things that bother me, list 3

- when I introduce myself to someone, very clearly pronouncing my name  and they reply, “Nice to meet you, [some other wrong pronunciation of my name].”

- the fact that someone in my company had to have a chart similar to this:

- the fact that the above mentioned dumbass took the chart down after being ridiculed by others in her office. i had to create the above pictured diagram in lieu of an actual photo.

- this whole  “being nervous around people” thing i’ve got going on lately. there can be people i’ve known for YEARS and i still get nervous when i see them. what the hell is that?

- stemming from the nervousness, always thinking people won’t remember me.  i don’t see someone for a while, then see them somewhere random, think they don’t remember me, so i don’t speak. then who looks like the asshole? this cracker right here.

- people who don’t reply to text messages. seriously, just common courtesy of saying “i don’t feel like eating dinner out tonight/with you/ever again” will suffice. most of us aren’t comprised entirely of baby girls; we can take it. 

- clicky shoes that women wear in the office. you may remember me mentioning this previously, but this time it’s almost worse because the lady who sits behind me wears them every. single. day. she also doesn’t celebrate birthdays which is weird to me, and i’m still unclear on the “bless you” thing if she sneezes.

Stand up and shout! This entry is mean.

Here’s a list of things I’d LOVE to stand up and shout while at work:

“It’s ‘asterisk’, not ‘asterik’ or ‘asterix’. Geez.”

“Just because you can’t hear yourself whisper-singing doesn’t mean the rest can’t. Shut it!”

“If you’d stop complaining about how overwhelmed you are/how much work you have to do, you’d get it done a lot faster.”

“Is it really necessary to yell every time you sneeze? I bet not.”

“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!”

“Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t realize the sign on the building said ‘bring all your kids and their friends to run through our office while we’re trying to work.  Every day.’ They’re cute, I get it.  But today they are loud and in large numbers.”

“You just used the word ‘like’ four times in a seven word sentence.  I counted.”

“You smell like a thrift store.  That’s not a compliment.”

“PICK UP YOUR FEET WHEN YOU WALK. ARE YOU REALLY THAT LAZY?!”

Things adults should never say = things I have heard adults say

“Let’s see if there’s a Bucky’s around.  I could go for a latte.” – A grown man  Any person alive should not refer to Starbucks as “Bucky’s.” Ever.

“Dere’s go.” – A former coworker would say this CONSTANTLY instead of “There we go”.  Someone has spent a little too much time around her grandkids.

“my ‘rents” – Are you seriously too lazy to fully say the word “parents”? Plus, ” ‘rents ” just sounds stupid.

“cool beans” - I’m sorry, I just have a personal hatred for anyone who uses this term.  Where are these beans and why are they so cool?

“chillax” - Are you on your way to the frat house to “bro down” with your homeboys before the kegger tonight?

“liberry”, “valentime’s day”, or “birfday” - if you are over the age of five, you should probably have your dental fricatives down pat.  I’m looking at YOU, ex-bosslady.

Anything that is said in a baby-voice or a squeal – there is a FORTY YEAR OLD woman in my office who speaks this way on a daily basis. It makes me want to rip my eardrums to shreds with my scissors.

Bluh.

Uncle! -or-The dumbest relatives are non-blood

Let me give you a brief listing of things my uncle has said… rather, things my uncle has let spew forth from his gaping maw, attached to his tiny, tiny brain:

- “That’s not even intermittently true.”  Seriously? So, sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it’s not?  Next thing you know, he’ll be telling me his car’s intermittent windshield wipers are accompanied by high-tech intermittent brakes.  If only.

- “Well, I pulled up diangally at the intersection right before we got hit.”  Hm. Nice to know he understands basic third-grade math-related vocabulary.

- “Have you gotten a urinal to put his ashes in yet?”  I wish I was lying about this one, but I’m definitely not.  It brings new meaning to the term “pissing on someone’s grave.”

I should feel guilty speaking about my mother’s sister’s husband this way, but I don’t.  After all, this is the man who referred to the house I grew up in as “tight” when we congregated there as my parents hosted Christmas one year and told my cousin he was lazy for taking a music appreciation course. 

WHICH IS ONE MORE COURSE THAN SAID UNCLE TOOK IN COLLEGE. EVER.

The damn food-stealer

There is a girl with whom I work who is ostensibly very nice, but she has a dark, dark inner self that I have come to recognize as the bane of my existence: she is a damn food-stealer.

It started out when my cubicle was near hers, and she’d mosey over to chat.

…

I hate myself for phrasing that last sentence like that.

Anyway, she and I became fairly good work pals right away and I think I know why: not only would I listen to her detailed conversations -including verbatim dialog, much like Lady Criesalot- I also overlooked her tendency to use “like”, “you know” and “or whateverrrrr” at least four times each during the course of a sentence or two, but I like to keep tasty snacks in my desk drawer so I don’t freak out and eat an entire buffet during lunch.

The damn food-stealer began taking advantage of my snack stash.

First, it was “Oooh that looks good! Can I have some?”

This, of course, should’ve been a major red flag, but at the time I was the new girl so it was merely a pale pink piece of fuzz in my peripheral.  Although I absolutely detest the thought of ever asking to sample someone else’s food [I assume if they want to share, they'll tell me] I decided to give the girl the benefit of the doubt and let her hand go snaking into my bag of granola bar bits.

That is where this Cracker made her major mistake: I opened the floodgates for all damn food-stealers and accidentally branded myself a girl-who-doesn’t-mind-sharing-food.

WRONG.

