Good Poker Players Don't Drink Tim Hortons Coffee

If you are someone who:

1. Purchases caffeinated beverages on a regular basis, and
2. Gets inordinately excited about injecting gambling into your everyday life,

then you've just hit one of the most wonderful times of the year: Roll Up The Rim To Win season at Tim Hortons. Roll Up The Rim To Win (henceforth RRTW because I'm too lazy to capitalize that many words consecutively) is an annual contest lasting from early February through late March/early April. It gives Canadians (and some Americans) an opportunity to win prizes for doing exactly what they do the rest of the year: buying coffee. Cars, TVs and cold hard cash are this year's big ticket offerings to aid in swallowing the cold coffees and hard muffins purchased from your local Tim Hortons.

It's hard to overstate the relevance of RRTW and Tim Hortons in general to Canadian culture. Today, while reflecting on this, I cracked a joke on Facebook about how this promotion proves that I'd rather enjoy a chance at small stakes gambling than a chance at a good coffee. That got me to thinking: just what are the odds of winning on RRTW, and what do they mean to me as a degenerate gambler? I embarked on a mathematical quest to find the answer to that question, and I intend to share the journey with you, my dear reader.

Caffienating Kenny Rogers

To begin, I decided to look at a popular method of calculating expected return from a bet known as expected value (eV). The concept of eV is best known to poker players, although anybody who's fortunate/unfortunate enough to make a living gambling is intimately familiar with its concept and calculation. The numerical eV of a proposition is described by the following equation:

eV = Probability of winning * Return on a winning bet – Probability of losing * Cost of making the bet

Now, since I'm a STEMbro with a dust-collecting degree in math, I find that concept pretty elementary. However, since not everyone spent their fourth year of university constructing BIBDs and applying combinatorial models to mundane situations, I'll explain the above by way of an unrealistic but simple example. 

Suppose you have a rather dim friend. You offer this friend—let's call him something overtly Canadian, like Moose—a proposition gambling on a series of coin flips. Every time you win, he pays you $12. Every time he wins, you pay him $10.

You are not a very good friend.

More importantly, we can calculate your eV as follows:

Probability of winning = 1/2 = 0.5 (You may be ripping Moose off, but at least you're using a fair coin. You always have 1/2 chance to win a fair coin flip)

Return on a winning bet = $12

Probability of losing = 1/2 (That's the probability of losing the coin flip. Your probability of losing friends may be even greater, you manipulative fuck)

Cost of making the bet = $10

eV = P_win * R_win – P_loss * C_loss

eV = 12 * 0.5 – 10 * 0.5

eV = +$1.00

In short, your expected value on this bet is a dollar per flip—if you flip 10 coins, you expect to win 5 bets and make a $10 profit, giving the stated average of $1 per flip. Of course, actual results might be as extreme as Moose winning $100 or you winning $120, but in the land of probabilities, it's all about what you can infer before the coin is flipped. Expected value is about what should happen, not what could happen. 

Note that, intuitively, Moose's eV for the game is opposite yours: -$1.00. You quickly find yourself unwelcome in Riverdale.

I Don't Want To Flip My Coins, I Want To Spend Them On Coffee!

Coming back to reality, let's set a baseline before we delve into the eV of RRTW. McDonald's runs a promotion year-round where they offer a free medium coffee after drinking 7 McDonald's coffees. While this isn't gambling, this promotion still has a calculable value. I'll cover some bases here where the numbers are simple (like Moose) rather than repeated divisions by hundreds of millions.

I want to know the value of McDonalds' coffee promotion. Well, after 7 coffees, my next one is free, so I'd be inclined to guess that the value of the promotion is 1/7 the price of a coffee. However, that free coffee also has a redeemable customer loyalty reward sticker. In other words, I always start with one sticker of the seven I need, and I'll only have to pay for six more coffees to get my second free coffee. This cycle repeats in perpetuity with the third free coffee, fourth free coffee, etc as long as I drink McDonald's coffee. Thus, the more coffee I drink, the more that the value of McDonald's customer loyalty program approaches 1/6 the price of a medium coffee ($1.82 tax in), or 30.333¢. This isn't an expected value because there are no probabilities, and we're not gambling. This 30ish cents is just straight up added value from that promotion.

Now, let's get back to Timmie's. They're kind enough (read: legally bound) to have a very long rules sheet explaining exactly the kinds of things we need to know for our calculations, namely, number of game cups, number of prizes and retail value of prizes. That can be found here. I'll snip the relevant information:

They're giving away 40 cars valued at $24990 each.

They're giving away 120 TVs valued at $5000 each.

They're giving away 25000 $100 gift cards. The value of those is left as an exercise for the reader.

They're giving away 100 $5000 CIBC cash cards.

Finally, they're giving away 45428910 prizes of food/drink. They even mention that the split is around 70% coffee and 30% donut, so we can quickly calculate that there are 31800237 coffees valued at $1.80 each (medium, tax in) and 13628673 donuts valued at $1.12 each (again, that's with Trudeau's rake included). Prices vary from province to province; I'm using my local costs for all calculations.

