This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: He was a classic double-dipper, referring to Merlin’s teacher Mr. Sherwood in High School who was a retired colonel from the Korean War who got his full pension from that and was now also working as a teacher.

The show title refers to the way John answered Merlin’s text if he was ready to record, probably an autocorrect mistake.

John was trying something new. Merlin asked him in the robot if he was ready to record and he replied with: ”Jim here”

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Finding Nescafé instant coffee tubes in an old guitar case (RL108)

Yesterday John was cleaning out an old guitar case and he found his old RAT pedal that had been missing, and he found a bag of little Starbucks Nescafé tubes, which is often the only coffee available in Europe. It is instant coffee where you just pour hot water over it and coffee appears and when John first discovered them he thought they were a revelation until he realized it is just Sanka and America has had instant coffee for years.

John didn’t have coffee until he moved to Seattle and he had never experienced coffee that comes in cans. It was what the adults drank when he was growing up, but he never had it, it was only espresso that was his introduction. John doesn’t even know what Folgers is. Merlin remembers Nescafé commercials with cool little mugs that looked like a globe with a handle on it. When he had one of his first freelance jobs and was discovering coffee, he would work late at night at a real estate office and he would make hot chocolate and dump instant coffee in to it because he didn’t know any better.

The first couple of times when John did European Rock touring he would show up at a venue and there would be a box with the equivalent of 50 cups of coffee in it, but all in little paper tubes, which was genius, and he would grab the whole box and stuff it in his bag. He had coffee now forever and no-one could tell him ever again that there was no coffee. He was going to carry one of these in his wallet at all times, like a condom for coffee.

In this guitar case there was a bag of Starbucks-brand paper-tube Nescafé grounds, which sounds like a Guided By Voices song, but he doesn’t remember seeing these before and secreting these into his guitar bag, but finding these is absolutely consistent with his coffee hoarder mentality. In any situation where he is in a backstage environment or a gift-bag situation… a lot of gift-bags that you get at events will have a pound of coffee in them, at least in the Northwest, like for example if you are a speaker at a conference in Portland.

In situations like that John will definitely wait around to see which 3-4 gift bags don’t get claimed and he will nab the coffee out of them. He used to be that guy in elementary school who would go: ”I’ll have it!”, ”You need that bun?”, so it is completely consistent with John that he would have been in a situation where he would have seen this bag of coffee envelopes and he would have taken a look to the left and to the right, realized that this was his backstage and these coffee envelopes were there for him, and he would have stuffed them in his guitar case without even remembering having done it, like a squirrel.

It was a weird guitar in this case and John wondered when he last played it live. This isn’t a guitar that he would grab without thinking, or he could have travelled with it to an event where he expected doing something fun and dumb, rather than that he was going to seriously use this guitar to play some tunes. It was so long ago that he doesn’t remember where he went, it must have been at least a year.

John had to really resist the impulse to use two of them and eventually only took one, the recommended serving size, the poured it into a beer stein, filled it with tap water and stuck it in the microwave for 2 minutes and now this brew is sitting in front of him and he has yet to taste it. It is strangely granular and it is very muddy, but it is nice and warm and has a chocolaty smell like international coffee. He took a sip and made a noise like it was very disgusting. It is terrible!

First of all you really taste the tap water, and there is almost a burnt meat flavor to it like the crusty end of a prime rib. It is coffee, though! There is something dirty in the flavor like a Mercedes exhaust with a bit of a Diesel component and it is sour, too. You would have to really be in need of some coffee, but John often is. When coffee has been sitting all day and brewing all day and gets a burned taste, then the taste is opaque and throughout the whole coffee, whereas in this case the burned coffee flavor is floating on the top of a watery base and doesn’t have the full sour majesty of the Kinian Tang (?), the proximity of a restroom used by truckers with the hot case on the other side with some Jojo’s (?) in it that you get with truck stop coffee.

A days in your room coffee does have the same watery quality, but they go to great lengths to take the burn out of it, and the burn element has been injected into these Starbucks pouches in order to conjure the sensation of dark roast. It feels like somebody in a laboratory has figured out what dark roast tastes like and then they made it into a powder. To top it all off, the crystals leave a slightly granular feeling, it is really mesmerizingly bad. But John is definitely going to keep them around and he is probably going to serve them to guests.

