Apr
10
April 10, 2006
Last week at the office, I watched a bunch of my coworkers stuff themselves into a large cardboard box. It’s kind of a long story–there was this giant box, see, and we wanted to find out how many people could fit inside it at the same time. Hey, I guess it’s not a long story after all.
We had a lot of fun with that box; everyone wanted to wear it on their head, hunker inside it like a prairie dog, scribble “transmogrifier” on the side, or carefully balance one end of it on a flashlight to create a trap using turkey jerky as bait. A big empty cardboard box is second only to the extra poppy kind of bubble wrap in terms of mass appeal.
Imagine my glee when JB and I brought home our newly purchased highchair this weekend, not because we have yet another bleeccch-encrusted baby item cluttering up our decidedly nonspacious kitchen/living room, but because after assembling the chair (a surprisingly easy task, so a tentative thumbs up to the Eddie Bauer highchair for being both semi-attractive and not requiring a degree in particle theory in order to put the damn thing together; minus 25 points though for having a cheesy “EDDIE BAUER” logo festooned on the back of the chair as if anyone gives a moist turd) we had, wait for it, a giant box.
JB had actually started to break down the box for recycling when I grasped his shoulders, shook him briskly, and shouted in his face, “My god, man! Are you blind? Do you not see the rich plethora of possibilities spread before us?”
So we crammed Cat in the box.
That was all well and good, but kind of boring because Cat likes being in boxes. She can be all sneaky in there and dream up various methods of vomiting in our shoes (Hmm, should I just splash it all over the laces so it dries to a crunchy patina of horror, or should I aim up the toe so it isn’t seen until too late?), plus there’s the nerve-wracking effect of looking into the box to find two barf-plotting eyes burning back at you out of the darkness…
(Gah.)
…so Cat was eighty-sixed in favor of torturing Dog.
Now, Dog is not exactly the bravest creature on four legs, so it took some encouraging to get her to approach the box.
Namely, a biscuit tossed inside.
When that didn’t work, we may have picked her up and heaved her in. I said MAY HAVE.
Once she was in the box, and JB and I had taken turns slapping our knees and heaving loud brays of laughter at her expense, we realized we weren’t sure how to get her back out. Tip it over? Lift her from the top using some kind of small crane?
Help meeeeeee.
Uh oh.
Luckily, the Biscuit Method provided enough motivation for her to spring faunlike from the box’s innards, leaving a festive spray of fur in her wake.
We tested her short term memory by attempting to lure her back in, but Dog made her preferences clear.
Now, before you ask, of course I did not put my seven-month-old child in the box, mostly because he started whining when I lowered him in, but also because we have plenty of opportunity to tease him.
“Hey, I’m crazy washcloth head baby! And I want some candy! I don’t have a normal head, I have a damn washcloth growing out of it!”
Yes indeed, a fun weekend was had by all. Well, except for Dog, maybe.
Apr
6
First, let me just acknowledge the awesomeness of the previous entry’s comment section. Everyone who treats a service employee badly should be made to read that list and write a 1603829596-word essay on each incident and why the customer was HORRIBLE and WRONG and deserving of intestinal TOILET SNAKING.
I don’t have any stories that even come close to some of yours, but in reminiscing about my golden years of Dealing with the Great Unwashed Public I randomly remembered this humiliating thing I had to do when I worked at a movie theater.
Before I finally got the revered ticket-selling job where all you do is sit in a glass booth all day, I worked many shifts in the concessions area where I sold popcorn and giant tubs of soda and other crap (including, dear god, hot dogs). We had these containers of hot yellow oil that you splurted on the popcorn if someone wanted “butter”. It wasn’t butter, of course, it was melted earwax or some shit, and so the manager came up with the brilliant idea of calling it buttery.
We ALL had to say “buttery”, as in “did you want buttery on that?”. If we said “butter” or “butter flavoring” we got in trouble, and so over and over I found myself saying “And did you want buttery?” to people who invariably looked at me as if I were missing my helper dog. “Do you mean butter?” they’d say, and I’d have to say “Well….no.”
My uniform included polyester pants, an ill-fitting vest, and a clip-on bow tie. Ah, good times.
:::
The house remodel marches on, and this week is a flurry of activity as progress is made on the plumbing and electrical work. Yesterday we made the exciting discovery that we had no hot water, and the color of the not-hot liquid coming from the taps was a rich, earthy shade of brown. This was especially fun at 2 AM when Riley decided he needed a bottle RIGHT THE HELL NOW and I ran around looking for a source of water that didn’t come out of a potentially contaminated faucet, Brita filter be damned.
Apparently the problem is all fixed now, but too late for me to wash my hair this morning, and thus I am my own private Exxon Valdez today. You’re welcome.
(I’m not really sure what to do with the boy when he wakes up and cries in the middle of the night, because it’s rare that he does it. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse the habit of plugging his snoot with a bottle whenever he bellows forth a midnight wolf-howl, on the other hand he usually sleeps through just fine, or wakes up and babbles for a while, then falls back asleep–so it seems like if he really starts complaining it’s for a good reason? Man, I don’t know. Just when I think he’s becoming somewhat predictable, he changes things up. There was this utterly strange and frustrating five-day stretch we had where he completely refused all solid food, would just start wailing the instant the spoon loomed into view, and then just as suddenly he was eating everything in sight again. What. The. Hell, kid.)
As part of the bathroom work, JB and I have tentatively decided to tile the shower ourselves. We visited a tile store in our neighborhood Bellevue last weekend, and although they had some beautiful products we were way out of our price range, as the woman who talked with us made abundantly clear.
“These are triple glazed,” she said, gesturing to a display of ceramic tile. “We’re talking forty.”
“Forty…?” I said.
She heaved a sigh. “Forty dollars a square foot.” The word “duh” hung unspoken in the air until JB and I slowly backed away, leaving her to attend to the customers who could actually afford to adorn their shower walls with squares of sun-dried black tar heroin.
We went to “Tile For Less” next, where we found tile for $3 a foot. And there was a Krispy Kreme next door. Now that’s the sort of triple glazing I can appreciate.
:::
My boy, while I am sure you will put in your time at a stupid job or two, let us hope you are never asked to confuse the public with bad grammar and toxic popcorn grease.
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