What in the Name of Sanity Just Happened?!

Sadly, the following is a completely true story. There is genuinely no hyperbole involved.

Quick backstory: My dog likes cats. My dog really likes cats. Like, will sit at the door and whine if he hears a cat meowing outside because he wants to bring it inside and cuddle with it. My dog, by the way, is a St. Bernard.

Proper Story:

I came home from work tonight, ran upstairs and got my dog to take him out for a walk. As we're coming back up on the entrance of my apartment building, I see a long, skinny as all get-out, pure white cat sitting outside my downstairs neighbor's window. My dog, who we'll call Lenny, because if people get fake names, he can too, runs at this cat. Cat doesn't respond at all. Lenny literally licks the cat's back. Cat doesn't respond at all. And then the most ri-goddamn-diculous thing I've ever seen happened. LENNY PICKED THIS STRANGE CAT UP IN HIS MOUTH. Like a mama cat, by the scruff of the neck. CAT DIDN'T RESPOND AT ALL. My dog has this strange cat slightly off the ground, and the cat is still just chilling, like it's still sitting undisturbed on the ground. After some sharp scolding, Lenny puts the cat down, but starts whining. Not like one sad little whimper. Like, eardrum shattering, devastated whining. If he could say words, they would have been, "But Mom! Kitty! Look at the kitty! Kitty is so skinny! He needs a home! Let's take him home! PLEASE MOM PLEASE MOM PLEASE MOM!" I unlock the door, drag my enormous dog to the door, get him halfway in, and he stops. While he's stopped, with the door propped open by his giant frame, the strange cat ran past his legs and into the building. Fucking brilliant. 

I try to catch the cat, but Lenny is going apeshit, chasing this cat up and down the halls. Need I remind you, readers, this is still a St. Bernard, crashing down the halls of an apartment building at 12:30 a.m. I decide my best option is to wrangle the dog and get him into my apartment. As I'm running up the stairs with the dog, the cat is running back and forth on the floor beneath mine. Lenny is trying to break away to go play with the cat. I get my apartment door open and shove Lenny inside, as my own cat, Banana, bolts out the door, into the common hallway. So I scream, "Nononononono!" and chase after her. Banana gets to the top of the stairs, and I hear this super loud, long, drawn out "MMMRRRRRRRRRREOOOOOOOOOW!" Banana is terrified and turns around and runs back to me. I grab her, get my apartment door open, block the dog from getting out with my own body, all but chuck Banana inside, and then a white blur streaks between my legs, and into my apartment. Lenny starts jumping up and down, again virtually screaming "Kitty! Kitty! Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!" Seriously. Jumping straight up and down. So, White Cat is terrified and makes a beeline for under my sofa. Lenny takes off after him and tries to get under the sofa with White Cat. WC is totally fine with this. Giant dog? Whatever! However, Banana is unhappy. She's growling and hissing and approaching WC. I have no idea what the deal is with the random cat and I don't want my cat anywhere near him, fearing he'll bit her and give her some horrible disease. So I jump in between them, which scares WC, who bolts from under the sofa, jumps on my end table and jumps on the back of my sofa, and runs across the back of my sofa. At this point, I grab WC from the back of my sofa, grab my keys and run out the door.

White Cat starts out totally fine with the fact that he's in my arms and being run down the stairs, but around the first landing begins to wig out and start squirming. He jumps from my arms and runs back up the goddamn stairs! Thus starts Benny Hills, Round Zillion. I run up the stairs, WC freaks out, runs across the hall, and runs down the back stair case. At this point, I'm thinking about just leaving it in the building, but figure my neighbors are already pissed. Then, Lenny starts barking. Loudly. Because, y'know, St. Bernard. Lenny is barking and jumping against the door. WC is scream-meowing in the hall. It's a lovely cacophony of BARKBARKBARKBARK SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! MRRRREOOOOW! BARKBARKBARK! SLAM! MREOW! SLAM! BARK! I recapture WC and successfully get him outside. I get back to my apartment and Lenny and Banana are just chilling on the couch, like nothing ever happened. Right now, Lenny's sleeping on the floor, dream running and Banana is chasing a bottle cap. 

The kicker is, I was on the phone with El Zacho (of elzachorocks.blogspot.com fame) the entire time. His experience through this was "Lenny. Lenny! Lenny! NO! Lenny, come on. Come on! Inside! GODDAMMIT, NO! SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! Come here! Come here! Get back here! LENNY! Get inside! Get inside! INSIDE! SHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! NONONONO! NONONONONO! Come back come back come back!" MRRRRRREOOOOOOW! "BANANA! Get in there! No! Stay in there! Fuckity fuck fuck, not you! Get out! Oh God no!" MRRRREOOOOOOW! BARK! BARKBARKBARK! Bang bang bang! HSSSSSSS! 

BLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOW!!!!

A few years ago, I was working in a theater in middle America. I use the term "theater" loosely here - it was a barn that had been converted. Poorly. It still had the architecture of a barn, but now had a stage shoved in the middle of it, some seats, and wires. It was still a very flimsy, very flammable, very wooden building. While working in this theater, most of the crew was living on campus at a local university, so the vast majority of us lived in the same small, two story dormitory.

