“Watch out or those BNI thugs will come at you harder than some Ron L Hubbard believers”

Tipskipper

A long long time ago I was solicited by a friend of mine, at least I thought he was a friend, to check out a BNI group (Business Networking International).  Unfortunately, at the time I had no idea the International Star Registry was a more legitimate enterprise than BNI.  What was even more problematic was that these movers and shakers met at 7 am requiring me to miss my morning hoops run if I was able to drag my ass out of bed, or even worse sleep.  Hey, I love awkward small talk and pretending like I am interested in the minutia of other people’s lives just like the next guy, but don’t ask me to arrive at 7 am to put on a fake smile and get introduced to people whose names I will never remember.  Does anyone else have this problem?  You get introduced to someone but you are so worried about the handshake going well that you don’t even allow their name to register in your cranium.  Granted, they typically have name tags at these things, but they have the adhesive power of a greased pig and you typically spend most of your energy trying to get it to stay adhered to your shirt.

Once I showed up I knew it was an epic mistake equally as catastrophic as the time I committed to going to Cedar Point with two buddies from high school only to find out by the time we hit Toledo none of us actually wanted to go.  The business types in attendance were almost as underwhelming as the venue, a stale room in an old church with folding chairs manufactured prior to world war II.  Window cleaning service, what the fuck am I suppose to do with that?  A company that makes signs, fantastic, I will never get a referral from you, but I am sure some day I will need your services when I run for County drain commissioner.  Here is the problem that I have, my referral sources are not exactly conventional.  If I could create a networking group of alcoholics, drug dealers, and serial philanderers this BNI thing would be well worth the money (that’s right, not only is this experience excruciating, they make you pay for it, it’s similar to a trip to the dentist but without the benefit of anesthesia).

Basically, they have people who actually work for BNI and are in charge of setting up new groups.  They over sell their value by claiming that if you were to try and generate the amount of leads BNI will generate for you in the regular marketplace it would cost you thousands of dollars, but it will only cost you a nominal fee of $500 a year to have the privilege of hanging out with all these cool cats.  Guess what, I would have a better chance of getting referrals from a room full of zombies than these losers.  What’s the screening process here?  The only place more pathetic and wrought with despair is a plasma donation center.  Not only do they charge you to  attend their pit of despair, there are attendance requirements.  Listen, I barely show up at my office on a weekly basis, you think I’m going to agree to pay money for the privilege of rubbing elbows weekly with a group of people I know I will come to despise in a matter of weeks?  The real kicker is that if you miss more than twice you get kicked out of the group.  I wanted to test this rule out but was unwilling to pony up the cash to see if they really stick to their guns on this rule.  Furthermore, if you do miss you have to send a sub in your place.  Let’s see who do I hate enough to have them attend a BNI meeting in my place, wait a minute, no one.  There is no one I personally know that I would send in my place out of spite, and that’s saying something because I dislike a lot of people.

What would truly be fun is to go with the express purpose of screwing with the leader of the BNI group, torpedoing the group before it gets off the ground.  The BNI group leaders I have encountered seem to always be an uglier fatter version of Sally Struthers, and they always claim to have had a successful business prior to going to work for BNI because it was such a “great opportunity.”  Exactly, selling the networking version of Amway for a living is a tremendous opportunity.  This is how I see it going if I had the courage to conduct a full frontal attack on a BNI group just starting to gain some momentum:

“So, how much would it cost for you guys to get this kind of marketing momentum in the regular business place?  Anyone? Anyone?”

No one answers because they have absolutely no idea, and awkward silence typically lasts 30 to 40 seconds before Sally Struthers pipes in with some figure that is complete bullshit.

“I have no idea how much it would cost, but this kind of smells like a pyramid scheme, we have to pay to be in it and you require us to bring new members into this thing on a regular basis, where is all the money going that we pay to be in this thing?  There better be one hell of a party at the end of the year with really hot strippers and top shelf booze or I’m going to be sorely disappointed.”

“Well, we have expenses, we cover those out of your annual fee, and then there is the  money we spend on coming up with new and fresh ideas for our groups that will allow us to increase referrals amongst our members.”

“Overhead, we are sitting on folding chairs that predate the birth of my parents in a room that smells like it doubles as a homeless shelter.  On top of that you guys have been rolling out the same BNI program for years.  Have you ever heard of Craig’s List, yeah it’s free to post shit on there, and you know what, I could easily start a referral group that is FREE, and it would probably have a lot more cool people in it than this lame group does.  Lot’s of interesting people to be met on Craig’s List.”

“That may be the case, but where would you meet?  We have a very unique structure that allows us to really add value to our participants already thriving business.”

