Dear girl in the class I just left:
Shut the hell up. You are dumb as a post and strident to boot. And if you ever EVER eat oranges behind me again, I will throw you out the window. I almost gagged listening to you suck on that thing. Before or after class is lunchtime, not during. But mainly shut the hell up.
How fucking old do I have to be before I stop getting ZITS?!
oof…thesis. I’m sooo glad that I’m done with undergrad 
Apparently 36 is not old enough. 
I was glad that my face was breaking out this morning because I had an appointment with my dermatologist. He duly bumped up the dosage on my medication. He keeps trying to reduce it as if he thinks he’s curing me.
“Would you mind if I shared your table?” he asks. Why yes, yes I would rather mind. There are plenty of empty ones so go get your own, I’m clearly enjoying my coffee and reading all by myself. So I just squint up at him, he’ll take the hint.
“It’s for the light from outside, it helps me see. I need the sunlight,” he bleats haplessly. Oh god. Okay fine, noblesse oblige is not dead and he’s pleading a medical excuse for being obnoxious, so I give a tiny resentful sigh and prepare for migration to a table far from the light of day. Let’s be nice and let him have his little table. Here tiny man, take your spoils.
“Well you don’t have to moooooove,” he says. “We can share a table.” L-on-my-forehead look right now, please just let me slip away quietly here precious. And then he delivers the coup de grace, a sentence that cuts into me like the blade biting into the neck of the bull at the end of Apocalypse Now.
“THAT’S WHAT THEY DO IN EUROPE!! THEY DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT!!” he hollers as I start to move away. The Italian tourists sitting two tables away are paralyzed by horror. They know they might be next. Reap what you sow, Italians. Reap it! He’s Rainman being denied his Peoples’ Court, his voice is beginning to enter the upper registers, if there were dolphins outside in the canal they’d be trying to answer his calls for help.
“THEY DO IT IN EUROPE ALL THE TIIIIME,” he squeals.
Oh really, Lonely Planet? Is that what they do? Is this the gross cultural mistranslation that precipitated a myopic waddle in this direction followed by your totally lame attempt to fling your noisome presence into my Sunday morning? Because I so clearly give a flying fuck? Because I looked like I was just sitting here wondering whether there were any presumably sophisticated but genuinely uncomfortable Continental social behaviors that I could begin aping so as to elevate myself beyond my pleb yanqui birth? Achtung fuckface: they do a lot of things in Europe, like chain smoking, genocide, and adopting a lax approach to regular bathing, but we won’t be doing any of those here at Borders this particular morning so you can get the hell away from me and besides motherfucker
THIS…IS…SPARTA.
I sat back down and put my feet up on the other chair and sneered at him. No sunlight for you, jackass. Had your chance, lost it, so sorry.
I don’t want to look at another negative pregnancy test, please. That is all.
Dear freelance editor,
I love copyeditors. For the most part, they rock. I certainly wouldn’t want to copyedit all day; it would drive me to drink. So here’s to you, for wading through messes of manuscript and attempting to make sense of it all so that I only need to cope with the major problems.
However.
Is it entirely necessary for you to smoke while you edit? Do you never consider that, perhaps, the foul excrements from your cancer sticks permeate these formerly pristine pages? Do you not think of the poor production editor, who must sit in her cube and flip through all 700 pages, her throat dry and eyes stinging due to the noxious fumes that home in on her face when she leafs through to find your notes? I am only 30 pages into this monstrosity, and yet I wish to die.
May you develop an allergy to perfume and be consigned to work the makeup counters in the bowels of hell for all eternity.
Kisses,
Mrs. M.
Amen.
Grossbottom, that was lovely. I can somewhat-relate; Calgary is very much a city of people moving here from all over Canada, and I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this or something similar; “That’s not how it is in {insert province/city here}.” You know what? Calgary’s full. Go back where ya came from if it’s not good enough for you here. Yes, it’s mostly flat, and yes, those are all the trees we have here, and no, we don’t have a lot of nice lakes nearby. We didn’t do all these things just to make your life more miserable, honest.
Well fuck me. I’ve just been informed that our Enterprise Standard for freaking shell scripts is to manually handle the return codes with if loops.
So this:
command1 && command2
Becomes this:
command1
RC=${?}
if [ $RC = 0 ]
then
command2
else
echo “command1 failed so command2 did not execute.”
fi
This despite the fact that command1 handles all of its own logging, and it would be absolutely retarded to run command2 without having successfully executed command1, so the fact that it didn’t run should be implicit to everybody who’s not a maroon when command1 failed.
What, are we getting paid by the word now or something?
First Shift Guy, Third Shift Guy, First Shift Boss and Third Shift Boss,
Would it have killed you to coordinate vacation days so Third Shift Guy and First Shift Guy weren’t off on the same day?
