Schadenfreude

And remember, if it wasn’t easy, it wouldn’t make you a douchebag.

Ladies, while douchebaggery is still very much a man’s world, women are making huge inroads into it as well. So don’t be afraid to follow the steps and the simple examples below.

Step 1: Believe your own bullshit.

Step 2: Believe everyone else’s bullshit.

While these are very simple steps, allow me to elaborate and provide some specific examples actually witnessed from the professional douchebags with whom I live and work. Now everyone exhibits a few of these douchebag traits, but to be a truly devoted douchbag, you have to commit to undertaking a lot of them.

Before we begin, you’ll need to pass a small test. Reconcile the following statements: “Douchebagging isn’t for sissies; you have to go all the way!” And, “The easy way out is the best way out, especially if you can fool someone else into believing that you’ve undertaken something truly monumental”. Step 1 will help here. Once you’ve passed this test, your mind will be primed and ready to follow in the footsteps of the greatest douchebags of all time.

In no particular order:

1. Maintain an unwavering belief in your own importance. Remember your Family / Business / Friends / Church / Favorite Team / Nation / Industry / Favorite Activity / The Internet / etc. would simply shrivel up and die without your constant attention and input.
2. Link your personal self worth to things that have absolutely nothing to do with your substance as a person. Examples include your career, your possessions, where you went to school, and your affiliations. Being a person of substance is hard, but buying status is easy.
3. Be immensely proud of things over which you have no control. Examples include your nationality, race, gender, physical attributes, ethnicity, or ancestry.
4. Tale credit for accomplishments that you didn’t have anything to do with. These include the accomplishments of your parents, children, countrymen, and subordinates at work. “My great great great great great great grandparents came over on the Mayflower!” “My son is an honor student at DB Middle School!” “My team was responsible for implementing the new collaborative workgroup environment.”
5. Believe that “perception is reality”. It doesn’t matter what is actually true or not, just what you can get dumb people to believe. Sure you’ve spent your whole life taking the easy way out, but as long as you can fool others into thinking that you’ve achieved something, you can pretend to have some worth. After all, that is the only thing that matters.
6. When making a purchase and being unsure of an item’s quality or value, get the most expensive one available even if you can’t afford it. Expensive items will impress other douchebags and reaffirm your status in the douchebag hierarchy. Researching purchases is for people with free time and no money. You are far too important and busy to bother with that. Ignore those who laugh at you for paying more for items with fewer features and lower quality than competing items. They are simply jealous of your ability to get “The Best!” Yes, a $30 Casio watch will keep better time than the $6500 Omega on your wrist, but who would be impressed with what you spent on it?
7. When engaging in or planning an activity, be sure to buy only the equipment that is considered “Professional Grade”. This includes tools, cameras, cars, boats, hiking boots, bicycles, home theater equipment, etc. Remember, high price and professional stickers are an indication of the suitability to a given task – any task. You really need that $5500 computer to do your taxes every April and occasionally play Solitaire. Also an $8500 digital SLR camera and $30,000 worth of lenses *will* make you take higher quality photographs. You get bonus points if your camera or lens is from a German brand, even if it’s assembled in Japan or China. Teutonic brand superiority seeps through regardless.
8. Get a tattoo. If you’re unsure what to get, pick something at random out of one of the many books of samples at the tattoo place. For extra douchebag points, get something that makes you look deep and spiritual like a Yin-Yang or an Asian-style character in a language that you aren’t familiar with. Believe the tattoo artist when he tells you that it means “Strength” or “Eagle’s Claw”. It probably doesn’t mean “asshole” or “retard”, so don’t bother to check. If you work out (and you do, right?) acceptable tattoos include barbed wire, bullet belts or “Tribal” designs around your biceps or thighs. Just make sure that people can see them while you have a shirt on.
9. When unsure of the quality of one of your possessions or activities when comparing it to those of other douchebags, be sure to drop the price into a conversation as much as possible. If the other douchebag is impressed with what you paid, then you can rest assured that yours is better than his.
10. Get a personalized vanity license plate for your car that has your name on it, some reference to how great your car is, or how much it cost you. Examples include: “U NV THIS”, “HER TOY”, “DDYS GRL”, “POLLERA”, “MY 911”, or “2 MCH 4U”. Other douchebags will definitely take notice!
11. Play golf. Pretend that it’s a sport. Rationalize your activity, err, sport by saying that “Lots of business happens on the golf course”. When you get lucky and get a hole-in-one, assume that is was entirely based on your own golfing prowess and ability to perfectly calculate wind resistance and compensate for the Earth’s rotation and small uneven patches on the green.
12. Be resolute that things that are of trivial importance to others are really of earth shattering importance. The fact that you are in the top 10 in the Halo 3 leaderboards is vital to the survival of freedom as we know it. You’ll show them all one day when you use your Halo 3 skills to cure cancer! It’s also important to be the CEO of a company even if the only employees are you and your wife. Be sure to put it on your business card and always mention it when introducing yourself to others.
13. Flaunt all of your accomplishments, no matter how small. If you acted as an extra way in the back of a scene in “Madea's Family Reunion”, refer to yourself as having acted in a “major Hollywood motion picture”.
14. Get a tan. But remember, you are far too busy and successful to waste time laying out in the hot, dangerous sun, so use tanning lotion to turn your skin a nice shade of Umpa Loompa orange. The darker, the better.
15. Find out about the latest trends. Follow them without question, reason, or taste. If it doesn’t succeed at first, stand your ground and soon other douchebags will respond by copying you. If that doesn’t work, refer to yourself as a trend setter and remind others that they are behind the times.
16. When deciding on a car, remember that image is important here. You can pick from an exotic sports car, way-oversized SUV or luxury car depending on which flavor of douchebag you are trying to impress. If you can’t afford a truly exotic sports car and the jealous car dealer won’t let you finance 120 months at 2/3rds your net monthly income, then just get cheaper or mundane car and “tune” it. Sure it will end up costing almost as much, will have no resale value and be an ugly, unreliable eyesore, but it will surely turn the heads of other duchebags. For sports cars (either real or tuner wannabes) be sure to apply many “sponsorship” stickers, non functioning air ducts, and spoilers all over you car. Fake carbon fiber parts and lowered suspensions are for bonus points. Justify this by being a “real” racer and take your car down to the track, once. It’s far too dangerous and you are far too important to risk getting hurt. For SUVs, bigger is always better. Bullet hole stickers show how tough you are and shiny 20” rims with spinners demonstrate that you have money to burn and are willing to sacrifice ride comfort and off road ability for Bling. If you end up with a luxury car, don’t let anyone tell you that your fancy new Lexus is just a Toyota with a different badge or that your Audi is actually made alongside lesser Volkswagens.
17. Go overboard at every opportunity. Party hard, drink hard, drive fast, and spend money on crap you don’t need or even want. Be sure to tell everyone, even complete strangers, about your exploits.
18. Your time is extremely important to you and everyone else. When at the grocery, it is perfectly acceptable to take your cart of 37 items into the 15 items or less lane. That silly restriction is there so that other people’s purchases don’t make you wait in line longer than absolutely necessary. That line’s only reason for existing is to make sure that you get in and out of the grocery as quickly as possible. Other people know that your time is far more important than theirs and will be more than happy to wait while you delay the whole line. That muttering you hear in the line behind you is just them talking about how they wish that they were you.
19. You are in a position of absolute authority. It doesn’t matter if you are the Assistant Night Manager at Taco Bell, the head of a cult, or if your daddy’s oil buddies made you CEO of a few companies that all failed under your leadership – you are not a person to be trifled with. Flaunt your power and destroy anyone who dares to question you. Blame any problems or failures on those who disobeyed you, are weak links in your team, or who are trying to undermine your authority.
20. You are a self made man (or woman) and got to where you are in life by pulling yourself up by your boot straps. Deny that you benefited from public education, social services, inheritance, social class, helpful mentors, ancestry, and employers who gave you a shot when you really didn’t deserve it. Work doggedly to deny those same benefits to others in order to give them character.
21. Be sure to talk about how you just can’t start the day without your fancy, overpriced coffee. Pretend that you can tell the difference between your coffee of choice and lesser coffees. This also works for wine, beer or just about any beverage.
22. Brag to anyone who will listen about how many hours you work every week. After all, hours physically spent in the office correlate directly to productivity, even if you spent 60% of your time chatting with people at the water cooler, shopping online, or in the parking lot smoking.