Meanwhile, I'm going to restate an assumption made in my preamble: you're buying coffee anyway. It costs you nothing extra to play roll up, so C_loss = 0. Conveniently, when C_loss = 0, it doesn't matter what your P_loss is, because it's multiplied out. I could explain and calculate it, but I don't need to for this exercise and I'm already tackling some hefty topics without delving into that. The point: if you were buying coffee anyway, RRTW represents only +eV for you. Same with McDonald's: if you're buying coffee anyway, you're getting something (a free coffee! eventually) for nothing. Added value.

Now we've got some grinding to do. Feel free to skip this if you're willing to take my word on the math.

eV = P_win * R_win – P_loss * C_loss

eV = P_win * R_win

This isn't quite as simple as the coin-flipping scenario above. There are multiple prizes each with different chances to win and different values. Since I'm a mathist, you'll take my word that we take the sum of all P_win * R_win:

eV = [(40/272598720) * $24990] + [(120/272598720) * $5000] + [(25000/272598720) * $100] + [(100/272598720) * $5000] + [(13628673/272598720) * $1.12] + [(31800237/272598720) * $1.80]

eV = 0.367 + 0.220 + 0.183 + 0.917 + 5.599 + 20.998 

eV = +28.284¢

In other words, your average cup of coffee during RRTW adds an expected value of a whopping 28 cents and change. Any poker player who had as much spare time on her hands as I do would quickly conclude that, long term, she should drink McDonald's coffee because it adds a value that exceeds the expected value of Tims' coffee. An interesting finding, and bad news for any aspiring professional rim rollers.

It's worth pointing out that the bulk of the +eV in RRTW comes from the commonly found coffee/donut win. 40 cars is a lot of cars, but you could still buy 40 cars much cheaper than you could buy 31.8 million coffees or 13.6 million donuts. (At that point, I'd hope they'd give you a bulk discount, but I digress)

But I Want A Pint of Coffee!

This leads to the obvious criticism of these calculations: anyone who cared enough to consider and abide by the eV of their morning coffee gamble would likely try to maximize the values of their wins. My above calculations are assuming all wins are a donut and a medium coffee. What if someone wants a muffin ($1.46 total) and the biggest, most expensive drink allowed under the contest rules (a large chocolate mocha at $4.40)? Well, that's their John A. MacDonald given right, damn it! 

In fact, the benevolent lord of donuts set forth in the tablets of testimony that someone can have exactly that. The odds and prices of the other loot remains static, but if we adjust our calculations for a min/maxing gambler:

eV = P_win * R_win – P_loss * C_loss

eV = P_win * R_win

eV = [(40/272598720) * $24990] + [(120/272598720) * $5000] + [(25000/272598720) * $100] + [(100/272598720) * $5000] + [(13628673/272598720) * $1.46] + [(31800237/272598720) * $4.40]

eV = 0.367 + 0.220 + 0.183 + 0.917 + 7.299 + 51.329

eV = +60.315¢

Which presents Tims' promotion as twice as worthwhile as McDonalds' promotion... until one then considers Mickey D's rules for customer rewards redemption. The most expensive drink available for free there is a medium cappucino or latte, coming in at a tidy $3.78 with tax. Multiplying this by 1/6 as earlier, the value of McDonalds' promotion rises to a more comparable 63¢... still beating the new mark set by the proprietors of RRTW. Long story short, an optimizer still couldn't make RRTW have a higher +eV than the value found at McDonald's, even if said optimizer was willing to contract chocolate-flavored diabetes in the name of expected value.

Interestingly, if you check Tims' estimation of the total prizes they'll be giving out, they assume the cheapest small drink and the cheapest baked good in their calculations, and while I'll spare you another number sprawl, that works out to an +eV of +23.236¢... so, in their own opinion, your +eV from participating in their promotion is beaten by almost 7¢ per coffee as compared to the inherent value in a McDonald's coffee.

Regardless of all this definition stretching, my original point stands. Practically, even if you're going out of your way to get more expensive drinks and foods for free when you do win, Tims' promotion isn't even as good as what the crowd across the road are running all year. (Pro tip: Neither is their coffee)

This statement finds its logical conclusion in this final point: we've been running under the assumption all this time that our gambler is buying coffee anyway. The frugal and astute gambler probably makes his coffee at home like a sensible goddamned human, and all of a sudden the values of each chain's coffee drop as follows:

McDonalds' value: 30.333¢ - $1.82 = -$1.51667 per coffee bought

Tims' value: 28.284¢ - $1.80 = -$1.51716 per coffee bought

Grinding your own beans: I don't know. I don't care. Much less than above numbers. Read CBC pontificate about that if you're not sick of price-of-coffee ramblings yet.

