Tag Archives: black friday

Amazon.com “Pick” of the Day – The Anger & Aggression Workbook

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Today’s pick is one that has, surprisingly, been purchased more times than you would probably guess (if you’re the kind of person who generally gives people the benefit of the doubt, the kind of person who trusts people and thinks most people are, under the surface, good people). It’s a book that doesn’t try to mask what its intentions are with a deceptive title: “The Anger & Aggression” Workbook.

We’ve all known angry people before, and we all know the various ways angry people work to become happier, calmer versions of themselves… but I doubt most of you have ever pictured a very angry man sitting down and completing a workbook that asks him to put his feelings down on over-sized, evenly spaced lines akin to the beginners’ Spanish workbooks you probably worked with when you were in the 7th grade. But let me tell you: plenty of men and women are doing this. The workbook is pictured below:

The most important question seems (to me) to be: At what stage in the “healing” process do you start using the workbook? What level of commitment to overcoming one’s anger does one have to have to order this book from Amazon and start doing the exercises? It’s a great question. Let’s explore.

Scenario: A man (we’ll call him Hunter) has a wife and two kids. Hunter’s a Buffalo Bills fan (he was born into it the team. unfortunate). When Hunter watches the Bills lose, he often loses control. He’s far from the point where he would consider taking his anger out on his immediate family (thank God), but the population of the family’s collection of plates, cups, and coffee mugs suffers on Sundays. The family wears shoes constantly in the family room, as you never really know if Hunter forgot to pick up a broken shard of the dinner plate he threw following last night’s massacre of the Bills (an almost weekly occurrence this year).

The wife (we’ll call her Allison) is getting sick of it. Her paychecks aren’t big enough to continuously replace the dishes Hunter tosses at will on Sunday afternoons. The tipping point? The first time little Billy (the youngest) doesn’t even get a plate to eat off of on Spaghetti Tuesday (a weekly tradition). Billy is forced to eat the Spaghetti off of a cheap napkin, whose fragility forces young Billy to ingest an unhealthy amount of cloth along with his spaghetti. He gets sick. The day before the big test on the 50-state capitals. He already has a low C for the quarter. Repeating the 3rd grade won’t vie well for the little guy later in life.

Allison’s told Hunter he needs to work on his anger plenty of times before. It doesn’t seem to be working. The family’s in no financial state to be able to get Hunter anger management counseling. He probably wouldn’t go anyways. He’s lazy and has been on unemployment for almost 3 months. She can’t sit back and do nothing.

Anger & Aggression workbook to the rescue. She orders one and sets in on the dining room table, a place Hunter sits every night to smoke a cigar and down a couple of Bud Heavy’s before heading to bed. He usually completes the daily crossword puzzle during this time (uncharacteristic of the man, but he loves word games). Tonight, however, following the newspaper subscription’s cancellation by Allison, Hunter is left with only one choice: the anger and aggression workbook. He wearily cracks the workbook open and begins filling out what seem like harmless personality tests and questionnaires.

Fast forward 2 months: Hunter’s Buffalo Bills are now the worst team in the league. But he’s gone through the workbook. Is he still an angry person? Call it a hunch, but I say he is. If a cheap, non-descriptive workbook like this couldn’t teach me a basic understanding of Spanish in 7th grade, I doubt it could free a man from his anger at 45 years old. I guess it’s time to stock up on paper plates and cups, Allison. Or pray the Bills get a decent draft choice for next season.

Amazon.com “Pick” of the Day – “Careers For Your Cat”

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Happy Black Friday good friends! It is my hope that on this day, you did not go out and buy the item I am spotlighting today. If you did, you wasted such an important day where you could have bought anything else and actually benefited. I don’t remember when I found it, as the hours and minutes are becoming a blur, but that’s not relevant. Anyways, it did come, and I’ll never forget it.

