Been away...

Conchobhar sent me an email today and, reading it, I hadn't realized how long I'd been away - from IMHO and MMFA anyway.  I've been taking a break, trying to re-balance my life.  I'm taking an art class and going to the gym, but that leaves no time for this blog, or my web-comic, which hasn't been updated in over a month either.  (And I don't even mean the NEW one, Utopia, which I stalled out on page two with!) *Phew* It's been crazy and a lot of stuff is not going all that well to boot.  And my company is seriously cracking down on internet usage during work hours, so MMFA-time is pretty much out for me, for the forseeable future. :(

So with that in mind, and all the shit going down in the mid-east, the mid-west and Japan...

Here's a funny story from work today that has nothing to do with anything of any value at all!

As some of you may know, I'm an Engineer working in automotive safety restraints.  And today, we got to do one of my FAVORITE things: Tear-down and analyse WARRANTY RETURNS!

I live for that, seriously.

One of the things that makes it so rewarding, emotionally, is looking at the stupid shit people return stuff for, and looking at the various levels of abuse and mis-uses that they've put our products though. One of the most common issues is foreign objects getting stuck in buckles.  And for the past year or more we've been KEEPING all the little souvenirs that we've taken out of "damaged" buckles that came back through warranty.  I've got about 30 dimes, 20 Buttons (presumably from back-pockets: think about it), broken windshield glass, fake gemstones, staples, nails (both the kind you hammer, and the kind at the end of your finger) paperclips, zipper pulls, pebbles, a few tiny Lego's (including a star wars gun!), a blood-glucose meter testing strip (used)... and even some cool stuff, like a silver dove pendent and a gold cross!

But today I think we've got a new record holder for weirdness, uniqueness and unexpectedness.

I popped off the buckle covers, tapped the frame against the table and out fell some...

POT.

Seriously.  I wasn't 100% sure at first (although I was pretty sure) so I turned to my college who was up from our Mexico plant to train and simply asked him, "Is this what I think it is?"

He said he thought so, and then squeezed the bud in his fingers, smelled it and said, "Yes, definitely, it's pot!"  (I didn't even know to DO that, so I figured he knew what he was talking about better than I did,) (No moral judgement being made there BTW!)

And my boss happened to be walking by, so I asked HIM, "Hey look at this... It came out of a buckle... It this what we think it is?" (Again - asking without saying WHAT we think it is...)

And he just starts laughing. "Yeah... I think it is!"

Six or seven people later, and they all came to the same conclusion.  My director told my boss to make sure we got a picture of it.  (He always gets a laugh out the shit we find stuck in people's buckles.)

So that's my laugh for the day: Buckle didn't work due to POT being jammed in the mechanism.

I can't wait to heat what the customer says when we deliver that report!

LOL