Lutfey.com

  • If you happen to be familiar with my annual Christmas letter you may be scratching your head thinking, “But Omar, it’s not anywhere near the end of the year– how can you already be posting your Christmas letter?” I decided that publishing my Christmas letter only once a year is not consistent with my idiom of working on “Internet Time.” I’m not exactly sure how to define “Internet Time,” but for the purposes of this letter it is me being up at 3 in the morning in my boxers and a T-shirt surfing the web because I got tired of watching infomercials on the television.

    What do women want? This question has plagued mankind since God kicked us out of the Garden of Eden (which I believed contained no menstrual cycles, beauty magazine quizzes, or clothes that made Eve look fat). When contemplating what women want, I prefer to approach the problem from a different perspective. It is possible to list all the things that men could possibly do, take out the things that woman don’t want, and what is left, by the process of deduction, is what women want. While creating a list of all possible actions mankind can take is well beyond my attention span, I am willing to add a few items to the “don’t do” list.

    First of all, women like compliments. There are, however, some important issues to consider when telling a woman “I love you.” Fellow men out there, I cannot stress this enough: only say this to a wife or established girlfriend. In general, a woman you have met for lunch once or twice and exchanged a few E-mail messages with does not meet these criterion. If you are invited to a party, it is generally considered bad taste to repeatedly yell out to the woman hosting the party “Angie, I love you. I know you don’t love me back, but that’s OK.” For whatever reason you may think it’s a good idea at the time (i.e. EXCESSIVE ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION), it will ultimately do more damage than good.

    Secondly, trying to hit on women after excessive alcohol consumption is generally not a good idea. For example, you may think that going around at a party after downing a few drinks telling women you have never met they have a nice tail and a blouse full of goodies is an example of your witty banter, but in reality they usually just smile politely, leave the room for some reason or another, and strangely enough you never see them again.

    And last of all, it is a good idea to stay after the party has died down and help clean up the mess. It is a bad idea to stay after the party has died down and repeatedly throw up in the sink before you pass out on the couch until the next afternoon. No further explanation is needed for this point.

    I really can’t continue until I confess something here. I didn’t just use my overactive imagination to create three random activities women don’t like. I attended Angie’s Christmas party, got drunk, professed my unrequited love to her, told several other women they had nice tails and blouses full of goodies, threw up several times (for history’s sake, I remember it being once in the sink, and three times in the toilet), and passed out on their couch. Around eleven in the morning, on what I think was my last trip to bow down to the porcelain God, I looked down at my boxer shorts and bare legs and commented to Angie, “I’m not wearing any pants” in a somewhat matter-of-fact tone of voice. It was well past noon when I finally thought I could make it home without blowing chunks in my car.

    I can’t say that I’m really proud of what I did, but I have to admit that it’s pretty amusing despite the fact that I am the ass in the story. In general I like to write stories where other people look stupid– it makes me feel better about my shortcomings in life. While I could have altered the facts of the story to make me look better, I don’t think it would have made for a funny story. Since I put (slightly) more importance on being funny than being truthful, I recorded the events as accurately as my impaired brain recalled them.

    For reasons that I greatly appreciate yet do not totally comprehend, Angie doesn’t seem to hate me. I suspect it is analogous to the episode of “Cops” where the guy in the beat up old pickup truck gets caught with the prostitute only to realize SHE was really a HE while handcuffed in the back seat of the patrol car. Sure, you can send him down to the station to be booked, but in all reality everything that happened before the police and television crew arrived will torture his soul a lot longer than any consequences of legal proceedings. As far as Angie goes, I think it is safe to assume that her name will not come up in future letters any time soon. If I manage to get invited to next year’s party, I think I’ll be the designated driver.

    And, just in case you are wondering, I took that line from the movie “Hot Shots.” The actual quote is “Not playing to win is like sleeping with your sister. Sure she’s a great piece of tail with a blouse full of goodies, but it’s just illegal.”

