The Hooters Girls Are Ready For Wildcard Weekend, Roll Tide Willie Reacts To Nick's Retirement & Driver On No. 7 At Pebble Beach
The Internet is spotty, it's Friday, let's get going and see how this goes
Let's get the weekend cranked up around here. I want to start with the Hooters team sending over word about 101-year-old World War II and Korean War veteran Harry Perez Cerezo celebrating his birthday last week at the El Paso Hooters.
"After serving in the Armed Forces for approximately 22 years, Cerezo was awarded the Purple Heart and has since retired in El Paso. Last year, Cerezo celebrated his 100th birthday at Hooters and plans to continue this tradition every year to come," the Hooters team announced via email.
Kinsey:
The haters will say, "This is sponsored content! You're being paid to post Harry at Hooters!"
Hey losers, I'm the OutKick Senior Editor for Content Development. THIS is content that the lib news outlets won't publish because they hate to see people smiling and beautiful biological women enjoying life with Harry.
This is the content that makes Screencaps a must-visit on a daily basis. This is content development 101.
If a World War II Purple Heart veteran goes into Hooters, Twin Peaks, or some other breastraunt to have the time of his life, I want to hear about it. I want photos. I want to show men that they can still smile, enjoy life, and keep getting after it.
By the way, I hope that's Harry's draft beer sitting in front of him on that table.
Now we're rolling on a Friday. Thank you, Harry!
• Cameron in Cincy writes:
Saw this on the interwebs today...glorious.
Kinsey:
Bama fans aren't going to like that slight, but this is content development 101. However, I'd like to see that Pope smoke coming out of a Waffle House. Still, it's good.
Moving along...I want to say thanks to all of you who reached out with emails for Zach, the reader who is trying to pivot out of a career that just isn't satisfying. I also want to say thanks to Zach and many others who trust me with these personal emails.
Hopefully, the following emails help some of you who are looking for more in life and in your careers.
Screencaps readers help Zach with making a major career pivot with their own stories of how they got out and how things turned out
• Jason in Lynchburg, VA writes:
I felt the the guy this morning asking for advice on changing careers. I am a bit of an expert on it and I wanted to share my two cents:
From my sophomore year in high school I always wanted to be an attorney. My dad ran a mid-sized electrical contracting company in East Tennessee. I grew up wanting nothing and had an impression that it was easy and prestigious. I let my dad talk me into (in exchange for him paying my college tuition) to major in Electrical Engineering at UT.
I hated engineering school and never fit in at all. All the guys working on projects on Monday morning were talking about Star Trek (no offense to those dudes but not my cup of tea) and I wanted to talk about how we slipped an additional 5 kegs past UTPD into the fraternity house after we ran out after the Bama game. I somehow managed to graduate with a 3.0.
Fast forward, I hated my job from day 1. It was like managing chaos. I had little guidance but bore the consequence of messing up. It was like one dumpster fire to the next. I got married in September of 2001 and my now-deceased father-in-law was a Circuit Court Judge in Virginia.
I always picked his brain as I was fascinated at what he did (often over a 15th beer at the table).
In 2005, I was getting on a plane on Monday and returning Thursday. The stress and travel was wearing on my young marriage. I kept thinking about ways out. About that time I decided that I needed to leave Dad’s company, but didn’t know what I could do. I was 30 and a mid career switch at point seemed insurmountable.
After the final straw of crisis, I flew home one Saturday morning. My loving wife said whatever you want to do, I got you. She clearly saw and bore the brunt of my stress. That Saturday I got really drunk to blow off steam and refocused on Sunday morning. I went to my office to be alone and sat a blank pad in front of me. I asked myself - if you could do anything without consequence what would you do? I decided right then and there that I was going to law school.
After I made that decision, dominos feel into place perfectly and you can call it God or fate, I took LSAT ( at TN law school during a football game, another story for another day). Got in to Liberty Law (congrats Oregon), and moved to Lynchburg. Law school was hard but worth it. This is where my father in law really came in to play. He helped me get started. I think partially because he wanted his then in-utero granddaughter fed.
It was a grind the first few years no doubt.
Fast forward to 2023, I am blessed beyond belief. I have developed an amazing real estate practice. I have three employees and don’t have a ton of stress and make solid money.
Lesson learned. Follow your heart. What it is you want to do, figure out the logistics of making that happen, find a mentor and just jump.
• Bob D. in Huntsville, AL writes:
I just wanted to give a different perspective to Zach and his asking for advice in switching jobs after 13 years with the same company.
I do have several questions that influence my perspective on his situation. Number one is: Is the company a publicly traded company, is it privately owned, or, even more important, is it employee owned?