“We could meet in the kitchen of an Old Country Buffet and it would be more appealing than this place.  Structure?  This is your structure:

1. Enlist the current members to bring in new members so you can make more money.
2. Current member makes a presentation that is mind numbingly boring and has no actual value to any of the other members in the group.
3. Petition current members again to bring in new blood, and close the meeting.

Not sure I can replicate that, you people at BNI have set the bar so high that not even a midget could do the limbo under it.”

I am quite certain that Heaven’s Gate started out as a BNI group, and when it morphed into a cult it became less restrictive and more worthwhile.  When the BNI folks circled back to try and get it back to a BNI group that’s when they all decided to drink the poisonous Kool Aid.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.  I think that’s how the saying goes.  Regardless,  I did get bamboozled into attending another BNI group and it was just as intolerable as the first experience, if not more, because I attended more than one meeting this time around.  The new group actually met at lunch on Thursdays at a restaurant.  It started off horribly and only got worse as time wore on.  It had the requisite realtor who thought she was the life of the party and couldn’t stop talking about the real estate biz, everything that took place somehow related back to real estate.  “Oh, you own a funeral home, we need to get together after this, I am sure I can get you a ton of referrals, my client’s look to me for everything.”  The ironic thing is that my buddy who sucked me into my most recent BNI debacle is still in the group and last I heard they no longer meet at the restaurant.  It shut down, couldn’t keep their doors open even with the $12 a pop they were getting per lunch from the BNI attendees.

When I was growing up there was a show called Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom.  I enjoyed watching it but it pales in comparison to a current show focusing on nature and animals, that being The Planet Earth.  In one episode they had a Cheetah or some type of feline with spots taking down a crocodile, it was F#*&ing awesome.  We have a bunch of them recorded and one thing that sticks out is how even in the animal kingdom males are programmed differently from females.  Species after species one thing rings true, males have a razor sharp focus on procreating, and that’s about it.  Their entire existence seems to be centered around passing on their DNA to the next generation, even if their DNA is compromised.  Even in the animal world it seems like the second a male ejaculates it just wants to be left alone.  There was a particular episode in Planet Earth where they were following a female grizzly bear and her two cubs.  The narrator indicated that they needed to stay at a high elevation in order to avoid the father because the father would likely eat the cubs.  Hey, that’s one way to get out of paying child support I guess.  Regardless, the nurturing instinct seems to be much more prevalent in the female gender than it does the male counterpart.

The nurturing instinct is not the only thing that sets the genders apart.  Just last Friday I had the privilege of attending a couple’s baby shower.  Yeah, that’s right, a couple’s baby shower.  Unfortunately there was no way for me to weasel my way out of this thing because Shirley was one of three women “hosting” the shower.  I have never heard of men having a baby shower for a father to be, nor have I heard of men having a grooms shower for a guy who has decided he no longer wants to have sex on a regular basis and thinks blow jobs are non essential.  The day of the shower I had an all day golf outing where I played 36 holes, man were my hands beat up after that many holes, not sure how those professionals can handle such an arduous lifestyle.  Shirley was hoping I would get home in time so we could ride together, purely by accident I made it home after she had left.  In hind sight it was the best thing that could have happened because by driving separately I was able to leave the shower early.   For the twenty five minutes I was there I kept thinking to myself “there’s no way women actually like these things, this is more painful than a BNI meeting”.  In discussing the whole shower thing with a couple of my law partners one of them said “women love that shit.”   My exposure to bridal and baby showers in not just limited to the couples shower I was strong armed into attending, Shirley has hosted at least a half a dozen showers at our house.  I will say I love having a penis, there’s so many reasons it comes in handy, but I love it even more after I see what takes place at these showers.  Is it the estrogen that compels women to organize these things? Or is it a lack of having anything worthwhile to do?  I guess it could be a combination of both.

I have routinely gone on golf trips or trips to Vegas flying solo.  One particular trip was at tree tops golf resort and after a heavy day of drinking and golfing the guy who organized the thing, and didn’t drink nearly as much as my brother or I, thought it would be cool to play their par 3 course which has a shit ton of hills and undulations.  My brother was driving the cart down a hill and managed to roll the cart so that I was the meat on the bottom of the sand which.  We skidded down the asphalt cart path and eventually came to a halt.  It’s a good thing my BAC was at lest four times the legal limit or I would have been a goner.  I ended up with a raspberry on my forehead (which is hard to cover up when you have no hair) one on my shoulder, and my ring finger on one of my hands looked like ground hamburger.  The crazy thing about my golf trips and Vegas trips are that I never see a group of women getting away to do this stuff.  Shirley always says to me when I’m going on these trips “Sure wish I could go on something like this.”  I always call her bluff and say go for it.  Unfortunately, the reality is for her and a lot of other women is that they A. Don’t have friends (at least friends that are as fun as guys) B. would have nothing to center their trip around:

“Becky, I am sick of my husband always going on these guys trips, why don’t we put something together with all of our friends and get away for a weekend to do girl stuff?”

