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.

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.

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.

"That really doesn't go into your nose."

I'm at my desk working on a layout when one of my friends comes up to see how things are going. She points at a little wooden toy at my desk - it's a chain of a multi-colored cubes linked by a string of elastic that runs through their centers. Everyone picks it up to play with it, the cubes snap all around to form different shapes and it's actually kind of relaxing to play with.

So I hand my friend the toy and she starts playing with it. I look back at monitor to work, when I hear, "...how's this?"

She had stuck one of the cubes into her nose , while the rest dangled out from below her nostril.

The beauty of that move was that I had no way of knowing which cube had now been tainted. But I'm pretty sure it was red.

Champion of the Day: Cafe Poseur Lady

One of the things that annoys me about cafe customers is that they'll make up drinks. They'll just pull some sort of concoction out of their asses. A lot of this is because of Starbucks. Their tall/grande/venti bullshit has people brainwashed. I always give people a sideways look when they ask for a "tall latte" as opposed to a "small". Oh, and don't be fooled by their "caramel machiatto" -- it's really a caramel latte. A real machiatto is a shot or two of espresso with a dab of steamed milk foam on top - that's all.

So this lady walked in the other day and said to me, "I'll have an iced double espresso with foam." Iced? With foam? I repeated her order and she nodded, and when I brought up that I'd have to steam some milk, she said, "...no steamed milk please."

My eye twitched.

That had to be the stupidest order I ever heard. I wanted to jump over the counter and shake this lady. Instead I explained that in order to make foam, I would have to steam some milk. I didn't even go into how pointless it was to have foam AND ice in the same drink. She just sort of stared at me and said, "Oh yeah." So I made her little drink and made her watch me add the foam so she could tell me the "right amount."

After I gave her the drink, she walked over to the condiment bar and proceeded to fill the rest of her cup with non-fat milk. Nice, dumbass. You just made an iced non-fat latte. I really wish people would just stick to the menu instead of trying to make up a drink -- you just end up looking stupid, and all the cafe workers know you're an idiot.

At least making fun of dumb customers with my co-workers makes this part-time job semi-worthwhile.

The coming of toe.

One of the indicators that summer is coming is that you see more people wearing open-toe footwear. Other than special corporate mandated "fun" wardrobe days, men in my office pretty much have to stick to semi-business casual.

The women, however, can get away with wearing sandals and/or flip-flops. I have no problem with this, but as general rule -- I believe that if you're going to walk around with an exposed body part, that body part should NOT be grotesque to look at.

At a staff meeting last week, one of my co-workers showed up wearing sandals. The room we were in was small with chairs along the outside wall of the room (we were basically all sitting facing each other). The woman in sandals had her legs crossed, therefore dangling one of her feet in the middle of the room. And holy shit, was that an ugly foot.

It was like a man's foot. There was nothing feminine about this crusty brick of flesh wrapped in leather straps. Every hardened crevice was visible as the leg that held it bounced it up and down. Occasionally, Manfoot would vigorously shake her five-toed appendage -- the resulting sound was reminiscent of sandpaper on a rough surface. Good lord, woman, a little Lubriderm goes a long way.

The toes themselves were another type of horror. Every toenail was overgrown, cracked, and YELLOW. I imagined that some sort of endangered fungus had taken residence under Manfoot's toenails, and that she was forbidden to wash her feet for fear that the fungus would become extinct.

And the overgrown nails were also rounded. Now, how fucking lax do you have to be at personal hygiene that you allow your toenails to grow so thick and long enough that they curve along the shape of your toe?

The Hitchhiker's Guide and almond soap.

I tweaked my knee while at the gym yesterday so it was a little tender to walk on today. I showed up at Bay Street Mall and parked over by the theater. I was still early for the movie, so I wanted to swing by the Body Shoppe and pick up some soap. Really, I'm being serious - a few weeks ago I tried out some of their face wash for men and I really liked it, so I wanted to go back for some soap. Not the foo-foo stuff, I went to the tiny little men's section and picked up some almond soap. There was a 5 for $12 special going on, so I made sure to stock up.

I think the soap stacking policy is pretty stupid at the Body Shoppe. The soaps looked nice, wrapped only in Saran-style plastic wrap, but they were displayed in an unstable pyramid formation. I swear I barely touched the top bar when half the stack came tumbling down. Just great. I made a mental note to remember to complain to somebody at Body Shoppe corporate about the lack of training their staff had at stacking non-square shapes into a pyramid.

After picking up the fallen soap, but purposely not restacking them into a pyramid, I paid for my items (all the while fending off the cashier's attempts to get me to join their discount card program --"No! I don't want the card. It's already bad enough I'm a guy in a foo-foo store, just please let me pay for my soap so I can hobble out of here on my bad knee!")