I just retired from a company that I have worked for for 26 years. When I hired on, it was employee-owned, but not a full ESOP (Employee Stock Option Program) company. About 7 years ago we turned into a full ESOP company, giving the employees an option to buy the company stock by transferring a portion of their 401K to company stock. My understanding is that by doing so, we helped the company secure the ESOP designation. Because the company stock had shown a progressive increase in value that out-performed the S&P and Dow Jones, I converted about 75% of my 401k to company stock.
To make a long story endless, we were given the opportunity to convert some of our company stock back to the 401k, but I stayed the course. We were bought out by a larger company about 4 years ago and. as part of the buyout. all company stock options were valued at approximately 2.75 times their face value. I went from looking at retiring at 67 to retiring at 60 based on my financial planner's recommendation to hit a nice even number.
I was in the same situation as Zach - well paid, good boss, treated well - but not totally fulfilled with my job in some ways. Call it procrastination, call it laziness, but my staying with my job instead of changing to a new company just because I could resulted in my ability to retire comfortably and look forward to my golden years.
Thus my initial questions. I would not recommend staying the course if the company is already publicly owned or if Zack doesn't have a vested interest in the company's future. But if he is in the situation I was in, I would recommend he stay the course for the time being. I know quite a few folks that quit a year or six months before the buyout because they didn't feel "fulfilled". They are now working for another company where if they stayed the course they could be millionaires.
• Jerry H. in Bismarck, ND writes:
My advise to Zach is get out now and find something you like. There has never been a time in my life like now with opportunities available to pursue a different career.
I became an IT professional right out of college with a career lasting 31 years. It became burdensome the last 5 years with me hoping my layoff would be announced so I could collect my severance and move on. When it finally happened I knew I didn’t want to work in IT anymore. I became a corrections officer at a maximum security prison which was enjoyable until COVID ruined that. Too much masking for me. I moved from that and now drive school bus.
Bottom line is what I’m doing now is relatively stress-free and my mood and relationships improved.
Jerry adds:
With the students as well as the inmates if you set your rules and enforce them they tend to fall in line. Be firm, fair and consistent. Ensuring they know there are consequences for their actions and helping them make better decisions increases your chance of successfully managing your school bus or cell block.
Keep up the great work on the column. The content has a great blue-collar feel to it. I’m not on social media so your column is as close as I get.
• Gabe writes:
I can relate to Zach. I worked as a valet parking manager for the better part of a decade. Fun job, met tons of celebrities, drove every car under the sun, and made decent money. But the thankless and 24/7/365 nature of the business burned me out, so I left. A couple years later, I got sucked back in…and it was a total mistake. Ended up in a no-win situation forcing a total restructuring to try to meet budget goals. Disaster. Did the best I could, but after getting blindsided on some BS by the client, I tendered my resignation.
I didn’t know what the heck to do and I didn’t have much career search savvy. I had a wife, small child and a mortgage, but I’d reached the end of the line and had to make a move.
My pivot was to go back to school and get a Masters degree in marketing. I picked marketing as it was my favorite business specialization during my undergrad and it was a 10-month hybrid program. I figured that my prior ops experience, client relations, leading/managing teams and people would add up well with this graduate degree. During the program, I was consecutively recruited by two of my classmates. They had no idea I was looking for a job. Well, I took the first job, but the real prize was a marketing job in healthcare for a great company. It took about 6 months for the stars to align, but I finally got hired and have been there 4 1/2 years now. I’ve been recently promoted and have carved out quite a niche for myself. I’ve also seen my salary increase 60+% during that time and when the pandemic hit we were sent home – literally two days after my son was born – and have worked about 95% remote ever since. Never got furloughed like so many in the industry. Plus, the work-life balance, benefits, etc. have allowed my wife and I to have two more children (thinking about another
), relocate to a less expensive and more family-oriented city, pretty much flipping our lives totally around in the positive.
It wasn’t easy and there were trade-offs, but in my case, approaching each opportunity with the maximum openness led to some major surprises and what I would consider a major life adventure that’s been amazing for my family and I.
My advice is not to wait until you’re burned out. In my case, I let things get so bad at work that it took a nasty toll that still resonates to this day.
• Chris B. in Florida writes:
Hi, Joe — Regarding Zach, the guy who wants to make a big life change (and I say ‘life change’ because it will affect more than just where he goes to work), I have a suggestion. I do business mentoring with SCORE — great place for us old guys with knowledge and experience to help the next generation of great American entrepreneurs — and the first question I always ask is:
“What can you do that people will pay you to do?”
Until you have that answer, you’d better stay at your job as long as you can stand it. I was a mid-to-high exec a while back and spent a year fulfilling a corporate dictate by flying around laying off most of my best people while pulling strings to get them the best separation packages I could. At the end of that year, I realized I was done with that life. I started a business, with my more capable wife as a partner, and we did okay — but it was in the same field, and we found a way to make it work (like Rule #1: No shop talk in the hot tub).
