Friday Fives – my speech is gooder you racist

How is the relationship with your family?

It’s great.  Health and happy, nothing but love.  Frankly, its why I will never be great.  It seems all great men come from fucked up families.  People who are wildly successful struggled as kids for food, love, attention… everything.  They learned to fight.  Most great musicians lost their mothers at really young ages.  I am 50, and my mom is alive and well and is my favorite person in the world.  Don’t tell my wife I said that.  KIDDING!  She can’t read, so no threat there.

Growing up I had enough love, food, attention… the works.  You’ll never believe this, but being a straight white male born in North America has an upside.  I won the lottery on every level.  Not just being born a straight white male in the US is pretty fucking great.  On top of that, I was born to an awesome family who I love to the bones.  Being a liberal and caring human, there was a long time I felt bad about winning this lottery.  I took about 30 or 40 years, but I finally figured I should appreciate it, and use it to the advantage of others.

How is your relationship with your manager?

Great, why?  Is there something I don’t know?  I love my boss, and she loves me.  I think the most important bond we have is trust.  There is a great saying that goes like this – “integrity is what you do when no one is looking”:  We both know that the other is working hard, and has the companys’ and employees best interest at heart.  As you can imagine, that isn’t always the case in corporate America.

How is the relationship with your neighbor?

I fucking love my neighbors.  We spend a LOT of our time together.  We travel the world together.  We live somewhat isolated on a small ranch on a dirt road half an hour out of town.  This means it isn’t practical to go into down to drink or party or whatever.  Its expensive, time consuming, and you can’t drink.  Finding like minded folks when we moved out here… we just hang out at each others houses.  Yes, Ric and Jenn are gone…and Rachel and Jason.  Yes, I cried about the latter.  I am still pretty upset and in denial as well, since they moved out of state.  Both couples took the stupidly high real estate values and cashed out.  BUT… we will have Sally, Linda, Karen and Andy, Luis and Lupita, Jared, Rod… etc

Here is how close we are.  We not only hang out here together and travel together… of that list above I have married two of the couples.

What is your absolute favorite useless fact?

Lemmy started out his career in music as a roadie.  For Jimmy f’n Hendrix!

What kind of accent do you have?

I don’t have an accent.  YOU have an accent.  Oh yeah?   What if I said I can prove it, racist!  South Metro Denver has one of the largest concentration of call centers in the entire us.  Just in the Inverness area is about 100K cubicle type call center jobs.  Why?  Two reasons seem to emerge.  One is a combination of rail lines and good weather.  He who controls the rail lines controls all communications.  Why is that?  Because whomever owns the railroads owns not just the land the tracks are on, but 10 feet in both directions.  This is likely for safety and logistical reasons.  Now… let’s say you want to run a phone line across the country.  Lets say you need an uninterrupted space that crosses the country to bury fiber optic cable.  You could try and contact about 1500 different landowners… and PRAY that they have mineral rights.  Mineral rights are if you own the ground under your house.  The reason people have and would be interested in mineral rights is if oil or gold was found on your property.  I would say 80% of American homeowners do not own the mineral rights to their property.

OR… you could contact the railroad.  You could deal with 1 single company that can connect you coast to coast and city to city.  These lines converge in Denver, and Denver is a popular spot because its pretty close to being in the middle of the continent.

What does that have to do with accents?  Above?  Nothing at all.  Its about the other reason all telecom is based here.  It is because we don’t have accents.  We are so in the middle in Colorado that we can talk to anyone in the country and no one would say ‘where are you calling from’.  In fact, our lack of discernible accents actually counts as an accent.  Linguists love this stuff… and you know I have always wanted to pretend to be a linguist.

Officially, most linguists would say that Coloradoans have an unmarked, neutral, or no accent, commonly known as Standard American English. Without a very distinctive sound in our speech that is highly recognizable or that makes people go, “Oh, you must be from Colorado!”, it is hard to say that there is a specific Colorado accent.

So I don’t have an accent, k?  Sometimes I use words I don’t know so people think I am more photosynthesis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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