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Look Ma, the Weekend Finally Started!

I apologize (to anyone who might notice such things) for my absence the past few days. I’m not sure I can muster sufficient excuses for the end of last week, but I can, from recent experience, assure you this:

When you plan to attend something called a ‘Beer Summit’ at half past noon on Saturday, you should really plan on getting nothing else done for the rest of the day.

Also, when said Beer Summit lasts for four hours and features only brews with seven percent alcohol or greater, you probably shouldn’t make any grand plans for Sunday morning, either. Possiibly Monday or Tuesday, either.

My lost day-and-a-half notwithstanding, the sudsy event was well worth the effort. I’ve been to similar shindigs before, with slightly different but oh-so-clever names — ‘BrewFests’, ‘Beer-O-Ramas’, ‘Brew ‘n’ Tells’, and ‘In-Law Family Reunions’, to name a few. And they’ve all followed the same sort of protocol as yesterday’s function — except for the reunions, of course, which are booze-soaked free-for-alls from the first bite of macaroni salad in the afternoon until the wee hours of the next morning, when we usually end up turning the hose on Uncle Floyd to get him off the roof. With that notable exception, the beer tastings usually go something like this:

Upon arriving, you’re handed some sort of drinking vessel — an oversized shot glass, usually, though yesterday we got the sort of plastic cup you might use for water in a child’s bathroom. Or to provide a urine sample at the doctor’s office. You’d be amazed how little beer it takes to shake the notion that you’re sipping yellow frothy liquid from a specimen jar, too. By the third drink, I was completely over it.

At the same time, you get your tickets. The rule is, one ticket for one beer. And one ‘beer’ means one shot in the glass or cup — two ounces, maybe three — up to the ‘fill line’. Now, back in the giddy old days, before any of us cared too much about wrapping the car around a tree on the way home or the health risks of having a liver the size of a small horse, they’d hand out twenty tickets, or even more. In recent years, the number’s been ten. Ten tickets, ten teeny shots of beer. Them’s the rules.

Of course, rules are always meant to be broken. Or at least bent. And rules involving beer doubly so.

This is where a bit of strategery comes in. I’ve found it’s best to spend the first five or six tickets wandering around and finding the good stuff. The really distinctive, quirky, top-shelf, never-heard-of-it-before brews. Seek them out, take your time, and savor them. Besides the fact that this will draw out the time it takes to use up your tickets, if you’re doing it right, these beers will also be the last thing you taste all day. Treat ’em right.

If you’ve sufficiently drawn out those first few tickets, you’ll be about an hour into the festivities, and you’ll have a significant advantage over several groups of people who attend these things:

• The chuggers — twenty minutes in, they were out of tickets, still sober, and now desperate. You’ll see these folks standing sadly in the corners, trying desperately to lick the bottoms of the insides of their glasses.
• The lightweights — they’ve got more tickets left than you do, but they’re already slurring their speech and stumbling along like a drunken sorority chick at her first Spring Formal. These people are the reason we only get ten tickets now. Amateurs.
• The connoisseurs — these are the blowhards strutting through the hall in little cliques, sipping and nodding sagely to each other over ‘floral hop aromas’ and ‘tinny overtones’. They’re relatively harmless, except that they seem to enjoy bothering the brewers manning the booths with their prattle, so it’s sometimes difficult to fight through them to get a beer of your own.

This is the time where a smart Summitteer can really clean up, if one is careful — and still able — to observe the dynamics that emerge. The chuggers, desperate for more, will work on the people running the event for more tickets. It doesn’t always work, but when it does — as it did yesterday — then it’s simple enough to follow their lead and grab another roll of tasty, tasty tickets.

Meanwhile, the lightweights are just about toasted, and the connoisseurs are getting bored with the ‘pedestrian fare’ that no doubt can’t match up to the concoctions they’re all brewing in their bathtubs at home. Personally, I prefer my beer without hair from the shower drain. But to each his own.

Anyway, when these folks leave they’ve got to do something with their leftover tickets. Latch onto a couple of the wobblier- and/or haughtier-looking candidates, and rack up the vouchers. Or, as I told one of my more ‘chuggery’ friends yesterday, stand by the door with your glass empty, your pockets turned out, and a sad, thirsty look on your face. Eventually somebody will take pity on you.