Con-brew-sion

Really, at the end of the day, this whole thing is an exercise in futility: the smartest person makes their coffee at home, saving their twonies for dice in an alley. Thing is, those of us who enjoy gambling couldn't care less about a couple cents here and a dollar there; that's a small price to pay for the rampant excitement of the next cup definitely hiding a car under the rim rather than another invitation politely asking us to play again. With that settled, that's all I have for today. Join me next time as I explain how much I love my freshly won 2016 Honda Civic. 

Note: This post originally stated McDonalds' most expensive medium hot beverage as a hot chocolate, but as my friend Amanda kindly pointed out on twitter, this isn't the case. Numbers have been reshuffled accordingly and now I'm even more right than before! 

The Most Convincing Take-down of Privilege I've Ever Read

The below is an excerpt from David Simon's The Corner: A Year In The Life of An Inner City Neighbourhood. I think it stands alone incredibly well as an essay, and unfortunately couldn't find it anywhere, so I'm posting it here to share with friends. Obvious content is not mine, etc. disclaimers apply.

This war, like the last one, will not be won. The truth in this is nakedly visible—if not to those crafting the tactics and strategy, then to those standing on the bottom, looking up at all the sound and fury. To the men and women of Fayette Street, it isn’t about tightening the screws, or raising the stakes, or embracing a few more constitutional twists and turns. It isn’t about three-time loser statutes or drug courts or kicking in the right door of the right stash house. It isn’t that all these efforts don’t work quite well enough, or that more of them will work better. It’s that none of it works at all. The tactics are flawless, but the strategy is nonexistent. 
At rock bottom, down here where Fayette crosses Mount Street and runs up the hill to intersect with Monroe, no one is fooled—just as no grunt up to his ass in rice paddy could ever be fooled. Here on Fayette, every fiend and tout and runner understands; they know with a certainty to rival the faith of any religion that no one will miss his daily blast. 
Against that, there will be no victory. Not if you come up Fayette Street with bulldozers and knock over every rowhouse between downtown and Bon Secours. Shit on that; the slingers and fiends would be out here in the rubble, slinging pink-top vials. Not if you call out the National Guard or put police officers on every corner; do that and they’ll move five blocks, or ten blocks, or twenty, until there’s an open-air market savaging some new neighborhood and you’ve run out of cops and guardsmen. 
But you still want it to work. Of course you do. 
Try napalm. 
Seriously. One of those Rolling Thunder air strikes might do it. Because that Marine commander with the sage wit had it right: Only if you’re willing to destroy the village can you be absolutely assured of saving it. Don’t bother with surgical strikes for the Fayette Streets of this nation; if you want victory, you’ve got to send these people right back to the proverbial Stone Age, because anyone left standing will be back on their corners the next day. Or better still, some New York Boy will figure out how to boil down the jellied gas you’ve been dropping, and the fiends will be lining up to buy that new, wild ride in $10 vials. 
A cleansing of that kind might actually work. But of course, we can’t do something even modestly genocidal and expect to stay the same ourselves, to maintain the myth of a national ideal. A war waged openly on the underclass would necessitate some self-inflicted scars, some damage to the collective soul of whatever kind of nation we think we are. And if we can’t stomach that kind of horror show, perhaps the only real alternative is to keep pretending, to keep telling ourselves that it’s only a matter of a stronger law or a better mousetrap or this year’s model of shit-spinning politician swearing that he’s the one to really get tough on crime. 
So we ignore these dying neighborhoods, or run from them if they creep too close. In the end we know we can always cash in our chips, climb to the embassy roof and ride that last Huey to suburbia or some well-policed yuppie enclave in the best quadrants of our cities. We’ve got a right to walk away because it’s our world; hell, we’ve got the tax returns to prove it. 
But how far can we run from New York and Detroit, from Atlanta and Newark, from West Baltimore and East St. Louis? How many county lines must we cross before the damned of these cities will no longer follow? How many private security guards can we hire? How many motion sensors do we need? This is different, this war, and instinctively we know that retreat from it can never be total. These people that we’re ready to abandon, they are not an alien foe—their tribe is our own. And these battlefields are not half a world away in places easily forgotten. This is us, America, at war with ourselves. In some weird way, this is our own manifest destiny coming back to bite us in the ass, the pure-pedigreed descendant of all those God-fearing forefathers plunging into the wilderness, stripping the land, looking to feed off their new world, killing and being killed, opening up the east and marching west. Now, it’s a twisted replay of that devouring, except that this time, we’re the fodder. 
We know this deep down; we read the newspapers, we watch the television. We have and they have not, and therefore, they need us. They need us so badly that they’ll cross the lines and dodge the rent-a-cops and climb any wall we build. And in the end, there is no real surprise when you hear that your neighbor’s car is gone. Or that the counter guy at the local 7-Eleven got aced in a robbery last night. Or that someone you work with pulled up to the pumps at the Route 32 Exxon and got carjacked. There should be no surprise when you come to that hideous moment for which you’ve spent a lifetime preparing, when you or someone you love walks down the wrong block, or into the wrong parking garage. In an instant, the illusions are obliterated and the reckoning—their reckoning—is yours as well. 
Thirty years gone and now the drug corner is the center of its own culture. On Fayette Street, the drugs are no longer what they sell or use, but who they are. We may have begun by fighting a war on drugs, but now we’re beating down those who use them. And along Fayette Street, the enemy is everywhere, so that what began as a wrongheaded tactical mission has been transformed into slow-motion civil war. If we never seriously contemplate alternatives, if we forever see the order of battle in terms of arrests and prisons and lawyers, then perhaps we deserve three more decades of failure. 
In the end, we’ll blame them. We always do. 
And why the hell not? They’ve ignored our warnings and sanctions, they’ve taken our check-day bribe and done precious little with it, they’ve turned our city streets into drug bazaars. Why shouldn’t they take the blame? 
If it was us, if it was our lonesome ass shuffling past the corner of Monroe and Fayette every day, we’d get out, wouldn’t we? We’d endure. Succeed. Thrive. No matter what, no matter how, we’d find the fucking exit. 
If it was our fathers firing dope and our mothers smoking coke, we’d pull ourselves past it. We’d raise ourselves, discipline ourselves, teach ourselves the essentials of self-denial and delayed gratification that no one in our universe ever demonstrated. And if home was the rear room of some rancid, three-story shooting gallery, we’d rise above that, too. We’d shuffle up the stairs past nodding fiends and sullen dealers, shut the bedroom door, turn off the television, and do our schoolwork. Algebra amid the stench of burning rock; American history between police raids. And if there was no food on the table, we’re certain we could deal with that. We’d lie about our age to cut taters and spill grease and sling fries at the sub shop for five-and-change-an-hour, walking every day past the corner where friends are making our daily wage in ten minutes. 
No matter. We’d persevere, wouldn’t we? We’d work that job by night and go to class by day, by some miracle squeezing a quality education from the disaster that is the Baltimore school system. We’d do all the work, we’d pay whatever the price. And when all the other children are out in the street, learning the corner world, priming themselves for the only life they’ve ever known, we’d be holed up in some shithole of a rowhouse with our textbooks and yellow highlighter, cramming for finals. Come payday, we wouldn’t blow that minimum-wage check on Nikes, or Fila sweat suits, or Friday night movies at Harbor Park with the neighborhood girls. No fucking way, brother, because we pulled self-esteem out of a dark hole somewhere and damned if our every desire isn’t absolutely in check. We don’t need to buy any status; no, we can save every last dollar, or invest it, maybe. And in the end, we know, we’ll head off to our college years shining like a new dime, swearing never to set foot on West Fayette Street again. 
That’s the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores—when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters—when we can glide on and feel only fear, we’re well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we’ve arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound. 
It’s a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily panies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it’s not chance and circumstance, that opportunity itself isn’t the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values—we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us. 
Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkly assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now possess. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith. 
Why? The truth is plain: 
We were not born to be niggers.

