Yesterday I had a quick lunch at a Chick-Fil-A restaurant, reading my book and just relaxing and taking a break. A gentleman near me wasn’t relaxing. He was interviewing. It was the most depressing attack on dignity I think I’d ever heard.

I imagine among fast food joints there are worse jobs. I worked at McDonalds when I was 16 and it was a wonderful opportunity to learn important concepts like “graduating from college” and “never, ever working in the food service industry.” This fellow was older and had obviously done a lot in his life. He had military experience, had had many jobs. And yet here was this greasy, middle-aged Chick-Fil-A manager asking him weighty questions as he interviewed for a minimum wage job at a goddamned fast food joint.

“Who are your heroes and why?”

I tried hard not to pay attention. I really wanted to read my book but as automobile crashes tend to draw the eye, I simply couldn’t help trying to bend an ear to listen in. The interviewee was facing away from me so I couldn’t really hear all of his answers. He tried gamely to tell this jackass what he needed to hear to offer him a job slinging fries or working the cash register.

“When you’re getting ready for work, what kinds of things do you pay special attention to?”

Lacing my shoes? Assuring myself that my underwear is crisply starched? Determine whether to wax my ass?

“Tell me how you work with a team.”

I find teams are better when they leave me alone.

And, of course, they’re performing this interview out in the restaurant at a spare table. Not that there’s anything wrong with working there, quite honestly. There’s nothing shameful about it. But be realistic in your interviewing demands if you’re offering minimum wage work.

My site statistics are, frankly, insane. Of the 5.8 million hits I’ve received since May of last year, a staggering 16% of visitors arrive to see my Xbox 360 FAQ. Coming in a distant second is the Photography category because people want to download one of my high res wallpapers. Then there’s a smattering of WordPress plugin seekers and results start getting noisy with spam and other things.

What it boils down to is I don’t really have a readership. I blame myself, obviously, because if I had things to read that had merit readers would come. Funny how that works! I have grazers, really. Lots of them. Which is dandy in that I get clicks and make enough money to pay my hosting, but I haven’t developed any kind of community following aside from a few stalwarts.

Then I had an epiphany: I’ll BRIBE you! That’s right, I’ll give you money just for reading. Well, reading and commenting. Well, reading and commenting and getting a question right.

How I’ll bribe you to visit

“That sounds (pathetic) great, ColdForged! How exactly do you plan to accomplish this?” you may ask.

Easy. At the end of every post I make there will be a highlighted question. Be the first person to comment and correctly answer the question and I’ll put $1 in your Paypal account. That’s all there is to it. As a technical note I’ll verify your email address upon winning and send the money to whatever Paypal account you desire.

Obviously the first people to see the question will have a better opportunity to answer correctly and get money. As such, you may wish to subscribe to my feed. That’s entirely up to you. I don’t have a posting schedule. I post when it’s convenient and whenever I have something to post, apparently regardless of quality. I may not — and almost certainly won’t — post every day. I may post multiple times a day. But for every “ColdForged’s $1 Question of the Day” you see, someone will get a buck. NOTE: make sure to get it right the first time as only your first answer will count. For instance in today’s question you can’t simply leave two comments each with one of the players names.

I should note that I have comment moderation enabled. If you’ve never left a comment before, your comment will drop in the moderation queue. Fear not! It’s there. The only winning criteria is that you have the correct answer first. This could also explain why the answer isn’t there when you comment and you may think you’ve won only to find out later another comment was sitting in moderation. I am the final authority on who is the winner of any particular question.

So, why am I doing this? I figure it will, if nothing else, be an interesting experiment. I get enough from my Yahoo Publisher ads to cover it. And if I drag a few more people in here for the actual content then it ain’t all bad.

I know there will be detractors. “He can’t get people to read his site, so now he’s paying them!” True, I came right out and said it. I know it’s quite frankly a silly plan. But I can’t get the idea out of my head and it’s just the kind of thing that hits me right. I’ve never claimed to be anything but silly.

How long will this go on?

I don’t know. If no one ever answers the question it won’t last long. If the same person wins for 6 months straight, well, it might be time to rethink. If it seems like fun and gets some traction I’ll keep it going indefinitely.

When does it start?

Right now. We’ll start off with a relatively easy one. I make no guarantees about future questions.

ColdForged’s $1 Question of the Day: Which of the two Carolina Hurricanes players that went to the All Star game scored first in that game?

The first correct commenter gets the money, no catches.

WINNER! ByTor scores the correct answer with Eric Staal.

