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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Sometimes, being the office smartass isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Take today, for instance. I was in a meeting with a few people in our group. Our little pack included two women who’ve only been with us for a couple of weeks, so I was on my best behavior. Such as it is. I don’t want to scare off the new hires while they’re still in their probationary period, now, do I? That would be like a car actually being under warranty when it breaks down. Much better to reel them in slowly, before you sink the hook deep.
Anyway, they were discussing some protocol or procedure that had little to do with me, and was approximately as engaging as listening to Ben Stein recite the Magna Carta. In full. In the original Latin. Not the fun piggy kind, either. The old, dusty, ‘Et tu?‘, ‘Hail, Caesar‘, ‘Vini, vidi, snoooooooze‘ one.
“They could have been arguing about how to prepare and cut a peanut butter sandwich. And for all I knew for much of the conversation, maybe they were.”
So, I was zoning in and out of the conversation, waiting for them to circle around to a topic on which I might offer input, or have an interest, or prefer to counting the hairs on the back of my hand and humming the Mr. Plow jingle in my head to pass the time. But they were mired deep, deep in the details of whatever the hell it was they were talking about, so I dawdled and counted and hummed away.
After ten minutes or so of this, it became clear that there were factions forming on this topic of discussion, and things were beginning to get a bit heated. One guy, and a girl he works closely with, seemed to want things done ‘by the book’ — or better yet, by a new book that they were writing themselves, which included the old book, but also expounded on a number of other points, introduced new twists and cautions, and included an appendix laying out just how the first book was nice, but also entirely inadequate in just about every conceivable way.
The other faction, made of of three ‘in the trenches’ types, didn’t like the first book, either. But they weren’t having this newly proposed book. no sir. They seemed to favor no book at all, with a much more laissez faire attitude about whatever the hell it was they were starting to get upset about. They might be willing, grudgingly, to do things ‘by the pamphlet’ or ‘by the paragraph you might read on the side of a Rice Krispies box’, but ‘by the book’? Not having it.
(Let me assure you at this point that it matters not one whit what they were actually arguing about. On any matter, there are always those who want to see every ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, with each letter firmly hugging the writing line without going over and no pen stroke astray or wasted. And then there are those who prefer to use crayons and unlined paper, figure you’ll decipher which bits are ‘t’s from the context, and you wouldn’t want them dotting letters anyway, because they’re more likely to use smileys or hearts or green freaking clovers than a simple spot of black ink. Or burnt umber, from the Crayola box of sixty-four.
These are the people on the two sides of the debate above. The details are frankly irrelevant. They could have been arguing about how to prepare and cut a peanut butter sandwich. And for all I knew for much of the conversation, maybe they were.)
As I sat, out of the fray and pushed back from the meeting room table, the proceedings reached a fiery climax when one of the guys in the ‘no book’ camp scrunched up his face at the ‘new book’ leader and sighed:
‘Look, we simply can’t go through all those steps every time. Can we be just a little less anal about this?‘
To which the ‘new book’ pusher retorted, and I quote:
‘Hey, a little anal never hurt anybody!‘
At which point, everyone in the room looked at me. Not at the guy who said it. But at me. All except the new girls, who had no reason to look at me — and certainly no reason to snap their necks around in my direction the first time ‘anal’ gets egregiously abused during a staff meeting. Still, after a couple of gawky seconds trying to figure out who everyone was staring at, they too wound up looking expectantly in my direction.
Except I was on my best behavior. Or something like it. Some reasonable facsimile that doesn’t allow me, in the presence of two ladies I’ve barely met and who have probably attended workplace sensitivity classes sometime in the past calendar month, to respond to the above statement with:
‘Ah, I bet you say that to all the girls.‘
Or: ‘Dude. How are you not on the hiring committee?‘
Or possibly even: ‘I know three girls, an ex-fraternity pledge and my buddy’s hamster who would beg to differ with you, there.‘
These are not things that you say in front of people with whom you have little history, and are expected to look directly in the face five days a week. That’s what my ‘best behavior’ book says, anyway. Though it’s really more of a ‘blurb’. Kind of a best behavior fortune cookie note. Still. On this point, it’s very clear.
