December 18, 2006
Imagine my bullshit detector as one of those carnival games where you hit a target and try to get that metal bar to slide up the tower and ring the bell. That’s how I picture it, actually, in my mind, except it is digital.
Saturday night, as business wound down, I got into a discussion with Dave about Merv. He was doing dishes and I was sweeping the back. The conversation started with “Why can’t Gary hire a non retarded fuckwad”, then shifted to talk about the seemingly unending string of hot women teachers sleeping with their underage male students. As soon as Dave began, “Well, actually,” my bullshit detector went *ding*. As he continued, that dinging continued in volume.
“…I slept with my high school photography teacher. She was pretty hot! I had a fake ID and bumped into her at a bar in Towson.”
*ding ding*
“…and she was like, ‘Oh, I have to take you under my wing’ and bought me a beer…”
*ding ding*
“And afterwards she invited me to the diner with her friends, except none of them came.”
*ding ding ding*
“And then she said, ‘Oh, well, I can’t let you drive home.’”
*ding ding ding ding ding ding*
“So I say, ‘Well, I’ll sleep on your couch’, but she said, ‘Oh, my couch is uncomfortable. Let’s share a bed.’ I had no idea what was going on.”
*DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING*
“Well, at least you’d get a good grade in her class,” I observed.
“Oh, well, you don’t need to sleep with the teacher to get a good grade in that class,” he replied.
“C’mon man,” I said. “Nice story.”
“No, really. Go to _____ High and ask for Mrs. _______ if you don’t believe me.”
*DING DING DING DING DING DING DING*
“Oh, like she’d tell me.”
“Well, she wasn’t really all that hot. She’d probably be pretty excited to remember her luck. Must’ve been how I was able to bed her in the first place.”
At this point, my bullshit detector had enough and it shattered: what happened to “She was pretty hot“? Who actually, in conversations, says “to bed”? The digital lights flared up, the mechanism shattered, and the bell fell free. There was a loud crack and the tower shifted hard, the front digital section coming loose and falling forward. There was a final shudder and black smoke billowed free from the tower’s mount.
I just sort of nodded to Dave and carried on with my sweeping.
Here’s the backstory: Thursday night, while I was not working anywhere, James was running the night shift at the Indy. Sloth, a lackluster employee who I hate because when I work the following dayshift, I usually have to redo half the previous night’s dishes because they’re all fucking dirty (hot soapy water and slight pressure with a sponge isn’t all that hard), arrived that night at five. He took two deliveries. It was steady business wise, and so James didn’t realize that Sloth hadn’t been back into the store until, at seven, a customer came in and said, “Hey, y’know one of your drivers is in his car out there and he looks like he’s dead?”
Sloth wasn’t dead — just passed out dead asleep. As he would later try to defend his actions to James (after James had three times called him to tell him, ‘It’s busy, get back in here.’), “I’ve only had six hours of sleep in three nights” and had been having trouble keeping awake while driving. Later that night, when all the deliveries were out and Sloth was doing his dishes, he confided to James that the reason he’d only had six hours of sleep was that he’d been going out drinking every night.
Bad move, Sloth.
Gary doesn’t like Sloth much. No one really does. He’s a big blubbering fool who shows up late, wants to leave early, and half-asses everything he does. He works a day-job at a deli in a well-known and well-liked (except by me) supermarket which opened fairly recently in the area. One summer day, he and a girl he worked with were supposed to unload a delivery truck and get that delivery situated in the deli’s walkin. Instead, they went on lunch break, and came back an hour later to find all of the produce — several thousand dollars worth — spoiled and ruined. Somehow, neither one lost their jobs, but when Gary heard this story, he felt it his responsibility to lecture Sloth on being retarded.
Gary has talked about firing Sloth before, but usually, right before Sloth is at “the last straw”, his internal warning alert goes off, and he corrects his behavior long enough to get his sizeable ass out of the frying pan.
Not this time. Gary let Sloth kick around at work Friday night right until he was about to leave on a very nice double. “Hey, Sloth, let me talk to you,” he said. A few minutes later, Sloth ambled out, struggling to keep back tears. At first, all Gary would say was that Sloth had left early and that was that. Later in the night, James reported that Gary had told him Sloth was gone — forever. He didn’t just reach the last straw, he shattered it. I’m not unhappy to see Sloth go, both for the above reasons, and because, well, it was a really nice double.
