The smell of barbeque sauce always reminds me of that moment when I learned some of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.
Check out episode 25 of What Some Would Call Lies:
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Here’s Episode 8 of What Some Would Call Lies.
Listen!
Some of life’s toughest dilemmas can be solved by a person who manipulates an inanimate object in real time to create the illusion of life.
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And don’t forget to write an iTunes review before January 30th for your chace to win the kickass t-shirt.
I love (love!) practical jokes. Love.
Seriously, I’d sign a petition right now to return Candid Camera back to TV
LOVE!
So the fact that I’ve sat on the details of this practical joke for so long is kind of surprising. I started putting this practical joke together over a year ago!
I have a friend named Tyler that is a radio personality here in Arizona and he also does events as a professional DJ. He calls himself “The King of The Streets.” About a year ago I started noticing that he was taking himself really serious on Twitter and Facebook. He would tweet things like, “Wats up? I’ll be on da mic at the Indoor Swapmeet in Peoria on Sunday.” I’m not joking.
He has a pretty good sense of humor, so I came up with an idea.
First, I should tell you that Tyler has a caricature that he uses for all of his King of the Streets stuff. It’s supposed to look like him (see below) but frankly it looks more like the creepy Burger King guy with a unibrow. Tyler is not as chunky as his King of the Streets caricature.
Well anyway, I have this friend that is a pretty damn good artist. So I printed out the little caricature that The King uses and I asked her to come up with something for me.
“I want it to look like the same artist drew both pictures,” I told her. “And I want him to kind of look like a version of Ronald McDonald. And his belt should say ‘PA’ because his name will be The Prince of the Alleys.”
Get it? King of the Streets…Prince of the Alleys.
She quickly got to work, and after about ten minutes (seriously…she’s good) this is what she came up with:
Pretty sweet, right?
I quickly hoped on Twitter and created a Prince of the Alleys Twitter account. And I started to tweet in the same style that The King tweets. Some of the tweets were parodying The King’s Tweets…like when the King tweeted “Gotta get home to watch ENTOURAGE!” the Prince would tweet “Gotta get home to watch GILMORE GIRLS!” And some of The Prince’s tweets were nothing but exact copies of The King’s tweets.
Some of my favorite Prince tweets include: “I’ll be spitting on the mic over at the Chilis on Camelback until midnight. Come out and say “hey!”" and “Sat at a bar and watched world cup soccer. I annoyed everyone by acting like I had a digetry doo”
So I was having a bunch of comedy fun for a while. But then I got word that Tyler was getting angry. He suspected that the person behind the Prince wasn’t someone like me (a guy just having fun at his expense) but rather he thought it was a specific “enemy” that was attacking him.
So I laid low for a while.
Well, actually before I laid low, I took a photo of the back of Tyler’s truck (which has the KING sticker on it) and used Photoshop to make this picture:
And the Prince included this message with the photo: “I just got this legit sticker on my truck.”
The King responded with something like, “This Prince guy is close to me, but won’t be when I figure out who he is.”
That’s pretty much when I stopped Tweeting as the Prince. I didn’t want to ruin the friendship…and I never intended to make him feel attacked or angry. So the Prince died.
Until last week when I uploaded this photo to Facebook:
He called me. Cussed at me. And basically said that he was ready to fight this one particular person that he was certain was making fun of him via The Prince…but now that he knows it was me, he wasn’t angry.
Now that my true identity has been revealed, I have to start thinking of who I can pull my next practical joke on.
BTW…Tyler is pretty cool. You can follow him on Twitter @tymartinez1011.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the fourth in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss giving out Awesome Attitude Awards.
The idea is by no means original: negative behavior receives too much adult attention, so you have to start recognizing young people’s positive actions too. Sometimes it’s called “positive discipline” or “positive behavior supports” but I feel a tangent coming on, so let me just finish my story.
Each day at the Club each member of the staff has the opportunity to recognize someone for their awesome attitude. We announce the AWESOME ATTITUDE AWARDS each day at announcements. Sometimes it’s for an action (“This person helped me clean up the huge Lego mess even though he wasn’t playing with Lego”) and sometimes it’s much simpler than that (“This person walks in each day and says ‘hello’ to me”). Then every one of the people in the gym yell out “AWESOME ATTITUDE.” [Sidenote: I video taped this process and was going to YouTube it...but then realized that too often we were yelling out kid's last names and it was a little weird.]
