The Urban Refugee

I’ve often thought that the body panels on cars and trucks should be made out of female nipples. No, seriously. Nipples can take pretty much any amount of abuse (nibbling, chewing, tweeking, squeezing, prolonged “doorbell ringing”, etc.) and still pop back into their original shape. So why not make cars out of ‘em?

Imagine this: You get into a fender bender (nipple rippler?) and put a goodly dent into the front of your car. All you’d need to do would be to rub and tweak the body panels a bit and all of the damage would pop right out again. Even better, on colder days, your car’s headlights would always be on. How cool would that be?

You can already buy nose bras for cars, so if cars were partly made out of nipples this would make a lot more sense. You could also call the guy who nearly ran into you a dumb boob and be entirely right. Face it, this whole “cars made out of nipples” concept just works.

So… How do I go about patenting the idea?

…especially given that I’ve purchased over 100 movies that I’ve yet to find time to watch (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Bride of the Gorilla being notable among them). Still, I find myself standing at the precipice once again.

“Fuck!”

“What?!?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”

“Putting away the cutlery.”

“Run it through the dishwasher again.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s no five second rule in restaurants!”

Nancy at Neuroti.ca writes:

You can find some rather alarming things in beer empties. Over the years I’ve opened bags and cases to find cockroach colonies, countless spiders, maggots, used condoms, fermenting limes and a litany of other items that have mercifully faded from memory. Stories from other personnel on the front lines have also included things like used needles and syringes, underwear, you name it. Even though they pay a ten cent deposit on each beer bottle and can, empties are rarely rinsed or sorted. More often than not, they’re slimed up, peed on, used as ashtrays, tossed in the backyard, scooped up out of a ditch or field or piled perilously close to a vehicle with a gasoline leak. When they’re ready to be brought back to the store, they’re bundled into a box or bag with any other garbage that might be stuck to them, and handed over to us with a big smile. To most, it’s not about recycling clean beverage containers: It’s garbage for money.

Ah, yes, the joys of a retail existence. Working in a beer store sounds like it’s almost as much fun as working as a video store clerk in an outlet that rents porn. There’s nothing like getting back videocasettes covered in varying types of fresh and not so fresh lubrication. Then there’s the presence of pubic hairs and other … secretions … on the returned items.

My advice to Nancy: buy a bottle of Purelle. A big one.

In most restaurants, the menu is the menu, and the concensus amongst the kitchen staff is that modified orders are, well, kinda rude. While we understand that the odd person wants to hold the onions or would like a bit of extra cheese on their pizza, please don’t start inventing your own menu items, especially in the middle of the dinner rush. If you honestly don’t like our menu that much, maybe you should be eating elsewhere. That or you can just fuck off.

People with nut allergies can fuck off. We have no idea whether the stuff we serve has been cross-contaminated with nuts or not, and we’re not going to change how our kitchen works for 1 out of a 100 people. Anyone with a life threatening allergy (or the parent of a child in that situation) who expects to get a nut free meal in a restaurant is a moron. Those who spend fifteen minutes whining to the restaurant staff about this during a high traffic time are annoying morons who need to fuck off.

Are you one of those people who thinks that you can shave a pile of calories off a meal by having a baked potato with your greasy veal cutlets smothered in gravy with a greasy piece of garlic toast? Are you also the one who bitched up a storm because we ran out of baked and/or mashed potatoes fifteen minutes before you showed up so you were stuck choosing between french fries or (God forbid) a salad? Hey, genius, if you were serious about losing weight you’d avoid our establishment entirely. Our menu gives 98% of registered dieticians hives for a reason. So, next time, either be honest with yourself and order a garden salad (our solitary menu item that won’t set up house next to your left ventricle), or just, y’know, fuck off.

Illiterate, loud, drunken rig-pigs from Saskatchewan who can’t refrain from bragging about pussssssy and swearing at top volume (yes, even I heard you back in the kitchen over the roar of the ventilation system and the deep fryers) when there are families with young children present can fuck off, too. I realize that Alberta is a bit short of labour, but we’re not so short that we need you losers.

As a matter of interest, I am the employee with the largest number (and severity of) health problems working in the restaurant. I am also the employee with the fewest sick days in the past two months. Surely if someone in my condition is able to show up for work when he says he will the rest of my co-workers can, too. Or if they really don’t like working there that much they just plain need to fuck off and work for someone else.

