super size your squash rings for only $.49!!!

okay, so tonight i had one of THOSE moments. like, if my life were happy days, and the stupidity portion was the leopard lodge, i just got the grand puba post that mr.c is always lusting after. you know, THAT level of dumbass mistake…but i can explain. and oddly enough, i intend to…

so, i work MORE than a full day today, and for the last hour get stuck fielding tech support calls. no big deal. by far not my FAVORITE thing to do, but no big deal. well, it gets to be 4:51, and SHE calls in. ms. orange. this is SO not a reservoir dogs reference. remember in the late 80s and early 90s their were those benetton stores that were all about racial equality? they had their own cologne called “colors”, and the different sides of the bottle had the word in different colors. VERY gay liberation without intending to be; but the point was that all colors belong in all places. our dallas outlets feel the same way when it comes to customer service people…

there are two of their clerks that call in the most. don’t get me wrong, these women are FAR from stupid. not dumb, not slow. it’s just that english isn’t their first language. hell, i don’t even know if it’s in their top five. but they put them in the most conversationally-based position in the store. and then when they can’t figure something out, they call me. she is kurdish. i am texan. this ain’t gonna be pretty…

keep in mind, this call came in when i’m supposed to bail in eight minutes. and it’s not like i’m off work. i get to go SOMEWHERE else and work some more. so, she starts in, and i won’t EVEN attempt to duplicate the accent in text form…the long and the short of it is, i spend seven minutes walking her through a sale only to find out she was about to sell them the wrong seats. then we start over, and spend another five minutes getting them the right seats, but they want to pay for the six tickets with three different credit cards buying a pair each. when i tell them they can’t do that, the three women sit and compare the last months worth of card purchases to determine who MIGHT have room for the $150 cost of the seats for about another TEN minutes. by the time a candidate is selected, the transaction has WAY timed out, so we have to start all over again. five minutes later we’re back at the same crossroads, but now the card won’t swipe. so, now she has to type in the card number, the expiration date, and the name…which isn’t something like “ann jones”; but more like “elizabeth katherine macintosh”, which when typing and our countries mother tongue are NOT your forte, takes a while. like long enough for the transaction to time out AGAIN…

it’s now 5:18. FUCK THIS. my savior comes in the form of a half asian, half cracker guy named brendan who works our help desk night shift and agrees to take over when i transfer him the call saying, “take this. if i have to deal with this woman for thirty more seconds i’m gonna cause an international incident…” he takes it, i bail the office. i drive thirty minutes to work thirty seconds (DON’T ask…and no, it wasn’t sperm donation), go hit the gym (in and out in about an hour; and somehow missed half a dozen calls on mobile…i was smacking myself in the head, saying, “i KNEW i should have taken my phone with me…i KNEW i should have taken my phone with me”), and the i was off to the house.

i get about ten minutes away, and i’ve been thinking about what to wear to sa the next day…something that’ll be cool to guys in a metal music store, look professional, and make me look down-right droolable for my possible lunch date afterwards…and then it hits me. and i don’t mean a wardrobe idea…

the system i spent fifteen minutes building by myself is in the back seat (not that i’m some sort of bad ass because i did it alone in 15 minutes…i had all the stuff left over from all the systems i pulled from sa…although don’t get me wrong…i AM a bad ass). but the notebook…the one that explains how to use the system, and contains parts on how to do the book keeping, and the selling, and trouble shooting, and has all the venue maps in it…THAT is not in the back seat. six people in three departments spent five hours putting that bad boy together. and it sits on my desk. FUCK. and all because of my united nations moment that rounded out my day and distracted me. so, here’s my situation…

it’s 38 miles back to the office, and 8:45 at night. i’ve got an eighth of a tank of gas, not a single cigar, it’s dark, and i’m wearing sunglasses.

hit it.

i call brendan (the guy who has a bit more ASIAN in his caucasian than the rest of us) and catch him 8 minutes before he’s gonna walk out. he finds the book on my desk, and agrees to meet me at a burger king that’s on his way home (sue me, i was hungry…but more on that in a second), which shaves about 15 miles of my trip. i grab gas in the middle of bfe, haul ass back to austin, and actually BEAT him to the meeting point; so i go in to grab a quick dinner, and see why i must bid good-bye to the land of the whopper for a year out of protest….

“NEW…WITH ONLY 11 CALORIES….THE VEGGIE FLAME-BROILED WHOPPER!!!”

WHAT THE FUCK? a veggie burger at burger king? now i have seen EVERYTHING. look folks, the veggie burger is just wrong. DAMN wrong. if you don’t eat meat, but you want something made of vegetables that TASTES like meat, then you, my friend, are in SEVERE denial about your existence. it’s like soy milk…soys don’t have nipples, so they CAN’T give milk. don’t get me wrong; not everything with nipples gives milk. i have ’em, and they’re pierced, and they don’t produce milk. the mudflap girls on the back of my ‘bu have nipples, and they don’t give milk. but i think if you DO give milk, nipples are a requirement, right? tell me what a soy nipple looks like. it’s just wrong. it’s against nature. just like the veggie patty. if you need your vegetables in patty form, eat a fucking cow and get over yourself. in fact, i think that should be some restaurant’s slogan:

“IT’S JUST A BURGER…SO DON’T HAVE A COW, EAT ONE”

there you go. free marketing. first come, first serve. i used to work with one of those guys who “never eats anything with a face” (no WONDER his wife left him), and he would brag about how the tofu based sausage and veggie burgers and meat free franks all tasted like meat; to which i would reply, “why don’t you just eat some meat, then?” and get a blank stare as a response.

man, i’m gonna miss burger king…but at least i still have whataburger…