Where do you wash your clothes, gentle reader? I ask because I’m convinced that laundry rooms are veritable foundries of awkward interpersonal moments. The worst rooms are the mid-sized ones, which lack the comfort of your own home and the mildewed anonymity of laundromats. I’m talking about the ones with four washers, four dryers, and two minutes of strained “conversation,” the kind that makes you want to pour Snuggle in your eyes.
So I decide to do my laundry on Friday night, thinking that everyone else in my apartment complex has functional night lives. Wrong. I spy a grand total of one vacant washer and make a beeline for it. While I’m shoveling clothes into the machine, a woman walks in and proceeds to empty out a dryer for her own clothes. I greet her and fall silent.
“I usually don’t like to do this,” she shrugged, “but this pile smells like it’s been here for a while.”
Zing! I guess that absolves you of all guilt, I thought. What came out of my mouth, however, was a cross between a chuckle and a sigh. This apparently was enough encouragement for her to go on.
“I thought it wouldn’t be busy, y’know?” she continued. “But I guess people are doing their laundry so they’ll have something to wear when they go out for Valentine’s.”
Unbeknownst to her, I was doing laundry for the love of the craft. The interpersonally chivalrous thing to do would’ve been to expound on the state of the laundry room and swap witty banter about our Valentine’s Day plans. (“Oh, I plan on spending Valentine’s Day riding my sweet, sweet honey, which is to say my car.”) Instead, I concur, give another contemplative sigh, and realize I’m done loading my clothes. Can I borrow some Snuggle from you, dear reader? I’m springtime fresh out.
In the past few days, gentle reader, I’ve received confirmation that I may not, in fact, be the only person left at Secondhand Rants. That’s touching, really it is, and it’s good to know that I still have investors.
That being said, you probably think I’m going to give you a big hug now. Bzzzt, wrong! Even as a wee lad swaddled in nothing but bank bonds, I knew that building a corporate behemoth would require one to be crotchety and uncompromising. So unless you want to see me go from zero to pissed in twenty seconds, I suggest you get out of my lobby. Immediately.
I don’t know if you’ve ever popped any cheesesteaks from this joint, gentle reader, but I think it’s safe to say that opinion varies wildly about the house dish. I’ve met some who begin salivating immediately upon first sniff, loudly declaring that manna could taste no better. Others claim to have found bones in these sandwiches, not once but every single time.
“Every single time?” you ask.
That’s right–every single time. It’s like they’re archaeologists, for the love of Benjy, and persistent ones at that. Yet another group of people swears that these hoagies not only taste marvelous, but that they also double as convenient laxatives. Heck, maybe it’d be more efficient just to have the chef flush a couple of cheesesteaks.
Given all this, I’d say that the entrée is damn nigh legendary, which is the perfect adjective to describe the bet taken on by co-worker Hooper. The challenge: to ingest cheesesteaks every day for lunch over the course of a week. The prize? A sweet, sweet Hamilton. That’s ten bucks, for those of you who can’t remember that Hamilton’s got ten dollars less hair than Jackson.
Embedded in this scenario are grave implications about our betting culture, not that I’m one to judge. Because when your great uncle twice removed began a grand tradition of betting on curling championships featuring three-legged cats as contestants, can you really cast the first stone?