I hope I'm not the only one who bursts into spontaneous fiery tears when I hear those OnStar commercials on the radio. Like when the OnStar representative helps the little girl whose mom is pregnant and unconscious behind the wheel? With the little girl weepy voice and the soothing omniscient "ambulance-dispatching" OnStar guy? Or, Jesus Christ, the one where the OnStar God informs the decapitated head-on collision guy that a) his airbag has deployed, and b) paramedics are on the way? To reattach his head? So he should keep his head in a glass of cold milk until they get there?*
So I'm thinking about having OnStar attached to my neck.
ONSTAR: Hello, Ms. Kline. How may I be of assistance today?
ME: Hey, Will. I'm thinking about trying to jump over this wall to get to my car because I don't really feel like walking around it? But... I don't know. It's that weird height where I might totally clear it but I also might break my ankle and land on my teeth. What do you think?
ONSTAR: Oh, you can absolutely clear that. Remember that puddle we jumped over last week? Please. And you were wearing sandals. Don't be such a pussy.
or
ONSTAR: Hey.
ONSTAR: Yoo hoo?
ONSTAR: Wow, you're seriously going to be late, man. You can make it if you don't wash your... anything.
ONSTAR: Hey, are you going to at least call in? Dude. At
least call in. Don't just
not show.** And clear your throat first. You sound like a fucking Marlboro.
* I heard this about knocked out teeth once. I assume the same is true for heads because, really, why wouldn't it be?
** Now that I'm gainfully employed I can belly up to the "fight the establishment" bar of self-pity and cynicism. And I would happily buy you a beer there if Uncle Sam wasn't bending me over every fucking week.
(I'm a fast learner.)
I straight up lied about when I'd have the Chicken Dragon of Doom Complete With Eggs of Doom pictures up. There was no fucking way. I have them and love them and they'll find their way up here sometime this week but right now I've got a 2:30 deadline tomorrow for a gigantic fucking manual full of information that I can't a)
find among the rampant live-network "just store it on the infinite 'R' drive with NO NAME" devestational document GRAVEYARD, b)
edit, thanks to the company's very self-congratulatory policy of using ONLY Adobe Frame Maker in lieu of anything resembling ANYTHING resembling a coherent word processor, c)
print, thanks to about fourteen hundred fax machines-slash-printers-slash-copiers that are all apparently hooked up to each other and nothing else. It's like Maximum Overdrive in there. I keep my head down, waiting for the pop machine to start slinging pop bombs. All this for a woman whose interpretation of "I started last week" must be something akin to, "Anything else I can do for you at home?"
So.
I think it's clear that I've never been happier in my life.
I'm not kidding.
Anyway. I thought that since I lied to you about The Chickens I would list for you some other things that I find myself flatass lying about on a semi-daily basis:
1)
LIE: "I knew Phil Mickelson in college! He was good friends with my boyfriend at the time and we all used to hang out."
TRUTH: My boyfriend was a golf fiend and freaked out like a little girl when he got to play on the same fantasy football league as Phil Mickelson. I think they might have SEEN each other once at a league meeting or something. Needless to say, I never met the man. I told R I did, though. Why? Eh. I'm sure I passively-aggressively threw it out there when I was trying to make R feel inadequate by harping on The Ex's Coolness Factor. Yeah. I'm the only one who does this.
2)
LIE: "I played softball in highschool."
TRUTH: No. Just... no. I played in seventh and eighth grade. I was catcher. I think I hit the ball like twice. For two years my dad promised me cash money if I could get on base but I don't think I ever did. No, I was catcher and right field. With a glove full of Nerds and Jolly Ranchers and Lik-M-Stiks. The funny thing is that, as devoid of athletic talent as I clearly
was, I did get moved up into some Allstar team in eighth grade; I actually could
catch, apparently. I remember catching a line-drive down the third baseline that happened in, like, a SECOND. It's still the fastest thing I've ever done. I guess the majesty of that moment justified an entire prestigious (if incredibly vague) varsity career.
3)
LIE: "I was in Allstars."
TRUTH: It's possible that I was just the oldest kid on the team that year. That would certainly help explain the tee.
Chickens of dooms! Dooms of The Chickens! I might have been drinking!
Today was the "deadline" but tomorrow is a lot like today in that it has traffic and a sun and an embarrassingly dirty guest bathroom. So KEEP SENDING. The ones I have are wonderful. I can't even articulate how much better they are than the original. We should all get together one day and have a "tablecloth" contest. You bring the crayons.
And the cash.
I was well on my way to achieving a full week without anyone suspecting that I'm a highbred dork from the Ancient And Most Embarrassing Ancestral Dork line when the chick who's training me (as her own replacement, as if having to deal with a woman who has dedicated eighty percent of her attention span to making sure that her breasts are adquately showcased and twelve percent to noticing with wolfish and immediate and PUBLIC disdain whenever someone -ANYone- accidently glances at anything in the room lower than the emergency sprinkler heads wasn't awkward enough) mentioned that she was going to print up another copy of a support manual and I, in hasty concurrence, bade her to "make it so, Number One".
