Coffee Break [5/7/21]

Your mid-morning pick me up

Deadsplinters are by and large good, kind people. But what if we weren’t? What if we gave in to our baser instincts? My question for you is this – if you were evil but had the same skill set you do now, what would your career be? I have professional experience in purchasing and distribution. Personally, I approach shopping like a competitive sport. My evil career would be scalper, the person buying up all the current must-have electronics, toys, and tickets, reselling them for exorbitant amounts of money.

What’s your nefarious vocation?

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40 Comments

  1. Much like current real life, I don’t think my skills, talents, and experience would lead to much of note in evil life…
    Maybe some sort of small, high-value item smuggling through the wilderness?  like blood diamonds or something? endangered animal poaching?
    Also, if I were evil, I imagine I would have both been in more fights, and have more of a talent for it, so maybe some sort of enforcer?
     

  2. I know exactly what it would be: espionage. I actually went to college hoping that I could one day live abroad on the government’s dime. The way to do that is the military (yes, even I have to laugh at that notion) or facility with language and history and international relations. That’s actually what I did in college. At one point I lived in West Germany and for a week was allowed to go back and forth to the Humboldt University in (the very hostile) East Berlin to research in their vast archives. Watched like a hawk, of course, but my research was benign and very arcane: it was a sliver of Weimar social history, let’s say, so nothing to do with Imperial Germany, or Fascist Hitler Germany, or postwar Honecker East Germany. 

    So the languages, the traveling, the living abroad (two different countries), and…no government career for me, my choice. I loved the 80s, but not the Reagan aspect of the 80s, and that was a slight hindrance. Plus all the faggot stuff.

    But all’s well that ends well, as Billy Shakespeare once put it.

      • I rarely go to chain restaurants, fast-food or sit-down “casual dining,” but I was at one once and I wish I could remember the name. Maybe it was a Ruby Tuesday’s. It wasn’t an Applebee’s, because secretly I want to go to one, same with an Olive Garden, but I’ve never been to either one.

        The menu at Ruby Tuesday’s (if it was RT), I thought, was like a version of this game I stumbled across many years ago. You’re asked to think of three ingredients where A+B = great, B+C = great, and A+C = great, but all three together would make you vomit. I wish I could remember the responses, because I’m sure the site closed down long ago, and might not have even survived the great implosion of Internet 1.0 in 2001. 

        • @MatthewCrawley I once lived in an area where Applebee’s was the fine dining. My parents were visiting and we went to lunch. We needed to pick my daughter up from preschool and told our server we were in a hurry and he assured us that was no problem. I ordered some sort of turkey sandwich, when it arrived I bit into it and realized something was wrong. Peeling off the top slice of bread I saw the cheese was still in its plastic wrapper, like a Kraft Single. When I told the server his response was, “Well, you said you were in a hurry.”  When we moved I said”As God is my witness I’ll never eat at Applebee’s again!” And I have not. 

        • I’m not sure when exactly it was that Applebee’s became the breadbox for mediocre chain restaurant food, but at one point that was Chili’s (and, in some locales, the Olive Garden). 
          Several friends live in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and it always slightly kills me when they’ll send out invitations with directions that reference the Applebee’s near DeKalb Ave station as a point of reference. Damnit, just tell me to head northeast. I’ll figure it out and risk getting lost than try to reconcile the fact that there’s a chain restaurant of doom so close to Pratt.

      • I will say that I got up to no shenanigans while in Berlin, East by day and West by night, which is kind of extraordinary because West Berlin was a very “anything goes” kind of town, living in the shadow of the Wall, “we could all die at any moment” mentality. I already had an American boyfriend over in the Bundesrepublik (West Germany) and a German kind of sidepiece but we kept that hidden, me from my boyfriend, he from his girlfriend. 

        I can’t believe how slutty I was. No wonder I coupled off for good so young, just to get all of this over with.

        But anyway, a friend of mine was living in Vienna (of course, of course he was) so I went to visit him for a long weekend, platonic, I slept on the floor, and we went to this party. There were all these Eastern Europeans there. Vienna was the great meetup spot during the Cold War for East and West Europe. There was a Bulgarian guy who was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever laid eyes on who spoke English suspiciously well. He plied me with slivovitz (that’s an eastern European plum brandy) and kind of came on to me. I almost went for it, but where was that going to go? And he probably wasn’t even gay, maybe bisexual at best, just doing his mission for is country.

        Oh speaking of, I was at another party here in New York before the fall of the Wall and I got talking with these Germans who didn’t speak English very well. That was kind of strange, because most 20-something Germans would have spoken more English at the time. But oh no, trust Cousin Matt to sniff out danger at every turn, they were East Germans attached to the mission at the UN. It was actually a very interesting conversation, I kept it strictly social, about New York, nothing about Germany. For all I know at least one of them showed up in the Merkel government. Merkel has an interesting family history. She was born in Hamburg (West Germany) but her family willingly moved to East Germany when she was a baby. This sounds now like a very strange thing to do but they had their reasons.

         

  3. Executive VP or a C-level individual.
    I’ve never been a social/ladder climber, but the particular set of skills (observant, perceptive, cunning (I think), ruthless to my enemies, tactical thinking, cool under pressure) I have would be very useful if I were evil and very selfish.
    The mean dark side of my personality/skill set only comes out during self preservation, not self promotion.
     
     
     

  4. hmmm…my mix n match skill set could probably be used for evil between welding and machining and basic electrics/robotics…i could probably build some truly vicious booby traps at least
    my short term memory means ill probably be the first person caught by them too tho

  5. Unfortunately, being the king’s maîtresse en titre isn’t really a viable career choice anymore…
     
    I don’t know what my evil counterpart would do. What terrible things can one do with a love of reading and cooking? I bet that bizarro world me can walk properly and maybe even run, though!

  6. Evil me would be like The Holy Hand Grenade – a republican – a very holy roller christian trophy hunting republican that only watches Keeping up with the Kartrashians and owns a hobby lobby franchise with a large collection of confederate flags. 

  7. Because I am typically WAY too trusted by folks who barely know me, and I’m usually pretty good at putting people at ease, i’d be some sort of con artist/grifter, or maybe one of those “religious” cult-leaders/ “charismatic church” leaders…. but one who only swindles hatedul *rich* folk out of their money–not the poor. 

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