The book is called “Careers For Your Cat” by “Ann Dziemianowicz,” and it’s probably one of the greatest wastes of time you can ever find with a modest amount of searching on the internet or in a book store… more than likely, it is the greatest waste of time you will ever find, but I don’t have the evidence to support it and I won’t and will never have the time or patience to find it.

Pictured here:

The premise of the book is deceptively simple and is much less “fiction” than you probably think. Apparently, through reading the book, and through dedicated and unique cat personality tests, you can gauge exactly what kind of career your cat would have if and when he or she was in the kind of world in which it would be socially acceptable and intellectually feasible for the cat to maintain a job. Long story short, you’re wasting an extraordinary amount of time. Note that this is not a short, quick guide to finding a career. The book is unseasonably long, leading one to believe that this book has an almost offensive amount of filler.

This is ordinarily the time when I try to pinpoint the type of person that would purchase this book. However, other than the obvious group of “cat ladies” that this book would attract, I have no idea what kind of people would be attracted to this book. There aren’t enough cat ladies in the world to garner this book as one worth being written, and it is my belief that the remaining group of people are hidden among us “normies” and will never reveal their identity. For good reason.

The kind of person who spends much of his time taking personality tests for his cat, running the results through a detailed list of strengths and weaknesses, and taking those and figuring out what kind of career the cat would not only be able to do, but excel at, is the kind of person who should never be allowed to engage socially with the part of the world that will never read this book, which… is a whole lot of us.

Now, the rest of this article could (and probably should) be a guide in helping you spot and ignore these hidden “Careers For Your Cat” readers; and if I knew, it would be. I don’t, though. I’m just as defenseless as you.

So what do we do? What do we do with your secret “Careers For Your Cat” neighbor reader man “Jim,” who is on his way to your new house with a “welcome to the neighborhood” casserole as you read this?

This is going to seem extreme, but I want you to play close attention: you don’t answer the door. You don’t even go outside. You never, ever go outside. You order your food from Amazon (I know from picking that, at the very least, you can order split pea soup, peanut m&m’s, cheez-its, and Progresso soup (most of the good groups are represented)), and you’ll find friends on relevant internet forums tailored to your interests and unique situation. You won’t ever meet them, but the world is heading down that path anyways.

It’s extreme, but it’s the only solution I can think of. Because a world in which you engage with the kind of person who reads this book is a one you’re not ready or equipped to live in. Stay away from this book.

If you have a cat, do you really care whether he’d fair better as a school psychologist, botanist, or ticket salesman at a ski resort? If you do, it’d probably best for both parties to find a better home for your cat. Literally immediately.

Amazon “Pick” of the Day – The “Wetstop” Bedwetting Sensor and Alarm

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Today’s “pick” was, in reality, yesterday’s, as today is THANKSGIVING (Happy Thanksgiving to you!) However, it has stuck with me since I found it early yesterday, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get it off my mind until I write about it. The item is a “Westop” Bedwetting Sensor and Alarm. Pictured here:

From the bit I read on the box right before I chucked it into a tote full of all the things people shouldn’t have wasted their money on, apparently this thing can not only sense when you’re ‘peeing’ yourself in the middle of the night, but it can wake you up so you can find yourself doing it. The problems are obvious.

So first, it’s important to target the kind of person who is buying this. It’s obviously a parent of a child who’s getting a little too old to be waking up in the morning with a little problem wetness in the sheets. Maybe someone who wants to go to summer camp, but knows he’ll have a hard time fitting in with the other kids until he kicks the habit. Maybe a kid who is sick of declining invitations to sleepovers because he doesn’t want to ruin his friends’ parents’ brand new carpet/upholstery. Or maybe even someone who just drinks a little too much a little too often, and is sick of replacing those expensive 800-thread count sheets every other weekend.