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    Newfunny.com is the first web site to officially acknowledge being run by Evil Alien Overlords in an attempt to distract humanity from their future invasion and enslavement plans. My name is Omar and I host the site and shamelessly bow down to our future masters in a “Locutus Of Borg” capacity. I am controlled by one of the Evil Alien Overlords via a XR-2300 neural interface. Everyone else has the less painful option of submitting material through the newfunny.com web site [ERTOK: we can’t go around equipping every humanoid with an XR-2300 BEFORE the mass landing of the replicator vessels, now can we? HA HA HA]

    Oh yes, I forgot to mention Ertok the Evil Alien Overlord who oversees this web site. He has a keen– if somewhat twisted– interest in humanity and occasionally likes to add his own thoughts to the web site. It is in my best interest to indulge Ertok since he has led me to believe that one of the features of the XR-2300 is the ability to make my head explode.

  • Welcome to the sixth year of the increasingly inaccurately named “Christmas Letter Trilogy.” The world seemed to have survived the whole Y2K scare without too much pillaging and plundering. Or at least there wasn’t any more than last year (adjusted for inflation). Despite the fact I didn’t get to spend six months in Europe this year and I didn’t have any awkward experiences in the women’s bathroom of any fast food establishments, I did manage to keep myself busy enough to write a witty and amusing end-of-the-year letter. My name is Omar Lutfey, and these are my stories.

    I started off the year Dr. Evil style by giving the command to fire the (make quotation mark gesture with your fingers) “laser” on my eyes in an attempt to improve my less-than-perfect vision. The entire procedure took 15 minutes for both eyes and I was awake and alert the whole time. Overall I would say the procedure was roughly as uncomfortable as sitting through an entire episode of “Threes Company” where, because of some wacky misunderstanding, Jack, Janet, and Mr. Furley think that Chrissy is pregnant. I was quite amused by the smell produced as the laser sculpted my eyes. I kept thinking how little pieces of my eye were vaporized and then sucked into my nasal cavity. Then I realized the entire operating staff was probably having the same experience. At that exact moment in time I stopped worrying about my personal safety or how my eyesight was going to be the next day, and focused exclusively on the fact a room full of people I will most likely never see again were calmly sitting there breathing in little pieces of my eye. In retrospect, my state of mind may have been affected by the fact the doctors had me hopped up on Valium.

    The new year is all about making changes, and at the beginning of the year 2000 I changed my work hours at my job to four ten-hour days a week. Dispensing technical advise for C++ libraries ten hours a day isn’t the best way to spend time, but having a three day weekend every week was pretty damn cool. I had every Saturday, Sunday, and Monday free from any job-related responsibilities. I quickly discovered that going skiing during the week is preferable to the weekends. The traffic on I-70 is 80 percent less likely to get you killed, you can actually park close to where you want to ski, and you can go into the ski lodge and leisurely enjoy a 14 dollar greasy hamburger without the weekend levels of noise and commotion. I am by no stretch of the imagination a good skier, but there were a lot fewer people around to see me perform the ever embarrassing “mogul wedgie.”

    In February I decided to use some of my extra free time by helping out at Habitat For Humanity. As a nonprofit organization, Habitat builds affordable, quality houses for families in need. I’ve picked up many new skills helping out– everything from building foundations to installing drywall. I’m not sure it’s going to help me out in the world of computer programming, but I think they are good general skills to have under my belt. Some people have told me volunteering my time at Habitat is a good way to meet women. I won’t disagree with that statement, but I have also taken a liking to the various power tools they let me use during the construction process. Oh yeah, and helping out poor people– that’s good too.

    I’m really good at putting things off a lot longer than I probably should at times, so this year I decided to get a jump on my mid-life crisis and learn how to ride a motorcycle. A coworker of mine and I decided to sign up for a motorcycle training class in April. I called up and discovered there was only one open position left in the next session. Being the kind and helpful friend I am, I told Scott that motorcycles are too dangerous, and I signed myself up for the last spot as to protect him from any temptation of taking the class. Ironically, a few months later he took a friend’s motorcycle out for a spin and crashed it into someone’s front yard. Scott is fine, the lawn he crashed into survived, but the motorcycle wasn’t really happy about the whole incident.

