What A Fucking Waste Of Time

Yesterday, I got a new cell phone. Well, I ordered it Tuesday, and it arrived yesterday… so I guess, I really did get a new cell phone yesterday. Seems like I get a new one every year. Last year I bought a v635. This year it’s a new smartphone. The Cingular 8125 has one major flaw; it runs Windows. However, I can over look that glaring technological pimple for all the other cool shit it does. It’s got bluetooth, Wi-Fi, infrared, USB, a miniSD memory card slot, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a QWERTY keyboard, and a 65k-color quarter VGA screen. Oh, did I mention it’s a cell phone? It’s freakin’ awesome. I can surf the ‘Net for porn, use jabber to chat with my two friends, or shell into my Linux machines or the servers at work… and I can still make calls to order calzones from Pizza Factory. Imagine that! The picture here is a shot of my phone, which I also uploaded to Wikipedia since the article for the HTC Wizard needed an image.

I had, just had, to run an errand in town today. I still had the nebulizer I used to inhale the medication I needed when I had pneumonia. It had to be returned to the medical supplier or I’d have been the next Jim Carroll, sucking dick in the men’s room for money to pay the goddamn bill.

My 5am-to-8pm daily commute has made doing things in town a fucking production, requiring a scheduled day off, an official Congressional order, and a high level of coordination rivaling that of Cirque du Soleil. If we need to run even the smallest errand in town, we have to burn a vacation day (or feign illness) in order to complete that errand. The amount of bullshit we’re forced to eat when asking for a schedule change is out of hand. There’s a really long story that goes behind all this, but I don’t want to get into it. Let’s just say that my carpool was asking to have “work-from-home” Fridays that would allow us to telecommute. So earlier in the week, I requested today off if (and only if) we were still driving to Seattle. If telecommuting was approved for Fridays (and all of us were working from home), I wouldn’t need the day off. Okay, let me simplify this as if you were a 2nd grader: I was to have the day off if we’re driving, or I would work from home if we weren’t driving. And as predictable as the rising cost of gasoline, the word came down yesterday that telecommuting was denied, and we would not be working from home. Bastards!

So, I was working from home today. I was logged into the support queue with my X-Lite softphone, tunneled into the company’s VPN, and connected to our jabber server. I was handling my tickets and doing my thing. One of my pet peeves about the jabber server is chat etiquette. It drives me crazy that the people I work with have to start off a conversation with a stupid question — “You there?” Jesus fuck, people! If my online status says I’m available, there’s a high goddamn likelihood I’m at my desk. Just spit it out! There’s no need to ask for my fucking twenty. One of my co-workers asked me this question shortly after 3pm today, and I replied accordingly. They’re jealous nappy-headed hos because I was working from home, and they had to drive into Seattle. They campaigned, via broadcast message, for everyone to send me a jabber message… “hey, you there?” As you can see by the clips of my jabber log below, everyone who asked got the same basic response, regardless of who they were. It was all in good fun, though.

<Twigg> hey you there?
<Twigg> hahahahahahha
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<Ocelot> hey you there?
<wafwot> I’ll say to you what I said to Twigg…. Fuck you.
<wafwot> C’mon…. get the boss to ask me.
 
<mike> you there?
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> LOL
<mike> your number one too!!
 
<mermaid> I’m to harrass you
<wafwot> Okay.
<wafwot> Just don’t ask if I’m here.
<mermaid> I was told to but I dont want to go with the crowd
<mermaid> I’m cool like that
<wafwot> ‘Ata girl!
<wafwot> Coolest in the whole building!
<mermaid> I know I know
 
<All> Hey u there?
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<wafwot> A broadcast messgage?
<wafwot> You ass.
<Ocelot> hahahahahaha
 
<paul> hey, you there?
<wafwot> Ffffffuuuuuuck You!
<paul> hehehe
 
<the boss> ‘hey.. you there?’
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> lol
<the boss> Ouch hhaha you would not like it
<the boss> what a nice guy.
<the boss> where is that pen I sign your check with? hahah

I so wish I had the wit about me to mention to “the boss” that he doesn’t sign my checks… they’re automatically deposited. Muhahahaha!

Just before lunch, my new phone rang. It was Ditech. He took the day off to move car parts from his garage to Bellingham. I think he took the day off to celebrate 420, but I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen one or two… hundred… thousand times before. After work, I drove out to his house and helped him celebrate the “holiday.” During the 45-minute trip, I realized the “Spring 2007 Hey You There” campaign took to the highway. My carpool buddies were now sending “hey you there” text messages to my cell phone. It was pretty goddamn funny once I had a good buzz kickin’.

As we passed the pipe around just outside the door of Ditech’s basement, he told me they were fixing up the house in order to put it up for sale soon. He told me that the carpet in one particular room is haunted by a mysterious piss odor caused by a former owner, and no amount of cleaning has removed the stink. This was highly funny to me in my state of bakedness. He told me most of the time the carpet in the room doesn’t smell. But sometimes just walking into the house, the stink hits you so hard, it makes Ike Turner seem tender. I couldn’t help but laugh. Not in a mean way. Phantom smells are not something you take lightly. If I’ve learned one thing in my 40+ years on Planet Earth, it’s that jocularity and noxious clouds of urine shall not be fucked with. I don’t make this shit up, people. No, I was laughing because my THC-induced imagination went immediately to a new direct-to-video movie of “Scooby Doo and the Lethal Piss Stink of La Conner” (No, I’m not talking about the Swinomish Tribe. That would be mean.) I couldn’t help but picture Shaggy and Scooby, clinging to each other in a quivering embrace of gayness in the back of the Mystery Machine because they saw a Specter of Pee floating towards them, laughing like Ed McMahon. Fred, Daphne, and Velma solve the case, but Shag and Scoob bumble through and somehow expose the true identity of the Pestilent Pee Phantom as Old Man Meriweather… who of course would have gotten away with it had it not been for those meddling kids. We had a girly giggle over that. I was hilarious! Ditech was worried his tale of tinkle stink might make it to my blog… but I wouldn’t do such a thing for the same reason I don’t make fun of the Swinomish. It was after 9pm by the time I got home from Ditech’s house… thanks to that period of time you have to wait before driving while stoned… so you don’t draw attention to yourself. Paranoia is a stoner’s barometer… or something.

So, that was my 420. Hope your’s was twice as fun. Pass the bong. And the lighter… dumbass.