Wow! Could it be merely coincidence that the threadstarter there was RON!
I don’t have a Ron story, but I have a Wally story.
We’ve been through a few temps this year, for various reasons. One was sweet as pie but dumb as a rock, and our office is fast-paced. One said, after two hours, that “he didn’t want to do the work”. Door, ass. One was bright and nice but unreliable and tried to get the boss involved in a pyramid scheme.
Our last one was out of desperation. And I found myself frustrated with her within a week.
You could not tell her Part A and Part B of a project. She would invariably get Part B wrong. So, for example, I could not tell her, “Fold all of these banners and put them away in this box.” Without fail, when I went looking for them, they would not be in the box, or they would be in a different box, or the box would be in the trash.
You think I’m kidding.
Once I gave her this project: Take all of these metal stakes. Lay them so they are all facing the same direction. Tape them together in stacks, of say 20 or so. Put them in a box.
I come back twenty minutes later to check on her - I had learned by this point - and she has taken all of the metal stakes and dumped them into the bin. They are sticking every which way and not one of them is taped. :smack:
Another day, I give her a HUGE pile of plastic banners. I say, “There are three different types of banners in this bag. Please pull out thirty of each.”
After several questions she finally manages to get thirty of each banner. I then say, “Divide them into three stacks, so each stack has ten of each type of banner.”
Oh. My. God. You would think I had asked for quadratic equations. It took her the better part of two hours, and then when I went and checked, she had put thirty of each banner in each pile. It’s not that she wasn’t working. I can see her from where I sit, and I could see she was working away diligently. I know I should have checked, but goddamn, how dumb can you be?
It got to the point where I simply didn’t give her anything more complicated than the very very basic, and never gave her a two-step job. How about this one? The girl did not know how to use zip ties correctly. Ok, so maybe she had never encountered one? I demonstrated for her…and still found them on backwards.
She wasn’t lazy, at all. She tried to do every project I gave her. It was just ridiculous.
If I think of more stories of her I’ll post them.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Rock pie.
I know a Ron. Four of us were officemates in grad school, became good friends and got jobs in the same city but eventually we went our separate ways because he kept doing… you know… Ron stuff. Let’s see, the fire story or the doing mushrooms in the JiffyMart story or…
So Ron’s working for a seismic aquisition company and agrees to work 3 months on a boat off Peru becuase there’s good money to be made. But it turns out he hates the ocean, something he unfortunately remembers once they’re already out to sea. He lasts for another 3 weeks and then says to let him off at the next port, he’s had enough. So they ship another guy out and take Ron off the boat and to Lima so he can fly home. They pay for his hotel and give him enough money to cover his travel fees, airport taxi and a meal.
Well, Ron has been on a boat for a long time with nothing to drink and back on shore he gets thirsty. Real thirsty. So that night he goes out and parties and soon only has enough left for the taxi.
The next day, hungover, Ron goes to the airport to fly home. He pays for the taxi, is now broke, checks in his luggage and gets ready to leave. But there’s an $18 exit fee (or some tax or something). Ron doesn’t have any money. Ron can’t get any money. The airline takes Ron’s luggage off the plane and shortly thereafter Ron stands at the window watching his flight home leave without him. Ron has suddenly metamorphosed from a reasonably well paid American geoscientist into an unemployed Peruvian peon.
So what to do? lightbulb Beg. Yes, Ron goes out to the front of the Lima airport alongside all the homeless Limans and holds out his hands, now dependant upon the kindness of strangers, at least strangers that can speak English because Ron doesn’t speak Spanish. He gets to know many of the other beggars well after a couple of days. Other beggars come up to Ron to beg and his beggar friends say don’t bother Ron, he doesn’t have any money.
Finally, after 2 days someone takes pity on Ron and gives him 50 cents. Ron hasn’t eaten or drunk since so buys an orange Fanta. He wants to drink the Fanta slow, make it last because who knows when he’ll get more money so he starts sipping but he can’t stop and never putting it down he gulps and gulps and like that the Fanta is toast. Now Ron is really sad. Pathetic, actually.
Finally, after 3 days he gets an idea. He has a watch, a nice one he paid several hundred dollars for. He tries selling his used watch in English to people that only speak Spanish but for some reason encounters nothing but problems. This is strange because it’s a “pristine” Seiko except for a bunch of scatches and scuff marks.
Another beggar, whether out of pity or just to get rid of him finally gives ron [del]$200[/del] $18 for his watch and Ron climbs on the plane.
Once Ron lands in Miami he’s set since he can go to an ATM and get some cash. Home free, he swipes his card but then hesitates… after a month away he’s forgotton his pin. He tries one, no good. Tries another, no good. Then he remembers, plugs it in and the ATM promptly swallows his card, confiscated after three incorrect tries.
I know all this because once Ron got back to Houston from Lima and Miami he called me for a ride home. But I was on vacation. So were his sister and all his other friends. Back at the airport after the trip from utter hell Ron had to wait until the next day, sleeping somewhere in the airport, until someone got home and could go pick him up.
I was telling this story to someone and they said hey, he sounds a lot like the guy on crutches doing mushrooms in the JiffyMart that got the giggles and dropped $9 worth of pennies on the floor. Why yes, that’s him, what a wonderful guess.