#oldmenatwork, We Hardly Knew Ye (Or: How I was convinced that gender equality is not yet a thing)

So, according to Twitter, I've tweeted a lot less lately than I used to. Like, way less.
There are myriad reasons for this: I don't message anyone on ICQ or MSN anymore, either. I blog roughly as often as George R.R. Martin publishes a Song of Ice & Fire book. Hell, I once bragged to people in real life about posting a top comment on a top post on digg.
...I'm going to stop with the en gratis-ing before further embarrassing myself.

Hobbies change, habits change, and technology changes even faster. I spend my time digesting social media elsewhere. More importantly: I now have a job where I actually have shit to do for most of an 8-hour shift and there are real judgments &/or repercussions for playing with my phone all day.
But I didn't always have this job.
In the 6+ years I had my old job, for anyone seeing this who hasn't followed me on twitter for years, I heard more than a couple things that I thought hilarious enough (some intentionally, some not) that I chose to share with the digital world. 

These are all things said to me by customers or coworkers while attempting to sell car parts.
Welcome to the full repository of things that I was likely to hear from #oldmenatwork.

A buddy of mine (shoutout to @boournes!) has kept the trend going, occasionally hashtagging some of his tweets of particularly crass things he hears his coworkers say. After reading a recent one, I got a little nostalgic. & god bless the ol' Tweetbox; she has a functionality to download an archive of all your account's tweets. Better yet: the archive is searchable by hashtag (or any keyword, really).

If my longwinded ramble hasn't foreshadowed the point of this blog post enough: for my own amusement, I searched and read through all those #oldmenatwork tweets. And, I mean, if I'm going to read them anyway...

This list is presented mostly unedited. I un-twitterized some, adding punctuation or compounding multitweets for clarity. Any comments of my own will be in italics, while the original tweet is in bold. I do want to note that none of these things were said by me, and further note that I generally in no way endorse or condone the things said: at best, these tweets are crude, lewd or rude; at worst, they're sexist, racist, contain rape jokes... you name it. Consider this a disclaimer.

There's a whole debate to be had about how disseminating these quotes in public is an implicit endorsement and is morally no better than whoever had the thought and said the thing, and that's fair enough.
Obviously, though, if I shared that opinion, I probably wouldn't be writing this. 

