As I sat working at my desk, I couldn’t believe the familiar, yet out of place, noise I heard. It was a clicking. But not just any clicking — it was a clicking sound normally reserved for the privacy of your own home or bathroom. It was clearly the sound of someone in the office clipping their nails.
Fingernails , I hoped.
But still, WHY AT THE OFFICE??? I was too horrifed and disgusted to get up and find out who had no qualms sending nail clippings flying all over their cubicle.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Thursday, June 16, 2005
It's only ONE minute.
The parking on my street is heinous. During the day it’s always busy because I live right next to Kaiser hospital. Kaiser has its own parking garage (which is free on the weekends, btw), but a lot of people will drive up and down my block for that ever-elusive free two-hour parking spot. Or they’ll double-park next to a row of meters waiting for someone to leave — the meters are $2 for two hours, but you don’t have to move your car after two hours, you can just plunk more coins into the meter. Luckily after 6pm, meter and parking enforcement ends. Then it’s all Lord of the Flies up in there — cars are all over the place zig-zagging and u-turning just to get a good spot for the night. It’s car anarchy. It’s carnarchy .
This morning as I walked across the street to my car, I saw a car moving towards me, obviously waiting to see if I was going to leave. I got in my car and signaled to the waiting driver that I need one minute to warm up my car. I did this by holding up my index finger in the "one" sign. I got no reaction. The guy just stared at me. After about 30 seconds I saw the waiting car start to creep up alongside my car. When I looked over at the other driver, he had an annoyed look on his face as he stared at me with his mouth open and one hand in the air -- it was the universal sign for, "Are you leaving or what?"
Are you kidding me? Wasn't my signaling for "one minute" obvious? And it was 8-fucking-o'clock in the morning, who's NOT going to warm up their car at that time? I furrowed my brow and rolled down my window, then I held up one finger (not the finger I wanted to hold up, though), and said, "I NEED ONE MINUTE TO WARM UP MY CAR."
The guy's eyes bulged like he just realized what I was trying to signal to him earlier, he nodded and waved before backing his ass up to get out of my way and wait like he should have.
This morning as I walked across the street to my car, I saw a car moving towards me, obviously waiting to see if I was going to leave. I got in my car and signaled to the waiting driver that I need one minute to warm up my car. I did this by holding up my index finger in the "one" sign. I got no reaction. The guy just stared at me. After about 30 seconds I saw the waiting car start to creep up alongside my car. When I looked over at the other driver, he had an annoyed look on his face as he stared at me with his mouth open and one hand in the air -- it was the universal sign for, "Are you leaving or what?"
Are you kidding me? Wasn't my signaling for "one minute" obvious? And it was 8-fucking-o'clock in the morning, who's NOT going to warm up their car at that time? I furrowed my brow and rolled down my window, then I held up one finger (not the finger I wanted to hold up, though), and said, "I NEED ONE MINUTE TO WARM UP MY CAR."
The guy's eyes bulged like he just realized what I was trying to signal to him earlier, he nodded and waved before backing his ass up to get out of my way and wait like he should have.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
X-rays suck.
So my doctor wanted me to get some chest x-rays. It’s nothing serious, my blood work was negative, but she just wanted to make sure my circulation was fine, too. This is all a residual effect of a nightmare weekend at the café two weeks ago. We were severely undermanned for the entire weekend and I had to work an eight-hour shift behind the counter alone. By the end of the weekend I was physically drained – I aggravated an old knee and ankle injury, bursitis in my elbow, and tendonitis in my hand.
Anyway, I took my doctor’s note to the x-ray lab and saw a lobby full of people waiting for x-rays. I needed to get back to work, so I asked the receptionist what their hours were for the next day. She told me that the wait wasn’t too bad, so I decided to stay and gave her my note. That was a fuckin’ mistake. Apparently “wasn’t too bad” is a relative term, because I was in that waiting room for TWO HOURS.
Not knowing the arduous wait I had ahead of me, I ran outside and fed an hour’s worth of coins into a parking meter and then returned to the lobbby to wait. I picked up an old Entertainment Weekly with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet on the cover that reminded me I needed to rent Finding Neverland, and one of the movie reviews inside confirmed my suspicion that the Fat Albert movie was terrible.