I was working on the lighting crew. One day I was cleaning lighting instruments with our master electrician, who came from the deep south. Theater lighting instruments are pretty large and generally quite heavy. In addition to the normal elements you would find in a light, theatrical lighting instruments have steel shutters that you can adjust to alter the size and shape of the beam. After spending a year in a closet in a wooden barn, these instruments were quite rusted, so the Master Electrician, who I will call Mark, and I were scrubbing the steel shutters with rubbing alcohol and steel wool. Mark went into the closet to get another instrument and I suddenly heard him screaming. Like a little girl. I jumped up and ran to him, fearing something had collapsed on him. I arrived to find Mark pointing at the ground, still screaming.

"Mark?! What's going on?!"

"BLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOWBLACKWIDOW!"

"Mark, that's not a black widow. It's just a little house spider."

"IT'S A BLACK WIDOW!"

"Okay, Mark, calm down. I'll kill it."

So I go to step on this tiny little common spider. Now, I thought Mark had already lost his shit completely, but he got worse. "Roz! No! Oh my God! Nonononononononononono! What are you doing?!"

"I'm going to kill it for you. It'll be fine."

"It's not going to be fine! You're going to step on it, it's going to hide in the treads of your shoes, it's going to come back to the dorms, it's going to get in my room, and it's going to kill me!" (Note: I lived on the top floor, at the far east of the building. Mark lived downstairs on the far west.)

Before I can explain to Mark why this is stupid, I see the dumb son of a bitch, our master electrician, grab a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and start shaking the bottle, trying to splash rubbing alcohol onto the spider. Then he takes his motherfucking lighter out of his pocket. So I tackle him. "Mark, you fucking idiot! We're in a barn! Don't set anything on fire!"

He starts weeping and shrieking about the black widow and I pry the bottle of rubbing alcohol out of his hand and smash the spider with it, grinding it a little bit. I can see the spider's legs have detached. Mark is still shrieking as I lift the bottle to reveal bits of spider exoskeleton falling from the bottom of the bottle. Bitch is clearly dead and all sorts of torn apart. At this point Mark begins screaming about the bottle of alcohol being contaminated and what if the "black widow" secreted poison onto the bottle and whine whine scream scream. I threw the bottle away.

And people wonder why I chose not to work in theater for the rest of my life...

Holy Shit, You MUST Be Employee of the Month

A few weeks ago, I got this report of an incident that occurred on my day off from my retail job. As always, the names are made up, but the story is, sadly, real.

Nate, Samantha, and Anne were closing the store. Samantha was running the main register, and therefore stuck up front. A customer was being creepy and harassing Samantha, so Anne, as closing manager, was up front, keeping an eye on this guy, preparing for the possibility of throwing him out. Nate was straightening up the store when he heard two girls giggling and screaming in the ladies' room. Anne and Samantha were both trapped up front, so he couldn't ask either of the ladies to see what was going on and wasn't about to walk in himself. Finally, the harassing man left and seconds after, two teenage girls ran out of the ladies' room, past my workmates, and straight out the door. The crew all looked at each other, locked the doors because it was closing time, and walked back to the ladies' room together. Anne opened the door and they discovered human feces EVERYWHERE. The floor, the walls, even the ceiling in places. So Anne, again in her capacity as manager on duty, told the others not to worry about the mess, that they don't get paid enough to literally deal with shit. So, Anne went to deal with the cash so the others could leave on time. Nate verified the deposit, and Anne went to the ladies' room to clean up the mess...and found Samantha was almost done taking care of it. Way to go, Samantha.

So, Samantha was showered with accolades for going so far above and beyond what is required of her. Anne was grateful, Nate was grateful, even the staff members who weren't present were grateful. Thank you notes were posted all over the breakroom. So, in my capacity as a manager, I mentioned to my boss how far Samantha went and how much we all appreciate her. My boss responded with "Yeah? So?"

And that, bitch, is why you have people requesting to transfer out of your store all the time.

SAWs Attempting to Flirt

I just blocked some jackass on Facebook.

I belong to a Facebook group for a certain science-fiction fandom in my local area. I know many of the people in this group personally, in real life. The few people I don't know are usually friends with some of my friends. So when a member of this group, who we'll call SAW (Super Annoying Wanker), sent me a friend request, I thought, "Sure, he's probably friends with a lot of my friends!" Nope. And, he's a super annoying wanker.

Mostly, SAW was a super annoying wanker because of the non-fucking-stop annoying posts and sharing. Okay, dude, you've known me for, like, two minutes on Facebook. Stop sharing shit to my wall like you know me and we have inside jokes. Even after I changed what should show up from him on my newsfeed, he was still managing to clog up my newsfeed with his stupid crap. I mean, okay, it's your Facebook, you can do whatever you want. If you really like pictures of cats, share however many pictures of cats you like. If you want to post new status updates about wanking to coffee every twenty seconds, go nuts. But really, you don't need to tag me in every damn cat picture/fandom picture/thing vaguely related to fandom/Muppet bullshit you post, especially when there's 80 posts a day!!!!!! The admins of our common group even sent him messages asking him to calm the fuck down and stop sharing every about this popular fandom that pops up on the internet on the group page.