Of course, all these strategies become moot with an hour or so left to go in the event. That’s when the brewers invariably realize that they’ve brought way too much beer to the party, and are going to have to lug it home if they don’t get rid of it. Plus, they know that the drinkers left so late in the game are the serious kind, and the need for silly games and rules like ‘tickets’ and ‘fill lines’ has passed. That’s when things get really interesting, and it’s best just to drink whichever beer happens to be at the closest booth when your glass runs dry. You don’t want to waste time at that point, and frankly, you probably shouldn’t be walking very far, either. Grab a few more cold ones, and crawl out the door when they tell you to. That’s a good little Summitteer.

So, that was my Saturday. I thought about posting something when I got back last night. At least, I think I thought about posting, but at one point I thought I was channelling the spirit of a 13th-century German monk, so it may have been someone else. It was really a good time, is what I’m saying.

So, there you go. I’ll do better this week, I promise. And there are a couple of changes in the works that I’ll talk about soon, once my brain cells get their shit the rest of the way together again. For now, I think I’ll have a nice lie down, and try not to think about beer for a while. Not until the next Summit, anyway. Cheers.

The ‘New Generation’ Is Parched, Dammit!

I’m sorry. I just can’t hold my tongue any longer.

I know, I know. Many of the posts lately have involved me bitching — about my computer, or eBay, or some other ridiculous thing. And I usually like to mix it up around here — a rant here, a list there, maybe poke fun at some dimwitted celebrity or other, or make up a story where I put the dog in mortal danger of some hilarious kind. The ‘potpourri approach’ is what I’m going for here. Only, with something manlier than ‘potpourri’ that I can’t think of, just at the moment.

But tonight, tis not to be. It’s a menuful of crabby snark again, I’m afraid. I am at the whim of the Muse of Pissy, and tonight she dances again. You’ll have to settle for all rose petals and none of… um, whatever the hell else they put in potpourri. I’m really disturbed that I even tried to carry the analogy this far. Let’s just get on with the bitching before I lose my froth.

(‘Potpourri’. Sheesh.)

So. Here’s the thing. I’m a Pepsi man; have been all my life. Don’t get me wrong, though — I’m not one of those huffy, uptight, militant bastards about it, like some people on both sides of the cola fence. If there’s Coke around, and no Pepsi for miles, I’ll drink one. I don’t look a gift soda in the mouth. And if I ask for a Pepsi in a restaurant, and the waitperson asks, ‘Is Coke okay‘, then it very probably is. I don’t stamp my little feet over it. I don’t glare and say, ‘You know, it’s because of places like this that the rest of the world hates America!‘ I don’t even roll my eyes and pout and sigh that ‘I guess so‘ sigh that we all used on our parents back in the day. I take my glass, drink it, and keep my smart mouth shut. Plus, if I’m at a restaurant, I’m usually too drunk to know the difference, so who’s complaining?

The problem though, is work. The office is the one place where I really need a nice caffeinated cola to make it through the day. And I’m occasionally not drunk at work, so I’d really prefer that tasty beverage be a Pepsi. This is where the bitching comes in; thanks for hanging in there. You’re a real trooper.

See, where I work there are two vending machines.

Actually, that’s a lie; there are really four machines. But one only provides solid snacks — mostly from the days of the Eisenhower administration, by the looks of it — and another is some sort of failed attempt at a coffee machine. I’ve never seen it used, I’m frankly not sure it’s plugged in, and it features blends with names like ‘Columbian Caress’, ‘Roasted Fantasy’, and ‘Dark Chocolate Surprise’.

I’m afraid to use it because I’m not entirely sure whether it serves cups of java or provides sexual favors. And apparently for an extra quarter, you can get ‘Cream’, ‘Sugar’, or ‘Happy Ending’. I ‘like my coffee like I like my women’, but this is ridiculous.

That leaves two machines. One is a standard-issue, run-of-the-mill Coke machine. It has the whole product line — Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, Cherry Vanilla Coke, Hollandaise Coke, Crisco Coke, Diet Crisco Coke, I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter Coke, Cherry Lime Mango Papaya Guava Kiwi Coke, you name it. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

The last machine, technically, isn’t a soda machine at all; it’s a water machine. Aquafina water, to be precise. But who’s going to fill up six shelves of drink machine with bottled water? Nobody, that’s who. How depressed would you be if you saw a ‘water machine’ with nothing but… water? They might as well vend hangin’ ropes and slittin’ razors out of the change slot. That’s helping no one.

So, for the past two years, the machine has been a veritable cornucopia of alternative products. Sobe drinks. Snapple. Arizona iced teas. Little bottles of Starbucks ‘espresso shots’ — because you know you’re not getting coffee from that ‘other’ machine. One shelf of Aquafina, naturally. And then — Pepsi. Half a row of regular, half a row of diet. Fine. So I could get a Pepsi out of the machine whenever I wanted, right?