So I said nothing. My eyes got wide, and I opened my mouth to say something entirely inappropriate, as usual. I thought better of that, shut my yap, and just looked back at the frozen crowd with a shrug and a sort of helpless ‘the brain is willing, but the body has been warned by HR about this sort of thing before‘ gesture. And after a long pause, everyone went back to arguing again. Which was fine by me and Mr. Plow.
Except.
Now what the hell do those new girls think? When a misplaced ‘anal’ halts conversation and all eyes swivel to me, what’s running through their minds? I’m somehow the resident expert on all things anal? Maybe I was a proctologist in a former life? I had a relevant but unfortunate experience in summer camp or Catholic church or as a fraternity pledge? I once owned a bowlegged hamster? I’m just an ass? What, dammit, what!?
I don’t know what they thought. I only know that I wasn’t a smartass, so that’s probably not high on their list of explanations. And that simply can’t be good. I can only hope now that the ‘anal’ talk stays at a minimum for a while, at least until we’ve all had a chance to get comfortable enough for wildly inappropriate zingers during work meetings.
Which might take an awfully long while. Both those girls have looked at me funny, ever since the meeting. And neither seems to want me walking behind them, for some reason. Looks like it’s going to be a long, long winter around the old office this year.
Permalink | 6 CommentsToday I played squash. Or rather, I practiced squash. Or more specifically, I stood on a squash court with a racquet and goofy goggles mostly wondering why the hell the little rubber ball wouldn’t go where I wanted it to go. That’s about as close as I got to anything resembling a sport.
It’s the first time I attempted squash, and the results were decidedly mixed. I thought I might be able to pick it up, because I played an awful lot of racquetball a few centuries ago in my youth, and the games look pretty similar. Which is just about as stupid a way to choose something as there exists.
My wife looks a little like Alyson Hannigan, for instance. That doesn’t mean that we get royalty checks from American Pie, or that she can introduce me to Barney Stinson.
(Although my wife was in band camp, back in high school. And she played the flute. Coincidence?
No idea. I’m afraid to ask.)
Anyway, back to safer topics. Like squash.
To prepare for my foray into a new sport, I went out and bought the cheapest racquet I could find. Which turned out to be the only racquet I could find. Squash isn’t going to challenge football or baseball as ‘America’s Sport’ any time soon, it would seem.
“If racquetball is like trying to hit a tennis ball with a platter, squash is like swinging a spatula at a marble.”
It took me three stores to locate the one racquet I did come across, and that came with a whole starter kit — a flimsy bag, two balls, a pair of goggles and a helpful-looking brochure entitled ‘How to Play Squash‘. Not knowing how to play squash, I thought this sort of information would be right up my alley. Fully prepared to soak up helpful tips and strategy, I dug in. Here’s one sentence from the booklet:
‘Squash is a game played on an indoor court between two people.‘
That’s the lead sentence of the third paragraph. On the second page. Of a four-page pamphlet. I’ll admit I may be a slow learner, but this is a little ridiculous. When the ‘big reveal’ at the end is that there’s a ball involved (“SUPPLIES!“), I might just be ready for the advanced class.
Frankly, though, I never made it to the end of the booklet. For starters why, here’s the sentence immediately following the one quoted above:
‘One needs to get started are a racquet, a ball, proper eye-protection and non-marking court shoes.‘
It’s a grammatical nightmare, but I can mostly get the gist of it. And everything but the shoes came in my ‘Baby’s First Squash Set’ kit, so I was all set there. The brochure continued:
‘The object of the sport is to win the “match” by winning the best of five “games”.‘
That’s as far as I got. Again, I’m no expert, but if they’re introducing concepts like “match” and “games” halfway through the instruction manual, I doubt there’s much help given in the last couple of pages. And if I’m supposed to whip out the finger quotes every time I’m out there in a “match” or playing a “game”, then I’m done already. I’ll return the racquet and take up bocce. At least I already know there’s a ball involved in that. Or a “ball”. I should probably pick up a brochure, to be safe.
