Category: Whinging

I work with a guy whom I’m going to call Caftan Guy. And the thing is, Caftan Guy is fundamentally intolerable. So I’m just going to get this off my chest. Oh, and if by chance he ever finds out about this post, somehow, let me just say right off the bat, so there’s no silly misunderstanding: I hate you, Caftan Guy, because you are so hideous.

He (obviously) wears caftans to work. And sandals. And kilts. And, probably, saris and obis and codpieces and feather boas and nipple clamps for all the fuck I know. I try not to be around Caftan Guy, not only because he looks like a twerp, but because he’s Deep, Man. He’s always wanting to talk about the latest New York Times story about . . . I don’t know, because this is where I always stop listening, because Caftan Guy is about as smart as a tennis racket. But with less utility.

Caftan Guy is very problematic, because he thinks he is very smart, but is in fact, very stupid. Now, I’m becoming more tolerant of stupid people as I come to realize that I can frequently be quite stupid, but Caftan Guy is way beyond the pale. Is the phrase, “Just right-click on the document and select ‘print’ ” a daunting intellectual puzzle to you? Caftan Guy regarded it as some mysterious Zen koan presented in an obscure Portuguese dialect. Have you ever asked anyone, ever, “What happens if I delete this document?” Caftan Guy has asked me that, and was satisfied when I answered him, “You’ll delete the document.” He walked away chuffing happily, and I sat in my chair pondering the cheerless notion that this person is responsible for actual medical data.

There’s another horrible reason I try not to be around Caftan Guy. And that is the bathroom . . . issue. Our company apparently pays this man to take endless, backbreaking dumps, because Caftan Guy is always in the bathroom. Constantly. And there’s not much guesswork involved in what’s going on, because he periodically cuts loose with bloodcurdling grunts, pops, and whistles. It sounds like the fucking Amazon in there; it freaks me out and makes me want to boil myself. Also, get out of the fucking bathroom, you goddamn bowel-mutant! I can barely bring myself to even shudderingly open the door any more. I’m too afraid I’m going to hear his terrible plorping and urfing and GRUUUUH!-ing.

One final thing about Caftan Guy. He writes haikus. Now, that’s cool. I’m down with people writing haikus, even maudlin, clumsy, florid ones. What I’m not down with is reading them. See, he emails them to our entire department when the mood strikes him. The death of a co-worker; the first day of spring; a random erection that he wants to announce: He’s going to write a haiku about it. I’ve decided I’m going to give it a shot.

Dearest Caftan Guy

You shit so audibly that

I pine for the grave

There is an advertisement on TV that has quickly vaulted onto my list of Things That Make Me Want To Set My Face On Fire. Perhaps you’ve seen it, which would explain the extensive facial scarring.

The scene opens up with a normal schlub sitting at his computer. Behind him stalks his clearly pregnant wife. She has the kind of face that suggests she has thus far spent her life spreading malice and despair; perhaps as a telemarketer or an angry Tiki god. It’s hard to say. The guy wears a faintly haunted look that suggests the early stages of Stockholm Syndrome. Anyway, he’s kind of dicking with his computer, tapping at it with the desultory air that men have at the keyboard when they know they won’t be looking at pornography.

Then you hear a sound like old bones being gnawed by hungry ghouls. Oh, right, it’s the wife speaking. “You know, starting a family means getting a new car,” she hisses in a nice wifely way. It does? Never mind, you poor shithead! Run! Run while she’s heavy with your unfortunate child! Start a new life as a lemur wrangler in Madagascar! Anything! Don’t doom yourself to this!

“Right,” he sighs, tapping away. Oh well. A weary voice-over is mumbling some baffling, meaningless horseshit, but you pay no attention, because of the vast horror of the scene unfolding.

She looks at the screen. “A sports car?” Her voice is loaded with poison. He hangs his head, and you hear his spine creak. It’s like watching someone slowly being eviscerated. He fearfully clacks some more with his desperate fingers. The sad droning of the voice-over slouches into audibility again, drops off its hopeless freight of by-now irrelevant information, and recedes.

