Month: October 2013

Brent is finalizing details of a new project with one of our clients, and during the course of the email conversation, the client wrote:

Uhh…

While it’s possible to buy a big box of Tootsie Pops, everyone knows that two of the flavors are completely pointless: chocolate and banana. I mean, seriously? The only “true” flavors are grape, cherry, and orange. So who wants to buy a box where 40% of the pops are unpalatable?

The answer: Amazon has some program called “add-ons” where you can add random stuff to an order. For example, you can buy a box of 60 Tootsie pops where all of them are one flavor.

My latest Amazon package (Halloween costume) just showed up. And…

Score!

One of Zing’s clients sent us a bunch of frozen desserts. They arrived in a styrofoam box packed with dry ice. After we moved the desserts into the freezer (for later consumption as a team-building experience), we were left with a styrofoam box…

…That looked exactly like the kind of box they transport human organs in.

So, I grabbed Brent’s red marker and wrote HUMAN ORGANS, DO NOT EAT on the box, then set it right inside the office door so everyone passing in the hallway could see it.

Josh has a good view of the hallway from his office, and he said there were quite a few people who walked past and did a double-take. A few laughed, and a few just shook their heads sadly.

I crack myself up.

Halloween is approaching, so I’m thinking about a costume this year. I was poking around Amazon, and stumbled upon an amazing banana outfit. Because hey, who doesn’t like a giant walking banana?

In the “customers also looked at…” section, I saw something that took my breath away. A bacon costume! Wow, I never would have imagined.

Even more funny than the costumes themselves are the expressions of the models. I can just picture the photo shoot, where the photographer is clicking away on his camera, yelling out, “Work it, work it! Be the bacon!”

Fortunately I came to my senses and didn’t get either one. I’m not sure what I’ll end up being this Halloween, but it sure isn’t going to be a breakfast food.

When I was a kid, I collected coins. One of my special interests was bicentennials, probably because they were in general circulation and not very difficult to find. Back in those days, the U.S. Mint didn’t redesign the coins every few months like they do now, so it was fun to find a quarter that was different than the normal “eagle” variety.

I played a lot of poker as a teenager, and our games were always nickel-dime-quarter stakes. With all of the coins flying around, I’d offer to buy any bicentennial quarters from my friends… and I’d pay a premium, so they could sell me a quarter for thirty cents. I was able to amass quite a few of them over the years.

The other day, Laralee bought a roll of quarters and a roll of half-dollars. (It’s kind of a long story.) Looking through them, I was excited to find a bicentennial quarter.

You generally don’t see many of them these days, possibly due to the fact that I’m not the only one who collects them, but also because they were minted in 1976, which was thirty-seven years ago. There aren’t nearly as many old quarters in circulation. So I bought this one for thirty cents from Laralee.

Then I looked through her half-dollars– there were fifty of them. I found a staggering thirteen bicentennial half-dollars!

I bought these from Laralee as well (she only charged me their face value of $6.50) to add to my collection. But it got me thinking. Statistically speaking, it seems highly unlikely that in a roll of fifty coins you’d find thirteen from the same year. I wondered what the odds would be.

Kennedy half-dollars, in their current copper-nickel composition, were minted for general circulation from 1965 to 2001. Prior to 1965, they had a high silver content, so it’s exceedingly rare to find any of them in circulation today. After 2001, only proof sets and collector’s sets have been minted. That means in all likelihood, one will find half-dollars spanning about 36 years. Using simple math (not accounting for actual production counts by year, nor taking into account the possibility that people hoard the 1976 coins for the same reason I do), one could conclude that in a pile of 36 random half-dollars, it’s almost certain that one of them would be a bicentennial. Thus, a single roll of 50 would be expected to have one. But thirteen?

I was going to sit down and do the math to figure out the actual probability of that happening, but quite honestly despite majoring in applied mathematics, I always kind of sucked at probability theory. A little internet poking might turn up a solution, but frankly I’m too tired for it now. I’ll just enjoy my good fortune, and probably end up digging out my old coin collection to bring back some good memories.

Pandora just barfed up a Twisted Sister song in the middle of my nice 80’s pop mix. What the…?

We received a shipment from Amazon; the box contained a bunch of big air pouches for padding. I emptied the box and asked Zack to pop them so we could throw them away.

He shouted, “This… is… Sparta!!” and proceeded to stomp the living daylights out of them.