How I Saved A Life Last Friday Night

I went to see a movie last Friday. The film was fantastic, but that's not what I'm here to write about. I'm here today to recount the tale of my harrowing adventure at the concessions counter.
The cinema I was attending has a large concessions hub in the middle of their circular lobby. Upon arrival, I took up the "second-in-line" position behind a gentleman who was already being served at the counter. Due to the general level of ambient noise, I couldn't make out the details of the conversation between this gentleman and the young lady serving him behind the counter, but over the next, oh, let's say, epoch I noticed him raising various numbers of fingers and identifying them ("Two," "Just one," etc.). In response the server would hold up various sizes of drinking cups and give him a questioning look. Then she'd put some candy on the counter in front of him. They cycled through at least three variations on this exchange and while they always gave the impression of being on verge of completing the transaction, they never actually seemed to make any real progress.
It would be fascinating to study this communication phenomenon under controlled conditions in a university psychology lab, however, at the time, feeling my feet actually start to take root in the floor, I found my fascination with the process waning rather quickly.
Off to my right, about six line-ups away, ninety degrees around the snack hub, I saw a man named Scott Sherman standing fifth in line. I worked with Scott Sherman about 28 years ago. I haven't seen him in at least fifteen years. I suddenly found myself looking forward to chatting with Scott, catching up on old times, updating each on our lives. He was fifth in line over there and I was next to be served over here. In mere moments, after purchasing my snackery, I would walk over to him and engage him in conversation.
Ah, the future seemed so full of potential then.
Five minutes later, Scott Sherman had been served and wandered off to find a seat at one of a score of screens and the guy in front of me had taken out a pair of semaphore flags and appeared to be communicating his order with a ship off the coast.
The line immediately to my right was now down to only one person and he was entering his PIN code into the debit machine keypad. He had his food and was paying for it. He was done and there was no one in line behind him. Uprooting my feet with Herculean effort, I stepped behind him, thus ensuring that I would be served substantially sooner than I would if I stayed waiting for a Rosetta Stone of candy to plummet down on the fellow setting up a base camp at the head of my now former line-up. The opportunity to catch up with an old acquaintance was now lost to me, but I was determined to salvage some degree of success from this quest for refreshments.
A receipt was now chugging its way out of the debit machine and I was moments away from being served. Nearly quivering with anticipation, a minor victory so close to being in my grasp, I mentally reviewed my planned snack order and reassured myself that I would be content with those items to serve as my repast during the movie.
Alas, the receipt was blank. Apparently the debit machine printer was out of toner. But fear not, the young lady behind the counter had the solution to this problem. Revelling in the obviousness of it, she pressed the "reprint" button.
Many, many times.
Over and over again.
She then studiously compared the multiple bits of paper she now possessed, all of them seemingly identical in their blankness. Sensing that the problem was beyond her pay-grade, she wandered off to locate a manager, returning sometime later with another woman. This woman demonstrated why she is such valuable management material by immediately identifying the true problem and replacing the roll of paper in the printer.
Subsequently, staring at a new collection of blank bits of paper, it seemed to dawn on them that they were faced with a real stumper and maybe there wasn't a solution after all. It was their own personal Kobayashi Maru.
Eventually they noticed that I was standing there aging, and the gentleman stepped to the side and the young lady behind the counter smiled vacantly and said, "Hi, can I help you?"
"Hi," said I. "Could I have a bottle of Coke and this pack of Glosettes, please?" I said, taking a box of Glosettes raisins from he open display case.
Apparently I confused her by speaking and performing a separate task (picking up the Glosettes) at the same time and she hit a bunch of wrong buttons on the cash register, causing the amount of $17.89 to appear on the little display screen. I was a little shocked but before I could say anything, she hit some more buttons and corrected her error. The display now showed $8.00. I was still shocked but movie concessions have always involved gouging. I was shocked but, sadly, not really surprised.
I paid and she gave me my change then wandered off around the inside of the hub. As I stared down at the dozen bottles of Coke in the display cooler six inches to my left, I concluded that she was off in search of a cooler from which to fetch my bottle of Coke. My guess was way off the mark and she returned, not with a bottle of Coke, but with a ball-point pen which she handed to the man beside me so that he could - get this - write out his own receipt.
Then her eyes glazed over and her head tilted ever-so-slightly to the side while, apparently, her internal system rebooted.
In due course she registered my presence and addressed me as a new customer. "Hi, would you like to try a combo?" she queried.
"No, thanks," I replied, "but I'd love to try the bottle of Coke I paid for."
I swear I actually heard the "ting" sound of the tiny bell inside her head ringing. After a momentary pause, she said, "Oh. Sure," reached into the display cooler and removed a bottle of water. Then she put the water back in the cooler, replacing it with a bottle of Coke which she vapidly handed to me.
And that's when I saved her life.
...By turning and walking away.

