Posts tagged ‘tips’

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April 13, 2012

3 Unorthodox Ways to Get Your Mechanic to Give You a Break

by Derek Osedach

Going to the mechanic can be a scary thing, especially when you don’t know all that much about cars. You try and look calm, sound tough, pretend you’re dying and therefore deserve sympathy, but still you feel your mechanic’s cold eyes scanning every inch of your nervous face, sizing you up, studying your weaknesses. He’s done this before and he knows what to look for. He has his tricks.

“And, is your vehicle two-door or four-door?” he’ll say in a friendly voice, as if it’s no big deal.

You freeze up. Your cool-guy swagger drains away. The charade is up. If you try and make up a lie it’ll only be worse for you. In a panic you decide to become Honest Abe. With a sort of apologetic smirk twitching on your lips you say, “Ooh. Okay. I gotta be honest with you man, I really don’t know that much about cars.” You figure maybe he’ll respect your sincerity.

But you know, deep down, you’ve just fallen victim to an old mechanic mind-trick, and now you belong to him. All you can do is pray he be gentle, and he rarely is.

You wonder: Is there no hope? Why is it always the same? How do I better prepare myself for next time? How do I finally get my mechanic to give me a break?

It’s easy, actually. You need only think a little outside the box.

3 Unorthodox Ways to Get Your Mechanic to Give You a Break  

  1. Enroll in a technical college, learn the basics about car repair, and then start applying for jobs as an apprentice mechanic. Once you get hired by a mechanic, simply remind him that by law he must give you at least one one-hour break during your eight hour work day. He’ll give it to you.
  2. Tell him you kidnapped his son and currently have the kid hanging upside down above the electrified cage where they keep the velociraptors, but that you’ll happily let him free if you get a good deal on the repair. When he tells you with a straight face that he has no son, call his bluff (and hope he’s bluffing).
  3. After your mechanic charges you $1476 just to replace your front left brake pad, remind him that by law he must give you back the old one, too, should you request it. Request it. He’ll give it to you.

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For more car-themed unorthodoxy, check out this post!

Posted in Lists, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | 2 Comments »

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March 19, 2012

The Absolute LAST 3 Things Your Job Interviewer Wants to Hear You Say

by Derek Osedach

We all do it. Fidgeting anxiously during an important job interview we say things our interviewer probably doesn’t want to hear. Often we make this mistake because we were underprepared for the interview, or because we couldn’t restrain our impulse to fill every awkward silence with fun facts about our social lives, or maybe because we misread some signals and mistakenly thought we were “like that” with our interviewer. We’ll say things like how much we hated our last boss for making us “work all the time,” or about how we dated two of our former co-workers at approximately the same time and it was a “big” mistake, or that our real aspiration was to became a famous novelist and so we would sort of consider this career-track opportunity a “day job.” But gaffs like those are surprisingly common. Certainly they’re not the LAST things your interviewer wants to hear, right?

Practicallyserious.com presents…

The LAST 3 Things Your Job Interviewer Wants to Hear You Say   

  1. “I’m not actually here for an interview. I’m here to tell you that your child’s being held in a remote, secure location. He’s safe for now, but whether or not he stays that way depends on a few things…”
  2. “This isn’t quite what it seems. I’m not really here getting interviewed, and you’re not really here interviewing me. You see, you are really in a hospital bed in a deep coma, and I have been sent in as a sort of “dream” agent to talk you out of it. You must trust me, I’m your only chance now and your time is running out. You must open the window behind you and jump out. Relinquish your hold on this made-up reality. Your impact on the sidewalk below will signal your comatose body in the real world to finally wake up.  If you fail to do this in within two minutes, you can remain in this self-made purgatory for eternity. Time has no meaning here.”
  3. “Sir! Whatever you do DON’T MOVE. There’s a tarantula on your shoulder and it looks frightened, looks like it’s about ready to make a rash decision. If you move at all, it might scare the thing into biting you. Just stay absolutely still and wait it out. OH CRAP. There’s like…two more on your other shoulder, they just showed up. What the hell kind of office is this anyway? Tarantulas?”

Posted in Lists, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | 4 Comments »

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March 17, 2012

3 Last Minute Saves if You Forgot to Wear Green on St. Patrick’s Day

by Derek Osedach

We’ve all been there. You show up at work wearing your standard dark blue collared shirt, the same blue jeans you’d been wearing for the last three days, the same black Chuck Taylors you wear all the time, and then you start to notice how just about everyone in your office seems to be wearing green stuff they don’t normally wear. Maybe it’s a green sweater, or perhaps a green belt buckle, or green earrings, green pants, green shoes. Then it hits you: It’s St. Patrick’s Day!

You notice with some resentment that some of your coworkers were clearly just as oblivious to the occasion as you were, but that they had blindly lucked into a least a little green. We’ll call them “the lucky Irish”:

“Uh…no, no, no, it’s okay because my eyes are green! GO ST. PATTY’S DAY!”

