Common Courtesies
I am a man driven by the simple ethos that you treat people the way you would like to be treated, until they give you a reason to treat them differently, of course. It's simple things I'm talking about here, nothing grand or far reaching.
Turn signals and the proper use thereof for example, make everyone's life just a tiny bit easier when they're on the road. Holding a door open for someone. Simple, everyday courtesies can make the difference between a horrible day and merely a crappy one. If we all took the care to extend to a stranger the niceties you would show to a friend, things that take virtually no extra effort, the world would become, by tiny degrees, a better place to live in.
Take Abraham, the Disc Jewky at our club. I've been sweeping the carefully placed toilet paper he uses to cover the seat at work into the bowl and flushing it for him for over a year now. 5 days a week for over a year. Why? Because as the first night shift Floor Twat to go in most days, I run around and do all the sweeping and restocking that the day shift guy couldn't be bothered to do even though he has NOTHING whatsoever to do all day.
It's an inconsequential thing, sweeping ass touched toilet paper into the john using the end of a broom. It doesn't cost me much effort and only takes me 3-5 seconds. It didn't really bother me the first day and it really didn't bother me the second day or the tenth for that matter. But by the hundredth day I kept thinking to myself "If I was an emotionally stunted germophobe who actually gained some sort of comfort from the useless gesture of covering a public toilet seat with tissue paper, would I consistently leave my security barrier there, every day, for some poor bastard to push into the toilet for me, or would I just nudge it in there myself since it's my ass and there can't possibly be anything living on my ass that I could catch from the TP that was shielding it?"
The answer, in my case, is that if I was delusional enough to think that a layer of toilet paper could protect my derriere from some perceived threat inherent in public toilet seats, I would indeed push it into the toilet myself when I was done for the simple fact that other people shouldn't have to do it for me.
Don't get me started on germophobes in the first place. I figure their lives are already enough of a hell due to their irrational fears and nonsensical rituals they use to get by every day and certainly don't need me heaping more scorn upon them.
Before I move on I would like to point out that there has never been, since we started keeping track of these things, a confirmed case of anyone catching anything from a toilet seat. Seriously, check it out. You can't find one.*1
All this leads me to Roscoe P. Colbrain, our tiny, dentically challenged cook. Now I don't have much good to say about Roscoe in the first place. He's somewhat competent in the kitchen provided he doesn't get more than 4 orders at once. He is certainly possessed of the over inflated pride in his culinary skills that most would be chefs have and professes to take great pride in his work. His crowning achievements at this club were to get his signature burger placed on the menu*2 and to wrap vegetables in bacon and deep fry them and call them appetizers.*3
In truth Roscoe is lazy, shoddy in his skills and ignorant of even the most basic fundamentals of culinary craft. He's a proven idiot who can't even drive himself to work like a normal adult American. He recently jizzed in an ugly girl he hates and now has a child with her which he has to support on his $10/hr paycheck.
He also enjoys rap music.
Roscoe has a problem similar to Abraham the Disc Jewky except Roscoe likes to leave his mop water in the bucket after he's finished mopping the kitchen, where it remains until I go to use it the following night and have to fucking empty the scummy, nasty water out before I can go about my nightly mopping rounds.
Once again this didn't annoy me the first time, nor even the tenth time I had to do it. I just said to myself 'fucking asshole...' and got on with it.
But since by the end of tonight I was feeling a bit frayed, finding last night's mop water waiting for me to empty it was like finding a fresh ring of Abe's ass paper.
I took exception to it.
I told the Manager, Sir Invariably Polenta IX that he needs to inform the cooks that emptying the mop bucket at the end of their shift is an essential component of them not getting their ass kicked by an enraged bear of a Floor Beast. I told him in particular to convey this to Roscoe, who doesn't have a lot of teeth left to lose and certainly doesn't need my fist abbreviating their already doomed existence.
If I have to explain it to the kitchen staff I will not take great pains to make it pleasant for them. If I were armed with a 10 lb leg of lamb, I would feel confident going into combat against the entire cook staff armed with whatever kitchen utensils they saw fit to grab. I may need a few stitches when the dust cleared, but they would need necromancers.
Then I would bread them and feed them to drunk strippers as 'pork bites'. Strippers will eat anything if it comes with enough ranch dressing.
So in summary, be nice until someone gives you a reason not to be nice. If something is your responsibility, like a toilet paper life preserver one must create to poop in an alien environment or last night's downtrodden mop water, take care of it yourself. Grow the fuck up, look up 'empathy' in the dictionary and try to put it into the context of your life and properly use your goddamn turn signals.
Monaco the tweaked-out whorebag.
Monaco is a tweaked out, bony, flappy stripper who regularly ingests enough methamphetamine to kill seven outlaw bikers. She is roughly as smart as an ermine, but doesn't nearly have as luxurious a pelt nor the charming demeanor of said mustelid.
