TMI

Last week was a bad blog week. This week too. I’m rarely this busy but historically, at least for the few years I’ve been an employee at our one-of-a-kind company, [and I don’t mean that in a nice way] February is one of the biggest months of the year, if not the biggest, in sales. That means yours truly really has to step his game up these next couple of weeks. There goes my resolution to write 2 posts every week. All I can do is try, I guess. ‘Normal service’ will resume in March, I trust.

People talk too damn much. Not only that, but they get into discussions or situations that have nothing to do with them and it’s annoying as hell. My boss calls it hijacking a conversation, and that’s the best way to describe it. I hope Mutumia won’t mind as I jock her style yet again.

Exhibit A:
A couple of weeks ago American Idol started and, as is customary, pretty much everyone at the office was talking about it at the waterhole or by the coffeepot.

I haven’t watched one entire episode of American Idol, ever. Not that the show isn’t entertaining – no. I’m not half as much of a TV or movie buff as I once was, for whatever reason. Gone are the days when I used to clear my schedule so I could watch TV. That was probably back in Maragua, when watching Wild Rose, The Bold and the Beautiful and The Rich Also Cry was at par with food and water as basic necessities. [I cringe at the thought that I actually watched soaps and liked it. Wow.]

Moving right along: I was listening in on the American Idol conversation as I was pouring a mugfull of that laxative they call coffee that’s dispensed liberally throughout the premises. I had no choice but to listen to the animated conversation since I was right there. Let’s see if I can remember how the conversation went, though I rarely remember any conversation verbatim.

“Did you see that one guy who was a Marine?” someone said.
“You mean the black dude that was in the Army?” someone else responded.
This next chic was 2 offices away listening in on the conversation and she bellowed:
‘You mean the Air Force, Jerry?!”
Jerry and the other guy glanced at each other, then in the general direction of the chic’s office, then back at each other again and shrugged.
“Yes, the Air Force,” Jerry said. “The one who stopped in the middle of a song, pulled out his sunglasses and said something to the effect of replay?”
“I think he said remix, Jerry!” the chic bellowed again. Jerry, visibly annoyed, didn’t say anything; he just grabbed his coffee and went back to his office.

I was laughing my ass off though! Y’all gotta admit that would be annoying as hell. Thing is, this happens all the time and the people doing it seem clueless about it!

Exhibit B:
I was driving home one evening not too long ago. It was one of those days when Old Man Winter takes a breather and it was unseasonably warm. I had the windows down and the music bumpin’ having a good old time when, inevitably, traffic lights turned red in front of me. I stopped and waited while nodding my head to the music when this old pick-up truck pulled up alongside me and this middle-aged Caucasian lady stuck her head out the window and yelled out at me.

“Hey, sir!”
I turned the music down and was like: “Huh?”
“I was watching how you were driving and you were switching lanes without regard of the safety of the other drivers,” she continued, yelling to be heard above the rumble-sputter of her old F150. “That’s how accidents happen. If you keep that up I will have to call the police on you!”
I looked at her, incredulous, wondering if I was hearing things. Did she just get in my grill about my driving, knowing especially that I’d been driving [rather] slowly that evening? Knowing that I never switch lanes without indicating? [This much is true] Knowing that I could contract a serious bout of road rage and pummel her into oblivion, for all she knew? I decided to be grown up about it though and smiled at her and was like:
“Oh, I’m sorry ma’am. I guess I was a little distracted; my mind was rather far away.”
That always gets them when you talk all polite and are grammatically correct.
She seemed at a loss for words coz I guess she had been hoping for a cuss-word battle. B*tch. Suddenly, the light turned green and I grinned at her, revved the lancer to 4500 rpm and released the clutch, damn near popping it. In those couple of seconds there was thick grey smoke everywhere. The spinning tires were screaming angrily, trying to grip the tarmac. The roar of the engine, accentuated by the exhaust and intake, further enhanced the burnout experience. Above all this I saw the startled, and disbelieving, look on the nosy b*tch’s face and I loved it.

Priceless.

Exhibit C:
I was in the zone at work some day last week, on the grind, when the receptionist roared through the intercom commanding me to help out some customer who was at the front desk. I grudgingly got up and tried to rub the weariness out my eyes as I walked up front. At the risk of seeming conceited, which I am not, the customer was an oldish man who had driven all the way from PG County, Maryland, and needed yours truly to work his magic on this project.

Anyhow, I collected all the paperwork and was about to go back to the office and get on it when he told me that he wouldn’t be at his office all week long and to call him on his cellie. I agreed and was about to leave again when he added that he couldn’t be at the office for long coz he’d just had surgery. That's how it started, this tale about his health woes.

Apparently he had been diagnosed with some malignant growth in his colon and they had to cut a nice, long piece off. How they went about it, he explained, was a little unorthodox coz they went through his rear orifice instead of incising his belly. [Trust me, his description was a lot more colorful. I’m only paraphrasing this, trying to make it family-friendly.] Apparently the none-too-smart surgeons slit his sphincter to gain access to the gory depths of wherever they needed to reach. The surgery was, according to the surgeons, a resounding success. There was the problem of the slit sphincter though [no kidding] and that’s what was buggin’ this poor man. Apparently he experienced excruciating pain – not surprisingly – whenever he tried to release the grease or drain the main vein, if you catch my drift. He even drove around sitting on some sort of hollowed-out-pillow contraption that relieved some of the pressure off the mutilated sphincter, he said.

As much as I sympathize with the dude, all that detail was totally unnecessary; though I felt so sorry for him coz I could only imagine the agony he must’ve been going through and my over-active imagination could, unfortunately, visualize his anatomy in explicit detail as he described the procedure in vivid detail, and I almost smiled while picturing him driving gingerly, wincing when he hit a bump, but I caught myself. [Guess, how’s that for a complex sentence, huh? ;) ]

Like Trey Songz says, I don’t wanna leave but I gotta go right now. By all means, feelanga free to share your TMI experiences here. Mi blog es su blog. [Spanish-speaking folk - is this even correct? Kinda like Mi casa es su casa, I hope?]