Anyway, I decided to trudge ahead and give it a go. I got to the gym and on one of the courts, I found a pair of older gentlemen beating the living hell out of the ball and scurrying back and forth with every point. They looked a lot like the dusty old farts who’d school me in racquetball at the YMCA growing up. Fine. So that much hasn’t changed in twenty years or so. Peachy.
I picked out an open court and tried hitting the ball around. There were only three things standing in the way — those twenty years of age I just mentioned, twenty extra pounds (fine, probably more) accumulated in that time, and physics. Three teensy little hurdles is all.
Actually, it wasn’t all of physics working against me. I’m sure Newton’s Law was mildly in my favor out there, and I don’t recall having any trouble with the weak or strong nuclear forces. But I was gravity’s bitch in a number of ways, the biggest of which was that squash balls don’t behave anything like racquetball balls — or softball balls, or billiard balls, for that matter — so my frame of reference for bouncing and thwacking them was way, way off.
It doesn’t help that squash and racquetball racquets are pretty different. What little muscle memory I have left from the old days tells me that the meaty part of the stick in my hand starts about three inches from my fingers, and gets wide really quickly, like a serving platter. This new model is probably a little longer than my old equipment, but it’s significantly narrower, and tapers really slowly from the neck to the heart of the racquet. If racquetball is like trying to hit a tennis ball with a platter, squash is like swinging a spatula at a marble. Which is what I looked like I was doing, for much of the session. If the spry old guys in the next court were watching, I’m sure they were appalled.
Still, I managed to meet my three criteria for a successful first attempt at a new sport — I didn’t hurt myself, I didn’t break the equipment, and I wasn’t escorted off the premises. So later this week, I’ll don the stupid goggles again, break out the spatula and give it another go. Maybe by then I can find a new manual. Or a store that sells those bocce balls. At least I wouldn’t look quite as stupid playing that.
Probably.
Permalink | 2 CommentsI’ll be taking off in an hour or so to attend a Super Bowl party in Connecticut, thrown by my friend’s brother. It should be a great time, but I do have one small worry.
As you may know, the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing the Arizona Cardinals in this year’s pigskin finale. I spent seven years in Pittsburgh before coming to Boston, so I’m still a Stillers backer. Mostly. When they’re not playing the Patriots, which would be awfully tough today, since most of the Pats are playing golf or sunning their hides on a beach somewhere this winter.
“If you never hear from me again and Pittsburgh wins the Super Bowl, just assume I’ve been sent upstate somewhere, and maybe I’ll be out on parole someday. Also, rest assured that it was totally worth it.”
So today, I’m solidly rooting for the Steelers. My wife is, too.
My buddy, I think he’s on the fence. A die-hard Pats fan, he could cheer for his team’s conference and take Pittsburgh, or cheer for the Cards to win, and then point out that the Patriots laid 47 points on them a few weeks ago, and so don’t we really know who the best team in football is?
It’s a dilemma, to be sure. But that’s not my worry.
My concern is his brother, who’s hosting today’s Super Bowl soiree. I don’t know who he’s cheering for. And he’s a cop. So he owns guns and tasers and can arrest you and stuff. If he’s going with the Cards today, and the Steelers go ahead, or — and this is purely fanciful speculation, now — say I get a little rowdy in support of my team, then what?
Can he claim black and gold are ‘gang colors’ and lock me in the squad car for the second half? Could he convince a judge to consider a Terrible Towel a deadly weapon? Will I do five-to-ten for attempting to incite a riot with a ‘Here we go, Stillers, here we go!‘ chant?
I don’t know. But I’ll say this: If you never hear from me again and Pittsburgh wins the Super Bowl, just assume I’ve been sent upstate somewhere, and maybe I’ll be out on parole someday. Also, rest assured that it was totally worth it.
Meanwhile, feel free to enjoy a few gridiron-related tidbits from posts past. Happy football!
December 14, 2003: Are You Ready for Some Snowballs?