I moved cubicles due to a coworker leaving and the new space being a prime spot to sit near my other team members, and, as I was moving across the room,  I assumed the damn food-stealer would find other desks to scavenge, but I was wrong.

Just the other day, we were on a major project deadline [data cutoff, semi-annual report due, and preparation for my coworker to be gone for a week] so I didn’t leave to get lunch. At all. Not even takeout.

I decided I could tide myself over with goldfish crackers until dinner and opened my food drawer to retrieve them.

It must’ve been like a dog whistle and the damn food-stealer some kind of terrier with as quickly as she spanned the room and stood before my chair.

My blood began to boil as I saw her skinny little hand go reaching into the bag of what was my only meal until 7pm or so.

“Girl, why’re you always stealing my foood?”  I said this in a joking, more-Southern-than-I-actually-sound way, but on the inside I really meant it.

“Because I know you don’t care,” she replied.

cue the crickets.

I was about to say, “Are you sure about that?” but I only got “Are y-” out before I was called to answer a question or take care of something.

Dammit.

Next time, I’m bringing in nothing but wasabi peas, McDonald’s [the damn food-stealer is kind of a health nut] and the flaming hot salsa from my local burrito joint [I happen to know that the damn food-stealer refuses to eat there on the grounds that she will have the hershey's about three minutes after eating].

I can’t wait until the damn food-stealer changes departments so I can snack and work undisturbed.

The very thought makes me drool…

I have a short joke for you…

JOKE

(it’s a link. click it. i don’t do viruses, so you’re safe)

Dead girl walking.

I am running on <4 hours of sleep.

I have puffy-eye and my coworkers have been saying “you look exhausted” or “you look like you’re in a bad mood.”

yes for the first, no for the second.

although i WAS in a semi-bad mood when i got a ranting comment on my “smiling sex offenders” entry

then i did some research and found out that the commenter well, you know.

if you don’t like this blog, don’t read it.

or, don’t fuck 14 year olds.

your choice.

Who are you perverts???

Ok. Like many bloggers, I am slightly obsessive when it comes to finding out how people are directed to my database of drivel.

Here are two samples of some recent google searches that have directed folks here:

* i assume that the part you can’t see says “during sex”. as i got a tattoo recently, the artist regaled us with his story of the first time he had sex with his current girlfriend: total squat fart.

as you can see, someone googled “bikinis” and found their way here. fairly benign search term, no? i assume they landed on the photo of my sister and myself wearing our green bikinis and our dad’s workboots/workshoes when we were little.

what is NOT fairly benign, however, is past searches for “little kids in bikinis” that i’ve seen before.

i do not want some pedophile getting his rocks off looking at a photo of me from when i was 2.

with a passy.

and who, pray tell, is karrie kendrick? a porn star, i presume? LK, maybe a relative of yours?

a tip for whoever was caught jilling their boss: either you don’t know what jilling means, or your boss is seriously getting the raw end of the deal.

again, why is someone googling “kids in bikinis”? PEDOPHILE!

and, i had no idea that herman munster ever dressed as a woman. of course, i was never that into the munsters, so i guess it could’ve been part of some crazy plotline.

or not.

and, of course the biggest pervert population of them all [according to the above exact scientific evidence]: people searching for poop/vomit and genital-related videos.

MISS Pronunciation

I’ve recently discovered that I am the QUEEN of pronouncing things incorrectly.

Luckily, I’ve only said one for real [okay, maybe two] and all the others I’ve either mispronounced in my head, or wondered out loud to people what the actual pronunciation should be.

- Aficionado. Proper pronunciation: “ah-fish-ee-uhn-AH-doe“. My pronunciation: “ah-fish-ee-AHN-doe“.
This is the one I said out loud. I was young and in college and a shame to English majors everywhere.

- Egregious. Proper pronunciation: “e-GREE-jus“. My pronunciation: “e-GREG-ee-ous“
This one comes from an Anne Rice book that I thoroughly enjoyed, save for her overuse of this word. I kept mentally mispronouncing it and second-guessing; then I resigned myself to the use of a dictionary and found out how wrong I was.

- Prosciutto. Proper pronunciation: “pruh-SHOO-toe“. My pronunciation: “pruh-SCOO-tee-oh“. This came up when cool Amanda and I were eating Italian food and I was perusing the menu aloud. This prompted much laughter when she later realized I wasn’t kidding with my pronunciation. It also prompted much singing of Phil Collins’s “Susudio”.

- Ciabatta. Proper pronunciation: “cha-BAH-tuh“. My pronunciation: “see-ya-BAH-tuh“. Luckily, I asked someone before pronouncing this out loud. Of course, I had to tell Amanda about it, which made the “pro-SCOO-tee-oh” thing even better.

and one final one that is a surprise for cool Amanda: Tiramisu.

All throughout college I mentally read it as “tier-ah-ME-soo“. It wasn’t until I met a girl who pronounced it “tier-ah-muh-SOO” that I knew the correct pronunciation. Even then, it took me a while, because I was convinced she was an idiot and was saying it wrong.

My bad.

Here’s a short one -or- ignorance grows rampant on the internet

To the “Proud Yankee” who commented:

“Face it southerners are just a bunch of inbred backward crackers.”

You forgot a colon. Yay for punctuation!

Also: not all Southerners are crackers. I happen to know and love quite a few black people who are Southern born and bred.

I also like how you didn’t put your real email address in the comment box. And, did you REALLY google “inbred southern crackers” TWICE?

p.s. This is your IP address: 65.191.212.235. Are you REALLY in Fayetteville? Or is it Dunn?