If Zach wants to make a career change while working for someone else in the same field, it’s a job for LinkedIn; if he wants to make a wholesale change, he should start with that first question and move forward.
p.s. I was talking with my family doctor, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria. I postulated that Costco is like shopping in the Soviet Union: you wait in line after line, you have to show your papers, you stand in line for a crumb at the sample table, you only buy what they decide you can buy… She laughed and said “It’s exactly like that!"
• Anonymous writes:
First time, long time. Really appreciate the community you’re developing. Have thought about emailing a few times but the career-change question prompted me to actually respond.
When I was in college, I wanted to be a sports writer. While in school, I was hired by my hometown paper to do just that. I started out covering high school sports, then moved to a small college beat, then a major Division-I university and, occasionally, an NFL team. The 90’s were a great time for that as I caught the tail end of local papers still making a difference. But the downsizing began and the money was awful. I remember reading a story about teachers complaining that their starting salary was too low to attract good candidates and thinking, “I’ve done this five years and don’t make anywhere near that!” So I began looking for an off-ramp.
I ended up working in Admissions at a public residential high school for high-achieving students. Basically, I took my communications talents and transitioned them in a different direction. A couple years of that led to a nice pay increase when I became the Admissions Director of a similar school in another state. That was where I met my wife.
After a few years of doing that job, I began to get tired of it. Much like your questioner, I wanted something more. We had two children and my priorities had changed. A friend of my wife’s suggested moving into finance, becoming a broker. I knew nothing about that other than stocks and bonds existed. My degree was in journalism. “Aw, you’ve got the skills. We’ll teach you what you need to know.” Sixteen years later, he was right. My lack of knowledge actually served me well because I didn’t have the ego to think I knew everything so I put in the effort to learn. And the communication skills gave me a leg up on several people because every business needs someone who can convey ideas in a concise, easy-to-read manner.
My advice to the original emailer would be to examine themselves with a critical lens, but think of their abilities instead of the job. What do I do well? What do I enjoy doing? What are the parts of my job that are fun? Look at your skills and think about how it fits in a position, then find something you want to do, knowing every job will have some aspects that are dull/boring/a drag. Don’t be afraid to step out and admit you don’t know everything, but show you’re willing to learn. Good luck!
• Another Anonymous writes:
I am starting a career pivot. Still working my 9-5 but going back to school to become an airline pilot. This is completely different than what I have done for the last 25+ years. It will likely take me 2-1/2-3 years to build the time to get there but this is something I have wanted to do since I was a kid.
• Triple B in NC says:
I've made two big career changes. In my 30s, I had a chance to leave the non-profit world I started in to jump into a political job at the state government level. That was a complete professional change but my family got to live in the same city we'd been settled in. It was a great opportunity, I learned a lot, and built a good network. Then after several years of that, I was done with the political climate and made the jump back toward NGO work in my 40s, but for a completely different kind of organization and in a completely different role. It also meant uprooting the family to relocate 3,000 miles away to a different region of the country.
I would just say that sometimes you know it is time for a change, but look for the right moment. I've done well, have a better financial situation and job stability at a place that treats me well, and it's been worth it. Never would have had a shot at my current role had I not made the first pivot into government when the chance came. Before we'd make a jump though, the wife and I made some specific criteria benchmarks that had to be met: stuff like salary, paid moving expenses, ability to find housing, and enough other up-sides to make it worth it. If there weren't enough boxes checked, I would stay put and keep waiting it out. I've seen big pivots not work out so well for others who didn't take a good hard look at the specific circumstances before they leaped.
Even though the work climate is better, it was much harder than I thought to uproot our lives in our 40s and lose all our hometown connections. We still miss that tight community we moved away from. A complete career change in the same city where we kept our culture and same circle of friends was much easier. Food for thought.
• Jim T. in Sandy Eggo checks in:
I’ve gone from being a newspaper reporter to a technical writer for high-tech startups to being a field representative for the Boy Scouts. Now I work as a project manager for a medical device company.
Looking back over 40 years of adult jobs (I had a paper route, mowed lawns, shoveled driveways, and washed dishes as a kid before that), the job I loved most, where I looked forward to going to work every day, was flipping burgers at the local Jack in the Box! I’m still friends with the folks I worked with there, and looking through a photo album from that time while visiting an old roommate last summer made me realize how much I actually loved that job. And it was the people that made that job great: I was friends with everyone I worked with, we had our regulars who were fun and often funny, and while the work was hard you were usually smiling while doing it. I think that’s the key to whether you enjoy a job or not – the people.
