» National Marketing Email Unsubscribe Day September 1st on Labor Day

Get your life back (and time) from your inbox. Unsubscribe from email newsletters and marketing messages on Labor Day September 1st.

I am proposing that everyone take (an hour or so of) time on Labor Day to clean out your overloaded email boxes and unsubscribe to the emails you always delete or file to read and never come back to. If you have not read it in a month or longer or you delete the email newsletter or marketing messages every time you see them, just scroll down to the end of the email window and click theunsubscribe link.

I think that everyone has the best intentions when they subscribe to email newsletters and marketing messages. I have subscribedto a lot of them over the years and only this week did I finally get to my breaking point when hundreds of messages were commonplace after only a few days away from the computer. Most were from companies I had purchased things from in the past, social networking sites that send you an email every time something happens, blogs which send updates via feedblitz and news sites that send news and links as they happen. Oh and the ubiquitous google alert on anything I was a fan of or working on at that moment. There were also some marketing newsletters from publications that write about the industry that I work in but as time has gone on some were relevant and others, not so much. Sometimes you also have to subscribe to and email newsletter in order try it and see what info they send. If you get all kinds of stuff that isn't helpful, it's time to unsubscribe.

I am guessing I unsubscribed to around 100 email newsletters. Everything from travel sites with airfare updates to flights to Paris to the Anthropologie and Nordstrom sale newsletters. (I'm sad to see those go but I never buy anything there, too expensive) I aim to take back the 3-4 hours a week it took to weed through all these alerts and updates on everything from celebrity news to Chicago entertainment options. I still get some alerts and some emails I am actually using but we will see if I can weed it out further and regain another hour of my week back.

If you think about it, you only have so much free time after work and why would you want to be mildly entertained by marketing messages when you could be out living your life? Or writing your own email messages to real live humans.

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» Fuck That Guy

Everyone knows "That Guy". The fat guy that stinks no matter what. The guy with the me first attitude. The guy that makes everyone around him uncomfortable in any situation. The guy that thinks he's better than the world, but still shoots snot out of one nostril right next to an old lady at a bus stop. That fucking guy. He ruined my entire Friday last week. I usually don't work on Fridays so I was already a bit pissed off that I even had to go in. So I wake up and lug myself to a train station to get to work. I had to stand on the train. Then I see this fat disgusting excuse for a man get on the train and plop his fat ass down in a handicapped seat. I close my eyes and pretend he's not there. But you can only ignore the 300 lbs of stench for so long. I hear him talking over the noise of the train to another passenger. Everyone else gets quiet and seem to be annoyed at Tubs here. We get off at the same stop, Dry Creek. I walk up the stairs to the sky bridge and make my way to the shuttle van. He takes the elevator and waddles about two minutes behind me. I make it to the shuttle van and sit down. The van fills as we have to wait for Tubs. Everyone knows he's coming. By the time he get's to the shuttle there about five empty seats. I close my eyes again and pretend he's not there. He plops down next to me. The force of his ass hitting the seat reverberates throughout the van, sending debris and dust into the shuttle's atmosphere. The pigeons that were roosting on the covered benches disperse as if a shot was fired from a .45 cal. His stink lines emanate spreading remorse to all of us trapped on the van. Windows open as if on cue. He's unshaven  with at least three weeks of growth on his face. His haircut speaks of the same grooming schedule. Clothes screaming to hold onto his 5'7" 300 lbs frame, begging for a rip. "Oh if only he'd rip us stitch by stitch then we'd be discarded, then we could die." I'm plastered to the window, clinging to the precious fresh air seeping in only when the driver accelerates. It's a new driver, so she's going extra slow. "HEY WHERE'S FRANK AT? DID HE QUIT?" Tubs shouts. Frank's the usual driver. "No he's just training a different route this morning." the driver politely responds. "OH... OK" Tubs adds. We continue our uncomfortably awkward ride to the office. I try and lose myself in my music, if only an iPod could block out smells and sound. His sweat running out of his clothes as if they can't wait to evaporate. Now I'm sweating from suffocation. If I don't get off of the shuttle soon I'll dry up. I keep hoping that something interesting outside will happen. Just something to distract me. Just something to trick my mind into forgetting that I'm dying a little each time he breaths.Thank goodness my stop is before his. I slide by him with more friction than I'm comfortable with. His stench stays on my cloths for 45 minutes.

If you think I'm some kind of hate monger against people with weight problems, I'm not. I do however hate lazy people. This man is a shame. The disgust on everyone's face is testimony enough. It's as if he refuses to bathe, wash/change clothes. Toothpaste is not considered a necessity by this man. Hygiene in general is left on the wayside as unimportant to him. I can't stand his very being. No one can. I only see this guy for fifteen minutes four days a week, but that's enough to know I hate him. That's enough nose torture, enough sweat. I can't imagine he is like this by accident. Chaos theory tells us he should have fallen into a body of clean water by this time, at least hindering the smell. This is planned. This is deliberate. This is a meaningful purposed action on his part. This is war. Stay tuned for the revenge.

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» my stove.

It occasionally happens that food is burnt onto my stove. It's a STOVE, for Christ's sake! You make food on it, and it is extremely hot. These things happen.

Yet, somehow through the evolution of stove technology, it has continued to seem acceptable to cover stoves with a substance that scratches off when scrubbed. I am not talking a scouring pad here. I am talking the innocent green side of a normal kitchen sponge. My stove is covered in a nice pale-yellow-tan coating that these same genius stove desingers seem to think is attractive. Problem is, you can't USE this pretty stove, lest it simultaneously get very hot and get food on it (as previously discussed, a likely occurrence). The food will just have to cake on, layer upon layer, because even that will look better than a scratched up stovetop.

An added frustration: Somewhere along the line, someone got frustrated with not being able to scrub their stovetop and added these little metal food-catchers beneath the coils. This helps reduce the amount of food that gets on the pretty pale-yellow-tan part of the stove, but sadly, YOU CAN'T SCRUB THOSE, EITHER. Mine are presumably made of aluminum and have a shiny finish on them. The shiny finish immediately jumps ship at first contact with the green side of the sponge.

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