The yelling part has kind of gotten out of hand in the past few months. All of the adult staff run over to the child and yell “AWESOME ATTITUDE” really close to the awesome-attitude-haver’s head. Normally the kid covers his/her ears and scrunches up into a little ball and falls over laughing.
And then I staple all the Awesome Attitude Awards to a bulletin board outside of my office (as shown in the photo above). The best part of this process comes when kids get picked up by their parents and they stop by the board to show them their AAA (which we now abbreviate).
I’m going to miss a few things about the AAAs when I leave here. The first is the most obvious…I’m going to miss randomly awarding mundane acts of positive behavior. But I’m really going to miss the process. I work with some really great adults that picked up this silly idea of awarding kids for saying “thank you” and “I like your new haircut” and turned it into one of the things I look forward to each day.
So I guess this post isn’t just about rewarding children for doing small positive things (which I’ll totally miss) but I’ll also miss the Awesome Attitude of all the adults that I’ve hired to work here.
Awesome Attitude!
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the third in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss the joke structure created by six-year-olds.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the second in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss how excited kids get when I do really bad magic tricks.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the first in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with.
I will miss pointless graffiti.
Someone wrote the word “nigger” in the concrete outside my building…see above. I don’t like the word “nigger” but I think it’s funny that a kid had a very small window of opportunity to write a message in concrete and he chose this word. Seriously, little Jeremiah Wright, you couldn’t think of any other word that might be funnier?
And I should point out that I’m not talking about gang tagging. I’m talking about real words. I’m especially fond of sentences. Things like, “XXXX sucks dick” or “XXXX is a slut.” I love when kids (usually middle-school girls) are too afraid to talk crap out in the open, but will take a sharpie to the bathroom stall. I absolutely hate cleaning up graffiti, but I don’t mind reading it.
So goodbye pointless graffiti. I hope that we can still see one another in really gross public restrooms from time-to-time.
My last day as a coffee bitch at the world’s largest coffee shop chain ended yesterday. I had a rather short run…about seven months. But in my time as a Starbucks Barista I learned a few lessons about myself, coffee, business and people. Here is the list of nine lessons I learned as a Starbucks Barista (in no particular order):
1.Surprise & Delight. As a Barista we are given the liberty to hand out free drinks occasionally and to do something that a lot of people call surprise & delight. A surprise & delight is when you have a good drink that you just made incorrectly (such as: if a customer wanted an ICED mocha and you made it hot) and you surprise a customer by giving it to them for free. This also applies to pastries that maybe fell apart in shipping. “Have you tried our pumpkin scones? This one fell apart, so I can’t sell it…but you should try it.”
This surprise & delight concept is something that I’m going to start using in life and business. Way too rarely do we just give because we want to make other people happy. One hundred percent free of agenda…hoping for and expecting nothing in return. Don’t be surprised if you get surprised or delighted soon.
2. Baristas are really good liars. I’m not talking about “um…yeah, that’s non-fat” when it’s not. I’m talking about the lying that we are forced to do by our managers. Do you think that I really believe a 400 calorie pastry would go good with your 1,500 calorie white mocha?! Fuck no…I don’t want you to go into a sugar coma. But I’m afraid my manager is within earshot, so I do the suggestive selling like I’m supposed to. “Would you like to try a bacon sandwich to go with your bacon-grease shake today?”
3. Smiling is contagious. That old Charlie Chaplin song about smiling when you’re down is actually true. After a six-hour shift of pretending to be happy, you kind of are. You’re also beat down, smell like putrid milk and hate the way that ASU girls say, “Can I get that with soy?” Like the song says, “if you smile through the pain and sorrow, then maybe tomorrow you’ll see the sun come shining through.” And it’s totally cliche…but I’ve also found it to be true.
I also learned that there’s no easier way to make a dick head feel bad then a simple smile. After getting yelled at because “this is the second time in two weeks I’ve had to wait longer than four minutes for my drink,” you just smile. That smile puts you on the higher ground and almost automatically helps the jerk realize how ridiculous they are being.
4. Some drinks are sexier than others. Quite frankly, I don’t know that I’d ever be able to sleep with a grande strawberries and creame frapp kind of guy. But give me a venti americano (no room) any day.
5. Good people are everywhere. I met some of the nicest, smartest, most genuine people working at the Bux. When I started my job as a barista, I knew I was going to be there less than a year…but I never imagined that it would be so tough to leave some of the people.
