| Secondhand Rants | Rock on, Sisyphus |
This, gentle reader, is the kind of program designed to suck productivity out of your workday. There’s nothing quite like soaring through the air into the arms of danger, only to succeed so you can progress to increasingly dizzying levels of peril. Ever since I collected my first gold coin, I’ve been trying to emulate the ninja by scrabbling up walls. I’ll let you know when I succeed.
A week or two ago, as the sun set on a long workday, I trudged up the parking complex to discover my car covered in shit. Some fiendish fowl had decided that my automobile was a toilet, and having made up its mind the bird happily soiled my roof and hood with gleeful abandon. Since then, Mother Nature has kindly offered a few days of glorious, cleansing rain, all of which had little effect on bird droppings impervious to water.
BP, with their enticing claims of “touch-free” carwash technology, lured me into paying $8.00 for an Ultimate Wash. You’d figure a carwash labeled so superlatively, developed by no less than British purveyors of petroleum, would make my car fantastically clean. I rolled up my windows and marveled as the computer articulated each step of the process: undercarriage wash, power wash, triple-coated polish, power rinse, spot-free rinse, power-coated spot-free rinse, power dry, get the hell out of here.
Given the hype and the dazzling colors, I expected BP to hire displaced circus midgets, push them into the fray, and have them lick the filth out of the dark crevices of my car. I drove out of the carwash into a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and five minutes later I parked so I could survey the cleanliness. Guess what, gentle reader? The bird poop was still there, though I suppose it was cleaned and polished. I must have missed the “guano enhancing” step when my windows were sprayed with colorful wax. Note to self: invest your $8.00 in napkins next time.
If you’re part of the workforce, gentle reader, chances are you’ve had a co-worker wish you a “Happy Friday!” at least once in the past few weeks. This is how my exchange goes when I’m in an upbeat mood.
“Happy Friday!” chirps a co-worker.
“Not anymore,” I reply with a sigh.
On days when I’m under lots of stress, however, the exchange looks more like this.
“Happy Friday!” says my co-worker.
“Do you realize,” I begin, “that Friday is only 72-hours before Monday? That’s when it all starts up again.”
My co-worker will probably throw his hands up in despair and tell me to shut up, but that only encourages me to skip into the office on Monday and respond with a “Happy Monday!” And then, in the interest of clarifying my joy, I point out that Monday is a brief 96 hours before Friday, which in turn is just around the corner from Monday.