When a restaurant’s sign says it’s closed, it’s probably closed. When the sign says closed and all the lights are off, you can be almost 100% certain the establishment is closed. If the sign says closed, the lights are off, and you’re there twenty minutes before the time the “business hours” sign says that customers are allowed in, the restaurant is absolutely, positively, closed. If you ignore all of this and come in through the front door, which was left unlocked for the employees — not you, and then you hassle said employees for a breakfast order, you’re a major-league asshole who desperately needs to fuck off.

A steak that is rare will have a centre that is red and barely heated. A medium rare steak is red in the centre, but the centre is completely heated. A steak cooked to medium will have a tiny bit of red in the centre, but will be mostly pink. Medium well steaks have pink in the centre, and will turn grayish brown as you approach the exterior. A well done steak has no pink visible and the consistency of shoe leather. This is how cooks are trained to produce steaks when a customer states their preference. The cook isn’t psychic and doesn’t know that when you ordered a medium steak you were just trying to impress your friends with your ‘culinary hipness’ and what you really wanted was shoe leather. What the cook does know is that you need to fuck off.

And to anyone I missed who pissed me off at some point over this past week, you can fuck off as well.

For all those who have e-mailed in to ask, no, I haven’t been abducted by aliens. It’s not from a lack of effort on my part, however. I and my towel have been faithfully camping out by the new crop circles found by Provost waiting for the arrival of Our Alien Overloards. So far, nada.

No mutilated cattle, no anal probes (being molested by passing oil patch workers doesn’t count), not even a single lousy tracking implant to show for all those cold wet nights in the field. I did manage to catch a cold and now my towel has mildew, but that’s it.

I really oughta sue Discovery Channel.

How long has it been since my last cigar? Let me put it this way — the last time I smoked it was still considered socially acceptable to light up in most places. These days, of course, that’s just not allowed.

So.

I have a pack of five Colt Old Port wine and rum dipped cigars that found their way into my posession yesterday. I can’t smoke them in my home as I’d rather not have my kid see me smoking, I don’t want to expose her to second-hand smoke, and most importantly, my quality of life would decrease drastically if my wife divorced me over stinking up the house.

I can’t smoke them in my office as the building actually belongs to the in-laws (who have generously allowed me use of it) since cigar smoke makes them both physically ill. Smoking outside is out since rain and cigars are incompatible.

I can, however, smoke in the vehicle if I open the windows, and that is what I set out to do this morning. Except that I forgot to purchase a box of wooden matches yesterday (lighting your cigar from anything else is not only morally objectionable, but is akin to child molestation in terms of sheer wrongness), so no cigar for me.

I guess I’m a little out of practice. That, and smoking is a hell of a lot more complicated than it used to be.

In fact, sometimes the customer is a total fucking moron. I’m firing one this morning as he’s simply too expensive to have as a client.

The offending customer had a poorly written antivirus package that was throwing false positives. It was reporting files as infected when they weren’t, and it would then proceed to “heal” files that weren’t broken. Windows 98 SE simply doesn’t run well with most of explorer.exe and msvcrt.dll missing (it won’t even load, actually). I diagnosed the issue, which is extremely fucking difficult when half the software on said system is in an Asian language, and asked the customer to stop using the defective application (I couldn’t find it to uninstall it because the interface for that program was also in said funky language).

Standing right in front of me, the customer insists that the machine is infected and runs the broken antivirus app again. Windows is no longer bootable and I have to fix the machine, so I do. And then the fucking idiot runs the antivirus app again! He simply would not believe me that his system wasn’t infected (it scanned clean using every other anti-virus and anti-malware tool in my arsenal). I fixed the machine again. I also toasted the antivirus app as I was able to identify it at this point.

After this I sorted out a hardware conflict for the external modem (twice — because the moron couldn’t stop frigging with that, too) and worked with the support tech for their point of sale system to get it working again (the original issue was a corrupted database in the point of sale app, which the other tech fixed remotely).

I could have possibly lived with this, because, let’s face it — I don’t expect my customers to be experts on computers — that’s my job. However, I’m not busy enough for it to be my full-time job so I work in a restaurant as a short order cook on evenings and weekends. What I don’t need is for customers from my computer business to barge into the back of the restaurant when I’m not there and abuse my boss when they can’t reach me on the phone. I don’t want my other souce of income being endangered either, thanks.

This morning the idiot is leaving messages on my machine saying that his system is still not working. You know what? I don’t care. He’s going to have to find someone else willing to put up with him from now on.

He’s fired.

The good news:

The diet is progressing nicely and my weight loss just passed the 22 lb mark. James T. Kirk gut here I come.

The bad news:

I can’t get Ray to stop checking out my newly slimmed down ass. The pervert.