“Girl power!  who do you think we can get to go with us?”

“There’s Kate, she was in that book club with us a few years back, I really like her, and we have kids the same age so that would give us something to talk about for most of the trip, do you still have her number?  If not I can probably reach out to her on Facebook”

“Kate would probably work, I could ask my sister-in-law, I don’t really like her but if we are looking for warm bodies she can probably make it.”

“I can’t really think of anyone else off the top of my head but I’ll work on being more friendly when I drop the kids off at school and maybe I can snare a mom or two that have kids in my kid’s class.  Worst case scenario we put something on Craig’s List to fill out the invite list.”

My buddy actually has a wife who does go on “girls trips” and she has one coming up this weekend.  I asked him how many chicks were going on this trip and he figured about 8.  I asked him what they do on this trip, I indicated that if there are any pillow fights in their under garments taking place they should faceboook live it for their husbands and boyfriends, he doubted any of that was going to be transpiring and thought it would be mostly them just sitting around cackling like a bunch of hens.  If my wife were to go on a girl’s trip this is my guess as to how it would shake out:

83% of the conversation would be about children, probably their own.

11% would be about how they try to avoid having sex with their husbands (not taking showers, shaving their legs, or trimming what needs to be trimmed, farting in front of their husbands as frequently as possible, maybe even forgetting to flush the toilet on occasion)

5% would be about where they wanted to go out to eat.

1% would be about the pros and cons of engaging in a pillow fight in their undergarments after consuming copious amounts of wine.

Ultimately, my question is this, why did Bruce do it?  Being Katelyn has got to suck.

Yesterday I was minding my own business when I received a text message from Shirley regarding the nutritional value of breakfast cereal.  As I suspected, the article basically laid out a case that a bag of sugar has more nutritional value than breakfast cereal.  I thought to my self who are these Fascists that are trying to do away with breakfast cereal?  Right behind, hot dogs, apple pie, and blow jobs its pretty much everything America cares about, at least American males.  Off the top of my head I am not sure how many billions the cereal industry brings in every year, but I will say this, whatever it brings in in dollars it also brings about an equal amount of worthless cereal milk.  There is nothing worse than being forced to drink cereal milk, if you want to truly torture someone to the point of breaking, put them on a steady diet of cereal milk and Ellen, there is no human who won’t crack when faced with sugary milk and continual jokes from a middle aged white woman who can’t dance and makes Amy Schumer look like the white fat female version of Dave Chapelle.  (I love vagina jokes by the way, especially from someone whose vagina probably smells like a lunchable that has been left  in the  trunk of someone’s car in the middle of the desert for weeks)

The funny thing about this whole cereal article is the fact that I have pretty much known all along there is no way that shit can be good for you, but does it have to be?  Breakfast: the most important meal of the day.  The options for breakfast are shit, if it were the most important meal of the day wouldn’t we be coming up with some better options than something you can put in a box and they don’t even bother putting an expiration date on it for two reasons: 1. You will either eat it or throw it out to make room for other cereal your kid claims to want before it comes even close to expiring. 2.  Someone will inevitably leave the bag open causing it to go stale so there is no need for an expiration date.  3.  I know I said there were only two reasons, but the third reason is you could pull a box of life from an eighties time capsule, pour some milk on it, and it would be perfectly edible and wouldn’t bring about any catastrophic stomach issues.  Granted, you can go the route of eggs, bacon, or something more “healthy” which I will get to momentarily, but who has time to put a fully cooked breakfast meal together in three minutes.  Yes, three minutes, that’s the amount of time available each morning at the Jansma household for breakfast.

Here is how it usually goes at the Jansma household:

3:00 am: one or both of the kids come into our room and ask to get into bed with us.  I think to myself “hell no” but realize they will likely cry and carry on dramatically increasing the likelihood I won’t fall immediately back to sleep, so I let them climb on board.  Typically I make some veiled threat about putting a lock on their door if they continue to do this, but they know my threats are as empty as Donald Trump’s soul and they also know I don’t have the mechanical capabilities to switch out the door handles they currently have for ones with locks.

3:34 am: Typically I would go into the guest bedroom and sleep the rest of the night because Todd, Ted, Shirley, and Allie (our 10 year old Boston Terrier) had forced me to the edge of the bed and I was sick of fighting to get additional space so  I wouldn’t fall to the floor.  Now Aiden and Parker have bunk beds and the bottom bunk is quite comfortable so that is my new fortress of solitude when our bedroom is over run by Tod and Ted.

6:30 am:  I am typically playing basketball at this point, but if I didn’t make it out of bed this is when Shirley’s annoying apple phone alarm goes off.  She hits snooze.