Do you recall that cartoon with Chester, the little, bouncy, yappy dog that flitted between the feet of big bulldog Spike? “Hey Spike! Hey Spike! What are you gonna do, Spike?” He’s annoying, constantly in poor Spike’s face. Spike can tell Chester to shut up and Chester might shut up for about a minute then pop right back up. The Windows XP installer perfectly emulates this activity.

“Sure Chester, I’ll let you install the updates you wish to install to plug the security hole you didn’t patch in the last update 2 days ago. Thanks a ton for letting me work while you do that. All done? Great. Now’s not a good time for me, so please shut the hell up for a while.”

Then, like clockwork, Chester pokes his little head up. “Hey Spike, wanna reboot now?”

“How ’bout now, Spike?”

“Wanna reboot yet?”

“I’m busy right now, Chester. Go away.”

Moping.

“Now?”

And it’s hard to just ignore because, as good UI design dictates, the window Chester uses to ask pops to the foreground so if you are, for instance, typing a blog entry you’ll have to reach out to the mouse and click on the browser window to get focus back.

I’d like to throttle Chester.

Please note this was taken from another post as I realized that I really didn’t want to spoil the words about my friend with my bellyaching. If you read the original version of that one, you’ve seen this.

I started my “ColdForged’s Code For A Cure” program when I learned of Mike’s disease. In essence, in lieu of asking for money for myself for the work I put in on any of my plugins I requested that people donate whatever amount they thought fair to my Paypal account and I would donate it to the local chapter of the ALS Association and, if that amount was over $5, I would send them a “Strike Out ALS” bracelet to wear. I’m happy to say that several people found it in themselves to donate a total of $191 dollars to this cause.

I’m also, frankly, a bit disappointed at this number. Let’s put this in context. 7 people, to whom I extend enormous gratitude, found $191 to donate. This month, so far, 1,100 people have downloaded one of my plugins. Over the lifetime of Code For A Cure, over 50,000 people downloaded at least one plugin. There are over a thousand comments in my blog for those plugins — over 600 for the image headlines plugin and over 400 for the spelling checker — the vast majority of which are support requests. And 7 people donated.

Admittedly, I’m not doing something as sexy and worthwhile with the money like getting an iPod for the Star Wars Kid or using it to purchase a PS3 and hit it with a sledgehammer in front of everyone but I somehow expected more than 7 people. If that sounds bitter, it is a bit I fully admit and it’s unworthy. But then I think of my friend and all of the other people suffering the indignity of one of the most cruel diseases in existence and I honestly can’t help it.

Regardless, I do extend my gratitude to the donors. And for those of you who haven’t, perhaps in lieu of donating do something that Mike’s family recommended people do instead of sending flowers, something that Mike likely would have appreciated far more. Donate 2 hours of your time and do something good for your community.

We mark time in diverse ways. The easiest way for me to mark time now is through Julia. When she was but 2 weeks old — sleeping fitfully, eating ravenously, crying in a tiny, shuddering way — my good friend Mike Andrews learned he had ALS. Unlike most diseases, his doctors that day almost certainly told him precisely how this would end because they could. ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is predictable. It does the same thing every time and always has the same outcome. So as my daughter was starting her life my friend learned that his was ending. And he learned that it was ending in possibly the worst way you’d want it to end.

About 4 months later (note: that one has some angry language because, well, I was angry) Julia was developing her personality. She grinned, laughed, and enjoyed baths. Mike was seeing more and more debilitating effects of his disease, struggling to speak and walk.

My daughter is now 3 years and 8 months old. She’s a growing girl. A person with all that word entails: walking, talking, eating, snuggling and loving. In the starkest of contrasts my friend, Mike Andrews, died on Friday at age 45.

It is not hyperbole to say that the world needs more Mikes not less. Caring, humane, witty, sharp. When Mike came into work on Mondays and happened to ask how your weekend was, he wasn’t asking to be polite. He looked you in the eye and asked you how your weekend was because he wanted to know. He listened. He spoke, in a rich Texas drawl that was never tamed, and he laughed a laugh free of malice or embarrassment. I laugh as I recall him putting on his “professional façade” when reporting his status at meetings but always just under the surface was that wit and laughter, waiting and looking for an opening.

He contributed of his time and energy in all aspects of his life, from work and family to his community. I’ve met people in my career that I consider to be honest, hard workers. Mike headed the list, without peer. Even when this disease took most of his physical abilities away, he used what little he had left spending, quite literally, hours typing emails to people, lobbying to support his efforts for conservation and better stewardship of the environment.

I’d like to say I knew Mike well but I didn’t, not nearly well enough. What I do know makes me wish I knew more.

Farewell, my friend. May you finally rest in the peace you so utterly deserve.

(EDIT: removed my complaining… doesn’t belong here.)