The Musings of a Magyar

Several of my neighbors in the cubicle farm apparently have really old cell phones.  So old that they were made before they had that new-fangled “vibrate” feature added that allows the ringer to remain silent while still alerting the callee that he/she has a call.  Oddly enough, they are new enough that they have some really funky, very loud, ring tones though. This is okay if they’re there and can pick it up right away; but invariably the most obnoxious rings happen when nobody is there to answer the phone.

So, to remedy this situation, I’d like to take up a collection so that these pour souls might be able to have a more modern phone.  One where they can turn off the ringer.  If you have an old phone you’d like to donate, please let me know and I’ll make arrangements to pick it up.

I mean, I’m assuming the underlying cause is that these folks don’t have the financial means to get new phone.  It couldn’t be that they’re just rude, could it?

After spending 45 minutes in line yesterday for Confession, I believe we need to start having two lines for confessions.  One would be an “Express Lane” while the rest would be for “everyone else.”   No, the express lane wouldn’t be “fifteen venial sins or less.”  Rather, qualifications to use the express confessional are as follows:

• You’ve already examined your conscience. 
• You know what your sins are and what you must confess.
• It’s a short list.  Maybe you’ve been doing really good but you succombed to a big temptation earlier in the week.  Or maybe you simply forgot about a Holy Day.
• Or you have a lengthly list, but you’re prepared to confess the number of occurrences of each and to provide all the necessary info, without going into all kinds of unnecessary details.
• You’re not looking for in-depth spiritual direction, other than maybe a little counsel.

In short, you can be in, confess, show contrition, and receive absolution within five minutes.  Welcome to the Express Lane.

On the other hand, if:

• you’re knowingly scrupulous
• your list of sins is long enough to make Augustine look like a saint before he converted
• you’re looking to chat with the priest about life in general
• you’re going to launch into long discourses about each minute character flaw

then you would be sent to the non-express lane.

Unfortunately, this idea probably won’t happen.   First off, it would require more than one priest to be hearing confessions at a time.  More importantly, it’s probably good to not implement such a tactic because otherwise people would wonder why someone’s in the non-express lane.  You know, “what kind of nasty stuff did HE do?”

Still, I think it would draw more people to the sacrament if they didn’t have to wait so long.  On several occasions, I’ve seen people outright leave because of the wait, and I’ve done it myself once.  (In my defense, it was already past the usual end time, Mass was due to start in 15 minutes, there were at least ten people in front of me, several more behind me, and I could go to a different parish where confessions were just starting, so it was really out of charity that I got fed up and left….)

Maybe the priests need to start telling some of the faithful that they needn’t confess with such quantity.  (“Yes, you got confused and skipped a Hail Mary on one of your rosaries.  I’m sure the Lord is pleased that you started the whole rosary over again to make up for missing the one prayer, and then as penance you wore a hairshirt for the rest of the day, but you didn’t have to do that.  No, it’s not a mortal sin.  You’re 85 years old, it’s bound to happen that you slip up.  Now, unless you kill someone or commit adultery don’t come back for another month, okay.”)  Hmm, maybe not….

At the very least, maybe they can announce that if you KNOW you’re one of those people who confesses every week yet still has 20 minutes of sins to confess, and confessions start immediately after Mass, please don’t run to the back of the church as soon as you can to be first in line so that others can get a chance.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that people think so much of their spiritual well-being that they are really thorough in the box.  It’s just that when there’s only one priest hearing confessions, and only 30 minutes scheduled, and a dozen other people in line, it’s taxing on everyone (including the priest I’m sure) when most of the time is used up by one or two people.  Naturally, if we had 10 priests hearing confessions in every church, or if we had confessions more often than just a half hour on Saturdays, then having someone in the confessional for a long time would be great.  But until then, there needs to be some way to keep things moving expediently, lest people get fed up and leave.

The only upside:  as you get increasingly impatient in line, and start thinking uncharitable thoughts, you can at least confess them once its your turn, so there should be no long-lasting soul damage as a result. 

Talking to a coworker about how long I’ve been at the company (longer than most of the peons in my department and probably many of the managers — which is an interesting story unto itself), a comment was made about working here being indentured servitude.

Not really, I said. I have all my own natural teeth, so I’m not indentured.

We get frequent reminders at work about how we need to reduce our paper consumption.  We’re also reminded often that we should avoid making color printouts and copies unless it’s absolutely necessary.  In fact, it costs us 10 cents per page for color copies, but only 1 cent per page for black and white.

To this end, the IT gurus have changed all the default settings on the printers to automatically print double-sided.  On the color printer, they also made the default grayscale.  (Why, I don’t know.  If I’m going to deliberately send to the color printer, odds are it’s for something in color.)  These defaults can be overridden if you know what you’re doing, but that doesn’t mean the printer is going to listen.

Case in point.  I had to print off a 3 page document in color today, and I needed it to be single sided.  I open the document, fiddle with the print settings to override the defaults, and print.  I trudge halfway across the building to pick up the print jobs, and lo and behold, they’re in color, but printed duplex.  I specifically said I wanted simplex, but I guess that didn’t compute somewhere.  No biggy; I’m right here, I’ll just make a copy from 2-sided to 1-sided since I’m here.  Copies come out and I throw the original into the secure recycling bin.

Get back to my desk, and I realize that apparently, the copier part of the device also prints in grayscale unless you poke around enough to tell it to scan and print color.  So, I’m looking at black and white copy.  Grrrr.  And I’ve already tossed the originals.  So, I open the doc again, fiddle with the print settings, making sure I’ve said simplex print, and send it to the printer.  I get back, and sure enough, it printed on both sides.  So I futz with the copy controls to get it to do color, and finally I get my pages, single-sided, in color.  Alleluia.

Now, here’s the irony.  This was all done as a cost-saving measure.  Had the machine just print single-sided color copies like I asked, it would have cost 30 cents (3 pages @ 10 cents each.)  Instead, I ended up printing 10 color pages (since the duplex to simplex copy used four pages, the fourth having some random smudges and lines from scanning problems) and 4 grayscale pages.  So, it cost the company $1.04.  Plus, my time going back and forth to reprint.

So, this is saving us money how?

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.  Try something foolish, and all you’ll probably get is an ambulance crew and a few gawkers.

The last sentence is the funniest of the whole thing though.

Students enroll in online gym classes — and can get school credit for this.

Clearly I was born about 15 years too early.  I had to endure the sheer agony of 11 years of physical education school-sanctioned torture at the talons of those sadists who called themselves teachers but were nothing more than child-hating scumbags.

Rather than put 232 candles on a cake, I think I chose to celebrate by offering no less than 232 mosquitos a delicious blood-feast to celebrate. At least, it feels like I have that many bug bites right now.

I’m glad all the skeeters are dead at Christmas. Imagine doing the same thing to celebrate Christ’s 2008th birthday. Ouch!

Apparently, Matt Lauer made a slip-up on the Today show by saying ”Obama…excuse me, Osama bin Laden.”  (Once I’m home I’ll try to find a video, but unfortunately the filters at work don’t allow that.)

Let’s not be too hard on Mr. Lauer.  I can totally see how anyone can make a goof and confuse the two guys.  I mean, both Osama and Obama have repeatedly demonstrated by their actions that they have an absolute disregard for the lives of innocent Americans.  Oh, and I guess their names sound similar too.