Anyway, the problems seem obvious. Imagine the scenario: a boy (we’ll call him Chad) has just finished his 6th grade math assignment (yes, 6th grade), and is about to go to bed. Mom “installs” the bedwetting alarm on Chad’s person, and sends Chad off into the realms of deep sleep and vivid dreams. Fast forward to about 3 or 4 in the morning. Wetstop senses something’s wrong. Springing to action, the alarm goes off, waking Chad immediately. Chad, confused for the first few seconds, as anyone is when woken up in the middle of the night, realizes he’s in the act of wetting himself.

Chad obviously can’t stop (no one can) right then and there. Instead, he has to sit through 10 or 15 seconds of humiliating helplessness and finish the act. Maybe he stays in bed. Or maybe he runs to the bathroom, leaking all over the upstairs hallway carpeting. The parents hear the child screaming and wake up. Dad will be late to work again tomorrow. 3rd strike. And this is supposed to help a child. More than likely, the stability of the child is in immediate jeopardy.

Repeat this over four or five nights, and your child is a shell of the person he used to be. He’s afraid to go to bed at night, his confidence is gone forever, and Dad is back on the unemployment line; but hey… at least he’s not wetting the bed anymore.

Parents: have more faith in your kids. They’ll stop eventually. Don’t ruin his future to save yourself a few extra wash and dry cycles a week.

Amazon.com “Pick” of the Day – The “Tree Toob”

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If you’ve been reading my twitter (shameless plug: http://www.twitter.com/AmazonEmployee), you might recognize this one. Well, another one was bought today, and with my personal sale count now at two, I really think it’s time to take a stand and question the intentions of the people who are ordering this item. It is pictured here:

It’s called a “Tree Toob.” Now I could spend the rest of this article contemplating why the company who makes this decided to spell “tube” wrong (a completely, 100% unnecessary change), but you don’t want to read about that. It’s too easy. My problem with this item lies in the fundamental question: what is anybody going to do with these?

I understand and appreciate that the environment is an ever-important issue in our world, especially as of late. I think trees much like the ones pictured above (though they are pretty terrible replications if we’re being honest with each other) should not only be saved, but grown in droves around our country. But that’s where I think it should end.

The second you turn something like this into a toy, you’ve soiled not only your company’s name, but your country’s. What half-decent, well-rounded, generally good-natured kid is going to enjoy these plastic trees for more than a few confused, baffled and ultimately angry minutes?

I consider myself a genuinely creative person with an abstract, out of the box way of thinking. I was a Lego man, you see. Anyways, I pondered a list of things I could do with 10 completely different species of trees to keep myself occupied for any amount of time, and I came up way short. There’s no way your kid’s gonna do better, parents. These things will be at the bottom of the toy chest by December 26th.

The list I did come up with goes like this:

1. Do some kind of all-encompassing school project on the world of trees. This is not fun in the least, however, and should not even be on the list. You don’t get your kids school supplies for Christmas unless you genuinely dislike them.

2. Create some kind of fantasy avalanche scenario (maybe with a sheet pulled off a bed and brought to the floor to resemble a “snowy mountain”). You wouldn’t get far, however, as you would inevitably ask yourself why so many different kinds of trees would be growing on a snowy mountainside in the first place, especially with all of their leaves intact and flourishing (it is my belief that no imagination can get past this issue).

3. Create some kind of tournament in which the trees fight one another. However, with no removable or bendable parts, and with no arms or legs or even faces, the fight would be too impersonal and wouldn’t last long due to sheer lack of interest in the outcome. An elm beating a juniper gives us the same cold, empty feeling inside as that very same juniper beating that very same elm.

4. Develop relationships between the trees. This might work to start, but trying to successfully integrate the “Monkey Puzzle Tree” into any of the various cliques and groups of friends you’ve create amongst the trees would be too hard, and you wouldn’t be able to continue without feeling irreconcilable sadness for the his inability to fit in, which may parallel your own.

And that’s it. There’s nothing else you could possibly think of. A holiday season of disappointment, boredom and absolute discontent awaits. Merry Christmas, kids.