February 1, 2005: Go, Pats… and Pass the Brewskis
February 2, 2005: Honor Among Scalpers
December 4, 2005: Hut! Hut! Brrrrrrrrr!
February 5, 2006: Super Bowls Ain’t What They Used to Be
January 18, 2007: The High Flying Falcon
Permalink | No CommentsThere’s a game my friends and I play sometimes, usually when we’re out at a bar. We don’t have a particular name for it, but if we did, it might be ‘Name That Tune-Singer‘ or ‘Who Da Band?‘ or ‘Goddammit, Timmy Got Another One? Whose Stupid Idea Was This, Anyway?‘
The rules are simple. When a song comes on the radio or gets played on the bar mix tape du jour, you have to name the band performing the song before anyone else can. Name three in a row, and you win. Win what? Nothing, usually. Maybe a beer, if we’re in a bar and there’s a tender handy. Or you win a reprise rendition of ‘Goddammit, Timmy got another one? Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?‘
(Hence the name. And the primary reason why we’ll never have team T-shirts made.)
This isn’t the sort of barroom activity that endears us to the other patrons, of course. If you’re ever out in the greater Boston area enjoying an adult beverage or two at your favorite watering hole and hear a gaggle of drunken idiots screaming, ‘PEEEEEEAAAARL JAAAAAM!!‘ when one of their songs come on, please don’t be alarmed. We’re not escaped mental patients, or especially deep-voiced ‘woo girls’. We’re just drunken idiots, passing the time trying to one-up the others. Carry on and ignore us; we’ll go away or get bored or pass out soon enough.
In my crowd, it’s hard as hell to win this song game, because the regular players all cover different angles. We’ve got the one rabidly competitive guy who hangs eagerly on the last dying notes of a song, ear conspicuously perked to the speaker to hear the opening riff of the next. If he’s the only one paying particular attention at the time, he’s guaranteed a head start on anything we might know. So you’ve got to keep an eye on that guy.
Then there’s the guy who knows all the stuff the rest of us don’t. As a group, we’re overwhelmingly likely to know just about any grunge, post-grunge, classic guitar rock, hair band, alternative, college rock or heavy pop number that turns up. This guy knows Madonna songs, and Jennifer Lopez, and Beyonce. And he’s not afraid to admit it. In public, no less. So basically, if it’s some song we’ve never heard of — usually soulful or sugary poppy, and always by a chick, it seems — he’ll yell out some female artist’s name, and the rest of us look at each other with blank faces and grudgingly give him a point. We don’t know if he’s right. And if we do, we’re not about to fess up to it. Luckily, we don’t hang out in bars prone to blasting Jessica Simpson threefers, so he doesn’t win a whole lot of games.
“I think I owe the dog a six-pack or something. The rules are unclear.”
Me, I’ve got the obscure stuff covered. If it was produced between 1985 and 1995, ever played on college radio, and no one even then had ever heard of it, then I probably know it. I probably own it — and it’s probably on vinyl or cassette, which means I haven’t heard it for fifteen years, either. But if it plays during one of our games, I can safely wait until the middle or end of the song to call it, because no one else is going to get it.
Unless this one other guy is playing, who’s got the same musical background as I do. If we’re both there, we have to rush to yell out even the obscure ones — but by the second one of those, we’re locked in debate over whether Joy Division or New Order turned out to be better, or if XTC jumped the shark on Oranges and Lemons, and then we’re not listening to the stupid music, so we don’t get much of anything. Even when we do, the rest of the guys just look at each other with blank faces and grudgingly give one of us a point. Because they just don’t know.
(I’m telling you, nailing a Housemartins song or something by Guadalcanal Diary is nothing like knowing some three-minute piece of pap was warbled by Kelly Clarkson or Mandy fricking Moore. But we get treated the same.
Sometimes, pop’s just not fair.)
