Monthly Archives: December 2020

Happy Holidays From Internet Manifestation!

Well, 2020 was quite a year for the Internet Manifestation family.  There were many challenges for us all, of course, as there have been for everyone, but we all put our heads down and met each piece of new adversity with a can-do spirit!  Except for Lars in Targeted Psychological Advertising.

Our intern Wally had a great year, even though his first day was January 12th, the very day when the eldritch leviathan first rose from the Atlantic.  “I guess I don’t need to ask if I can have a week off in March to go to Myrtle Beach now!” he said, which really lightened the mood around the office.  Not that we give our interns a whole week off anyway.  Wally pitched in wherever he was needed throughout the year, whether it was cleaning ectoplasm off the walls of headquarters or picking up the corpses of the hideous lunar cyborg sparrows that some mysterious entity had sent to probe our defenses.  He’ll be missed when he moves on to his new job at Amalgamated Defrenestrations, but we’re all looking forward to meeting our new intern, Lobo McCoy.  Welcome to the Internet Manifestion family, Lobo!

In addition to losing Wally, of course, we lost our head of Font and Indentation Policies, Ellabeth Wizenthorpe.  Unfortunately, rather than heading off to a new career with Amalgamated Defenestrations, Ellabeth was eaten by spectral rats that had infested the east wing of Internet Manifestation headquarters before anyone noticed.  Up until then, though, she’d been having a great year, and was learning needlepoint in her spare time.  We’ve decided against promoting from within the department (sorry, Fred and Antonio!), so the position of lead of Font and Indentation policies is still open.  Readers interested in applying should send a resume and at least three references to Human Resources!

Image by moritz320 from Pixabay

Speaking of Human Resources, good old Nick Yathapopolis in HR has been doing great work.  He had a busy year, thanks needing to fire several employees who could no longer meet Internet Manifestation standards after becoming infected with the dread brain worm of ancient Y’thorglith–exit interviews are hard enough to conduct without needing to do them while wearing a wire mesh suit keyed to anti-brain worm frequencies!  Still, he had time to squeeze in a visit to the mysterious gray monolith that recently manifested in the Mojave desert, and he reports that it was time well spent.

Everyone’s favorite Internet Manifestation employee, Marge in Speculative Accounting, spent another year trying to learn how to do pivot tables in Microsoft Excel.  You’ll get it one of these years, Marge!

Johnny Yojimbo, who heads up Electron Redirection, has had a fantastic year, despite suffering from a disorder that forms the abstract shapes he sees against his eyelids when he closes his eyes into arcane characters that transmit messages that are as unusual as they are unwanted.  He also learned four new languages in 2020, one of them still spoken by humans!

There are plenty of other members of the Internet Manifestation family that have been doing great things in 2020, but frankly it’s hard to keep track of the survivors, what with the eldritch leviathan and the hijinks it’s been getting up to, so I’ll sign off here. 

I hope you and yours are doing at least as well as we are, and looking forward to 2021 with the same anticipation!

Free happy holidays clipart the cliparts 6

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I Just Can’t Stand This

In case you aren’t familiar with it for some reason, the classic show Parking Wars is a reality show that airs on A&E. The last new episode was filmed back in 2012, but it shows in reruns to this day, because who doesn’t enjoy watching people yell angrily about parking tickets?

As great as the show is, though, one thing about it has always bothered me. In approximately half the episodes, someone will get a ticket for parking in a no standing zone and argue to the beleaguered parking enforcement officer that they “were parking, not standing”. Sometimes, they will buttress their argument by pointing out that they are not from Philadelphia/Detroit/Staten Island/whatever, and that’s why they don’t know about this peculiar regional parking rule.

Throughout all the arguments that inevitably follow, though, the representative of parking authority, no matter who they are or what city that work for, never seems to think of explain what the difference between parking and standing (when it comes to automotive rules), actually is.

Now, the readers of this blog are all the sort of people who would thoroughly learn all traffic rules and regulations before getting behind the wheel of a car. But for the benefit of those readers who don’t drive, the difference is this: Parking is stopping a vehicle for any purpose other than loading and unloading people or stuff, while standing is stopping temporarily to pick up or drop off passengers (as in, what you might do at a taxi stand).

It’s not that difficult to understand – basically you just need to lay out the “No Stopping” > “No Standing” > “No Parking” hierarchy – but for some reason no one bothers with the definition. They just go in circles, with one person saying “you can’t park in a no standing zone” and the other saying “If I wasn’t allowed to park here, the singn would say ‘No Parking'”. It makes (sort of) good television, but it seems odd.

Unless it is because the parking enforcement person knows about the loophole in some municipalities that make parking and standing mutually exclusive. Which, it could be argued, allows you to park in a No Standing zone, so long as no one but the driver leaves…

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