice sink you have there! Five years from now? I'd definitely like to be bathing in that puppy there!" Please. Don't. It is not a good goal to have, nor is it a good goal to express an interest in having.

The MySpace phenomenon amazes me. I just don't get it. And judging from the pictures, it seems rather clear to me that these young, clueless lasses are trying to be sexy. (Utter the following in a dull monotone voice for the full effect of how "sexy" others may interpret this stunt as: Oh, baby, how hot. You are in a sink used to wash off greasy chicken dishes. I'd sure like to get me a piece o' dat!) I can think of very few things that are much more less sexy than three sturdily built, shielded from the sun teenagers in the dish sink at a KFC. (And from the looks of it, that's a really big sink! Where does one get a sink that big? It's obviously industrial, which could have been another adjective used to describe the bathers, but you could wash a Volkswagen in there it would appear. Forget about the pictures of them in the sink. Someone call Guinness! World's Biggest Sink! World's Biggest Sink!)

According to the folks over there at the Redding Record-Searchlight, "One of the girls bathing in the sink at the Anderson Kentucky Fried Chicken posted the photos on the Internet and after management learned of them, all three were suspended today, said Cheri, assistant manager at the restaurant. She declined to give her last name." Declined to give her last name? You're in a town with a population of 11,000 that the rest of the world has never heard of. I'm pretty sure that anyone who you're worried about knowing who you are, already knows Cheri, the assistant manager over there at the Kentucky Colonel's.

“The girls are being reprimanded for it,” Cheri said. Well, I should hope so! What else would happen? Would they just be given a strongly worded lecture? Wait a minute. Reprimanded?! Fired!! FIRED!! I want the Chicken Sink Bathing Trio of Anderson FIRED!!! Not reprimanded!

After immediately posting their photos on MySpace (for the entire world to engage in the ol' gawk n' mock), "The photos had been filed under a gallery called “KFC moments.” Well, it does appear it was a moment. Not exactly a moment of inspiration, but a moment. ::::sigh::::: Idiots. We're surrounded by idiots and now they're in our sinks.

A KFC spokesman, a one Rick Maynard wrote an email as a response to this incident, which read, in part, “KFC has zero tolerance for violations of our operating standards, and our franchisee has taken immediate action by terminating the employees who were involved." Apparently, someone felt the need to ask Rick if "...there had been similar situations at other KFCs. He replied, “Of course not.” " What in the hell kind of a question is that? "Do you frequently have employees bathing in utility sinks at your restaurants?" "Oh, all the time! We can't keep 'em out of there!" Seriously! Have you heard about this happening in other KFCs? Because if this incident is any indication, you would have!! Who asks that kind of a question?

Perhaps someone like a one Fern Hastings, a "...senior environmental health specialist for Shasta County’s Environmental Health." "Looking at the pictures, she said the girls are violating state Health Code 113971 — which details that restaurant workers are required to wear clean clothes." Wait! It gets better! She said, "Obviously they are not wearing clean outer clothing." Um, ma'am? They're not wearing any outer clothing! But this woman is master of the obvious. You can tell when she says, "You just don’t think someone is going to get in there....it’s definitely not made for humans.” Well, of course it isn't! It's a sink used for dishes! Hence the term, dishes! What is wrong with people?

But here's how this way too long, sad, sad, saga comes to a close. Whichever one of the Sinkettes had the MySpace page where the photos were posted, has since set her page settings to "Private". And while you can no longer view her pictures on her MySpace page (and why would you need to, as they're all over the Internet), she did leave a little message for....I guess maybe the media? It's hard to say. It's odd, though. It reads (and I am not correcting grammar, etc.), "Its a sad world when one has to stoop low enough to go through ones dirty laundry....one womans trash is anothers treasure! —Thanks alot for having good respect how can you live knowing the little bit of money you made was made hurting someone!”

(Well, she shouldn't have been doing her laundry in the sink, either.) Spare me. What did she think was going to happen after she posted those photos? You can't tell me that she had not heard about the guy in the Burger King sink before her and her cohorts pulled their little stunt. Maybe she was hoping for a sitcom? Wow. Welcome to the real world, honey! That's the world where, when you do dumb things, people make fun of you! Most people know a dumb thing when they see one and they treat it as such. They do not think you're cool, no matter how much you'd like to think that you are. They think you're a moron in the sink of a KFC. (By the way, just a tip, you probably shouldn't be getting too riled up at others for not "having good respect" when your "respect" wasn't all that "good" when you climbed in the sink at the Kentucky Colonel's. Not so much. "Hello, Kettle? This is the Pot. You're black!") But for now, since you've been fired and won't be working, might I suggest an English class? Perhaps English Composition 101? Or even just a basic English Grammar 101? That little paragraph of yours there is horrendous.

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