About Rob Pollak

I plan to get famous via the internet.

Some random thoughts

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Rob Pollak

As I continue my interminable defensive driving course, I thought I would use the excess time between slides to write down some random things that I’ve found troubling recently. I’ll also intersperse some of the more useful tidbits from the course.

– Why doesn’t anyone care about Powerball when it’s 50 million dollars? When it gets up to like 200 million, the whole world is in a tizzy. But no one gives a shit when it’s a smaller, yet still massive amount. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and the only differences I can imagine are the following: (1) If I had 400 million, I could afford to wager 50 million on one spin of roulette at a casino. If I had only 50 million, this would probably be unwise. (2) If I had 400 million, I’d immediately buy a jet. If I had 50 million, I’d just join NetJets. (3) If I won 400 million, I’d share it with Anne. If it was only 50 million, eh.

– When you park your vehicle, make sure the transmission is in “PARK.” Seriously, they just told me this.

– This article summarizes my opinion of half the baby pictures I see on facebook. The other times, the pictures include afterbirth or other types of overshare.

– My dad’s in the other room, and just heard him use me as an excuse to get off the phone with his friend Vinnie. He said, Robert’s here, so I have to go. He won’t talk to me for at least another hour. This is also a test to see if Uncle Vinnie reads my blog. If so, Hi Vin! If not, you’re a fucking asshole.

– Highway hypnosis generally occurs when drivers have been driving for too long without periods of rest. After onset, highway hypnosis generally results in periods of unawareness when a driver is unable to recall specific portions of a trip. It also can result in the hypnotized person forgetting his own name or barking like a dog when he hears certain words.

– Googling things that hypnotists do just cost me an extra 15 seconds on that last slide.

– I recently discovered reddit, and it has ruined the rest of the internet for me. I realize that everything funny I see on other sites has already been on reddit. Speaking of which, I should probably just post this directly there. Here’s something I saw on reddit today that you will probably see in the next week somewhere else and now you can be all, “yeah, I saw that already, bro.”

– I find it incredibly unfair that fantasy football scores include stats from overtime. That makes no sense to me. It’s not like a real game where both teams are physically on the field during overtime and play exactly the same amount of time. If you have a QB that gets overtime, then you are basically cheating.

– That being said, I don’t even care about fantasy football anymore. It stopped being fun when everyone in the world has immediate access to the same information. I could literally not pay attention to anything in the off season, not read a single article before the draft, not watch a single game all season, and then follow a few tips along the way and still field a competitive team. I’ll have you know that I did exactly that this season and my teams are 1-12, 3-10, and 4-9 and I missed the playoffs in all my leagues. But other than that, I stand by this theory.

– The defensive driving course has periodic checks to see if I am still here. They use five security questions that are supposed to prove that I am who I say I am. I hope the CIA uses better security questions to determine identity. So far, I’ve gotten “What color is your car?” and “Is your a car a sedan or SUV?” Also, at the beginning of the course, I chose the questions and the answers myself.

Defensive Driving

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Rob Pollak

Thanks to an unfortunate speed limit in Central New York, I have been taking an online defensive driving course. It is an excruciating experience. The course is a mandatory six hours, which means that the viewer can’t advance to the next slide until an allotted amount of time passes. The only explanation for how the time limits were created must be that the person who set them did so to optimize my frustration with the situation.

For example, the slide titled, “Should I wear a seatbelt?” had a 100 second playback. The short answer is yes. Also, the long answer was yes. When I smashed down on the next slide button, a screen kindly reminded me that I was required to wait 100 seconds before I could advance to the next slide (as required by New York State law). It also was kind enough to remind me that the time it took me to read that notification would not count towards the time limit.

The worst part of this whole process is that the time I wait for the next slide just fills me with road rage. And as I learned from a 450 second slide, road rage is bad. Another problem with the program is that the timing of the slides isn’t usually long enough for me to go and read something else somewhere on the internet. I’m too nervous about going one second over the time limit and having to sit through extra minutes of the class. I hate them.

One important item I learned is that AAA no longer recommends 10 and 2 as the ideal hand positions while driving. 9 and 3 or even (gasp) 8 and 4 provide the driver with ideal hand position for safe deployment of the airbags.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve recently been thinking that the speed limit everywhere in the country should be raised by 10-15 MPH. For as long as I can remember, the speed limit has been the same, but cars have gotten safer and stronger and better in every way. One would think that we could now safely drive 65 on I-95 (everyone drives 80 anyway). To make my case even stronger, the defensive driving class told me that the majority of injuries from accidents happen at intersections not on the highway.

Welp, time’s up for the “Headrests” slide, so I guess I’m done here.