6:38:  She hits snooze again.

6:46: She hits snooze again until she makes her way out of bed around 7.  The alarm has no impact on the ability of Tod and Ted to carry on sleeping and we are forced to drag them out of bed.  Cool thing is, on the weekends they get up way before 7 and bug the shit out of us.  Kids are great.

7:12 Tod gets on the crapper and takes his customary morning shit.  He is not a real big fan of wiping his own butt and has trained his body to avoid pooping at school.  He dumps in the morning and before he takes a shower at night.  I am somewhat ashamed that he can’t (won’t) wipe his own but, but my hat is off to his regularity.

7:28 After yelling at the kids for a solid twenty minutes they have finally made their way down stairs.  It hasn’t been without conflict with Ted thumbing his nose at two shirts, three pairs of shorts, and a pair of socks.  While hearing “wipe my butt dad” isn’t music to my ears, at least Tod doesn’t complain about the clothes I pick out for him.

7:29  “What do you guys want for breakfast?”  “what is there?”  “The same thing there was yesterday!”  I then list off every cereal we have in the cupboard and wait for them to make up their minds.

7:42 “Holy shit! what happened to the last 13 minutes, we are going to be late, really late. Get in the car NOW!”

Granted, if the Jansma family had their shit together we probably could fix some sort of “healthy” meal for our kids every morning.  Likewise, I am sure in her mind Shirley thought, wow, this article has a valid point, we really are doing our kids a disservice in more than just the areas of discipline and structure, they are going to turn into fat bastards if they keep eating breakfast cereal.  However, I will give you one guess as to what they ate this morning:  Breakfast Cereal.

The author of the article I mentioned at the outset of my post had this to say as what Americans should look to as alternatives to breakfast cereal:

What does she recommend for breakfast? Steel-cut oats, not cooked but rather soaked overnight with a dash of vinegar. I add whole-fat Greek yogurt and some nuts if I have them — it’s a satisfying small dish. Beans are great too. I had a delicious dish of lentils and a small amount of basmati rice, a preparation called kitchari, at the new vegetarian restaurant abcV in Manhattan, the other morning, and my companion had congee made with black rice and millet, in a seaweed and mushroom broth. Excellent breakfasts. An egg and some cheese are also a nourishing and satisfying way to begin the day.

There is nothing better to kick start your day than steel cut oats with a dash of vinegar.  How would anyone even think to put vinegar on anything in the morning?  Hey Steve, you know what this could really use to make it taste better?  Vinegar.  How bad does something have to taste for vinegar to make it taste better?  What kind of sadist is this women.  Beans for breakfast?  Typically I don’t like to get too terribly reactionary, but anyone who eats beans for breakfast isn’t part of my America.  I always question people who eat grapefruit for breakfast, but to opt for black rice and millet (I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds terrible) that is really doubling down to make your breakfast taste like a dog’s butthole.

Unfortunately, there is an all out war on sugar.  It isn’t just relegated to breakfast cereal.  You can’t go down an internet rabbit hole without running into some article about how terrible sugar is for you.  Guess what, it probably should matter to me, but it doesn’t.  If sugar is knocking years off my life, they are going to be the shitty years from like 85 to 90 where you poop your pants and can’t even remember your own name, in all honesty if those years get knocked off, sugar is doing me a favor.  THANK YOU SUGAR!   If something tastes good there is a 99.9 % chance it’s bad for you and it has sugar in it.  If something tastes awful, it’s probably good for you.  Not sure why God made it this way, my guess would be because Eve screwed the pooch, but it definitely hasn’t deterred me from taking opportunities to enjoy the sweeter things in life.

But back to the breakfast cereal thing as I close this out, when I was a kid I ate shit tons of breakfast cereal.  And to my mom’s credit, she initially tried to get me to drink cereal milk, but when I refused we either dumped it in the sink or the toilet.  Also to her credit, even though she is Dutch and has a Tupperware coupon box the size of glove box, she never skimped on cereal. It was always name brand.  I can’t imagine eating off brand cereal, if name brand cereal is bad for you, off brand cereal probably makes your testicles fall off.  That being said, having lived a child hood full of breakfast cereal and very few restraints on sugar consumption, I’m still awesome.  That’s right,  I run, I water ski, and I’m great in bed (at least I think so, and that’s all that really matters). My last physical my blood work came back and they though I was genetically engineered it was so phenomenal.  My point is, science may say this stuff is bad for you, but I’m doing fine (I will probably get diagnosed with diabetes tomorrow as pay back for my bold statements) but as long as you only let your kids eat breakfast cereal for one meal a day, ice cream once a day, and sugary snacks only after school, they should turn out just like me, but probably not quite as awesome.