“A sedan?” She’s all but filing her teeth now, and there’s a screaming voice in your head. “A SEDAN IS FINE! A SEDAN IS FINE!” No, nothing is fine in this world. She speaks again, and somewhere birds fall dead. “We’re talking . . . family.” This last word spoken in a tone suggesting dark, religious overtones of a uniquely Faustian variety. Even the boneless schlub can’t quite process this turn of events, and mounts a defense not unlike that of the Cincinnati Bengals. You want to cheer weakly when he turns in his chair to confront her, but it’s too cruel to entertain hope now. You sit morosely, vaguely wondering why life is so terrible. But he has apparently picked up your madly broadcasting alpha wave message, because he despairingly reasons your very thoughts: “It’s a sedan.” Her implacable response comes like the distant croon of a lonely wraith. “It’s too smaaa-aaalll.”

“What . . . kind of family are we talking about?” he quavers, because now, like you, he is flailing around in a mind-shattering welter of panic and dread. What the fuck is going on? Marat/Sade is starting to look like a merry episode of Three’s Company compared to this.

She grins with a mouthful of angry little teeth. She pulls something from an envelope, and you feel the temperature drop ten degrees; your blood is jellied mercury. She holds up a false-color sonogram showing . . . three babies. Three tiny incubating souls waiting to erupt into this dismal world, where horrors happen every day, horrors like this fucking commercial; and they will probably grow up to produce commercials like this; and they will cackle with mad laughter.

The man is now, you see, utterly pithed by this image. All lucidity sluices from him like so much cold water, and you see him give over into pure, gibbering surrender. On a fundamental level, he is no longer alive; he is now simply her automaton, to be maneuvered as thoughtlessly as a mannequin. He grins jerkily, and tries horribly to emulate human behavior. He clacks lifelessly at the keys. “A minivan,” he jabbers in a stale voice. The beaten voice-over once more drifts into cognizance, and you manage to hear the perpetrators of this death-carnival. “Vehix.com,” intones the voice, which, you can tell now, was recorded in a dank basement with no light and no hope of escape.

It’s over. The commercial is over. And so are we all. These are the end times, and you can thank vehix.com.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my optometrist. Pro: I’m leaving work early. Con: I’m doing this to willingly have an unctious person jab erratically at my eyes while asphyxiating me with aggressively minty breath.

Nothing good ever happens at the eye doctor, and I’m an authority on this, because I’ve been blind as a turnip since fourth grade. I’ve been to a lot of optometrists, and I think I know the problem. Let’s admit it: they are not real doctors. They are a rung up from podiatrists, who are the Mortimer Snerds of doctordom. Okay, urologists and proctologists get their share of guff, but they also get points for sheer determination and bravery. You gonna get into a bar fight with a bunch of pissed off proctologists? I don’t think so. They know exactly how to hurt you.

Optometrists don’t really dispense useful advice: I know I can’t see. I even know I’m nearsighted. I see stuff up close okay, far away stuff is blurry. I can look this up! So he’s not telling me anything fresh. Every now and then I want to pointedly say, “Listen, doctor, what about this lump in my groin?” I imagine he’d look thoughtful for a moment and then say, “That’s your penis.”

But optometrists do try and sell you stuff. Doctors–real doctors–do this too, but they’re selling drugs, and hey, sure, I’ll buy some. But optometrists try and sell you expensive bullshit based on the “you’re ugly” factor. Sure. You could go for the 2-for-$29 frames sitting in a fish bucket in the bathroom. But you won’t, and to be fair, who wants to? They all look like they were made by the Mafia. No, you’ll let the blandly pretty woman make you try on all the designer frames and squintily assess your face with each one. “Hmmm. Your eyes are so unique. I want to find just the right thing for them.” Of course my eyes are unique; I’m fucking blinder than Oedipus. What she’s implying is, “Those frames make you look kind of ugly.” And it works, because I’m kind of a funny-looking neurotic guy.

I’m embarrassed to say how much I spent on my last set of glasses: around $600 (insurance picked some of this up). Okay, that’s fucking stupid. I’m wearing a used car on my face, and the glasses won’t last as long as a used car. The truth is, they don’t even look like six hundred bucks. They look like fucking glasses. Now of course I know that they’re made out of honey-glazed molybdenum steel and were polished by the hot breath of a Scandinavian bra model–or whatever the blandly pretty woman said–but nobody else does. Maybe if they played Supertramp mp3s or something, that would be tangible, I could demonstrate that. “I love your glasses!” someone would say meaninglessly, and then I could excitedly reply, “Want to hear ‘The Logical Song?’ ” And then the other person would look puzzled and say, “Nobody wants to hear ‘The Logical Song.’ “

So that’s a bad example. But you see what I mean.