It turns out the seperate facility was a single room manned (wo-manned? wo-mynned?) by a single woman – a stern middle aged Russian woman. She looked like a typical technician – there was nothing extrodanrily Russian about her except her very thick accent. Her dyed-at-home hair and aging manicure job were looking a little rough, like this Russian lady had seem some better days – days she didn’t spend collecting blood from strangers.

She did not look like this.

She was gentle with the needle, but tough looking, like she wanted to just jab you to death with that needle. Uninvited, she shared that often men who give blood faint and she finds this ‘disgusting’. Imagine in your best James Bond Russian lady villian voice, ‘I say to them, you are not man. Man does not faint for blood’.

I imagine that when I left she drank my blood, it spilling down her chin as she called the Kremlin to share US military secrets. Or she ordered lunch.

"Weed" (aka marijuana)

I actually did some research (i.e. googling) on weed underwear just because. It turns out that I am not in the top 10 or even 30 of weed underwear search results, but Robot Underwear is nevertheless in some pretty awesome company. For example, there’s the Bolivian blog called Veneno Lundico which features a song called “The Woman in Weed Underwear can Carry me to Heaven.” Or there’s the puzzling site called Share the Talking Stick which advises women to discontinue use of dryer sheets as underwear. (P.S. Robot Underwear also recommends that you discontinue use of dryer sheets as underwear.) One commenter, Jodie, adds, “I agree that dryer sheets are just plain nasty. I haven’t used them since I first moved out of the house!” Good for you Jodie!

Sneaker - possibly to be used to house penis as neccessary. (Penis not pictured)

Further research, however, indicates that the searchers were probably just looking for the lyrics to the popular artiste J-Kwon’s song entitled “Underwear”. The song is really a masterpiece:

Got pussy everywhere
Weed in the air
I’m in my underwear
My under the underwear
Liquor everywhere
Condoms over there
I’m in my underwear

I am unsure as to what “my under the underwear” means, but he’s got pussy everywhere and I simply haven’t any, so who am I to argue? The song also goes on to discuss the pleasures of golden showers (“In the gold shower I’m handin’ out gold showers.”) and how his J-Kwon’s penis requires a sneaker (“Right now my third leg need a sneaker on.”)

I sure hope he gets that sneaker!

Santa Clara = snooze time

So now – off to LA. I was sad this morning to return the Mustang without having time to do a naked lady photo shoot, but I think that the shot included in the previous post would likely top anything I was capable of. I’d also like to point out the time stamp on that photo. Someone scanned that shit in. Someone took that photo earnestly and was so into it that they decided to share it with friends. I also like that the lady (and I use the term “lady” loosely) is wearing capri pants. It makes the whole thing feel very spontaneous.

Who doesn't love tea-bagging?

Anyhow, once at the airport I was again selected for screening. What the fuck American Airlines? The screening was easily the MOST DETAILED SCREENING EVER. First, whilst patting my down, the dude slid his hands a little too high and touched lower ball area. I do not feel that this is acceptable. Then, after tea-bagging his hands with my goods, he went through every fucking thing in my bags. He literally took out my book and flipped through the pages. WTF would be in the pages of my book? He also looked at like every container within my bag. Surprise! My sunglasses case has fucking sunglasses in it.

As I land in LAX, wish me car rental luck. Cross your fingers for another mustang. I promise that if I get another Mustang I will pose topless on it and post the pictures here.

This woman came with the car.

The unfortunate reality of time on business trips dawned on me pretty quickly once I got into SF. I had about 30 minutes to walk around before I had to go directly into focus groups. In the 30 minutes however, I saw streetcars and walked next to someone smoking up on the street, so I think I got the full SF experience.

I didn't actually see Arnold, unfortunately.

The groups themselves were pretty surreal. Focus groups are weird anyway, watching a bunch of people behind glass, but these were especially weird because they were conducted in languages I don’t speak. A woman of generous girth sat in the room with us and translated everything for us in real time. She tried to do different intonnations for different people, but either way it’s super weird to have someone saying in mostly a monotone, “What do you think about that? I like it, the colors work well. Which colors do you like best? I like purple, it reminds me of home.” for four hours straight. Also, the food at the focus groups was a great disappointment. It was thai, which is a plus, but there was only one bowl of M&Ms and few other snacks were provided. This merits a grade C on food.

This was how I was feeling about the lack of snacks, namely cookies.

Today I am off to San Jose for more groups. NYC conference calls have kept me locked up in the minature hotel room (seriously, it’s smaller than my bedroom in NYC and that’s really saying something) on the phone, so I didn’t get to see anymore of San Francisco today. The view of the building outside of my hotel room window, however, looks pretty sweet.

9:50 AM: I was selected for additional security screening at the checkpoint. I am pretty sure that I was selected so that they TSA could say they weren’t racially profiling. There was an odd little glass booth in the middle of the security lanes where I had to stand and wait. It was me, some Asian people, an old Hispanic couple, and a young guy of ambiguous ethnicity and a foreign passport. I was the TSA’s show white guy. “See? We check out white people too!” Anyway, after waiting forever because most of these people didn’t speak English and the TSA didn’t speak any language other than English, I got through, only to learn that the TSA had lost my boarding pass. How the fuck do you lose a boarding pass when your job is airport security? They were like “We’ll just call your gate and tell them to let you on.” Apparently they can do that. Who knew?

10:45 AM: Whilst boarding I passed a strange looking man in an inappropriately sized suit. He was looking half leather face and half ‘men who look like old lesbians’ with a cheddar-y shade of hair. So he was kind of a freak. He was with his mother, who looked nice enough. She was perhaps in her mid-60′s. For some reason they were stopped at boarding and cheddar lesbian man started freaking out on his mom. He was all “Why did you do this to me??” and the airplane people had to ask him if he was OK to fly like he was retarded. Since he was not retarded, he said yes and then continued to yell at his poor old ma. I wonder what she did to him? Maybe she put him on the terrorist watch list.

12:23 PM: As I write this I am on the plane, in the air and traveling backwards through time (re: Facebook status) writing business emails and having important business IM conversations and writing important business documents. Later I might watch business Hulu, but only if business web email continues to not business work.

Fortunately I can focus on business because there was a free seat and I was able to move away from my overly chatty seat-mate, a woman vacationing from Hong Kong. She seemed young and nice, but her fake eyelashes were coming off in the most distracting way. I wanted to rip them off. Anyway, it turns out the she is a headhunter and she immediately began pitching me on work in Hong Kong. Instead of telling her I was not interested (too distracted by aforementioned eyelashes) I let her prattle on even though I didn’t fully understand what she was saying. At some point it turned into a job interview and she asked me why I wanted to work in Hong Kong and I was like “I don’t want to work in Hong Kong?” and she was all “Why are you asking me about jobs in Hong Kong?” and I was all “Who’s asking you about jobs in Hong Kong?” It got a little weird. Then she told me she though NYC was dirty and I decided I hated her and moved seats.