My sister dated a Ron… his name was actually Mike, or PsychoMike to Mom and I. MikeRon claimed to be a Navy Seal and talked about all these covert missions he’d been on that he couldn’t actually tell us about. Dude was only a year out of high school at the time… Sure Mike, we believe you.
Total Ron move.
New Ron stuff?
Oh wait. Just a re-Ron.
Sounds like you had a ME there, not an EE…at least we can hope.
Is Anthony Weiner, of Weinergate fame, a Ron?
My cousin is a Ron-duh. She’s in college and living with her boyfriend. She moved in with him because her parents were making her do horrible things like chores and paying her own car insurance after two speeding tickets and the incident where she attempted to merge into a car (shame on them).
The catch(es): Her boyfriend lives with his parents . . . in a trailer . . . and she has to sleep in her own room. He’s going to get a promotion soon (at the local feed store) and they’re going to get their own place. He also has plans of starting his own company that does something with lawn care; it will be big though, you can count on it. He is going to start on that plan as soon as he’s done fixing up his truck first.
I love this thread. I’m glad it came back to life; I never would have found it otherwise!
I was never sure if this guy was a Ron or not–maybe he was just pathetic. When I first met him I thought he was just a bit eccentric but the more I learned about him the more he veered into Lala-land. He was going to write a book; about what I don’t know but he had to score some sort of deal with Walter Cronkite first. As far as I could tell Cronkite never answered the letters and “Ron” never did any writing, except to write more strange letters to other people over random topics.
He admired me and promised to pay off my student loan when he got rich, but he never worked on his “book” – he never worked at all. And he always had such bad luck. If he wanted to take the bus somewhere, well, the bus was always leaving the stop about 30 seconds before he arrived. Did this mean he had poor time management skills and needed to get an earlier start? No, to him it meant the bus drivers were meanies. If he had no job and few friends that was just because of fate and the cruel mean world, not because of poor choices he’d made.
And everything to him was a major dramatic tragedy even when it occured to someone else. A person recovered from a serious accident but with a barely noticeable limp? How sad, everyone would probably make fun of her for the rest of her life because she was a cripple! A person left a lucrative career for one that paid less but was more satisfying to them? How sad that the cold cruel world would let that person starve in the gutter (forget about explaning to him that this was not the case.)
Actually he probably wasn’t a Ron so much as overly dramatic and possibly mentally ill (his obsession with Cronkite and also a few other things bordered on pathological. One reason he is a former friend.)
He’s perhaps a Ron-doh-doh?
I read/post from multiple computers. Subscribing helps me find it easily on any computer.
I learned how to do that reading this thread, after I had posted.
Besides, by posting to subscribe, I revived the thread, and brought us new Ron stories. And helped new people discover the joy that is Ron. Gedd wouldn’t know about this thread if I hadn’t posted. So there!
Given his glass-half-empty way of seeing things, I was thinking Negatron.
everything has a point.
I work with a Ron (uses the name Rik), who blames women and fate for all his troubles. Five offspring by four women that he never paid a lick of support for have now caught up with him, and his court ordered garnishments take 75% of his wages. It never dawned on him that he is somehow responsible.
His way of seeing things is neither half-full, nor half-empty. He thinks it is time to get a smaller glass to make it look fuller. Hasn’t reduced his expectations of how things would be without cruel Fate’s intervention.
Here’s a Ron contribution from Nava and myself from another thread.
[squee] The Return of the Ron!
One of my all-time favorite threads.
I’m all smiles reading this again!
Since Maastricht brought him up…
That dude was my junior; in theory I was supposed to teach him how to be a consultant using the Big Blue Database in things Maintenance-related. In reality, he latched to our new manager real fast (we acquired both at the same time and they were of a similar age), so I wasn’t allowed to waste poor Ronaldito’s time trying to get him to do any work.
Fast forward several years, I see him and another former coworker at the Home Office site of my current client. The other former coworker is still doing what he’s always done and done well, Logistics. Ronaldito is now doing Costing. Upon hearing this I exclaim, “God help them!” You know things are really bad when someone from Operations takes pity on the moneymen.
Ronaldito is Andalusian, from an area that has a reputation for people being unable to code-switch. He certainly is unable to do so, and his accent is so thick that at one point I witness another Andalusian tell him “pro-nounce, damn you!” (well, the exact words were “¡pero vo-ca-li-za, cabrón!”). Ronaldito’s response is his usual “bah hey man, if dey don unerstan me snah my poblam! Day auta larn t’speak normal!”
Fast forward to the start of my current project, back to client #2. At some point, the programmers are complaining about “that dude from Costing who doesn’t pronounce for shite and who thinks ‘definition please’ means ‘will you insult my mother and my intelligence, please?’” Yep, Ronaldito. Dude’s still as useless as a third pair of legs on a dog, yet still there. Makes me wonder about the people he works for, you know? Are they unable to convince themselves that someone can be that useless? Do they keep changing and thinking that reports of his uselessness are being exaggerated? I sure don’t know it, because man, if I ever was in a position to do so I’d love to hand him a pink slip. Or two, or three…
Ron! Ron! Ron!