Friday, August 26, 2005

hait

you know you've had a good week when three of your best friends in the office leave, your favorite bar burns to the ground and your $300 suit gets covered in some asshole's neon green chewing gum...which reminds me,

the phrase "i hate..." has become regrettably abundant among the youths of today, of which i dare count myself a member. while i too am guilty of using it flippantly, like the bulk of my peers i feel it important to differentiate between the definitions of hatred. when used in the aforementioned parlance it might be defined as 'extreme dislike', or a 'feeling of animosity'. even in the most capricious uses of the word, these definitions generally fit. on the other hand, there is the more serious essence of "hatred," for which the english language lacks a fitting definition. one of the better ones i've seen was "a feeling of hostility so strong that it demands action" but obviously that falls far short of satisfactory.

it's easy to hate things in this latter way (pork rinds, the scent of fresh vomit, the ebola virus) but i'm more concerned here with that hate as it pertains to dudes and by that of course i mean people of both genders and any inbetween. this rare and perilous form of hatred is a delicious lotus fruit of unknown destructive power. it is one don succumbed to many years ago and through which i believe his downfall was paved. and though i may have certainly felt extraordinarily strong lesser-hatred in the past, the blossoms of hatred-major have for the first time ever begun to peek from the cold cowboy's carefully-fertilized hate-buds in recent months. though thus far i have managed to keep its cruel pollen-enrusted stamen from view, the subject of this ire, my coworker "wendy", now perennially tests my hitherto steely resolve.

in the interest of clarity, i propose we differentiate between these "two hates" by renaming the latter, more forceful one "hait" after the legendary dead vulture scum song of the same name.

and so lies the queston: to hait or not to hait?

Friday, August 05, 2005

the saga of dashing don part IX: in come the coppers

yes, yes, i know. for too long have i lain in atrophy while the sands of time pile up below like a great mound of teeming, soul-hungry fireants. but recess has descended and the glimmer of hope that i may have a day or two not spent in the throes of damage control has once again returned. thus:

...don, you see, is not an un-smart man. just a crazy, maniacal one who speaks fluent spanish. he knows, for dale has surely told him, that he is on the ropes in the office. he may also know that we no longer send calls to his voicemail, we take messages. me might further suspect, as is the case, that my coworker sven has been given the task of overriding his voicemail privileges. other than a few items of critical importance to the district, sven won't speak about what he finds and when i stop to think for a moment i realize i don't want to know anyway. the catch is: to fire somebody you have to be able to say you told them so. don will not answer his phones; he surely has call waiting. don will not respond to his personal email account. the boss calls don's parents, who must be over 70 years old. they say something along the lines of "welp, sounds like don!"

the minor bit about the thousands in merchandise on the office account is really not cool, 'specially since it's all public record. so we call the good ol' coppers who admit they can do nothing until we fire the dude. we know he will open no certified mail from the office address so we send it from a coworker's zipcode in maryland. three days later we receive confirmation that it was delivered. the letter says something along the lines of "dear don: here are the items you illegally charged to the offic account...(list)/please return them by the end of the week along with your ID, blackberry and office cell phone so we won't have to bring in the coppers! xoxo, thy now-former boss". well, t'was a bit more formal. i'm lazy.

the next week she gets a giant, unadorned package in the mail from you-know-who with the three laptops, the blackberry, the cell phones, no id, no printer, no fucking $800 worth of ipod + accessories. so we call law enforcement and now it's out of our hands.

what is in our hands is the largest sack of backlog ever wrought. and we spend the next two months sifting through and deconstructing piece-by-piece his monolith of crazy. the man saved everything. i mean this not in any loose or casual sense; he quite literally saved all things. and we quite literally threw out two dumpsters of worthless paper and trinkets and miscellaneous garbage such as mousetraps and an old bottle of rancid vodka stored somewhere underneath government-vouchered taxi cab receipts reading "3am saturday, august 24, 2003" in his desk bowels.

and oh how we danced.

until the new menace emerged; one truly as vile as the first.

and to his credit, don recognized her savagery early on.

from the beginning in fact.

her name:

wendy.