So, without further ado...

1) "jesus! when we was young we used to have to go to town on a horse. it's not cold ya woman!"
Note: the "ya woman" was to me. I'm not sure if that makes it better, or worse.

2) "hey tony, couple summer girls outside for ya! ...some are 10, some are 12"
The assertion that I'm a pedophile isn't even the best insult in the first ten.

3) "buddy chev never changes... sure i puts car engines in dumptrucks drive 'em seven years!"

4) "buddy whattaya mean LIMITED lifetime warranty? if me horsey dies, she dies!"

5) "they say we spend 9 months coming out of it and the rest of our lives trying to get back in, eh b'y"
I love that one. Perfect combination of witty and lewd without actually being offensive. 

6) "now b'ys, the question today is what are we gonna get that's cold & not good for us?" 
"da woman's heart!"
That was supposed to be my flippant way of asking who wanted ice cream.

7) "26 dollars for an air filter?! ya fuckin' jew, you'll never see the face of christ!"
This tweet was #oldmenatwork's My Sharona IMO. You can stop reading now, they never get better than this. And, in case you were wondering: Yes, a man actually said that to me; yes, as far as I could tell, he was serious.

8) "we have thanksgiving because the indians gave the pilgrims turkey. if they gave them donkey, we'd all share a piece of ass for thanksgiving!"

9) "she got a set of dairys on her like you wouldn't believe!"
That's not a typo of "diaries". The A is supposed to be before the I. 
...Maybe dairies though?

10) "YOU feel old tone? go on b'y, you're still on your first dick!"
True.

11) "now, some advice for if you start a whorehouse... too expensive to make it two stories... too much fuckin' overhead!"

12) "did you hear the one about the midget who walked between the lady's legs? he got a crack on the head!"

13) "sure, you'd broaden her shoulders if you went aboard of her!"
Oh, how I wish this was about a boat. 

14) "if we can't overcome it, we might as well come over it"

15) "some set of legs she got on her... and the further up ya goes, the better they gets!"

16) "she had lovely blue eyes... one blew east, and one blew west"

17) "i'm sure if she ran hard enough she'd blacken her own eyes!"

18) "i got the misses slippers and a dildo for valentine's day... she don't like the slippers, she can go fuck herself!"
I promised I'd heard real people say all of these to me in a professional setting, I didn't say that they were original.

19) "if it flies, floats, or fucks, it's cheaper to rent it"

20) "had a girlfriend with a tattoo of a seashell on her leg... i put my ear there to listen to the ocean... i could even smell the salt water!"

21) "wonderful! sure, it's like the front of the stove... it's great!"

22) "i'm not prejudiced, i got a colored tv!"
"Colored" is [sic], if that's not obvious.

23) "price on that filter is 5 bucks, tax in" 
"tacks?! b'y, i was just gonna screw it in there!"

24) "his last name's wall... ya ask me, it should be wallstein! he's so cheap, he squeaks!"
Didn't really get the second part then, don't really get the second part now.

25) "fine set of legs on that one, knows she couldn't walk across the barrens"

26) "they calls me the hammer... i won't strike bottom or nothing, but i'll beat the walls out of it!"
I noted on this one that the man was old enough to be my grandfather, if that helps your mental image.

27) "dunderdale? more like stunnederdale!"
Oh, burn.

28) "if it got tits or wheels, 'tis only trouble!" 

29) "only thing, when you move in for the kill, be sure you do it on the side of the car, 'cause if you strikes that tailpipe, you'll know it!"

30) "i slept with a blind girl last night. told me i had the biggest dick she ever felt. i told her she was pulling my leg"

31) "when i was your age, i was like a truck... dodged the father, rammed the daughter"
I swear that this was before some of the classy folks in St. John's had this joke as a truck decal.

32) "that fuckin' truck driver couldn't drive sheep out of the garden!"

33) "tony b'y, you wouldn't be the coolest kid in school if you were the only one there!"
#MegaBurn #MagaBurn 
...#I'mFromGrandFalls

34) "they got no computers in whorehouses, they gotta run 'em by hand"

35) "tony b'y, ever see the serial number on a condom?" 
"...no?" 
"s'pose that means there's not enough to ya to roll 'em back far enough!" 

36) "did ya hear about the feller with three dicks? his pants fit him like a glove!"

37) "what's the definition of indecent? if it's in far enough, in hard enough & in quick enough, that makes it indecent"

38) "tiburon, fart can, tinted windows... i bet he gets all the chicks" 
"yes b'y, i'd say he got the trunk full"

39) "how's business?" 
"sure, business is like a whore's drawers; up and down all the time."

40) "busy? yes b'y, flat out like a pancake!"

41) "it's like the two bald fellers tryin' to think... they put their heads together, and made an ass of themselves!"