So much for
that.
I Got A Job, So The Jake Threw Up In My Backseat And Then Ate It Again. Thanks, The Jake, For The Cleanup.
(Some Things Before I Post The Post That I Started Three Days Ago But Kept Falling Asleep Writing:1) The thing? The thing that I mention in a few minutes? Yeah, there's no INTERnet there. Just the bullshit communist INTRAnet that they throw out so that the cubicle masses don't have quite enough reason to set the manager's hair on fire. Because, after all, they do have
something that ends in "-net".
Something happens when you hit the Internet Explorer icon.
A job! A
real one! With paychecks that are "new car"-able, a shit-ass commute and pantyhose mandatory! I didn't know this last thing. All day today people were eyeing my unsheathed legs like I was the dice blow whore at the dollar craps table. (The benefits therein are self-evident.) I have ten years experience in grocery management, right, and I've been trying desperately to forget that any of it ever happened. An impossible feat, really, when your resume reads, "Always remembers nametag; produce codes like sixth sense; will pitch in and work night crew for overtime; thinks assistant manager's secretly filmed late night rendevous with the scan clerk on the meat cutting table is high entertainment; passionately late coming back from all breaks and/or lunches." So, naturally, I took a job in the grocery industry. In the fancy-schmancy corporate office. And for a crapload more cash. So now I get to boss people around all the time, which is truly what I was after the first time around when I got railroaded by the Instore, Unwashed, Not Registered To Vote, Multiple Abortion set.
On my first day I overheard no less than six people bitching about something behind someone else's back. I also got the "if you need something right away from the print shop wear a skirt and bring donuts" speech. GOD, I MISSED WORKING.
2) OKAY! Damn! Microsoft Paint me a Chicken Dragon of Doom Complete With Eggs Of Doom. I did mine in a lake, but that doesn't mean "it" can't venture.
Styrosent me hers seven minutes after I mentioned it, which is why I'm marrying Styro. You have until Friday. I'm off on Saturday (maybe, since I'm not off
this Saturday, unless you count teaching thirty newly appointed night crew members about in-store saftey for nine hours "off") so I'll post them next weekend.
3) That thing in the title about Jake throwing up and then eating it is way too self-explanatory. Go draw a doom-filled chicken.
San Francisco! With The Fog! And The Taxis! And The Streetcars! And The One-Ways! Give Me The Keys Before I Scratch Your Not-On-The-Road Eyes Out!
or
That New Chrysler Sedan Looks Like An Eighty-Four Year Old Man And Drives Like A Ninety-Two Year Old Woman. In The Bad Way.
1) Northern California vacation in
this vein; it's an annual retreat that R's non-profit club indulges in once a year. Strangely enough the group always manages to get reservations in a "resort spa" so the women can indulge the apparently club-requisite Eighty Dollar Pedicure addiction and I can pack all of my gym clothes and my mp3 player and two pairs of sneakers and then slink by the gym on my way to the open bar hospitality suite. It's a generally good time. Lots of buffet chicken. Lots of Baileys and decaf during the slide show. Lots of giddy middle-aged men duct taping other peoples' doors closed. Overall I think we're lucky that the SWAT team wasn't called.
2) So "wine tasting"? Yeah, let's just go ahead and call that "drinking all day, starting at nine-thirty". Jesus. I found it increasingly entertaining to think of new ways to describe the wine in taste question. (I'm sure that this development was unrelated to the wine imbibement itself in the same way that I'm sure that the waiter's shirt at dinner was a funny enough shade of mauve to cry over. Which is to say, not at all sure.) For example, I remember gazing around pensively, swirling my glass and declaring the wine within to be "clammy", "squishy", "barkish", "tiger-like", "very Gatsby", "hard to be offended by", "standoffish" and "adorable". I've left out the ones that don't make any sense.
3) One of the other women paid me a compliment one night at dinner: "You're so young but you really carry yourself well. You blend in nicely with what could be an intimidating group."
That was nice.
I'm betting that she hadn't seen me at lunch earlier when I had three pieces of "RED BLAST" Hubba Bubba in my mouth and I was drawing the "Chicken Dragon Of Doom Complete With Eggs Of Doom" in crayon on my tablecloth. I clean up good.
I've been in Northern California! With no internet! And you don't even KNOW how hard I tried to find an internet cafe or an airport internet thing or a working keyboard at the Santa Rosa Costco... all to NO AVAIL. So I'm home now. Me and The Jake. Who's getting over having been boarded by slapping me in the face with a glove full of sand over and over again. At least they taught him turn-of-the-century chivalric revenge techniques. Like they promised.
More tomorrow.
