I sure am. (Also, that is a fuckton of fake Swiss Army Knives. I kind of approve, especially including the loose busted off scale on the platter, there.)
Story time. In fact, I have told this story before. It’s got two acts.
Act 1: Our local farmer’s market/flea market had a stall that sold, among other sundry low grade imported Chinese crap, a wide variety of low grade Chinese knives. I bought a few from them over the years for the sheer novelty value – you know how it is – but one day I noticed their stall was completely barren of knives. I asked the owner what was up.
He told me he (or rather, his son) got busted via some kind of sting operation by the local cops selling a knife to a minor, so they’d been banned from selling knives and weapons altogether. What was he to do, he told me, with all of the crap he had left over he couldn’t sell.
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” I said. And I did.
I wound up with a Samsonite suitcase half filled with bargain basement knives. It took me years to get rid of them via giving them all away, and then breaking the rest. Me and my friends would go camping with bandoliers of 20 identical knives each. We’d use cheap folders for throwing knives, baton firewood with fake Swiss Armies, and lashed brass-and-plastic bejeweled Arabian daggers to the ends of sticks to use as fishing spears. The whole lot. It was a riot.
Act 2: At that time I was working in IT at this engineering firm. This is relevant because one day we had a prolonged power outage, and I can tell you there’s very little in this world that’s as useless as a bunch of engineers who can’t use their computers. While we were waiting around in the semi-darkness waiting for the lights to come back on, I was hanging out in our accountant’s office chatting (because we got along, and also not least of which because her office had a big window in it whereas my IT dungeon had none), and idly flipping my balisong/butterfly knife around. As you do.
Well, as I do, anyway. It’s not like I’m not a known quantity in that regard. Both here and there.
Some background on this, we had a new accountant in training who nobody liked because she was a little proto-Karen and also not very competent at anything. We suspect her CV was rather embellished. Even the boss didn’t like her and he was the one who made the decision to hire her in the first place. She came in to ask our head accountant some question or other, damned if I was paying attention to what it was, and left. No incident, didn’t speak to me, didn’t even look at me.
Well, here comes the next day and I get a calling on the carpet from the boss because this nutty woman complained that I was “brandishing a knife in a threatening manner and she felt unsafe,” or some shit.
I told my boss two things in no uncertain terms, the first of which was I was standing behind our head accountant’s desk while this chick came no nearer than the doorframe, so I’m like 20 feet away with a significant quantity of office furniture between us. And more to the point, we’re all adults here. All you gotta do is say, “Hey. Why don’t you put that fuckin’ blade away, man?” No problem. But she didn’t say anything about it to me.
Nothing really came of this and she got fired a couple of weeks later for gross incompetence and, I suspect, getting on the boss’ nerves.
The punch line: This announcement came at our weekly meeting where every single individual in our little office was crammed in the conference room. “Awesome,” says I, “To celebrate I have some party favors for everyone.”
Among my suitcase of shitty knives I had a ridiculous bevy of crappy balisongs, which I’d dutifully sorted out and completely filled an empty box from an Allen Bradley contactor assembly with them. I must have had fifty of the damn things. I plonked it on the conference room table and told everyone in the company to take one. Hell, our outgoing employee can have two, for good luck.
Now we had a level playing field – everyone has a butterfly knife. (Glassdoor did not exist at the time, and in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t.)
Anyway, I can now tell you there are in fact two contenders for the most useless thing in the world. The second one is a building full of engineers, all armed with balisong knives, none of whom really know how to use them.
In case anyone else wants to do the same: https://www.govdeals.com/search?kWord=knives
Looks like they pick out the knives that are good, and you just get shitty ones in bulk.
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world is gonna have a field day with this
I sure am. (Also, that is a fuckton of fake Swiss Army Knives. I kind of approve, especially including the loose busted off scale on the platter, there.)
Story time. In fact, I have told this story before. It’s got two acts.
Act 1: Our local farmer’s market/flea market had a stall that sold, among other sundry low grade imported Chinese crap, a wide variety of low grade Chinese knives. I bought a few from them over the years for the sheer novelty value – you know how it is – but one day I noticed their stall was completely barren of knives. I asked the owner what was up.
He told me he (or rather, his son) got busted via some kind of sting operation by the local cops selling a knife to a minor, so they’d been banned from selling knives and weapons altogether. What was he to do, he told me, with all of the crap he had left over he couldn’t sell.
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” I said. And I did.
I wound up with a Samsonite suitcase half filled with bargain basement knives. It took me years to get rid of them via giving them all away, and then breaking the rest. Me and my friends would go camping with bandoliers of 20 identical knives each. We’d use cheap folders for throwing knives, baton firewood with fake Swiss Armies, and lashed brass-and-plastic bejeweled Arabian daggers to the ends of sticks to use as fishing spears. The whole lot. It was a riot.
Act 2: At that time I was working in IT at this engineering firm. This is relevant because one day we had a prolonged power outage, and I can tell you there’s very little in this world that’s as useless as a bunch of engineers who can’t use their computers. While we were waiting around in the semi-darkness waiting for the lights to come back on, I was hanging out in our accountant’s office chatting (because we got along, and also not least of which because her office had a big window in it whereas my IT dungeon had none), and idly flipping my balisong/butterfly knife around. As you do.
Well, as I do, anyway. It’s not like I’m not a known quantity in that regard. Both here and there.
Some background on this, we had a new accountant in training who nobody liked because she was a little proto-Karen and also not very competent at anything. We suspect her CV was rather embellished. Even the boss didn’t like her and he was the one who made the decision to hire her in the first place. She came in to ask our head accountant some question or other, damned if I was paying attention to what it was, and left. No incident, didn’t speak to me, didn’t even look at me.
Well, here comes the next day and I get a calling on the carpet from the boss because this nutty woman complained that I was “brandishing a knife in a threatening manner and she felt unsafe,” or some shit.
I told my boss two things in no uncertain terms, the first of which was I was standing behind our head accountant’s desk while this chick came no nearer than the doorframe, so I’m like 20 feet away with a significant quantity of office furniture between us. And more to the point, we’re all adults here. All you gotta do is say, “Hey. Why don’t you put that fuckin’ blade away, man?” No problem. But she didn’t say anything about it to me.
Nothing really came of this and she got fired a couple of weeks later for gross incompetence and, I suspect, getting on the boss’ nerves.
The punch line: This announcement came at our weekly meeting where every single individual in our little office was crammed in the conference room. “Awesome,” says I, “To celebrate I have some party favors for everyone.”
Among my suitcase of shitty knives I had a ridiculous bevy of crappy balisongs, which I’d dutifully sorted out and completely filled an empty box from an Allen Bradley contactor assembly with them. I must have had fifty of the damn things. I plonked it on the conference room table and told everyone in the company to take one. Hell, our outgoing employee can have two, for good luck.
Now we had a level playing field – everyone has a butterfly knife. (Glassdoor did not exist at the time, and in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t.)
Anyway, I can now tell you there are in fact two contenders for the most useless thing in the world. The second one is a building full of engineers, all armed with balisong knives, none of whom really know how to use them.
Now this is how you anecdote.
Excellent story
Bookmarked for future lore drops.