The sponsors of this OhMeNerves.com are proud to bring to you the second annual Stupid Steve Shirt Day.

Sigh. A year ago, almost to the day actually, I had an unfortunate (and embarrassing) mishap with a new shirt. Well… It seems that I’ve decided to make this an annual event.

Yesterday morning, I proudly donned my brand new shirt that I had purchased on sale just a couple of weeks ago. Looking dapper in my new duds, I headed off to school… er, I mean, work ready to take on the day. I walked through the office to my desk, booted up my computer and sauntered down to the cafeteria for a nice hot cuppa java. Several smiles and “Good mornings” later, I managed my way through the crowds at the coffee urns and I was on my way with my steaming mug of perkiness. (Perkiness… get it? Sorry.) Wandering back down the hall, I approached one of my colleagues. As he walked toward me he said, “Steve, is there a sticker or something on your shirt?” As throngs of people sauntered by, rubbernecking toward me as if I had just overturned my car in the median, he walked behind me and carefully took his time removing a sticker boldly displaying “XL” - the size of my shirt.

Sonuvabitch!

How did he know about the sticker on the back of my shirt as he walked toward me from the front? How long ago had he seen it? Or worse, who told him? Was word getting around?

Sigh. Oh well, at least there were lots of witnesses.

America’s best selling, best tasting filter cigarette.

Man! Time’s have changed.

You know the feeling you get at the moment between doing something stupid and realizing how stupid it was? That two seconds of limbo where you don’t know exactly how bad you arsed things up? That juncture where you are certain you have gone beyond the point of no return, but you are uncertain what the consequence is?

That’s a looonnggg two seconds, let me tell you. Trust me.

Last evening, I tried to install new photo sharing software on my website. I had used other galleries and flashy showy things before, but they were either too heavy or too hard to manage. Then I found Zenphoto. It’s PERFECT. It integrated neatly into the site and I liked the design, straight out of the box. I loved it. But, my webhosting service offered an easy one-click install that, while very easy, did not allow me the convenience of uploading and downloading my photos using FTP. In other words, I didn’t have a backdoor. So… I tried to install it manually. I checked around, found others online that had done it, and followed their instructions. To the letter.

That’s when it happened. My website disappeared. When you go to ohmenerves.com you got nothing but a strange looking listing of garbage. I have a test site as well and it was messed up too! Oh my God. Oh… my… GOD! I could go to my administration panels and find my database and all my website files, but the site was down. PANIC!!!!

So I called upon Jody. My good buddy Jody. My hero. My lifesaver. He’d saved my bacon before… maybe he could do it again.

Well, so far, since you are reading this, you can see that he fixed my problem, but not before I got a couple of emails with quotes like:

• ha ha
• I don’t think it’s a problem
• what the hell did you do?
• that doesn’t sound good

When I finally got the note from him saying the site was up, I tested it. Here’s the first thing I saw.

The picture, the font on the website name, and the tagline all reflect exactly how I feel. Man!

Thanks again Jody.

Sometimes when you are walking through the supermarket, you just hear some pretty weird stuff.

Uhm… that is just wrong.

I play pool in a local fun league. There’s roughly a hundred people in the league, divided into about 20 teams. Every Wednesday we get together and attempt to pocket balls for the sake of entertainment. By virtue of my ranking (average games won) among these folks I am the captain of one of these teams. This year was a fairly successful year for me and my team. My team finished second in the finals and I personally ranked 7th in the league.

At the end of each season, the league throws a kickass banquet, complete with awards, prizes, and a pool tournament. They cater in BBQ steak and have a buffet-style spread of baked potatoes and various salads. They usually draw names for prizes that vary in size from a $300.00 golfing weekend get-a-way to a $75 dollar Walmart coupon. Usually, there’s about half as many prizes as there are qualifying members. Pretty good odds of winning a prize. But this year, there was a prize for every single player in the league. Pretty awesome. On top of that, they gave away a shitload of Dooly’s cash and Pizza Delight coupons. In the draws, I picked up a pool cue (which I sold for a hundred bucks) and two pizza coupons.

We tried to use the coupons that night on the way home, but Pizza Delight closes a little earlier than 2:30 a.m. apparently. I put the coupons in my shirt pocket, we stopped at Greco for pizza, then we went home, went to bed and the next day continued about our normal business and household chores. Changing clothes from the washer to the dryer, I noticed a bunch of little pieces of paper. Oh no! My pizza coupons! Oh well… shit happens.

That was two weeks ago.

Friday, I was wearing that same shirt and noticed a ball of something in the shirt pocket. It was the pizza coupons, all balled up after being washed into raw pulp and then reconverted to a ball of paper after going through the dryer. I showed it to a colleague and half jokingly asked if Pizza Delight would accept it. She suggested that I wet the paper and attempt to unfold it again. I did just that and after some careful prying and spreading I was able to produce a couple of scraps of paper closely resembling their original form. They looked like something discovered in an archaeological dig. I let them dry and pressed them inside a notebook and went to Pizza Delight lunchtime today. After some giggling and poking fun at my expense, the nice young lady behind the counter wrote me up some new coupons and I was on my way!

The prize that keeps on giving. Free pizza… twice! Kind of.