I woke up this morning at about 8:00am to a house that was downright chilly. That really means a lot for me since I’m actually pretty fond of the cold. We’ve had an unusual cold spell for the past week, and it’s been snowing with temperatures in the 20s and 30s for a few days now. This isn’t a good time for my heat to go out, (and on a holiday no less) but that’s what happened.

After a bit of frustration I began to suspect that furnace was fine but that my thermostat had gone bad. Off to Lowes (which doesn’t open until 10 am) I went to find that thermostats, even the programmable ones, are even fancier than the one that I got just a few years ago. I found one that appeared to work (even had a rebate) and went home to try it out.

My wires were already labeled from the last time I did this, so it wasn’t a big deal, but it did leave me with a fun looking wire mess. Not something that you really want to see on a Sunday Morning.

Drilling the holes for the wallplate apparently required a 3/16” drill. Now that’s no big deal except that I don’t seem to have a 3/16 drill. I have some 5/32” bits and I’m pretty sure that I have the entire supply of 1/8” bits for the Midwest (so if you all can’t find any, my bad) but no 3/16”. As it turns out, a 5/32” and a small hammer will get the job done in most situations.

Now that everything is back together and I haven’t been electrocuted or set on fire, heat is once again coming out of my ducts. I’m still not sure that everything is working perfectly, so I may still need to call someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. But it will keep me warm for now.