Note to Scott Sherman: If you are reading this, having found it by Googling your own name (everyone does it, there's nothing to be ashamed of), then drop me a line. We'll go for a beer and catch up on life after the Comic Den.

I've lost my faith in Darwinism

Survival of the fittest, my ass!
Modern civilised society has made it impossible for natural selection to actually do its job. I’m not just talking about making old people live longer and catering to the “needs’ of the feeble. I’m talking about the over-population of “stup-manity” because snapping the neck of the guy in line ahead of me at the gas station who walked in just to not make up his mind for twenty freaking minutes about what scratch lottery ticket he wants to blow two dollars on… snapping his neck and feeding him into a wood chipper would be considered rude and now we’re up to here with stupid people, stumbling around, cluttering up the place being, being stupid.
I mean, natural selection, survival of the fittest, we should just be allowed to kill anyone who demonstrates extreme stupidity on three separate occasions. See, I’m not just being ruthless. Everyone can be stupid once by accident. It’s bound to happen. But I’m saying if someone shows a pattern of stupidity, a consistent history of being a complete moron, then, ppttt, out of the game, thanks for playing, parting gifts are in the parking lot.
There is an occasional theme in spy novels and science fiction – it was big in the seventies, especially in comic books – for the villain, some mad scientist sociologist type, to have this big master plan for releasing some deadly virus or bombing ninety per cent of the world or just starting a lot of wars and hiding out with a bunch of chosen refugees. See, the idea was that the world population is too big, there’s too many people and Mr. Evil Villain’s plan would wipe out most of the people in the world and then start over with a much more… manageable ten million or something like that. But then James Bond or Superman or Bruce Willis du jour or whoever foils his plan and saves everyone in the world… even the stupid ones.
Gaahhhh!!
See, I think the villain’s got the right idea, but because we let all the stupid people inflict political correctness on us, it’s rude and insensitive for me to even talk about this stuff. Stupid people wandering around, getting in my way, all day, every day and I’m the bad guy!
I’ve lost my faith in Darwinism.

Blinded By The Light

(The following opinion, in all its validity, was adapted nearly verbatim for a play I'm writing. The fact that it has been applied to a work of fiction does not detract from the reality of the hazard created by the morons mentioned therein.)


Headlights are way out of control. Seriously.
People don’t understand how to use headlights anymore. If they’re driving and it gets dark outside or rains or gets a little bit overcast or if the sun goes behind a cloud for a few seconds, people think that they are legally obligated to flip on their high beams.
For safety.
Because the highway will be so much safer if the guy in front of you is suddenly blinded.
And if it’s not the high beam morons, it's the stupid road weasels with their after-market fifty billion candle-watt halogen headlights. I mean, life is stressful enough, right? But I try to drive safely. I’m willing to make the effort to try not to actually kill any of the utter meat sacks that I have to share the road with. And I glance in my rear view mirror, as a safe driver should, and boom, I think I’m having a stroke. There’s this intense pain behind my eyes and I can smell something burning. Turns out it’s the smoke wafting up from my burning retinas because Needle Nuts McGee back there thinks that, while driving on the highway, I might have a sudden desire to cast shadow puppets on the freaking moon and he’s just trying to be helpful.
So, my vision slowly returns, just in time to see some moron on my right, who’s doing a steady ten klicks slower than everyone else, decide that he urgently needs to be in the express lanes. He veers across three lanes of traffic, which is moving faster than him, remember, so that he can get on the transfer ramp about fifty metres after the solid white , do-not-cross “V” that divided the lanes. Nearly kills forty-seven people to get over there.
They just call them express lanes, buddy! It doesn’t actually mean anything! And you’re going slower than everyone else on the whole freaking planet, anyway, so you’re obviously not in a hurry. You’re just stupid.
I spend a lot of time driving. I’ve seen all sorts of stupid drivers, bad drivers, nervous drivers and life-long pedestrians who have no business getting behind the wheel of a car in the first place. I’ve noticed a few interesting patterns with different types of drivers. It helps me decide which cars to not be behind or to avoid completely. One thing I’ve noticed, and you’re more than welcome to disagree with me on this, it’s just my opinion (which happens to be right) but I’ve found that, on average, people with religious bumper stickers, people who firmly believe that travelling at ninety to a hundred kilometres an hour in a two tonne steel killing machine is the appropriate time to share their views on faith with total strangers who are also travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour in their own two tonne killing machines, these people, on average, are really bad drivers.
As near as I can tell, they seem to feel that their total faith in God gives them an excuse not to actually accept responsibility for anything that happens. “God’s will.” “God will get me safely to my destination.” “God is my co-pilot.” Well, for Christ’s sake, would one of you grab the freaking wheel?