This is just backstory. Time to get to the specific stuff. SAW sends me a friend request that I foolishly accept. I haven't even lifted my finger from my mouse after clicking "accept" and I've got a Private Message from him. So I talk to him a bit, and I'm not digging him too much, but okay, sure, whatever, we'll chat. He then ends the message with "Okay, cutie, I'll talk to you later."

Oh, SAW. "Cutie"? For real? Let's start with the stupidity of YOU'VE NEVER FUCKING SEEN ME! Do you know what I look like? No. You've seen a picture on the internet. The picture is actually of me, but you don't know that. I am cute, but it's still ridiculous of you to assume that. Also, why do you think it's okay to start out making comments about my appearance? We're having a conversation, not fucking and not having a photo shoot. You're asking me questions, I assume this means you want to know about me as a person. This assumption is shattered by your saying "I don't care about who you are, I'm bringing focus back to your appearance." Thirdly, you didn't make a comment about "I think you're pretty." You have taken away my name and replaced it with a term of condescended, pseudo-endearment that one would use for a child. You know who I called "cutie"? My three week old nephew. You know what I usually call him instead? "David."

So, SAW shared a comic with me on Facebook and this was about my last straw.
You know what? I'm going to be lazy here, and just copy and paste my replies from Facebook.
Comment One: Well, let's start with the fact that it's Negging. If any of you are fortunate enough to not know what "negging" is: this is when one person (frequently a male talking to a female, but not necessarily, but I'll be going with this scenario to avoid wanting to punch a pronoun in the theoretical face), trumps a minor compliment with an insult, i.e. "I really like your bangs. Most girls with a nose that big can't pull off bangs." It focuses on a negative, a likely point of embarrassment, and is meant to damage the self confidence of the woman. It's like saying "You have this flaw, but I can forgive it. Never expect anybody else to though! All anybody else is going to see is that big nose." It's manipulative and terrible, but it is a ploy to achieve casual sex. So salsa's response is dead on, even though I think she should have included "Fuck off" and breaking off the corner of his chip head.
Comment Two: Also, "Don't be shy; here's a comment on your appearance." Because I don't fucking care about you as a person (or an anthropomorphized jar of salsa). It doesn't matter who you are. You have a physical quality that I like. For example, I like men with dark hair and olive complexions. This is like me saying to a guy "Yeah, it doesn't matter to me what you say right now because I'm not paying attention to your personality or your opinions, you have a physical attribute I like and that's the only reason I'm here."
Tonight, SAW sent me some more private messages, to which my answers were becoming increasingly curt and snarky. This culminated in him saying "Your fun to talk to" (oh, yeah, no attempts at proper usage of your/you're or abbreviation is TOTALLY the way to win the heart of a nerdy girl!) and me replying with "Yeah, well, you're not."
Could I have handled this better? Certainly. Could he have? Definitely. 'Bye-'bye, Wanker.

While I'm on the topic of SAWs, let's discuss a few more of them.

I went on a date with this guy a few weeks ago. Partway through, he starts telling me his life story. Not like, "I went to college here, I do this for a living." Like "When I was 8 my mother died in front of me, and my father tried to get custody of me but couldn't because he had been married to somebody else when my mother got pregnant so she didn't list him on the birth certificate. So I went to live with an aunt and uncle who beat their autistic son who in turn tries to beat me up. Yeah, I still live in their basement and am 30. I just don't want to look for work more than two miles from home. Well, my brother offered to let me live with him in this area where jobs are good and plentiful, but I don't want to do that. Where are you going?" I mean, people go through shit in life. It doesn't make them bad people. It frequently makes them stronger and better people. However, when you tell me that you're in a bad situation but are making no attempts to make it better, you're fucking ridiculous. I don't want to deal with people who lie, but you're supposed to try to sell yourself a little bit on a first date. If I can bother to put on mascara, you can wait until a second date to tell me all about your defeatist views on life. Actually, you know what? Scratch that. You can tell me about your defeatist views on life before asking me out. Save me some time. And seek therapy. Seriously. You need help with that shit.

I once went on a first date with a guy who told me a story about his being dick to some kid. He then actually used the phrase, "Yeah, because I have really high self-confidence, I'm okay with telling people when they're wrong." Nope. That's not self-confidence. That's narcissism. It is not an attractive quality. Stop talking.

Went on a first date with another guy. We had fun. He paid for my chai tea, we talked, we laughed. He boasted a little bit about how he's young (younger than me, incidentally) but has a good job that he really likes and owns a house and such, but never said "I own a house at 25 because I'm fucking awesome." More in terms of "It's important to me to be independent. I really like my job, because it's meaningful to me and I think I'm good at it. It doesn't make me sad that it's good money." Good job, sir. You've presented yourself well. Please give lessons to your peers. Did it work out? No. But at least he wasn't a SAW about it.