Now I have to work 10 hours on Thursday and 12 on Friday, and even so there’s going to be no one in Premount for 10 consecutive hours. So I’ll try to set everything up as best I can, but everyone knows it’s going to get screwed up while I’m gone.
Alternatively, could you have told me some time before Wednesday that I had to stay late on Thursday and come in early on Friday?
Regards,
Second Shift Guy
I had an appointment this morning with an oral surgeon to have a nasty broken tooth dug out of my jaw. He did a fine job. But Dude, I don’t go to the dentist to get a fucking lecture about the hazards of smoking. I’ll visit my doctor for that, thank you very much.
I didn’t mention that I also chew tobacco — something I would imagine would be of more concern than smoking to a dentist — and he didn’t mention noticing the signs of it while he was digging around in my mouth.
I got home tonight, got the mail, and took out a long fat envelope postmarked Washington, D.C. and with a D.C. return address (Thomas Jefferson Ave NW) marked “URGENT” and “TO BE READ BY ADDRESSEE ONLY” and “REPLY EXPECTED WITHIN 5 DAYS” and no sender name. I thought “Oh shit, am I being audited?” and “This better not be some $8.21 late fee from Movie Gallery from seven years ago that’s finally found me but will fuck with my credit report”.
It was neither. It was indeed urgent and highly confidential, but since we’re friends I’ll share with you:
Of all the people in America, I am the one, I do not think it’s too improper to say The Chosen One even… selected to receive a special $15 rate on a subscription to U.S. News & World Report.
I HATE when businesses fucking do this. Point of fact I might have subscribed because that is a damned good rate and I read their articles at the library, but just on principle I won’t now. I’ve gotten notices of car auctions that read “DO NOT DISCARD- WE MUST HEAR FROM YOU IMMEDIATELY” and ads for insurance that read “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL ENCLOSED” and keep expecting to get an envelope reading “Do Not Turn Around. I’m Watching You from the House with the Green Shutters aCROSS the stREet and I have your dog OlliE. Make a MoTioN and HE’S DEAD. Just do exACTLy as the lettER instrucTs” on the back in magic marker and clipped newsprint that on the inside is a booklet on the Jack Lalanne juicer.
There should be a law and some public lashings over mail abuse in general and at least one beheading over using Confidential and Urgent! for anything that is neither. I honestly think only one beheading would be necessary before the others fell in line.
(Very minor…)
If I wanted to look like Mary-Kate Olsen, I’d get a bleach job and a meth habit.
So please please please can I find some sunglasses that aren’t the size of dinner plates? I know they’re fashionable right now, but I don’t think they look good on me, and I don’t dress to compliment them.
Why did I have to leave my sunglasses that I loved in London?
Gaaack! I HAATE those things. It’s a fashion trend that should’ve died with “That Girl”.
Why do the rich and famous perpetuate trends that make people look stupid?
Dear Old Fart,
You shuffle your fat wrinkly ass into my bank and demand money from me. You present a check. I ask for ID. You give me a glare, obviously meant to put the mere female teller in her place. How DARE I ask for ID, harrumph, you’e been banking here for 20-some-odd years!
I politely state, “I don’t know you, sir, so I’m just checking for your own protection as well as mine.”
Another glare. I just smile back. You turn to the next teller…“MISS!” My boss turns and asks how she can help. “Would you verify who I am to this woman?” She’s dealt with you before, (who could forget your glaring scowl amidst so much wobbly, age-spotted cheek) so your check gets her signature.
After giving you money, I get another time-to-put-this-one-in-her-place glare. “In the future, I suggest you only deal with customers you know.”
“Sir, how will I get to know you if you don’t present ID?” Another smile.
You just glare and hobble away. Fucktard asshole.
Nicely handled, Luna. Isn’t it fun to smile sweetly at assholes when you know how much they *hate * it?
To the secretary/staff member in the second place I work:
If you’re going to get on to us about being “professional” and looking good to the people who come in here for consultations, you might want to consider not doing the same thing yourself. Specifically, why the hell did you just have a LOUD phone conversation with someone down the hall about colonial wigs? I know it’s near the end of the semester and our brains are all frayed, but seriously what the hell?
ElzaB, my mother went through something similar. For some reason I simply refused to breastfeed. She was all excited about the process and the bonding with her new baby.
I was having none of it. Formula for me then.
I turned out all right. . . for the most part.
And as for those the people giving you flak, to hell with 'em.
That’s so ludicrous it’s laughable. Yes, that is how all businesses run - with only people they know. Since he was an old fart, maybe you can just put his sourness down to not having pooped for a week - there is no logic there at all.