No. It’s not that simple. Nothing in my world can ever be that fricking simple.

No, the way it would happen is this: one day, the vending maching guy would stop by, and stock up the machine, as described. The Pepsi products would last, oh, maybe nine minutes. Forty Pepsis, forty Diets — whoosh! Gone, in the blink of a carbonated eye.

(If I was lucky, I might get one before they disappeared. One time, I scored two between fill-ups. I almost wept.)

Next, it was the iced teas. Snapple first, then the off brands, and a few of the Sobe concoctions. Then, the off-off brands. After a week, only a few stragglers remained. Then the waters began to go. Did the vendor sense this pattern, and stock up the popular items, to make more cash?

No. No, he did not. Jackass Vendor Man remained conspicuous in his absence, and we were left to rummage through the remaining scraps. Eventually, the teas disappeared. The rest of the Sobes, the waters — all gone. The machine would sit like that, all but empty, for weeks at a time, a desolate shell of the refreshment oasis it once had been. The only thing remaining were the bottles of Starbucks product.

(How, you ask? In an office full of caffeine-addicted codehounds, how did the bottles of pep juice survive? Are we too picky? Were they tainted? Priced out of our meager spending range, perhaps?

None of the above, actually. Everybody tried the Starbucks bottles — once. But in a move typical of the gross mismanagement of this particular Vend-O-Rama, the bottles — glass bottles, mind you — were stocked on the highest rack on the machine, a full six feet above the delivery slot below. And this is one of those machines that *boots* the requested item off the end of the shelf and against the front glass, letting it fall to the bottom to be retrieved.

And it only takes one loud crash and smashed bottle of two-dollar vending machine coffee product on your shoes to deter you from ever trying that shit again. My mocha-flavored loafers are a grim reminder of my own trip down that dark and bitter road.)

Anyway, eventually — many moons later — the vending chump would show up and stock the sodas, and the cycle would start all over. That’s how we lived for two years. But there was nothing we could do about it, so we sucked it up and dealt with it.

Until last week.

Last week — after his typical months-long absence — the vending douchebag returned to stock up the machine. Only this time, were there iced teas? No. Those were replaced with another row of water. Apparently, Aquafina was concerned about their margins on all the water they weren’t selling. Fine.

Were there Sobes, then? Snapples? Arizona tea goodies? No. In their place, we now have a variety of fruit juices. Orange is there. Apple. Cranberry. All the delicious flavors of the rainbow, which we’d all enjoy in the office, if ANY OF US EVER GOT THERE BEFORE FRICKING NOON! Who’s drinking orange juice at lunch, I ask you? Nobody. ‘Sippy-cup of apple juice-juice before you get blitzed at happy hour, sweetums? No? How about a binky before nappy time?‘ Bitches.

None of this would really faze me, of course, if they’d left the Pepsis. Their one hot seller, their consistent money maker — the only (non-breakable) source of caffeine in the entire operation — surely, they didn’t take away the Pepsi. Right?

Wrong. Pepsis — gone. In their place, we have — I can’t even believe I’m typing this — lemonade. Pink lemonade. That’s where the Diet Pepsi used to be. And to replace the regalar soda — sit down for this one, folks — something called ‘Tropicana Strawberry Melon’. Can I stay up at night blogging furiously writing code with the help of pink lemonade and strawberry ri-goddam-diculous melon soda? No. No, I can’t.

(And for you granola-sucking health nut-bags out there who’d argue that at least ‘strawberry melon’ anything is better than soda, I”ve got news for you:

*bzzzzzzzzt*!

Maybe if it actually contained the juice, or pulp, or even zest of the fruits in question, you’d have something to work with. But this new bullshit is about as beneficial nutritionally as three big bowls of crusty toejam, and there’s a hastily-settled lawsuit to prove it.)

So, basically, I got screwed. Along with the rest of everybody around my office. I’m encouraged to say, though, that we’ve all independently taken the same tack towards this new affront — as far as I can tell, not a single product has been extracted from that vending machine in a week. Maybe, just maybe, when the guy comes back — in, like, October — to ‘fill’ the thing and sees no empty slots, he’ll come to his senses. Twatwafflin’ douche-diddlin’ bastard.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what I’m going to do for caffeine, because I can only stomach one or two Cokes a week. And that’s pushing it. I may resort to sucking the abandoned coffee goo out of the bottom of the crappy machine. It’s nasty and sticky down there, and there’s a good chance I’ll swallow some glass in the process — but how the hell else am I supposed to stay up late to write this crap?