It's a good thing that college football isn't normally played on Monday night. It's a bad thing that I used up my "way too drunk" tailgate day on a Monday.

It's been a long time since I did a mailbag post, and I've been saving up some good ones. I've used my best judgment about whether to use real names or not. I have a lot of ones that people forward me from their office, and I don't want anyone to get in trouble.

I suppose that some of you noticed that I haven't posted a damned thing in a long time. It turns out that I needed a little hiatus. "Hiatus" is a fun word, don't you think? Say it out loud right now. I dare you not to laugh. Anyway, we have a lot of catching up to do. This will be a long post.

There are blogs aplenty if you want to read about how horrible the hurricane damage and evacuation to Baton Rouge is. And other than mentioning that I still have no electricity, I won't complain today. Or at least, I won't complain here. Instead, I want to compile a list of the amusing things that happened this week. If you have your own story to share, please email me, and I'll pass it on.

Even before the hurricane, I was behind in my posting, but the events in Louisiana the last few days have made it even more difficult to add to this blog. Here are some notes I've made about what's happening from here.

Do you ever get a document whose paragraphs are numbered? I see quite a few with paragraph number schemes like this, and it's irritating as shit.

When MTV2 first hit the air, they showed nothing but videos. You know, just like the original MTV, but almost 20 years later. For one of their early years, they started playing all of the videos in the MTV library in alphabetical order by song. They started at the turn of the new year, and the drill lasted all the way into May.

I don't know if there was ever any debate about whether a credit union places more value on technology or on business knowledge. But if there was such a debate, I can resolve it here and now. I went to a client site last week. My trip happened to coincide with another person's trip from the office at the same time. Ann's mission was to educate users on configuration of credit policy and scoring. My mission was to meet with the programmers about interfacing the system to other things in their universe.

Back in the spring, our company had a users conference. We bring as many clients down to New Orleans as will come, and bombard them with all of the gee-whiz neato things that they could do with their software but probably aren't. There is also a lot of opportunity to socialize (or kiss asses, depending on one's nature). They make a particular effort to schedule activities where clients interact with the teams of people that support them specifically.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with a VP of sales who was a complete doofus. Come to think of it, that describes more than one sales VP that I've had the pleasure of knowing, but one particular guy is story-worthy. I called him "Date Rape Dan," because in a meeting where we decided to decline some particular client request, Dan had this immortal quote, which seemed to be taken right from the date rape handbook.

More thoughts that I'm inclined to share, but don't have enough to say to write a whole entry....

The new Whole Foods store in our area opened on Wednesday of this week, and being the diligent reporter of what's happening locally, I joined about seventy thousand other Baton Rougans to see how it was. To be honest, there's nothing substantive to share. It's just a big store with a good but expensive selection of produce, meat, and cheese, not to mention a highly diverse selection of olives and nuts.