However, I have mixed feelings about the reason he was let go. I have, on occasion, napped in my car when I’ve had trouble keeping awake behind the wheel. It’s a no-duh rule: you can’t drive while asleep, and trying to do so is just dangerous and irresponsible. Getting off the road and sleeping was perhaps the one instance of Sloth using his brain. On the other hand, usually when I’m tired behind the wheel, it’s because I’ve worked all day, or worked all day the previous day. In Sloth’s case, it was because he irresponsibly neglected a good night’s sleep (or even a decent night’s sleep, or any night’s sleep) to drink and drink and drink. It’s like going in to work a nine hour shift on a quarter gallon of gas: you’re going in knowing you don’t have what it takes to get you through the day, that’s your own irresponsibility.
If memory serves, the “Moonbase” in Lego Space circles was the brainstorm of Jon Palmer, who concieved it as a way for builders to merge their styles at conventions. Every now and then, a gallery of a new Moonbase set-up will appear on Brickshelf. In particular, this gallery caught my eye because, hello, what would Spacekea furniture look like? I wish I could have a Spacekea Catalog …
A few weeks ago, I was notified that I was eligible for a cell-phone upgrade. I’ve had the same cell phone for going on three years — well, the same model phone, anyway — and while it has been a good and reliable cell-phone, I was in the mood for something new. In addition, I wanted a camera phone — if I’d had a camera phone with me on Thursday, I could have taken a photo of the “penis with teeth” painted on the men’s room wall on the first floor of Linthicum Hall. So, last Thursday, I stopped into the Cingular store at the intersection of York and Ridgely Roads.
I took American Geisha along for moral support. We were in and out in five minutes. The guy kept trying to upgrade Geisha’s phone too, but she’s on Verizon. A few of the other clerks gave the guy who was helping me hateful looks, but that’s because it took me about ten seconds to decide on what phone I wanted, and most of that was choosing the color — I’m the owner of a Motorola Razor in black. With my rebate — which is in the mail, after a frantic ten minutes trying to find my receipt because I needed that for the rebate form — I paid thirty-bucks for it.
I’ll admit that on occasion I’ve missed my old phone. Sure, in comparison, that phone was big and clunky, but when you’re used to a certain set-up, it takes awhile to adjust to something new. I’ve been making progress with text messaging on the new phone — it is so much easier (the keys are larger) — although I still trip up remembering that the bottom left button spaces and the bottom right changes the function (a shift from my previous).
What I’ve missed the most has been my old ring-tone: the Imperial March from Star Wars. Saturday, during a break at work in the afternoon, I browsed through Cingular’s online store looking for the March. They didn’t have it. They had “voice” ring-tones, with Star Wars characters saying lines from the movie, but if they had clips from the actual movie scores, I couldn’t find them. So I settled for second best: a clip from Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.”
Flash forward to later that night. I get to this house and pound on the door. Little boy opens the door, stares at me. I stare back. Finally, he asks if I want his parents to pay me. I think about telling him, “I don’t care who pays me as long as I see some green, little man” but I don’t want to get in an actual discussion with him. So I say, “Yes, please.” He runs up the stairs and starts screaming at the closed door of the master bedroom: “Mom! DAD! Pizza guy is here!” After several minutes, his dad opens the door and hurries down the steps, dressed in a robe. Now I’m feeling oddly bad, and I don’t get this, but I’m assuming I interupted him having sweet love with his wife (or the babysitter). As he’s handing over cash and I’m handing over the pizzas, my phone goes off.
Did I mention what the ring tone was? Yeah, “It’s My Life.” So that was a little awkward, but I remember when I was surfing Cingular’s ring-tone site, that ring tones from Boondocks were available. One of them was titled “Jesus was Black.” So, as uncomfortable as I was when my phone played “It’s My Life”, I comforted myself by thinking how uncomfortable I would’ve been if I had been delivering to a church and “Jesus was Black” went off.
After some more ring-tone browsing Saturday night, my new ring tone is the theme from “The Pink Panther” (the Sellers’ films, not the Martin).
