by Michelle Perez
On the job, more and more often than the day before, a lot of the stupid things you see people hear and do pile up. If I had to go with three succinct ones that I could post and make really just the world at large aware of, they’d be the following three things:
1. Wipe The Doo-Doo Off Your Behind
Cannot stress the importance of this enough! When you’re about to sit down, your boot* is at face level with your fellow employees before it reaches the seat. Even afterwards, a person’s nostrils have such difficulty expelling a wet doo-doo smell. I like thinking about butts, don’t get me wrong, but like pizza or small birds (as the saying often goes) if they’re covered in doo-doo, I’m ill equipped to cope, and prone to jumping out of second story windows. Physically.
2. If You Wear A Combination Of Duster, Top Hat and Alligator Shirt, (A Definite Contender For Heir To The Wolf Shirt Throne), Make Like Toshiro Mifune And Rip Open Your Own Stomach**
These are the first guys to offer idle talk of video games. Now, by itself that’s harmless, but they’re so numerous and idiocy drunk on being the first jerk out of unshaven herd of many to drown you in their explicit and completely unsolicited opinions in the most repugnant way possible, I think there’s a want and most definitely a need for company policy of “kill on first sighting.” You’ll be sitting there, reading Parade when all of the sudden, this man you mistake for a pile of donuts in a shirt starts strangling you with meme humor, invoking such time honored classics as FailBlog and ICanHazCheeseburger. As a man who does push polling for a living this is too much even for me.
Fred, we’ll call him, is one such brimming cauldron of human sweat. He’ll talk in great, passionate verse about Ron Paul, chuckle about his original Charlie Sheen for President Idea, and his respect for the shrewd campaigning from the Rick Santorum/Newt Gingrich camps as the primaries progressed. His political affiliations aside, he seemed more involved in actually talking to someone than making one focused salient point. He described Rick Santorum’s campaign as being an act of great cunning, resembling Michael Moore’s tactics in its barbed questions, all the while repeating he was a liberal. He did this while ignoring the fact that this was a poll from the Romney campaign; they confirm at the end it is indeed them, they give a phone number. These claims are bookended by talk of conservatism and finding unions loathsome, and declaring he can have enough money for his retirement by the average age for that by living within his means. His means are eight dollars and eighty cents. When he isn’t making claims in the vein of a first grader, he’ll go onto something he actually has measured knowledge in, which is actually more infuriating for good reason. If you held Fred at gunpoint, and asked him who Abraham Lincoln was, he would probably say in earnest that he was the president of the United States of America, but also a vampire hunter.
This is Fred. You may have met him.
Do you want to know Boba Fett’s ancestry? Talk to Fred; He’ll tell you all about Mandalore and how much of a Bad Ass he thought Canderous Ordo was. If you want to talk shop about LARPing, he’s got you covered. You’ll learn that Fred’s skill in LARP was cultivated in his buddy’s father’s chateau. All those French swords sung a song in his heart of the foam battle soon to come. I have experienced The Paradox of Fred so painfully and frequently throughout the years that all the names of the people not too unlike Fred and blurred into a Greater Fred. It’s like one Fred flew so close to the sun of imagination that his wings burned off and he was cast down into the blackest pits of himself, arising atop the glass that were his broken ambitions as a shackled solipsistic Batman. Another Fred I’d met years before claimed he could run atop a car moving seventy miles an hour if he were forced to take such actions. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of Metal Gear Online, and never once failed to fill me in on the finer points of Japanese storytelling at its peak in Kingdom Hearts. I don’t know who Sora is but when I do, by God when I do I will punch whatever Japanese man who made him in his whole face.
The entity invites spiritual ruin on all those who want to have fully-formed worldviews. Your hobbies will affect you, sure. The notion of them informing your actual decisions and your being or essence as a person blinds you, and besets you with devils of incongruous thinking unmindful of where your feet lie. Inform your opinions with actual knowledge of the subject at hand, or at least some semblance of understanding. Speak the knowledge sincerely, and know to distinguish and acknowledge other frames of reference. Know with great love and care, and strive to discern infatuation with the superficial from truth. Love people, not things. And for God’s sake shut the hell up about the goddamn My Little Pony.
3. Stop Pissing All Over The Floor Of The Bathroom
Ladies how can you even manage this without a pee-pee or weenus?
*Shorthand for “booty” or “butt”
**The author of this article in no way advocates actual successful suicide attempts. Many Toshiro Mifunes have gone on to great success in their lives after having ripped open their own stomachs.