42) "see, the trick is to smoke a draw of weed before an interview. that way, they don't think you're high, they thinks you're like it anyway"

43) "she got more friends than kellogg's got cornflakes! if ya know what i mean!"
Fun game: add "if ya know what I mean" to any of these tweets. 
It seldom changes anything.

44) "misses got more fingerprints on her arse than the fbi got on file!"

45) "...well, we know her youngsters won't starve"

46) "42 years wit 'er yesterday. and i tell ya what, if id've took the 12 out and shot 'er? i'd be out by now!"

47) "tone, you still single? i knows where there's a couple cute ones. you're just their type, too. down to the cnib!"
For the uninitiated

48) "tone, i needs to borrow something off ya. i'm like your shirttail, i'm on the bum!"

49) "he'd fuck a clothesline if there was panties hung on it!"

50) "of course the lifetime warranty's more expensive! only thing a 1 year warranty is more expensive on is a woman!"

51) "i think the b'ys got a few rooms upstairs not finished"
The new "few bricks short of a load".

52) "when the weather's hot & sticky, 'tis not the time for dunkin' dicky; when the frost is on the pumpkin, then's the time for dicky dunkin'"
I think this one came from Whitman's later years...

53) "how far did ya get last night b'y?" 
"right from appetite to asshole!"

54) "that'll put hairs on your chest... and blow 'em off your arse!"
In response to my suggestion that we have hot peppers on a pizza.

55) "keep your car out of the ditches & your cock in your britches; and don't put your hose where you wouldn't put your nose"
This one is more Yeats than Whitman, n'est ce pas?

56) "misses coming in there now got her landing gear down and all!"

57) "shea heights: where they ties on the youngsters so they don't bite the dogs"

58) "you got no worries about me getting her pregnant, i'm afraid of heights!"

59) "i'd like to have a 22 year old blonde here now... i'd blow the carb right out of 'er!" 

60) "had one this one time" 
*awkward hand motion resembling ladyparts* 
"never had nothing outta mother's cabbage patch like that!"
Wherein Tony uses the word "ladyparts" in a sentence and embarrasses himself more than whoever he was quoting

61) "...and tits on 'er like a volkswagen!"
Commentary still relevant: what does that even mean? That the engine's in the trunk?

62) "first it says do not remove card... now it says remove card... fuckin' woman's machine this is!"
Septuagenarian + debit machine = headache
See also: control, remote

63) "anyways tony, you gets a chance to go fuck yourself, take it!"
At least six of these quotes are from this guy who was definitely my favorite customer.

64) "problem with women my age is that they're all sealed up like the bell island mines!"

65) "know the difference between erotic & kinky? erotic is when ya tickle her arse with a feather, and kinky is the whole chicken!"

Mario Lemeiux) "can't go to costco on a saturday! baymen up there like caplin, and every fucking car back window with a box of tissues!"

67) "... and an arse on her six axehandles wide!"

Jaromir Jagr) "rather a 69er than deal with that feller... at least then ya see the cunt coming!"

69) "do you know if you works at wal-mart you can't talk about sex? ask someone if they got their skin, and they'll go tell the manager on ya, cause it's sexual harassment. thinks you're queer or something. they got it ruined!"
Sexual Harrassment (n): What a feller accuses you of if he thinks you're queer or something.

70) "you wanted to see the accident i seen last night. one eggroll crashed into another!"

71) "s'alright for you, you married mudder! i had to go and marry a stranger"
Another perennial favorite.

72) "set of nuts on him sure; he'd shampoo a buffalo"

73) people don't live as long today as they used to. reasons include lack of cod liver oil & living off the land.
No quotes because I paraphrased this one in the first place, but the idea was too good to leave out.

74) "what's that queen song? the one about the big ass women?"

75) "mondays is a miserable way to spend 1/7th of your life"
Also, I likes when the wife makes lasagna.

76) "fuck off tony, your mudder had all daughters"

77) "i shoulda picked up smoking instead of getting married. i'd be richer, i'd be happier, and i'd already be dead!"

78) "how do you sell this so cheap? i'm telling all my friends! and when i'm done talking to him, i'm going to mcdonald's!"

79) "tony, ya hear what happened to alvin? it's a mortal sin."
"no b'y i never, what happened?!" 
"poor fucker was born!"

80) "wouldn't kick her outta bed for eatin' bickies would ya, tone?"

81) "i told the wife about it. and ya knows now, that went over like a fart in church"
I would be amazed if someone from Newfoundland reading this had never heard a father/uncle/etc say this one.

82) "tell you one i likes... misses be's down to david's teas... and she comes from somewhere where they actually walks on the tea!"

83) "tony b'y, be honest now. when was the last time you had your oil changed?"
See earlier "if you know what I mean" clause.

84) "if he didn't have money or play golf, he couldn't get laid in a chinese whorehouse with a bag of rice strapped to his back!"

85) "motorboat 'er? sure i'd hook her up to the outboard!"

86) "buddy, you got either racket in stock there? i'm lookin' for a racket"

87) "getting the misses a dildo and a box of chocolates for christmas... she don't like the chocolate, she can go fuck herself!"
While I rarely tweeted these twice, some slipped through the cracks, mostly because I heard them literally a hundred times. 