People trying to sell insulated windows door-to-door (RL108)

For example to the guy who comes to your door and asks if you have ever considered replacing your windows, he is going to ask him if he wants a cup of coffee. It has never occurred to John to replace his windows until the guy showed up, although obviously 25 guys have showed up before and asked the same question. Isn’t it amazing that people still go door-to-door for anything? Merlin just assumes it is a burglar. Sometimes John thinks those guys are people who belong in sales and would be a good sales person if they just had the Glengarry leads (reference to the movie Glengarry Glen Ross).

Instead they answered an ad in the newspaper, showed up to a seminar, learned to sell windows door-to-door, and the only reason that this would be your life, being a 45-year old guy standing on John’s porch, not taking ”No!” for an answer is that you have fallen on hard times and some twist in the road resulted in you needing to decide this late in life that door-to-door sales are going to be your thing. It is a guy who is probably living in his car, but he still presents well, so John always wonders what the problem is. Is it alcoholism? Is it gambling debts? Recent divorce? ”Windows: The Clear Choice!” should be the title of their seminar.

John being in Junior Achievement USA, selling home-made chocolate, people telling John he should go into PR (RL108)

Merlin was never a member of Junior Achievement USA (JA), that was totally opaque to him. Also Future Farmers of America (FFA), all these groups seemed like cults to him. JA had a cool logo with a triangle. John liked about JA that it attracted the brassy girls and John likes a brassy girls and at one point in High School he got roped into Junior Achievement. There was a time in his Junior year when he was really trying to decide what his course of action was going to be, which is what your Junior year is for, when you spend a lot of time alone in an orange flight-suit (see RW137).

Even as a Junior John was sure that his course of action was to be the retired director of the CIA. It was too late for him to go to Yale, which would be a shoe-in. The cult that they are really trying to put into kids is business. Merlin had a class called marketing, which was kind of about advertising. Adults would tell John when he was 13/14 years old that he should go into Public Relations because he was good with people, and John didn’t know what that meant, he thought it was going to be the president’s press secretary, that you stood at a podium and reporters shouted questions at you.

John joined Junior Achievement and he sat in the meetings. The adult supervisors were trying to walk them through the entire process of starting a business, they had to decide what their product was going to be, and they decided on chocolate brittle and nut bars and white chocolate. They went into manufacturing and bought bulk nuts and chocolate and in JA-class they cooked them down and made them into bark, packaged them up and then began the real process of selling them to their friends’ parents, which was a total Girl Scout scam and turned into door-to-door sales or standing in front of the Costco at 8pm with a folding table.

Merlin did the same thing in Key Club, which is not what it sounds like. John would like to be a member of a Key Club now! It was like Junior Kiwanis, one of the many clubs Merlin joined because there was a girl that he liked in it. Mr. Sherwood, who taught Americanism vs Communism, was also the sponsor of the Key Club. All Merlin remembers of any of those meetings were the cookies. Nothing says Kiwanis like anti-Communism. Americanism vs Communism was an actual class that until 1984 when Merlin took it was still called: ”Comparative government: Americanism vs Communism” (see RL364).

Mr. Sherwood brought in his wife’s world-famous recipe for cookies and the chief selling point was that they never go bad. They made them exactly right to the last teaspoon, and they were the worst thing Merlin ever had in his mouth, but they still had to go out and sell them. These are all cults and money-makers, it is like selling flowers at the airport. John wants to live in a world where the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

The problem is obviously that adults in schools have no imagination, they have no sense of what business is because they are teachers. There was nothing that pushed him away from business faster than the idea that if he went into business school he would end up outside of Thunderbird Business School, selling fucking white chocolate bark.

Mr. Sherwood was awesome, he wrote Merlin’s recommendation letter for college, but he was also a huge double dipper, he was a retired colonel who was in Korea and maybe even World War II, and he had a full-time job as a teacher, which means he is getting his full retirement and he is working as a teacher, imparting to the next generation all of the hard-worn lessons that he learned running up the hill at Incheon.

Merlin would like to contrast Sales, Marketing, Public Relations, and Publicity.

This year the Girl Scouts were out of control. Merlin wants to be supportive, but it is very frustrating that in West Portal, the neighborhood near his house where he went to Goodwill with John that one time, at every corner there is an encampment of Girl Scouts, which is a lot like Baltimore in The Wire. Obviously this is their earner and how they pay for Girl Scouts, but it is weird that they are doing it by selling sugar once a year.

