Saturday, March 31, 2007

Not Getting Things Done

Jay is generally hardworking, and spends really long hours at work. However, outside the realm of work the guy just can not get things done. It's not that he's lazy, it's just that he will not spend time on anything that he doesn't enjoy. Unless it's directly involved with his work it's just not getting done. If my life depended on Jay taking a bullet for me I wouldn't worry. If my life depended on Jay running five small errands during the next month, I'm fucked.

Some of my favorite examples of Jay's ability to not get things done:

1) The phone. Jay was without a cell phone for a while then one day he proudly called me up and told me he'd gotten a new phone. I was impressed. I assumed this meant he'd actually gone to a store and purchased a phone. I was less impressed when a few days later I got his voice mail. The first part of the voice mail message was a standard pre-recorded greeting of "The person you have called is unavailable. Please leave a message for:" The next part was in the shaky voice of an old woman "Jaaay Haaalking". When I called him up the next day: "Jay, your grandmother got that phone for you, didn't she?" "Man, ... how did you know?".

2) The car. Around six years ago Jay was thinking about getting a new car. At the time he was thinking about a mini cooper. A few weeks later I was on the phone with him. Jay: "Man, I got my new car!" "Awesome, what did you end up getting, the mini-cooper?" "No, I ended up getting a Buick." "A Buick?!? Dude, did you let your grandparents pick out your car?" "Well ..."

3) The wallet. Now I'll admit I'm a little uptight about wallets. I like to keep my wallet fairly empty with as few cards as possible. So, a few years ago Jay is up visiting and he pulls out a bloated, overflowing Castanza Wallet. This thing barely qualified as a wallet; it was really more of a decaying leather wrapping around a giant pile of frequent shopper cards, business cards, and receipts.
"Dude, WTF is that thing?"
"What, it's my wallet."
"That thing is not a wallet. What the hell is in here?"
I start going through the wallet
"Why do you have all these receipts in here?"
"I don't want people to get my credit card number."
"Jay, your credit card number isn't even on these receipts"
I spend the next 20 min or so sorting out the wallet and getting everything organized. 90% of it was pure trash.
"Dude Jay, you see this business card you had in here"
"Yeah, I know that guy"
"Is there any reason you had two copies of his business card in different places in your wallet?"
"Well... I met him twice."

Next up is "The List". And just as a reminder to myself I need to tell you about "Direct Deposit" and "The Frenchman's Shower".

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