The Shit List: Personal Foibles Publically Berated

ShitList.com: a slightly different take on Aziz Ansari’s stand up. Instead of a list of people who hate you, a list of shitty things. Everyone has their own little foibles and I hope here to playfully bring those to light in the hopes that they might be corrected or merely recognized. My dad gave me this little bit of wisdom in my childhood: be grateful for people when they criticize and make suggestions about you and your work; they only do it because they want to see you improve. It is much better than the alternative. When people don't criticize, it can mean that they've given up on you.

Lars:

1.      Staying up way too late. Aside from the fact that we really have no idea what you're doing up in your room for the last four hours each night, we can safely assume that going to bed at two o'clock plus for someone who works at 7:30 is a bad idea. The locked door for the last couple hours of each night only points to something more sinister than the marathon Facebook sessions we experienced in college. Even if the nightly Internet cocoon sessions are only two hours, getting rid of them and substituting them with CFA study sessions would mean that you would never have to study for the CFA outside of each nightly two-hour session. Hell, you would even have time to learn other things pertinent to finance and/or develop more Excel tools to help make your company even more in debt to you. Perhaps going to bed earlier by an hour or so might make a huge difference in that you won't have to take 40 min. showers in order to come out of your sleep stupor.

2.      The 2.5 times lateness multiplier. The notion that people can accurately predict how late you will be, might be an indicator that something needs to change. I don't believe that you are a habitually late person. On the contrary, I think it's because you're too nice. When you have an engagement and are currently talking to someone, I imagine that instead of excusing yourself and going to your engagement you sit and listen to the other person and talk with them far longer than you should. I think that there is a fairly easy solution to this problem. Whenever calculating when you will be at your next appointment add 30 min to the time you think you will be there. Combine this with politely excusing yourself from your current engagement and I think that you will arrive far more on time.

Zach:

1.      Lack of a system. Clothes spread everywhere, cooking supplies sprawling, the car a mess, little notes scribbled on tiny pieces of paper with no pattern. This is merely the tip of your disorganization iceberg. The most interesting thing, in my mind, about your lack of organization is that it doesn't hinder you at all. For most people the lack of organization would be severely punishing to their productivity. However you don't seem to experience this. I think that the reason why you are capable of operating the way that you do is because of your intelligence. While there is no corporeal organization that most people can see, the plan and its product are clearly in your mind's eye. This might be just fine but it severely limits other people's ability to help you. Spending the weekend organizing your things and creating a system would be immensely beneficial. People would be able to help you out when you're creating things and additionally allow your brain to think about more important things.

2.      Your job. You process, categorize and maintain the flow of medical supplies. The first thought that comes into my mind is: are you fucking kidding me? The smartest person I know, someone who could and probably should have a PhD, spends his time making tallies. The other person who might contend for the smartest person I know is Leo Stefurak, my chess teacher. This is Leo's resume:

"Dr. Leo Stefurak, or Coach Leo as local students know him, graduated with a B.S., Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington and performed graduate research as the Kollmorgen Fellow in Color Technology at the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California in San Diego.

Leo holds his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuropsychology and performed applied post-doctoral research at the Tokyo Institute of Technology as a Monbusho Fellow, the Institute in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), University of Minnesota campus."

Here's the crazy part: your GRE test scores are better than his. I think the main reason that you haven't tried something incredibly ambitious yet, is that you have the ability to make anything interesting. Whether it's making coffee, cooking, writing, designing, working or fantasy football, your brain has the ability to find something interesting in everything. The question then is: if you find everything interesting, what do you really want to work on?

Jeff:

1.      Surprise phrases. There are some phrases that come out of your mouth that are classics and immensely humorous. On the other hand there is the big C word written all over my whiteboard calendar. We all enjoy when you have the perfect phrase at just the right moment or even the random “I remember when your father was in here buying his first wand” or “yo!” That being said, there are the Auschwitz jokes, references to our parent’s buttholes, and worse at the other end of the phrase spectrum. The random “poop on August 4 at 2 PM” is much better than having every vulgar word in the English language written on my whiteboard.

2.      Solitary. When you choose to get good at something you get really good at it, alone. We've all heard the litany of blasphemous phrases coming out of your room when you're playing COH or when some bullshit happens in LOL. And while we're not at the level of greatness in those games we still would like to participate in swearing along with you. We all know that you've mastered the art of pilfering resources in Settlers of Catan or putting curses on the top of people's decks in Dome. Although the board games that we play might not hold much of an allure for you, that doesn't mean we don't want to play with you. In fact we would love to play with you in games that make you go “Fuck that bullshit! God damn cock! I told the sniper to shoot but the fucking game is bullshit!” Play with us, maybe?

Michael:

1.      Ivar’s and Kid Valley. This to me is almost as astounding as Zach working in a medical supply company. Your historical and worldly knowledge is paralleled by no one for how old you are. You know and can remember things that I never will be able to. And yet, all of this knowledge is put to use flipping burgers. Why you aren’t working at the State Department figuring out foreign policy or writing a book or in graduate school becoming a professor is beyond me. And while it takes time to figure out what you want to do in life, it might be time to begin forming an exploratory committee.

2.      Sleep Patterns. While I did expect people to have different sleeping patterns than myself, I don't think I would've ever predicted finding you awake at 5 AM playing LOL. Nor did I think I would find you, who is seemingly interested in everything and pursues learning just about everything, getting up around noon. Although Lars has beaten his body into three-hour sleep sessions before going to work and Zach seemingly only needs five hours of sleep to operate properly, your need to sleep nine hours a night seems abnormal. I'm sure that some of it is psychologically and physiologically conditioned, but I think that there are environmental factors at play too. You might want to consider testing out different bed softness levels. Another thing to consider is getting a large comforter or more than one pillow. Or pillows of different sizes and textures. Your bed size might also be a problem. Probably the best thing to do is to experiment.