The Floor Axis hates her. She's mucks up the ecosystem with her tawdry whoooooriness. Tweakheads are unpredictable, misbegotten auto collisions*4 who only exist to plague the lives of Floor Apes and MisManagers everywhere. They are our penance for previous lives of misdeed and abuse of power, I am sure of it.
I'm only mentioning her here because she's sorta in the title to this edition.
What I'd really like to talk about now is my current computer chair dilemma. Yes, I have a computer chair problem which is vexing me.
Confused? I don't blame you. Let me elucidate.
You see I am a gigantic, shamelessly heavy brontosapien. Normal, commercial desk chairs don't work for me very long. They are not forgiving of my gravitational pull. They, with startling regularity, suddenly bend at a 45 degree angle and dump me on the floor.
I am the Death of Chairs.
So in desperation I bought a 50's era Swivel Stool With Optional Useless Back Support Illusion. It was designed by a man named A. Shugguroth for use against clerks and accountants and anyone else that was required to sit more than 15 minutes at a time. It is built to withstand a small but determined Apocalypse and can quite easily cope with my ponderous largeness.*5
This hideous, tank-proof Chair is quite comfortable for roughly 5 minutes, which is how long I sat in it at the antique store I bought it at. After that a variety of painful symptoms develop and they sharply intensify the longer you sit in The Chair. I firmly believe that this Chair was crafted in an odd-numbered Circle of Hell and is most certainly powered by the souls of dead children. I am sure that if I went looking for this antique shop again, it wouldn't be there anymore and no one in the area can remember an antique shop ever being there.
Lest you think I exaggerate, let me give you a painstakingly recorded transcript of an experiment I ran last week where I subjected myself to The Chair for 27 minutes straight and took notes on the experience.
Don't try this at home, I am a professional Lummox and am built to survive dicey encounters with demon-wrought furniture. Even so I only write this after a lengthy recovery period.
Reader Discretion Advised.
1 Minute in Chair: It's sturdy and comfortable, but I wish I could lean back without cracking my spine in half or falling onto my back.
3 Minutes in Chair: This will definitely not shatter under my mighty buttocks. I can't believe it only cost $25! Sure it lacks in lumbar support but that will just encourage me to sit with better posture.
5 Minutes in Chair: It could be worse and it only cost $25.
8 Minutes in Chair: Strange, but I can't feel my balls anymore and my taint is just a distant, icy memory. Wasn't this damn chair comfortable just a second ago? Am I going crazy?
11 Minutes in Chair: For shit's sake who made this fucking thing? How can numbness burn like napalm and what the hell is compressing my tailbone like a drop forge?
14 Minutes in Chair: Dear God, it hurts! IT HURTSSSS! Legs feel like firey dead things....won't respond. Thoughts shredded with suffering...can't think way out of Chair...
15 Minutes in Chair: Pass out from the excruciating pain. Sweet, blessed unconsciousness...
19 Minutes in Chair: Awake screaming to find the mewling, piss stained remnant of a man that lives in The Chair is me. Helpless and very afraid. I am going to die in this Chair.
22 Minutes in Chair: Ready to admit that I killed Christ for the mercy of death. Willing to admit to any crime, any unthinkable atrocity to just make the agony go away. I have purchased Chairthulu and it will wrench my soul from my pooper.
25 Minutes in Chair: Gibbering with pain induced hallucinations of the Spanish Inquisition. I smell burning flesh and rotted leather. I confess to being a Jew, a Cathar, a Muslim but the misery won't stop. My vision goes black I can hear a Vast Slithering as I pray for devourment.
27 Minutes in Chair: Death convulsions hurl me out of The Chair and into the refrigerator where as fortune would have it the freezer pops open and a bottle of Ketel One pours into my open, concussed mouth, revitalizing me on the brink of my extinction. I was super lucky.
Sigh, guess I'm gonna have to spend some stripperherding money, or become paralyzed and have my soul eaten by something with tentacles from the Netherworld.
Long Live The Chair,
-The StripperHerder
*1 I'm not saying that I don't wipe a seat off before I use it. Dudes are notorious for pissing all over toilet seats that they were too lazy or inconsiderate to put up before they cut loose. Since I don't relish the idea of sitting on some other guy's dried urine, I generally wipe the seat off first. But I am under no illusions that this will do anything at all to eradicate lurking germs and bacteria, nor do I ever think about contracting a disease from a public crapper because I'm not a fear ridden fuckdrivel.
*2 Your basic Black n Bleu burger except his has grilled red pepper and comes on ciabatta bread. Wow.
*3 As if this is original, creative, innovative or he knew how to spell any of these words.
*4 Like a Trainwreck but a little bit quieter and more localized.
*5 And this is just a guess mind you, since I can't seem to find a scale that goes over 300 lbs, but I'd be willing to bet that I'm around 350-370 lbs right at this moment. Chairs hate me.
