Just Off Center

So yesterday I'm walking down the hallway at work and I decide to stop by the bullshit little mini-cafeteria that most assuredly had once been the storage closet for old mopheads and bucket water scum. I realize that I've had less than my requisite 40 oz. of piping hot, blissful, morning's mellow orgasm, International Foods French Vanilla flavored coffee. As I make my way around the little coffee bar that also serves as a selling point for shriveled oranges, day old Krispy Kremes and Moon Pies I manage to fill to the line my pretty, bottom-wide coffee mug that is the same red color as our company logo. I'm a contractor, bitch! Step off! As I try to prep my java in a manner that is quick and yet pays appropriate respect for the ceremony that is adding two creamers and four Equals, I keep rubbing bodies with all of the other patrons looking for a cup 'o jo and a breakfast burrito. I fucking hate bodily contact, especially with my customers. Customers have fucking mad cooties.

Creeped out, but victorious, I make my way to the cash register where some old heifer is paying for her cheese danish in nickels and chatting the cashier up about how much she likes her hair. "I used to wear it that way when I was in my twenties. God that was decades ago." Nice compliment, Jello. As she lumbers away toward my freight elevator, as do all fat useless women who have to make the arduous trek up one flight of steps, I finally get to pay for my faux-international coffee. I know it's ninety one cents, baby. You're dealing with a fucking professional here. See my red mug? I throw down my Washington and collect a shiny dime in change. Yeah! This broad shows respect to the real playas by putting the kibitz on all that penny bullshit.

Now I'm strolling in as close to a strut as a half asleep Mike can. This looks more like the "limp to the side like your leg was broken" part of the Humpty Dance, but without all that unnecessary "crazy whack funky". In my state of partial unconsciousness I make the error of missing my pocket as I try to store the dime. The dime bounces off my work boot and lands on the never-waxed linoleum floor. Now the pennies can all just lay there for the poor folks. But I'm not about to let a full tenth of a dollar slip away like that. I bend down to pick up the dime, but I must have been too confident in my wedge and lift technique. As my knees start to pop back into place, lifting me to my full five foot ten inchedness, I realize that I have been unsuccessful in getting my fingernail under the dime. There it lays, mocking me. And I have been standing in one place long enough to get the attention of passersby.

Now I'm getting annoyed, because I hate it when I can't pick something up for no good goddamned reason. So I bend down one more time, and more carefully attempt to pick up the troublesome coin. Once again I am outsmarted. The dime just lays there stuck to the flooring as I nearly stand up again. Now I'm pissed. I'm looking like more of a fool than that lady in building 2 who wears her hair in a giant bowl shape, like she wants to walk around carrying fruit in it. I've never been one to just progressively and incrementally increase concentration when a task frustrates me. I'm more of a "if a nudge didn't budge it, the sledgehammer should" type of guy. So I slam down my coffee. Droplets fly up and then land back in the mug, thank you very much. I get down on one knee, looking at the dime with defiance and rage as though it were about to be melted down in my fiery gaze. Enough of this thumb and middle finger bullshit. It's a five fingered claw move to settle this score. And so with great force, and a possibly juvenile about of determination, I snatch up my dime and stand up just a little bit taller than I was just moments ago.

Taking a moment to spin around, I am able to see that nobody was actually watching the event. It seems they have their own coffee and dime troubles. Fine. No harm, no foul. However, as I was walking up the stairs, like a full grown, non-gelatinous mass hominid, I started to think of all the other little things in my life that can infuriate me for apparent reason. I think it's when things don't work the way they're supposed to that I start to feel the veins in my neck tensing. Nina's seen me blow my gaskets over the stupidest shit more times than I'd care to count. But it's not my fault, swear to the Maker. If the non-English speaking janitorial crew had waxed the floors once in a while, that dime would have been snatched right up, thus allowing me to keep my composure and possible an extra twenty minutes before my first heart attack. And it doesn't stop there. There are plenty of little things that give me thirty-second ulcers.

Take Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for example. Have you ever tried to open a box of the old-fashioned powder and noodles concoction as suggested on the packaging? It clearly states that if I press my thumb against the side of the box at the dotted line that the perforation should tear, allowing my thumb to break the cardboard seal and continue on its path of ripping off the box top without a single macaroni spil't. But that's not how it works. No fucking way, hombres! Oh, you may press with your thumb like you're supposed to, but that cardboard doesn't tear. The perforation doesn't give. It just starts to cave in toward the box top until the physics of cardboard and applied pressure make it such that you'll never get that fucking dotted line to give way. And the harder you push, the worse it gets. In the end I'm yelling at a Crackerjack box wannabe and biting the entire box top off. Because biting the box top off makes the box know that you win. You're not just going to quietly grab a butter knife and help that perforation split. Biting is the only way to punish the box for its insolence.

And whose dick do I have to suck to hear a goddamned song on the radio when I'm driving home? I mean don't these radio stations have at least one guy sitting in a room with about six little radios, all tuned to the competitors' stations, just waiting for them all to simultaneously go to commercial? Then they can just press the "Put on a song, quick" button and be the fucking heroes of the 4:39 P.M. Loop 101 traffic jam. It doesn't even have to be anything good. You've got a fucking lock on the market. I mean I'll fucking choke somebody if I have to hear any more of that that monotone fuck droning on about his precious fucking Shane Company. Play Candlebox or even the fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers. Why hasn't anyone thought about this? Isn't it bad enough that I'm stuck behind five thousand tourists and snowbirds? Do I have to click on channel after channel hearing nothing but screaming car salesmen? RAH!

And what about the toilet paper at my office? I could use that serrated plastic edge on the dispenser to saw off my fucking hands if I wanted. Yet every time I try to rip any off of the roll, it just starts tearing longways. So then I have to tear off the other half, put the two together and wrap the whole wad up like some weird pre-ass wiping origami. And it happens every time! I've tried yanking harder, I've tried slow pulls. I've tried holding it and ripping. I've done it all. IT NEVER WORKS! FUCK!!!

O.K. Breathe, Mike. Hummmmmmmmmmmm. Alright. See what I mean though? All of this could be avoided if they just wax the floor, use a better needle to make the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes, hire some schlep at minimum wage to press the "music NOW" button, and make a non-split-down-the-middle brand of bulk Toilet paper. How can I, or anyone for that matter, be held responsible for their childish tantrums in the face of such stupidity? Yeah, that's what I fucking thought!