What terrified John about sales when he was young was the palpable desperation in the eyes of everyone who ever talked to him about sales, the feeling that every sale is a make-or-break situation where you are only as good as your last sale or only as good as your next sale.

John buying two suits in San Francisco, one of which didn’t fit him (RL108)

The last time John was in San Francisco (John says he talked about this on You Look Nice Today, but Merlin is not going to release that episode) he went into a preppy clothier that he was very excited to finally visit, and he bought two suits. It has taken him several months to unpack the entire experience. He has a tailor now in Seattle who has taught him an enormous amount of how men’s clothes are meant to fit, and the scales have fallen from John’s eyes because he now knows what to look for in clothes and he has realized that a lot of the clothes he owned that he thought fit him actually did not fit him.

One of the suits that he bought in San Francisco turns out does not fit him at all and in reflecting upon it, when the little tailor came out from behind the curtain to fit this garment to him, because alterations were made to this garment that added a considerable expense to the purchase price, a dark look crossed his face and the salesman who is also the owner of the store and the son of the founder had a very fast-talking chummy car-salesman patter and he looked at the tailor over the shoulder while John was looking in the mirror at himself in this suit, thinking: ”Boy, don’t I look sharp!”, but he was more thinking that this was the kind of suit and the color of suit that he has wanted for a long time.

The aspects of it that aren’t fitting the salesman was saying that their tailor will get this taken care of, and he sees the dark look on the tailor’s face which he did not recognize at the time because he was in the excitement of the moment and the salesman was pattering in his ear, and then he hears the salesman say over John’s other shoulder: ”Ricardo, we are trying to sell some suits here!”, but Ricardo came out from the back, saw that the suit did not fit John at all, and the salesman saw the look and preempted any comment from Ricardo by saying: ”We are trying to sell some suits here!” and Ricardo didn’t even visibly shrug and he went about this deal with the devil where he is employed by this guy and he is being asked to do tailoring on suits that in his profession are an abomination.

At the end of the day when he goes into the darkest room in the tailor’s guild and sits down in front of the tribunal he has to go into the confession booth and say: ”I have sold size 46 longs to a 44 long and there was nothing I could do!” and they have said: ”No, you do not get into heaven!” John feels bad for Ricardo, but he also feels bad for himself. Now that he has been shown how a suit is meant to fit he would need to have his tailor remake it at great expense or he can write it off as a very expensive learning experience, but he is still getting email blasts from this company, telling him to come on it for a special fitting with 50% off all men’s shirts.

At first John was not going to put a Google filter on these and consign them all to the garbage dump, he is going to look at these because he had such a nice experience there and maybe this was the beginning of a relationship, maybe he was going to buy ties from this guy for 40 years, maybe he will get a tux there for his daughter’s wedding, and this is going to be his place, the family-owned little clothier, this was was his airplane mechanic in California (see RL106).

Now weeks have progressed to months and this guy in his salesman frenzy to get John out the door that day in a suit and his willingness to sell him a suit that he knew it didn’t fit, and he enlisted his tailor in a conspiracy to not reveal to him that it didn’t fit, these emails from this company have gone from little imaginings of being an old man, wandering around the house in his smoking jacket made by this company, to little reminders of horror and John feels like now that this guy probably was on cocaine and he wants nothing to do with this store.

Maybe Ricardo already worked for the guy’s father and now he is not allowed to work anywhere else and he lives back there behind the curtain in a refrigerator box that has a window cut out in it and this guy holds the papers on his kids or something. It is all because of that salesman moment where this guy was thinking he was going to sell this suit today and he was not practicing what surely his father practiced: Making John a customer for life. All he had to say was: ”That suit doesn’t fit you, we don’t have one in your size, sorry, I don’t think you should buy it!” - ”You sir are a man of integrity!”, but instead John has committed himself to a lifetime of war with this person.

John trusts his Seattle tailor implicitly because he says things like: ”This is going to cost $100 to do and I will do it if you tell me to, but I don’t see how you are going to win!”

That is what Merlin always liked about his mechanic, he would tell him the honest truth about what he needed to fix and what were just optional fixes. His advice is that if Jerry the mechanic tells you that you really need to replace the timing belt in the next month and then over the next year your wife literally begs you three different times to fix the timing belt and Jerry reminds you that if the timing belt breaks it is going to be an order of magnitude more costly to fix than if we just did this one simple fucking thing, Merlin, then go ahead and get the timing belt fixed!