88) "and the pants she had on! well! i'd say she jumped off the eave of the house to get into 'em!"

89) "buddy don't be talkin. i'll never drive another kia again. them koreans can't do nothing right. look at that gang nam style!"
This one is hard to convey in writing; if you could bold, underline and italicize the space between "gang" and "nam", you'd be off to a good start.  

90) "i needs a driveshaft to fit a '67 vagina" 

91) "misses should count herself lucky! better she got knocked down than knocked up!"
I'll take "Appropriate responses to hearing that a woman got hit by a car" for $100, Alex.

92) "he's the only feller i ever met who could have phone sex with himself."
?

93) "got me new cheques the other day. they're wicked! instead of bouncing, they floats!"

94) husband: "buddy, you got either elastic band there i can have?" 
wife: "what for paddy? sure thas' not enough to hang yourself wit!"
#Oldwomenatwork?

95) "well b'ys, see ya later now; i'm off like a jewish foreskin!"

96) "frig pills and pumps; ya wants to make it bigger, let one of them cougars hook into ya. if it's 6 now, it'll be 8 time she's done with it!"

97) "hear about the newfie who tried to commit suicide? he jumped out his basement window!"

98) "did your mudder have any youngsters that lived?" 
Deep.

99) "she must be a welder's daughter, she's got acetelyne tips on 'er."

100) "that's b as in bobby, and e as in h'edward"

101) "have her in a few years or a few beers, whatever comes first"
Well, at least he implicitly acknowledged that making a lewd comment about a 15 year old was wrong.

102) "man, i got some headache." 
"me too. mine's 5 foot 3, what about yours?"
Since I had to think to remember what this meant, I'll go ahead and ruin the joke by explaining it: his wife was 5'3".

103) "i tell ya, i never went to me bed with a dog face woman... woke up with a few though!"

104) one of the #oldmenatwork i sell to frequently just referred to his in-laws as his outlaws multiple times. i'm amused.
Again, paraphrase, no quotes, etc. Worth it.

105) "the misses got superpowers b'y... she can hear a $5 fold into my wallet from three miles away"
I ain't sayin' she a golddigger...

106) "would ya rather mount pearl or kill bride?"
That's a two-stepper.

107) "b'ys from the hill stealin' tools?! sure, i wouldn't whip it out up there to take a leak for fear someone would steal it!"
FYI: The Hill = Shea Heights

108) "i tried dat viagra once. got it caught on me t'roat, ended up wit a stiff neck!"

109) "anyone who knew her years ago will tell ya; that's like throwin' a caplin out the bay of fundy"
'ot dog down an 'allway, h'eat your 'eart h'out.

110) "hear about buddy who tried to trade in his wife at hickman's? said he wanted a pickup; needed something with a smaller box!"

111) "steely dan! takes me back. b'ys used to say; no matter how maggoty a party was, ya turn on steely dan and everyone got cool" 
Disclaimer: Above may only be funny if your name is Tony.

112) "took the misses fishin' the weekend. that's the only way i ever gets her to wet a line!"

113) "sure, they threw away the best part of him when they circumsized him!"

114) "i knew one misses so stunned she used to dip her arse in the well to take a drink!"

115) "now, when you gets to the hospital, you knows how to tell which one's the head nurse, right? the one with dirt on her knees!"

116) "i'm gonna phone yer misses & tell her that the reason she don't get it enough is cause you're too busy fucking me on prices!"

117) "i asked misses if she smoked after sex. she said she didn't know, she never looked!"
Unrelated: My frequent overuse of exclamation marks in these tweets makes me feel like I'm reading Archie comics gone terribly wrong.

118) "ya hear they got a viagra for women now? it's called niagara!"

119) "the misses tried that pulled chicken sandwich out mary brown's the other day" 
"any good?" 
"i'd say it was good for the rooster!"

120) "portugal cove got two exports: crab apples and crabs"

121) "now b'ys, remember: a porkchop dinner's better than fries & gravy but fries & gravy's not bad"
Re: An Island Girl in the Buy & Sell.

122) "want a bag for that stuff, walter?" 
"no b'y, she's home"

123) "what do ya call a bear with no teeth? a gummy bear!"

124) "it smells like labrador in here"
I was mixing spray paint...

125) "things have gone backwards... the nose is running and the feet are smelling!"
From a guy with a head cold.

126) just served a guy who's afraid of the immigration of "jungle bunnies" to newfoundland. when asked why, he explained that he "couldn't imagine anything more scumbag than one of them crossbred with a feller from bell island"
Sometimes they weren't even funny, just dark/incredible.

127) "Sure he's been gone so long he's halfway back!"
About a dead man.
So much italic context; once I'd heard everything that fit in 140 characters once or ten times, the only thing novel was situational commentary.

128) "she haven't got a box, she got a crate!"
Exhibit A: As time went on, I'm honestly not sure if the b'ys got blunter or I got bolder with my willingness to repeat this ridiculousness.