The guy sitting next to me was a very fidgety fellow. He was tall and lanky, and looked like he had some sort of middle-eastern ethnicity. His legs were crossed and he kept shaking his raised foot every few seconds. He’d get up every couple of minutes to see how soon he’d be called and to add to his annoyance factor he pulled out his noisy phone and started playing video games on it. I really wanted to hit this guy.
The guy sitting diagonally on the other side of me was a quiet middle-aged guy. He looked like the cool english high-school teacher with the gray hair and ponytail that all the students liked. He was reading a Fortune magazine, but when I took a closer look at him I could see he was occassionally glancing up over the top of the pages to stare at a girl sitting straight across from him. She was a tall redhead wearing a pink top and black skirt, her pasty white legs were crossed, and she kept running her hands up and down her leg as she read a copy of Dwell. I could tell she was driving the middle-aged guy crazy as his eyes strained to get a peek upskirt .
Sitting directly across from me was a large latina woman and her baby. The poor kid was the one getting x-rayed and he sounded terribly congested. The baby was understandably cranky, so the mother started to breast feed him. Then she pulled out her cell phone and started calling people. Great. That’s just what a crowded lobby of people needed, a loudmouth on a cell phone with a baby at her teat.
I needed to change seats, so I got up to get a drink of water and then sat back down on the other side of the lobby away from Fidgety Abdul and Cell Phone Mamacita. After an hour of waiting I realized my parking meter had expired — but I didn’t want to run outside and miss getting called. So now I had to sit there with the added stress of worrying about getting a parking ticket.
When I finally got called, the x-ray technician was no treat. She was a short curmudgeonly woman who looked like she’d seen too many stupid patients that day. And why is it that x-ray techs have to know why you’re getting x-rayed? She looked me over and asked in a judgmental tone, “...so you’ve got right-side swelling and your doctor wants chest x-rays?”
I told her that my doctor just wanted to be safe and check my ciruculation, so she wanted to see my heart and lungs. JUST TAKE THE DAMN X-RAYS, BITCH! That’s what I was thinking. I wanted to get out of there so bad. When it was finally done I headed out and saw that, luckily, I didn’t have a parking ticket.
Anyway, I took my doctor’s note to the x-ray lab and saw a lobby full of people waiting for x-rays. I needed to get back to work, so I asked the receptionist what their hours were for the next day. She told me that the wait wasn’t too bad, so I decided to stay and gave her my note. That was a fuckin’ mistake. Apparently “wasn’t too bad” is a relative term, because I was in that waiting room for TWO HOURS.
Not knowing the arduous wait I had ahead of me, I ran outside and fed an hour’s worth of coins into a parking meter and then returned to the lobbby to wait. I picked up an old Entertainment Weekly with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet on the cover that reminded me I needed to rent Finding Neverland, and one of the movie reviews inside confirmed my suspicion that the Fat Albert movie was terrible.
The guy sitting next to me was a very fidgety fellow. He was tall and lanky, and looked like he had some sort of middle-eastern ethnicity. His legs were crossed and he kept shaking his raised foot every few seconds. He’d get up every couple of minutes to see how soon he’d be called and to add to his annoyance factor he pulled out his noisy phone and started playing video games on it. I really wanted to hit this guy.
The guy sitting diagonally on the other side of me was a quiet middle-aged guy. He looked like the cool english high-school teacher with the gray hair and ponytail that all the students liked. He was reading a Fortune magazine, but when I took a closer look at him I could see he was occassionally glancing up over the top of the pages to stare at a girl sitting straight across from him. She was a tall redhead wearing a pink top and black skirt, her pasty white legs were crossed, and she kept running her hands up and down her leg as she read a copy of Dwell. I could tell she was driving the middle-aged guy crazy as his eyes strained to get a peek upskirt .
Sitting directly across from me was a large latina woman and her baby. The poor kid was the one getting x-rayed and he sounded terribly congested. The baby was understandably cranky, so the mother started to breast feed him. Then she pulled out her cell phone and started calling people. Great. That’s just what a crowded lobby of people needed, a loudmouth on a cell phone with a baby at her teat.
I needed to change seats, so I got up to get a drink of water and then sat back down on the other side of the lobby away from Fidgety Abdul and Cell Phone Mamacita. After an hour of waiting I realized my parking meter had expired — but I didn’t want to run outside and miss getting called. So now I had to sit there with the added stress of worrying about getting a parking ticket.
