I’ve had a rotten day, so I’m offering four bitches in one.
To the bastard who stole my laptop, camera, teaching notes and class records from my locked classroom: I call down upon you a pox in the form of a leisurely but excruciating, disfiguring and ultimately lethal cancer.
To the police who took my statement: I can’t see why it was so hard for you to comprehend that the door handle had been forcibly broken, and I can’t see the use of giving me a number to call with further information when no on picks up the phone and there’s no answering machine.
To the cab driver – in fact, to all the miserable cab drivers who bitch and whine about making change for a twenty: you run a cash business, the twenty-dollar bill is unquestionably Canada’s primary financial instrument, and it is never – never! – the customer’s responsibility to make change for you. Just shut up. You are a plague, and I am profoundly sick of the lot of you, and I condemn you to an eternal hereafter of driving taxi in Mumbai.
And to the bartender: when someone specifies a premium brand, it’s generally because they want that particular taste; and mixing a drink to the point where it’s $11 worth of vaguely flavoured ice-water defeats the purpose. And I really needed the cleansing floral/citrus tang of a well-made Hendrick’s martini.
But to the server: thanks for being nice, and thanks for the delicious free desserts. You helped take some of the ragged edge off the day. May you reside in peace and well being all your days.
I still feel pretty lousy, though.
—Deflated
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2009.
You just potentially caused a fortune in tax-payers dollars on (evidently useless) treatment and hospital stays.
Thanks for that.
why couldn’t the pox be “completely contained in a tank of water/oil/urine/whatever except for a straw through which you are forced to breathe until you decide to drown”? still agonizing and more eco-friendly than burning. Think people think!
It is really annoying when people get mad at you for using a 20 dollar bill these days. It’s not just cabbies, although they are bad, but anywhere that accepts cash, if you hand them a 20 for something that costs less than 10, you get this annoyed look from them. Well guess what, if you only accept cash, I have no choice but to go to a bank machine, and lo and behold, they only give out $20’s now!
If bank machines popped out 5s and 10s like they used to, there would be a lot less of this. Cabbies always have lots of change on hand and can always stop in to get more if need be.
The bank machine in Loyola @ SMU still shits out 5’s last I checked. Only one i know of in the city. Prob because most students only have 6.50 in their account at any given time.
But police chief Beazley says crime is down! Surely such a thing would never happen in this fair city, and if perchance it did, surely our crack police force would apprehend the perpetrator within moments. I am astounded.
OP: My SO is one of your students. If it makes you feel any better, they got a kick out of your repeated sarcastic comments in class about having your things stolen. (I’m not being snarky; I’m serious. Oh and: they do feel pretty bad about your shit being taken, and as an alumni, so do I).
Sometimes I get slightly annoyed as well about cabbies hemming and hawing about not having change for a $20. But, this is just my “ME ME ME” coming out. The fact of the matter is, when I used to work customer service, it used to annoy me that person upon person would come in the morning to pay with a $20 and then wonder why eventually we had no 5s/10s left. The reason is because we were only allowed to start our day with $50 worth of fives in the till. I assume this is because if we were robbed, less money would be stolen. Getting more fives, more often than not, would result in having to get it out of a locked safe IF the manager was around, or having to go somewhere else to get fives, like a main office, or having to call the manager who is elsewhere and get them to go to the bank. But none of that matters to the person on the other side of the counter, for whom more often than not it’s just YOUR fault, yes, you, the person who has the least to do with the situation. I suspect the cabbies operate under the same restrictions, especially considering how easy it would be to be robbed as a cabbie. As someone who’s just gotten their shit stolen, perhaps you could be a bit more sensitive to that situation.
In general I think people should be more pissed at the actions of the people who’ve made it necessary for certain inconveniencing restrictions to be implemented, rather than at the unfortunate people who are tasked with carrying out the restrictions.