Then there’s Timmy. Timmy knows a lot of the old stuff, most of the new stuff, and some of the eighties and nineties stuff in-between, too. But that’s not his biggest weapon. His most devastating technique is to convince people that he’s not really playing, not even listening to whatever’s blaring over the loudspeakers at the time. Then he’ll drop the band name into casual conversation, infuriating anyone (see player #1 above) who’s actually racking their brains to figure it out. So you might be talking to Timmy, minding your own business and forgetting momentarily that he’s one band away from you owing him a beer, and he’ll say:
‘Y’know, I’m a big fan of these wings. Are… U2?‘
Or: ‘Did you see that dunk on the TV? That was a real… Coldplay.‘
Don’t ask how he works Finger Eleven into a sentence. It’s unprintable in its full form, but let’s just say it ends with, ‘I barely even know her eleven!‘
Clearly, he must be stopped. Timmy is no longer using his powers for good.
Luckily (for the rest of us), we haven’t played our little game in a while. So what made me think of it? After work today, I came home and decided to listen to a little music. I geared up my MP3 player, loaded everything the missus and I own, and put it on shuffle. A couple of songs in, I figured I could use a little practice, so I started playing our band naming game. Solo. WIth my own music.
And I sucked. I must have listened to thirty songs. And while I got some of them, I don’t think I ever got three in a row. Either I’m way out of practice, or I’ve got way, way too much music that I don’t take the time to listen to properly. I’m afraid it’s the latter. Mostly because I took some recommendations on newer stuff from Timmy a while back — so now I’ve got a player full of the stuff that he knows, only I don’t recognize it, so it’ll do me no damned good next time we’re all sitting around in a bar and Boy Hits Car or Sevendust comes on. Meanwhile, if I can’t even name three bands in a row on my own player, I don’t know what the hell that means. I think I owe the dog a six-pack or something. The rules are unclear.
So I guess I’ll be listening to a lot more music at home now, to be ready for the next match. Maybe I’ll even start working my calls into conversation, just to rub it in a little bit. I’d hate to lag behind in any smart-ass area; that could leave my reputation forever tarnished. Or Staind, even.
Oh, yeah. I’m getting the hang of this. Look out, gang! I’m back in the game!
Permalink | No CommentsGetting to work isn’t nearly as easy as it used to be.
I drive to the office, and my commute takes just about twenty minutes from door to door. Or rather, it used to. For three years, barring the occasional traffic snafu or detour, I’d hop in the car, spend my third of an hour warbling along with the tunes on the CD player, and arrive at my parking area. Day in, day out, same old commute. Then one day, I thought, ‘You know, I bet there’s a faster way.‘
That was my first mistake.
Not that I was wrong, mind you. There was a faster way. Lots of them, as it turns out, which was no real surprise. I have the navigational instincts of a crack-addled mole rat, so when I’m told or shown a route that gets me from Point A to Point B, then that’s how I get there. I don’t ask questions, I don’t cut corners, and I sure as hell don’t take any detours. If the directions tell me to turn left six times consecutively and cross the same intersection on Main Street over and over, then that’s just how it is. If I eventually get where I’m going, then the experiment is a success. Period.
“Luckily, there’s more than one way to skin a Cadillac.”
So, one day I decided to venture forth on a new path to the office. I knew the intervening area well enough by that time that I couldn’t get ‘lost’, per se, but that doesn’t mean I knew what the hell I was doing. As usual. The first ‘shortcut’ was an unmitigated disaster. I took a little side street to cut off a right angle, got funneled onto a one-way street going the opposite direction, and lost ten minutes trying to get back to my usual route. Total driving time to work: 35 minutes.
The next day, I cruised past that little snafu waiting to happen, and took the next side street. Boston can be a tricky town to navigate, but if there’s one rule around here, it’s that they never put two one-way streets going the same way in a row. You can always go a little further and loop back the way you came. So I made the next turn.
It also funneled me into a one-way street. Going the wrong way. And I couldn’t loop back and go the way I came. At least I remembered how to get back to my usual route from the previous day’s adventure. As I cursed the city planners, wishing for large cloverleaf onramps to be shoved firmly up their asses, my total driving time to work was: 25 minutes.
