How to Try to Make Someone Hear What They Are Saying

I had a situation where, for work, I spent an entire week with the most unreasonable person I ever met. She was training me for a job, and I told people at the time that if she were a running coach she would have trained people to sprint faster by running along behind them and shoving them.

One day, during lunch, the TV in the cafeteria was showing a rerun of Beverly Hills 90210.

My trainer asked, “What show is this?”

I said, “Beverly Hills 90210.”

My trainer said, “No it’s not.”

I said, “Pretty sure it is.”

She said, “No, it’s something else. That’s Tori Spelling. What other shows was she on?”

“At that age, none. That’s 90210. See, that’s Shannen Doherty with her.”

The show went to commercial as I said that, allowing my trainer to say, “No it wasn’t.”

“Yes it was. It was Shannen Doherty.”

“No, it was some Chinese girl.”

“It was Shannen Doherty.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, Scott, it can’t be. Shannen Doherty isn’t Chinese.”

I may have said this before, but most kids watch Star Trek and think they’ll grow up to be like either Kirk or Spock. I’ve grown up to be like the computer Kirk destroyed by feeding it illogical nonsense until it blew up.

(That same trainer, during a different lunch, complained that she’d had a headache for a long time. I asked how long. She said a few days. I told her to go to a doctor. She said no need. She knew what caused the headache. She had fallen down earlier that week and hit her head, causing this days-long headache. I told her she needed to see a doctor. She said it wasn’t a big deal and she wished she’d never brought it up. The headache wasn’t that bad. She was bothered much more by the fact that the spot on her head where she had hit it was still soft and hurt when she poked it.

She demonstrated by poking it a couple times and saying “Ow.”)

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How to Not Change People's Minds

I sold that shirt on the website for a while. It might surprise you to learn that it did not sell well.

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How to Inspire Your Followers

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I traced over photographs to create the art for Basic Instructions. I thought it might be fun to explain what images I used to create the rare, more ambitious images, like the one in panels two and three of this strip.

The image is a composite of several different traced elements. Adobe Illustrator made it easy to hand-trace the part of an image I wanted and have that tracing isolated as a single element, which I could then easily combine with others in a sort of image sandwich.

Working from the back forward, this image consists of: a black rectangle, a tracing of NASA’s “Earthrise” photo, a crude drawing of rolling, gray hills, the screen of an antique Philco Predicta television which I stretched at the middle to make the screen and the base pedestal wider, The Emperor of the moon cut to fit the screen, and on top, a rough tracing of Fremen warriors taken from a screengrab of a single frame from the film DUNE.

It’s my understanding that this constitutes a “transformative work,” and is perfectly legal.  Luckily, even if that’s not the case, my limited art skills renders all of the elements unrecognizable enough to not infringe copyrights.

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How to Better Understand Another Person's Hobbies

I’ve known a lot of guys who have bought a lot of things expecting to make a lot of money off of them, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: anything marked “collector’s edition” is guaranteed to become worthless.

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How to Create a New Business

Actually, they could probably market spa services to guys if they themed it like a garage, or a NASCAR pit crew. The attendants would wear matching jumpsuits and work as fast as possible, swarming the customer all at once. The furniture would all look industrial. The clippers and files would make loud noises to give the impression they are pneumatically powered. Any dermal peels, facials, or exfoliation treatments would be renamed and described to play up the similarity to chemical stripping and sand-blasting.

Hmm. Looking back at the previous paragraph, it occurs to me that in an effort to make spas more manly I’ve removed everything even remotely relaxing from them.

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How to Talk to Someone on a Third Party's Behalf

Once, in junior high school, a friend of mine decided to explain to me how he knew when a girl is interested in him. He said, “If I notice that she’s looking at me, she’s probably into me. Or, also, if you see that she’s not looking at me, like every time I look she’s looking away from me, then I KNOW she’s into me.”

I pointed out that if any girl looking at him was into him, and any girl who wasn’t looking at him was into him, that meant that every girl on the planet was into him. To his credit, he laughed and admitted that wasn’t possible. Then he said that in addition to the looking/not looking thing, he knew when a girl was interested because he “could just kinda tell.”

I decided his advice was not likely to be helpful.

Also, in case you’re wondering, no, he was not popular with the ladies.

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How to Align Your Goals

Floating in slime would be great for your back. The Movie Minority Report predicted the future of office work, but it wasn’t the hand-wavy Tom Cruise computer interface, it was the precog’s vat-based workspace.

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How to Explain Your Profound Personal Triumph

The only details I left out of the meal plan described above are that I would cut open the box and turn it inside out so that the hot pizza wasn’t resting on the waxed, potentially dirty outer surface of the box, and that I timed the cooking so that the pizza would be ready for me to eat as I watched the nightly Simpsons rerun.

I’ll describe my home at the time so you can get the full picture of an evening at twenty-something Scott Meyer’s bachelor pad. We’re talking about a one-bedroom apartment with bare walls, a rickety desk, a single white resin chair, a TV on a small stand, a futon used as a couch, and in the bedroom, a slightly newer futon used as a bed.

Missy described my apartment as “spartan.”

I think she married me in an effort to rescue me. All in all, it wasn’t a bad strategy on my part.

Note from Missy: As they say on the home improvement shows, he had good bones. I don’t think Scott was a total gut job, but the pink tile and peeling wallpaper had to go. 🤣

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How to Discuss a TV Show When You Haven't Seen All the Episodes

If memory serves, this was inspired by a conversation with a coworker about the game Uncharted 3. I had just started playing the game, while he had completed it.

I said, “Please don’t tell me anything. I don’t want any part of the game spoiled.”

He said. “Of course. I wouldn’t do that. Oh man, it’s such a great game. Have you gotten to the place where you get drugged and the world goes all weird?”

A work-appropriate amount of yelling and insults ensued.

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How to Keep Track of Your Ideas

Here’s how punchy I get writing these comments. I read this comic, read the insult about stink-rings in the final panel, and for a few seconds thought, “Ooh, it’s a shame I never used that one.”

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