    I learned quite a bit about motorcycles during the weekend training class. We started Friday night by learning what all the knobs, levers, switches, and pedals do on a motorcycle and worked our way up to actually riding them around on the driving range Saturday and Sunday. We practiced just about every combination of how to stop, start, turn, and accelerate. I was one of the few students taking the class that had never ridden a motorcycle. I never got the cone weave down as well as I wanted, but I managed to get through the class without hitting anyone else or tipping the bike over, and for that I received my motorcycle license.

    Once I could legally drive a motorcycle in the state of Colorado, the next step was to go out and buy a motorcycle. For me, this was by far the most annoying part of the entire process. I’m not very good at shopping in general (my wardrobe is strikingly similar to what it was in high school), and my total motorcycle experience started two weekends ago when I spent hours riding the same motorcycle around a small training course. I started by looking around at different motorcycle shops to see what they had to offer. That didn’t turn up anything that I liked that also happened to be in my price range, so I turned to the classified section of the newspaper. I eventually found a motorcycle that I liked and could afford– a dark blue 1993 Honda Nighthawk 750. After driving my motorcycle a few thousand miles since April I have become very comfortable with its abilities and limitations. If I ever encounter a police officer who wants to pull me over, I won’t have any reservations about eluding him in a high speed chase through residential neighborhoods.

    October 31 was the last day I worked at Rogue Wave Software. I had been working in the Technical Support Department for 3 1/2 years, and I decided that it was time for a change in my life. I’m going to miss working with everyone in my department and all the good times we had over the years. I can’t possibly list every cool aspect of my job, but I’ll never forget the foosball table, arsenal of Nerf guns, and occasional boxing matches with the phone coordinators. Of course I can’t leave out our annual Gashos/Haunted House fun activity. Each year in October we would go to the Gashos of Japan (a Japanese restaurant where they cook the food right in front of you), get really drunk on saki and plum wine, and then go to a local haunted house. If you are wondering why I left such a fun work environment, I discovered that some of the people in the company received their positions by selling their souls to the Devil and go about their daily business as nothing more than minions of Satan.

    I decided to celebrate my last day at Rogue Wave Software by going out that night and getting a four point speeding ticket. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The cop clocked me going 57 in a 45. To make matters worse, he didn’t even give me a chance to beg and grovel my way out of the ticket. I was telling a friend I had met online about what happened, and it turned out that she knew the officer who issued me the ticket. When I went into the courthouse to defend my driving skills, the clerk at the main desk informed me that the district attorney has offered me a zero point plea bargain. How cool is that? I accepted the offer and got out of there before they had a chance to change their minds. I never thought anything useful would ever come about from meeting women over the Internet, but I stand corrected. Thank you, Jenny 🙂

    Where am I going to go from here? What will the true new millennium hold for me? If you know the answers to these questions, please e-mail me so I can get on with my life. I’m thinking of getting out of the computer industry all together and following my dream of dying my hair blue and forming a comedic guitar duo that sings funny songs for spare change out on the Pearl Street Mall when the weather is nice. I’m not sure exactly what kind of 401K plan that would provide, but I’ve already written a few songs such as “Taco Bell– Village of the Damned” and “Tupperware Death Party” that I believe will help me earn a name for myself in the cut throat world of street performing.

    Well, I guess I’ve rambled on enough for this year. I wish only the best for everyone in 2001. Everyone, that is, except for Jar Jar Binks– I wish only bad and evil things for that computer generated monstrosity. I fantasize about him being pummeled to death in the next Star Wars movie by the Ewoks after some wacky misunderstanding during his gratuitous vacation scene on the third moon of Endor. But that’s just me. Thank you for coming, have a good night, and drive safely.