I took a step back and reassessed my plans. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to cut off the angle I’d been trying to shave. There were a couple more side streets I could have tried, but what were the chances those would work out? Zero. Those were all one-ways the wrong way, too, or led to dead end cul-de-sacs or tar pits or tiger cages or something. No, thanks. If I was going to cut time off the commute, I’d have to do it elsewhere.
So I looked closer to home. Before I got into the meat of the route with that big right angle, I traveled on a couple of busy roads near my house. What if I could zigzag a shortcut through the back streets there? Surely, that would save me a couple of minutes. And that’s two more minutes I could be sleeping every morning. I had to try.
First, I veered into a little alleyway off the main road, knowing there was a street parallel to my route that wasn’t nearly as busy. What I failed to realize is that it’s less busy because there are stop lights every nine feet or so on that road, and they’re always red. Always. Even when they’re green, if they see you coming, they slam over to red. They don’t even bother with yellow; they just say, ‘Aha, drivers hoping to get by! No green for you! and it’s *bzzzzzzt*, right to crimson. Sometimes, I swear they even blink a little, just to mock you. I tried for a week to beat the lights, but my best driving time to work was: 28 minutes.
Luckily, there’s more than one way to skin a Cadillac. All sorts of other little alleys and thruways veered off that main street. One of them had to take me somewhere useful — and faster. Right? Well, here’s the tally:
Second turn: Alleyway dumping into another one-way street going the wrong way. Can’t somebody outlaw these fricking things? Total driving time: 31 minutes.
Third turn: Driveway into Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Thought there’d be a way out the back; there wasn’t. Total driving time: 26 minutes. But the crullers were delicious.
Fourth turn: Street back to stop light hell. One light turned red, then yellow, then immediately back to red. I took a right turn to get away from the nightmare. Onto another one-way street. Kill me now. Total driving time: 38 minutes.
Fifth turn: Some guy’s driveway. He didn’t seem too happy to see me, and wouldn’t let me drive through his back yard to the next street. Maybe I should have saved him a cruller. Total driving time: 25 minutes.
Sixth turn: The turn I take on my usual route. Le sigh.
Just this week, I turned to my last resort. Between my parking area — just a street with several open spaces, actually — and the main part of the route, there’s a bit of a hike on a street with two stop signs. Maybe I could shortcut past those — or one of them. Or just start blowing through one to save a few seconds. I’d take just about anything at this point.
After careful study of this part of the drive, I targeted one little side street that looked promising. It pointed the way I wanted to go, and as far as I could see down it, there were no stop signs, snarky lights or one way pointers to screw me. Yesterday, I took the plunge and ventured into the unknown.
For a block, it was smooth sailing. Two blocks, no problem. Three blocks, fine. And I was making super time. At the end of the fourth block was the turn onto the street where I parked. I had victory in sight when I glanced to my left, at the house at the end of the block. On the sidewalk there was an older woman, probably in her fifties, and quite heavy. She was shoveling the snow from the night before off her walk, wearing just a too-revealing pair of hip-hugging sweatpants and a thin white T-shirt. On the shirt, emblazoned across her ample, lumpy chest were the words:
‘Got Milk?‘
Clearly, I can never travel on that street again. If that’s what the lady wears in wintertime, god only knows what she’s parading around in come summer. Also, I won’t be drinking any milk for the next couple of weeks, thanks just the same. And who knows how long it took me to get to work that day; I drove around in circles for a good ten minutes before I felt stable enough to park.
Circles on the next block over, mind you. No way did I need to see Ms. Shovelcrack and her milky mammaries again. Not then. Not ever.
Still, all was not lost. Today, I took my usual route, like I always do, onto the busy street, through the right angle, past the stop signs and onto my parking street. And then I parked — four spots earlier than I usually park. Total driving time: 19 minutes, 50 seconds.
Sure, that’s an extra minute or two added onto my walk into the office. But it’s not driving time, now, is it? Sometimes the small victories are all we have, and I’m more than happy to take this one. I’ll worry about shaving seconds off my walking commute some other time. Or not at all, if I’ve learned my lesson. Slow ‘n’ steady wins the race, right?
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