John’s new mechanic is like that as well. He took his stuff to his old mechanic for years and years and the falling out that they had was when he said that John’s truck needed a new $1200 brake job, and when John asked him in all honesty friend-to-friend if it was worth it, a cold light showed on him and he shrugged his shoulders and said: ”It is up to you!” - ”After all the work I have had done here, you are going to suddenly turn into not a human? You are just a fixer-bot now and it is entirely up to me and you are not going to give me any advise?”

What he was really saying was: ”I want the $1200, so I am not going to tell you not to do it! I am not going to sit here and argue against you paying me for work that is good money after bad!” It is that good-money-after-bad thing where somebody really shows their integrity.

John at the Conference on World Affairs (RL108)

When John was at the Conference on World Affairs in Colorado most recently, he asked the gal who was assigned as his student ambassador and was supposed to drive him around town and be helpful what she was majoring in and she said: ”Business!”, but she was at this conference and advice had been given to her that business was a practical major for successful people, but her heart really lies in the arts and she was dabbling in the Conference on World Affairs because she wanted to be engaged with people who are doing interesting and thoughtful work, but she is still putting in the hours on the business degree because she doesn’t want to disappoint her parents, but eventually she was going to try to use it to do art business.

As an individual she seemed great, but she seemed like an absolutely terrible fit in business. Whatever business understanding they manage to actually impart to you in business school, which is probably at the level of white chocolate bark, is not going to hurt her as she moves into wanting to work in the arts. She is 21 and had already this knowledge of herself, it is not that she was going to spend 15 years in HVAC sales before she realizes that what she was really wanting to do was write a novel. There are more and more reasons to discover stuff like that sooner than it used to be.

Computer maths / computer science is a trade, college inflation (RL108)

Merlin’s entire college career, a year in college in 1986 in state tuition at one of the best public schools in America, the New College of Sarasota, which was among the Public Ivy’s, was under $6000 a year including housing. When he met his lady he was working in Menlow Park while she was working at Stanford, and they would laugh because Standford undergrad would cost $40.000 a year back then.

Even taking all the meager things that Merlin accidentally picked up in college into account he cannot imagine being 23 years old and entering this fucking job market with your business degree and being over $100.000 in debt, particularly since conservatively 60% of what is being taught in colleges now is trade school education. Computer science is a trade! It is a bunch of math classes! If somebody is sitting in a room and the light is streaming in and there is a shelf of bookcases and they are staring out the window, thinking about math, that kind of maths belong into the college of arts and sciences, but computer maths? You can get that at the ITT Technical School and that is where that should be taught!

Every time John talks to a computer person they are saying that they are now using XT-HTML’s and these languages now are easy to use because all you have to do is say to the computer: ”Computer, make me an app!”, you put a couple of colons and backslashes and the math is done for you by the machine. Most of what is now be taught in college is things that belong into trade school. Unless your education involves a certain number of hours sitting in a room staring out the window, then you don’t need to be in college.

Merlin doesn’t understand the episodes John does and doesn’t let Merlin put out!

College is a building of windows made to be stared out of, and every once in a while you talk to someone in a tweed jacket and in answer to your questions he asks you more questions. If you ask your professor a question and he gives you an answer that is not phrased as a question you know you belong in trade school. 50-60 years ago we have decided as a country that college was the symbol of upward mobility, like: ”My parents didn’t go to college, but I am going to go to college!”, or ”I didn’t go to college, but I am going to put my son through college!” and that is how we know that America is growing and that we are providing opportunity to people.

We have increased dramatically the amount of technical knowledge that is required to have a basic job now. You got to know about the colons, about where to put the backslash, about a bit.ly and you have to put stuff in a cloud, but all of that is the equivalent of knowing how to operate a steam engine, which also was very difficult, but now the steam that is powering the engine is bits and bytes. From steam to cloud!

Almost everybody Merlin and John know fell ass-backwards into something and who knows, it is like the quote from the movie Equus: ”Moments snap together like magnets” Who knows why anything turns out the way it does? It could just be by virtue of the fact that college mostly kept you out of trouble for 4 really difficult years, which is a good thing for a lot of people. So much of what got Merlin jobs had absolutely nothing to do with liberal arts, but with all the other shit he picked up and learning how to put up with bullshit.

There was a time before World War II where a very small percentage of people went to college. It is basically the Jews!

Merlin stopped John right there although John was on a roll.