Gobius Industries

Connecting the dots

While recently browsing CNN.com on June 16 around 1:30am, I noticed a pecular connection between two stories on the home page. One was a human trafficking report complied by the US State Department and how there was in increase in slave labor that conincided with the recession. Another was a story about how British Airlines was asking its workers to work without pay for one month. I didn't see it in the first story, but I wonder if England made it onto the black list...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/06/16/human.trafficking.report/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/06/16/british.airways.work.free/index.html

About last night....

If it takes longer than 40 seconds to tell someone about the funny/cool/weird dream you had last night, you should really reconsider telling it. Four minutes is way too long.

Change in venue

From this point on, "Tales from the Nightshift" will be featured on its own blog. To see the latest and greatest being done with Microsoft Paint, check out http://www.nightshiftsteven.blogspot.com/ . Same humor, different location.

Tales from the Nightshift

May 23, 2009

Tales from the Nightshift

May 22, 2009

Tales from the Nightshift

May 21, 2009

Unethical

I think the public hysteria surrounding the swine flu and previously SARS is incited by the people who make face masks looking to make a quick buck.

One of these things...

E-love

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the making out emoticon.

:Pd:


Also included because I don't feel it's profound or long enough to constitute its own blog entry:

I love the word "albeit". It's like, I want to use these three words, I'm too lazy to put spaces between them.

April's million dollar idea

This last Monday, April 6, the Daily Universe (for all you non-BYU'ers, that's the student run daily newspaper) had an editorial lapse. While covering the LDS conference, they included a caption on the front page under a picture of the twelve apostles that read "...members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities..." (emphasis added). Now, typical of BYU, the mistake was quickly and quietly apologized for and forgotten (similar to when two weeks ago the Humanities department accidentally sent an email intended for one person to the entire college- 2,500 students. Not too big of a deal, except for the email contained the GPA's of every student in the Humanities department. Mine was on there, but nowhere near the top of that list).

I wasn't aware of what happened until later that day. I had seen a sign in one of the newspaper booths apologizing for the delay in delivery but didn’t think anything of it. The next day in class a student mentioned their parents in Oregon had heard about the typo. I wondered if, since the paper had made national news, if there were a market for the pulled copies. I checked on ebay and saw only two- one going to $102 and the other for $34. Those were some inspiring digits.

My roommate Beau and I immediately set off to go dumpster diving. Copies of the paper with the typo were hard to come by; a person had to have picked up the paper super early in the morning, held on to it while the recycle bins were emptied, and then have thrown it away without having folded it all up or done the crossword. After having looked through just about every recycle bin on campus for two hours Beau and I came up with 16 mint copies of the paper and 4 decent ones.

There have been some issues about the morality of profiting an article that labels the leaders of the church I attend as apostates. Cami said it was if I were selling my g’s. I disagree. While it may not be the most reputable way to make a buck, I justify it by a) knowing I’ll pay an eventual tithe on the money I make and b) knowing the people buying the papers most likely have issues with the church, so where’s the harm in making them a little poorer?

There are about 6 other people currently selling them on ebay, but none of them for as much as the two of mine that have already sold, probably because mine were up sooner and people likely thought they would be less available. I haven’t put all my papers on at once- controlling the market by not saturating it was a little trick I picked up from DeBeer’s. I’m fairly positive I have more papers with the typo than anyone else, so in a week or so I’ll be the only person to do business with. Whether or not people still want them in a month is yet to be seen, but I hope so. If they’re not going for very much I can wait a while (months, even years) before trying again. With no overhead or product costs, I can afford to.

To date, I’ve sold two of the typo papers on ebay. One went for $76.55 and the other for $50.00 for a total of $126.55.