When I finally got called, the x-ray technician was no treat. She was a short curmudgeonly woman who looked like she’d seen too many stupid patients that day. And why is it that x-ray techs have to know why you’re getting x-rayed? She looked me over and asked in a judgmental tone, “...so you’ve got right-side swelling and your doctor wants chest x-rays?”
I told her that my doctor just wanted to be safe and check my ciruculation, so she wanted to see my heart and lungs. JUST TAKE THE DAMN X-RAYS, BITCH! That’s what I was thinking. I wanted to get out of there so bad. When it was finally done I headed out and saw that, luckily, I didn’t have a parking ticket.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Champion of the Day: Hungry Bleached Hair Dude
It was hot today. And I was grumpy. My hand hurt from an aggravated injury, and I was limping because my ankle was sore. All I wanted to do was go into Longs, pick up some water and go home.
As I hobbled to the cash registers with my gallon of Alhambra, I was abruptly cut off by a fat guy carrying two large bags of peanut M&Ms and a big bag of Pecan Sandies. I was literally less than ten feet from lining up when this bloated wonder swooped in unapologetically and stood in front of me -- I felt his mass come up and pass me from behind, I was afraid I'd get caught in his gravity well and hurtle downwards toward the black hole that was his belly button.
Did you ever notice that whenver fat slobby people wear t-shirts, you can always make out the shape of their huge belly buttons?
I stood there in awe of his rudeness. I could hear him breathing as he waited to pay for his crunchy snack treats. I couldn't discern, however, whether those were breaths of anticipation or breaths of fatigue from exerting the energy needed to "turbo boost" past a limping man. I noticed the roll of hot dogs that made up the back of his neck, it led upwards to a patch of spiked, bleached hair -- obviously cut short to give that "slimming" effect. I wondered to myself if there was any strategic logic to his platinum blonde hair, whether it was supposed to distract people from noticing his size 48 waist.
It apparently didn't work since I was able to easily read the tag on the back of his Levi's. That leather patch on the waist of his jeans stood out like a billboard, boldly advertising the statistics: W48 L30.
As I hobbled to the cash registers with my gallon of Alhambra, I was abruptly cut off by a fat guy carrying two large bags of peanut M&Ms and a big bag of Pecan Sandies. I was literally less than ten feet from lining up when this bloated wonder swooped in unapologetically and stood in front of me -- I felt his mass come up and pass me from behind, I was afraid I'd get caught in his gravity well and hurtle downwards toward the black hole that was his belly button.
Did you ever notice that whenver fat slobby people wear t-shirts, you can always make out the shape of their huge belly buttons?
I stood there in awe of his rudeness. I could hear him breathing as he waited to pay for his crunchy snack treats. I couldn't discern, however, whether those were breaths of anticipation or breaths of fatigue from exerting the energy needed to "turbo boost" past a limping man. I noticed the roll of hot dogs that made up the back of his neck, it led upwards to a patch of spiked, bleached hair -- obviously cut short to give that "slimming" effect. I wondered to myself if there was any strategic logic to his platinum blonde hair, whether it was supposed to distract people from noticing his size 48 waist.
It apparently didn't work since I was able to easily read the tag on the back of his Levi's. That leather patch on the waist of his jeans stood out like a billboard, boldly advertising the statistics: W48 L30.
Uh, you can't use that yet.
File this as a Great Moment in Corporate Incompetence. We got a new color printer installed in the office today - which is great because the old printer was on its last legs. This new printer is HUGE. It's like one of those monoliths that shows up every few billion years to help man make the next evolutionary leap.
The problem is that the new color printer isn't hooked up to the network yet.
A technician came in today to take down the old color printer and remove it from the network, then he installed the new printer. BUT apparently he wasn't the guy that's supposed to hook the new printer up to the network. That guy won't be in the office until later this week. Pure genius.
The problem is that the new color printer isn't hooked up to the network yet.
A technician came in today to take down the old color printer and remove it from the network, then he installed the new printer. BUT apparently he wasn't the guy that's supposed to hook the new printer up to the network. That guy won't be in the office until later this week. Pure genius.
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