“Ooh…no, no, I’m good to go! My sneakers have a green stripe on the side!”

“Hmm…no, it’s cool, I recently got this tattoo on my ass cheek and four days ago it got infected and so there’s a bunch of greenish ass veins sort of branching out from it. St. Patty rocks!”

But no matter how closely you inspect your clothing and your naked body you come up with exactly zero greenness. You are the joke of the office. You are not part of the club today, and even the lucky Irish are giving you condescending looks.

What’s a guy to do?

  1. The Leaf Technique: This is the oldest, lamest way to fit the bare minimum qualifications for greenness. Just go outside and rip a leaf off the nearest bush and scotch tape it above your lip so you have a sort of oversized green mustache/face-flap. If you’re willing to do this, to sacrifice this much of your dignity, people might overlook the fact that you’re employing the shameless “leaf technique” in the first place.
  2. The “Eat Your Greens” Method: Find the nastiest, fuzziest Chinese food in your office’s break room fridge. Closely inspect it with a magnifying glass (so you know exactly what you’re about to eat) and sniff it like it’s a brand new car (so you know kinda how it’ll taste). The moment you start to gag simply from the thought of eating it, eat it. Stuff your gagging face with it. Swallow. HOLD IT DOWN. In moments you should be green and good to go.
  3. The “He’s Green” Technique: Start bumping into coworkers and then apologizing. Ask people where the bathroom is. Screw up simple tasks like making copies. Ask coworkers what their names are and forget their names again EVEN AS THEY ANSWER. If you do all of this correctly, your coworkers will start whispering to each other “Eh, he’s green.”

Posted in Lists, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | Leave a Comment »

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March 5, 2012

5 Unorthodox Tips to Help You Save at the Pump

by Derek Osedach

Gasoline in Los Angeles has recently broken past the $5 barrier and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna be going down again anytime soon. It’s important that we, the people who rely on our cars to get us to and from the gas station, cultivate money-saving habits when it comes to the pump. But besides the normal, common-sense things that all the other blogs yap on about like “check your tire pressure” and “don’t ride the break” and “don’t drive anywhere unless you have to,” I decided that practicallyserious.com should offer some non-traditional gas-saving advice that you can’t get anywhere else. Here are my 5 money-saving tips when it comes to pumping gasoline.

1. Don’t fill up your tank with leaded fuel if your car takes unleaded: The only thing worse than paying $5-a-gallon to fill your tank is paying $5-a-gallon on the wrong kind of fuel. And I’m not a car guy but I bet this mistake could end up costing you even MORE than you paid for the gas! Please, just put the kind of gas in that your car wants you to put in.

2. Don’t fill up your tank with diesel if your car takes regular gasoline: On the surface this rule may seem merely to be a cheap ‘filler’ rule (no pun intended) to help me get all the way to 5 rules, but it’s not. It’s much more than that. This rule is nothing like the Rule #1, and it is possibly more important. How so? Because very few gas stations even have “leaded” fuel as an option, but many stations legitimately offer diesel, increasing the chance that you’ll eventually decide to put it in your car. Just know this: if you make the decision to put diesel in your 1997 Jeep Wrangler it will end up costing you dearly—you’ll wish you just chose regular gas. So, like I said before: just put the kind of gas in that your car wants you to put in.

3. Always complain to all of your neighbors and friends that you are “running on fumes”: Even if you have a full tank of gas never admit this to anyone. It could cost you gas money. If people think you belong to the “1%” (the percentage of people in your city driving around with more than a half-full tank of gas at any given time) they will think you owe it to them to share your good fortune and drive them to the store and to other places. That’s money out of your pocket. So make sure you whine loud enough and often enough for everyone to here: man I don’t know how my car survived last weekend’s 80-mile trip to Vegas…on fumes!

4. Don’t recruit your children in your scheme to siphon gas from the neighbors: It may bolster your confidence and profits to enlist your three pre-teen children in your siphon-the-neighborhood’s-cars scheme, but if you inculcate your children with how to stick the rubber tube in and suck out the gas and get it into a bucket, your kids may eventually go mad with power and siphon your own car! Why would they do this? Because gas is expensive these days, and so is Playstation 3. So if you’re gonna do it, do yourself a favor and don’t pass your skills on to your kids.

5. Don’t buy gas if you don’t even own a car: If you don’t even have a car to put it in, don’t buy gasoline at all. What are you going to do with gallons of gasoline if you have nothing to use it on? Where would you even put it when you squirt it out of the pump? A bunch of buckets? Why would you even bother when you really don’t have to? It makes sense for people that own cars but if that’s not you then just don’t buy the stuff at all—you’ll definitely save plenty of cash.

I could come up with a dozen more money-saving rules but then everyone will save so much money it might offset the economy and send us all into our worst recession yet. If nobody has any jobs then they won’t even have enough money to buy a car, and so then only rule that would mean anything to them would be number 5.

Posted in Lists, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | 2 Comments »

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