129) "years ago you'd never dare tell anyone you had 'skimo blood... they all come out of the woodwork when there's money in it though!"
Exhibit B...

130) "you be careful out there today tony, you turns the wrong way you might lose your virginity!"

131) "jerome kennedy b'y; he got the rig goin' on supplyin' the hospitals. 'e's crosseyed but his brain's not!"
That might be libelous if I knew what it meant.

132) "tony b'y you must have a twin" 
"why?" 
"'cause you're too fucking stunned to be one person!"

133) "she might get 25-30cm, but it won't be snow!"
That's 10-12 inches for you curious imperial system fans.

134) "sure he's hard as nails! when he was born, he smacked his mother's arse!"

135) "tony b'y, why's all that screamin' comin' from yer phone? that jenna jameson misses win the curling game yer watchin'?"
During last year's Olympics.

136) "b'y, i'm tryin' to grow my own now. gonna call it brake fluid kush"

137) "buddy, i saw the perfect restaurant the other day. the sign said lobster tail and beer... me t'ree favorite things!"

138) "told the woman i had something in my pocket she could squeeze... she reached in and took my fuckin' wallet!"

139) "i don't drink no v8 juice, it's too fast for me... won't drink nothing more than a 6 cylinder!"

140) "nobody likes working on fucking volkswagens; they're hitler's curse on the world"
#GodwinsLawAtWork

141) "some doctor you'd be, you got no bedtime manner at all!"

142) "see what you wants is a rig like the highways gang... they gets off 4:30, and they're home by 3!"
Relevant Buddy Wasisname & The Other Fellers

143) "yeah?! well i'm gonna go slam my left fuckin' nut in the car door four times for charity. then you gotta do it!"
Re: ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

144) "jesus tone.. tits everywhere! if that's all they wore downtown when i was your age, i'd STILL be in jail!"

145) "i'm not prejudiced or anything, i just don't like gays"

146) "fuckin' face on 'em to stop an eight day week!"
I want to listen to old skippers make fun of each other for a while and release a book of these insults. So good!

147) "me buddy was trying to sell me a canadian tire welder; i told him he'd be lucky if it could spark a draw!"

148) "tone, you're like a cross between pippi longstocking & the cookie monster!"
Another probably-only-funny-if-you're-me.

149) "they're ALL sluts except for mom.. and ya can't trust her when she's drinkin'!"

150) "...them Ramadan noodles your generation's always eatin'..."
Only after dark.

151) "I'm blind in one eye and deaf in the other!"

152) "I'll be back in a jiffy" 
"Call Bugden's b'y, they're quicker"
...And so ends an era.

Bonus) I couldn't find it in the archive, but somewhere amidst my near-decade on twitter, someone at work said something I wouldn't even repeat on twitter because it was so bad. A few people PMed me about it and I'd repeat it on an individual basis, but not on twitter where someone who'd never seen #oldmenatwork might see it and give me a (probably deserved) hard time for it.
But!
Given that, presumably, the only people to make it this far share my amusement in/incredulousness at some of the things I used to hear, I feel a little more comfortable in this venue repeating it. Repeat of above disclaimer about your mileage may vary + actual trigger warning + I know this is goddamn terrible but men actually say these things when there aren't women/children around to hear them; 

"Lately I've been hearing so much about spousal abuse. All this about treating your woman right and not hurting her and it's battered women this, battered women that. And I thought to myself 'battered women... jesus, my whole life, I've been eating mine plain!'"
And boom goes the dynamite. I suppose it's not the worst thing I've ever heard, but "LOL spousal abuse sounds like deep fried food" is just so crass that I wouldn't want to subject someone to that 'joke' unless they've brought themselves this far.

Forgive me for being all serious at the end of something intended to be funny (what is this, a Judd Apatow movie?), but this is why I consider myself a feminist, if only a shitty armchair one. If asked why, I just point at the giant glowing neon experience that this job gave me. Some of the folks who I would definitely consider the salt of the earth (see also: "best kind"), some folks who treated me and others like family and invited us to their homes for holidays, some folks who host annual fundraisers for the Vera Perlin society raising thousands of dollars, some folks who spend two weekends a month volunteering with church groups and community groups, are the same folks who spewed the demeaning sexist, anti-semitic, racist and generally crude drivel repeated above when there were only white men aged 21-65 in earshot. I'm sure they mean no harm, even if they cause it.
I don't know why I felt the need to add the above. Just an attempt to convey eye-opening life experience into a paragraph that I'd have never believed if I didn't see it myself. Like an oft-quoted Louis C.K. bit, I don't know what to do with this information. Is someone who says such things necessarily bad? Can you teach an old dog new tricks? How do you treat an admirably good person who is misinformed but stubborn? It bends my brain.
Long story short: if anything, this is all another proof that we're not there yet. 
In the meantime, forgive me if I have a few guilty laughs along the way. 
I hope you enjoyed my walk down mammary lane.