Mini-Gripes

• They were out of regular peanut butter at the store, so we got light peanut butter. Yep, Skippy Light, the healthier version of a food spread that can glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Does this not seem like an odd product to make to "light" version of? What's next, low-fat lard?

• Whatever happened to Reinhold Weege?

• Have you seen the ad for the Bo-Flex home torture kit? The one with the smug guy who's recently embraced his exhibitionist tendencies? Don't you just wanna slap him?
  "I gave all my fat clothes to my fat friends."
  Did you call them fat when you bestowed this wondrous gift of kindness upon them?
  Sure, you may be all ripped and toned now, ya bug-eyed freak, but deep inside, where it really counts, you're still a fat guy. All it'll take is one little slip up, one missed work out, one bit of temptation and that fat guy will rise back to the surface, like the bloated corpse of your dignity, bobbing around the harbour while gawking tourists and fishermen take photos.
  I'd like to track this guy down and leave a box of donuts on his doorstep, ring the bell and run away. Next, leave two boxes of donuts, then three the next. Within a week he'll be a blubbery slug waddling around his house again, unable to take his walrus-like girth outside because he gave away all his fat clothes.

• There's another "buy-this-it's-good-for-you" ad on TV, but I was so distracted and confused by what they were threatening to send to my home, that I have no idea what the actual product is.
  Here's the thing... When you speak, without even being aware that you're doing it, you leave the tiniest pause between words, thus indicating to the listener, mainly on a subconscious level, that you have finished that word and are now starting the next word. This is what makes human communication possible, otherwiseitwouldjustbeahugemessofwordsandsoundsrunningtogetherandyouwouldn'tknowhatthehellanyofitmeans.
  But not these guys. Throughout the commercial the words "Free DVD" kept flashing on the screen. However, the two people doing the voice over told me about 18 times during the 60 second ad that if I ordered now they would send me a freedy veedy.
  I don't know what a freedy veedy is, but I was somewhat frightened by how adamant they were about sending one to my house.
  I even checked the urban dictionary it told me that freedy veedy isn't defined yet. Holy crap, it defies description and they're sending one to get me!
  
  

Misfortune Cookie

We got some take out from the Chinese restaurant down the road from home the other night because they have the greatest lemon chicken in Canada. It was yummy and I enjoyed the meal until I got to the fortune cookie.
Crunching on the tasty bits of cookie, I read the words of wisdom bestowed upon me by, well, probably just randomly by some machine in a factory, but let's assume, for the hell of it, that a fortune cookie actually is just that: a specific, individual, yet vague, prediction or insight into a particular person's future.
If that's the case, then I think the universe is taking cheap shots at me and I feel somewhat insulted. My fortune, tucked inside the crunchy folds of my cookie, said, "You have a slow and unhurried natural rhythm." To me that just seems like an unnecessarily polite way of saying, "You are lazy and unmotivated."
That's a hell of a thing to be told by a piece of food.
(Now, there are probably other ways in which that sentence could be interpreted, but frankly, I couldn't be bothered thinking of any. Hell, it took my three days just to get around to bitching about it on a blog. Hmmmmm, maybe it's not so slanderous, after all.)
It got me wondering what other cryptic, backhanded insults have been doled out under the auspices of clairvoyant confectionery. Are there fortune cookies that say things like...
"Your non-traditional appearance is augmented by your parent's imaginative sense of fashion." (You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.)
"Your stark olfactory presence ensures an unobstucted path in life." (You smell so bad, even homeless people avoid you.)
"Your flexibity gives you a unique perspective on the past." (You have your head up your ass.)
"You were raised with a large maternal presense." (Your mama is so fat...)