6. I can work hard. On paper, it might not sound so bad. Wake up a few hours early and drag your butt into the coffee shop and earn a couple of extra bucks. But in reality, it’s not just waking up a few hours early. Working on three or four hours of sleep will eventually wear you the hell out. And this job is much more mentally and physically draining that I ever expected it to be. You have to remember drink recipes, carry six gallons of milk at a time, be nice to people and run from the oven to the window a hundred times a day. I genuinely worked hard for my money at Starbucks. And it feels good to know that I was able to do it for so long.
7. There is something beautiful about cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s the busiest time of the morning; everyone is scattering like Japanese nuclear engineers (too soon??) and inevitably somethings going to spill. Well the barista responsible for the spill has a drink to hand off and has to remake the spilled drink…so I grab a rag and I clean up the spill. We’re partners, right? And maybe I’m over thinking this one, but it actually feels really good to be part of a team – a team where you know someone’s got your back and will help you when you need it. I’d guess that this is a feeling that people feel on an organized sports team, but my sports experience is somewhat limited.
8. It is possible to miss the toilet entirely while pooping.
9. Know what you’re selling. I’ve walked into a restaurant with questions about the food, and received a cross-eyed look from the employee. I got a shrug of the shoulders when I asked a Barnes & Noble employee if they carried a title from my sister’s Amazon Wish List. But if you walk into a Starbucks, most of the baristas will be able to tell you the difference between a Southeast Asian, Latin American and African coffee bean. That’s primarily because Starbucks encourages their partners to taste and discuss coffee…they encourage us to know the product. As a customer, that says a lot. And in the future, all the people who work with me will entirely understand what we’re selling. I’ll do my best to make sure everyone around me is active in understanding what we do and what their role is in our mission.
I’m really happy that I’ll never have to hear someone say, “I don’t know how much is on here” when they hand me a Starbucks card. And I won’t have to say, “What size?” again. And most importantly I’ll be able to get a full-nights sleep for two days in a row. Part of me wants to write a big Fuck You to the Bux…but I will admit that I’ve learned some valuable lessons there and I’m going to miss seeing all of my partners on a regular basis.
Would you like a piece of Banana Walnut Bread to go with that?
This week I was playing little time-wasting game with the kids at work that I called “Do The RIGHT Thing.” The basics of the game are this: I ask a thought-provoking moral question or ask your opinion on a controversial issue. You can only speak if you’re holding the Right Guard deodorant stick (left over from the Passport To Manhood classes we held last month).
The questions were rather easy. If you found a wallet with $500 cash in it, would you try to return it? and If your best friend was wearing something that made her look ugly, would you tell her? That kind of stuff.
There’s no right or wrong answer. We just discussed our feelings about the questions I asked and that was that.
One of my questions was, If you could tell one lie that would make you filthy rich, would you do it?
The conversation went back and forth. Some kids say, “no way” because they would be unable to enjoy wealth based on a lie. Other kids said they’d lie and later use their newfound wealth on good. Then the Right Guard was passed to one of my favorites, Brian (who I’ve written about here) and he said, “Hannah Montana told a lie and she has made a lot of money and I think she’s very happy. So I would tell the lie to make money.”
I never realized what a shitty role model Hannah Montana is.
On Monday at the Club we had the pleasure of hosting a wonderful man who came to speak with our youth members about a book that he wrote. This guy climbed Mt. Everest and had an incredible story to share. Incredible.
His hour-long presentation included pictures, crazy stories about people dying up there, lessons about other cultures and life-altering epiphanies he had on the world’s largest mountain.
His presentation was awesome. He is from London and had a rather thick accent, and he wore hiking boots, tight black jeans and a tucked-in polo shirt. You could kind of tell that he wasn’t really experienced talking to really young children because he wasn’t too engaging…but his story kind of spoke for itself.
After his presentation, he made a little joke about the real reason he wanted to climb the world’s largest mountain was so he could post the photos on his Facebook page – an arguably funny joke…but totally lost on th five-year-olds in the room. And then he clapped his hands once and said, “So…are there any questions?”
And a six-year-old named Brian (who is slowly becoming one of my favorite kids) raised his hand and literally jumped to his feet.
The speaker pointed to Brian and said “yes. you. what is your question?”
And Brian asked, “Why is your shirt tucked in like that?”
[