I was still early for the movie so I put the stuff I bought in my car and then headed to the theater to meet my friends. After a few minutes of waiting I get a call on my cell from one of my friends. She was aggravated. There was a blur of words to the effect that her boyfriend forgot about the movie. She was supposed to pick him up at BART, but instead he was on a bus and she was headed on an intercept course to pick him up. That sounded pretty excitng to me - I was hoping he'd jump out the bus window onto the roof of her car, and then he'd just car surf all the way down the street. So while they played out their very cool real life action movie, I went ahead into the theater to wait for them there.

How was the movie? Eh. It really made me want to read the book, because it felt like I was missing a lot of the story. It was like the script for this movie was actually the CliffsNotes version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sam Rockwell was great, and Mos Def did okay, too - but the whole thing seemed a little "cutesy" when I expected something a little darker.

The grind is getting to me.

Tacking on an extra 25 hours to your regular full-time week can really make you feel overworked. After I get done with my regular job on Friday, I slap on an apron and head over to the cafe to work a full closing shift. Then, I work another full closing shift on Saturday night. And I top off my weekend of work by working an 8 hour mid-day shift on Sunday. How do I get through it?

It's the grinds.

There's coffee beans and grinds everywhere. I'm smelling coffee, I'm breathing coffee, there's coffee dust in the air. I'm convinced that my body is absorbing caffeine through osmosis. That's how I get through the weekend - the grind is getting to me.

Another thing about working at a cafe - there's a lot of cute customers that come by for coffee, but the difficulty level at flirting is pretty high. The problem is bringing into conversation the fact that this isn't my real job. That's not really something you can just blurt out...

"Hi, I'd like a medium latte."

"Sure, no problem. So how's the studying?"

"Oh, it's hard. But finals are almost done..."

"That's good. ...uh...I'm glad I don't have finals at my REAL JOB, where I'm an Associate Art Director of two magazines."

See? Not very smooth.

Champion of the Day: "Cell Phone at the Wedding" Lady

Wow. What can I say? That was really brilliant of you to not turn off your ringer during our friends' wedding. When the bride and groom were staring lovingly into each other's eyes as they recited their vows, I thought there was nothing in the world that could ruin that perfect moment. Boy, was I wrong.

What was that polyphonic melody that echoed through the chapel? Was it Bouganville? Or Futuristico? Retroverse, maybe? At least it wasn't the cell phone version of Baby Got Back.

Even more classy than your cell phone ringing was the fact that you let it ring TWICE. Simply amazing. Who could possibly be calling you that didn't know you were OUT OF TOWN AT A WEDDING? Seriously, screw you lady.

MySpace Cowboy: Fat and Needles

These are the stories of a hapless MySpace junkie and his efforts to meet women. As told by the people who have to listen to his "bragging."

When last we saw the MySpace Cowboy, he was attempting to worm his way into Cousin Jailbait's spring break get-away. To continue that story -- he didn't go. So CJ and her friends were free to enjoy some fun in the sun without the creepy older guy who wanted to get them drunk.

Meanwhile, back at home, Mama Jailbait found out that CJ's current boyfriend was 26 years old. That couldn't be a very good development.

And it wasn't. Outraged, Mama Jailbait called CJ and basically told her she was kicking her out of the house and pulling her out of private school. In a panic, Cousin Jailbait decided to call... the MySpace Cowboy??? If you're an underage teen, the last person you should be calling for help is the Master of Ulterior Motives.

Obviously "worried" by his cousin/ex-girlfriend's predicament - the Cowboy quickly made plans to travel to Cousin Jailbait's hometown to ...uh... to ...ummm... to talk to the mother? Nope. To offer support as Cousin Jailbait talks to her mother herself? Nope. To hopefully bring Cousin Jailbait back to live with him? You betcha.

Seriously. What kind of letch is this guy? His "cover" was that he was going to go to her hometown to help enroll her in public school -- I don't know if that's necessary or even legal, and his other plan was to point out how her current boyfriend isn't any good for her. Then, with Cousin Jailbait not being able to go home, the MSC would move her into his place -- effectively becoming Daddy Cousinfucka.

One of the good things about the MySpace Cowboy's plans is that they really never come to fruition. This time was no different. Cousin Jailbait moved in with her boyfriend and the MSC stayed home with no one to help him hang his harajuku girl posters.

So you're wondering about the "Fat and Needles" promised in the title? The Cowboy had bragged complained the other day about how sore he was. Without being asked about it, he volunteered the info that he "had his first non-surgical liposuction procedure... called mesotherapy."

Mesotherapy uses hundreds of tiny needles to inject a fat-eating fluid into the targeted area. Then the fluid goes to work and turns unwanted fat into waste.

Still no confirmation as to whether MSC will be having the procedure done on his head.