So my advice to Zach would be to try to figure out what it is that’s causing that itch. Every job has its boring moments, as well as moments of reward. But it’s the people you work with – fellow staff and customers – who make a job more than bearable.
Sally & Leroy
• John H. writes:
We have two resident eagles that spend a lot of time overseeing their domain from the top of one of our large fir trees. We have named them Sally and Leroy just because.
The Things The Ts See In Portugal on their latest winter vacation
• Mike T. says Cindy T. saw this guy out fishing while she was on a boat cruise. Seems like an aggressive fishing location:
The ultimate compliment to a guy who can back a Yukon into a tight spot: 'What kind of boat do you have?'
• Keith, who was looking for workout advice last week (he's very thankful for the advice, BTW), writes:
Small humble brag here as well. Probably 7 years ago, my last vehicle was a Yukon and my now wife and I were headed to a concert at Red Rocks. Those are dirt parking lots with no lines so they can get a little narrow. The narrower the lane, the harder to park obviously. People were tailgating in the lanes, it's tight. I find a spot and throw it in reverse and back in with no adjustments. Get out and start walking to meet other friends somewhere else in the lot. A guy that was tailgating had watched me back in and says, "What kind of boat do you have"? Confused, I responded with, "what do you mean"? He says, "I figured if you can back up like that, you must have some sort of boat. Not sure how you got in there so easily". My wife still brings it up to this day. The compliment had more of an effect on her than it did me, to my benefit of course.
The topic of backing into parking spaces has really taken off & there's even a little bit of drama in the comments, which isn't a bad thing
• Jeff M. in Ohio is not happy with Miles O.'s comment earlier this week:
Miles O. can go f himself with his phallus symbol comment in his prick mobile Lexus. I routinely pull trailers with 10,000 lb plus loads of hay, tractors, track loaders, etc. I have to have a big truck and occasionally I end up driving said truck to "town" and have to park it within sight of his precious Lexus.
The one allowance I'll make is it does irritate me when people leave their bumper hitches in (I almost exclusively pull gooseneck trailers, so I don't have that issue). It's not a huge deal to pull the hitch out, so people should be doing that in a parking lot
• Luke O in WI writes:
It’s been a while since I’ve written in, but thought I’d add to the conversation around backing into parking spots.
First I’d like to give a shout out to Dan K in AZ who has contributed to Screencaps a few times. He is my co-worker and my co-owner of our league champion fantasy football team in the work league.
Anyways on to some comments. Our company mandates backing in to parking spots. We work for a construction company in the utility space and it is pretty common throughout the industry. Safety statistics and safety culture is a big part of the industry and always making your first movement forward in a vehicle is a way to cut down on the number of backing incidents.
In addition to job sites, they also rolled it out to office locations probably 3-5 years ago. I’m sure I had an eye-roll reaction to it at the time, but definitely see the value in it now and carry it over to parking whenever even not driving a truck. On a side note, we’ve made a calendar with pictures of all the crappy parking jobs at the office over the last year or so.
Definitely lots of gold mines there … maybe sad really and I wonder if the boss man gets worried that he’s paying people to do a job when they park like that.
Kinsey:
I have heard from numerous people about company policy on backing trucks into spots. Safety, safety, safety!
I have to tell this story real fast about our trip to Menards last night to pick up a vanity. Customers are told to pull INTO a spot where there's a number to call. I called it. The guy says he'll be right out. I ask if I should back the sled right on back to the door.
I WAS DENIED!
Talk about a kick in the gut. The Menards guy told me to leave the sled parked right there and he'd bring out the forklift. In the end, he was right because it gave the fork operator room to maneuver, but in the moment, all I could think about were Screencaps readers looking at the sled pulled into a spot and what you'd think.
• Cypress, Texas Shawn writes:
I'm in oil & gas country which presents tons of project work and if you work on these sites, most of them require you to back in for emergency evacuation purposes; you get used to it down here. I don't have a problem with it in the general public and as mentioned by a few, it's easier to back in. In either case, you have to back up at least once unless you pull through a spot. Whatever, everyone just needs to exhibit a little patience these days.
On a similar note, I wish people would stop pulling through spots which then points them against the flow of parking lot lane one-way traffic.
Portugese beer
Mike T. checked in right as I was about to hit publish. He wants you guys to see a Super Bock mobile beer trailer. He says it's the official beer of Portugal. Who am I to argue with that. I've never been to Portugal.
That's it. My phone Internet connection worked through this post. We made it.
Now we get ready for SIX Wild Card Weekend games. Enjoy the weekend. The weather is going to be garbage across the country except for the Californians, Floridians and the people hanging out in the Arizona desert.
Take care. Find your fun this weekend. Smile. Have a good time like WWII vet Harry. Channel that man's energy this weekend.
Email: joekinsey@gmail.com