Onward and Upward

I started this blog in 2007. I *love* this blog.

It catalogs a lot of my life, and frankly, helped me discover that I’m hilarious and that I can write in a way that gets people’s emotions goings, and I love that.

A lot of times I come to this blog and start to write and realize that what I’m writing isn’t fitting the tone of this blog and isn’t what this blog is all about. No Really – It’s Just My Face turned into my ranting board, and a place for me to vent and be angry at people who thought I wasn’t happy.

I’ve gotten messages and emails from people asking me why I’ve gotten so soft in my posts, where my edge has gone, where my rants are and why my most recent posts are so different. The answer is that it’s because I’m not that person anymore.

Trust me when I say that a LOT (like, ooooooooooodles) has changed in my life since I first started this blog as a way to kill time at a boring job. And trust me when I say that they are GOOD changes. Amazing changes. They leave me happy, not angry. They leave me more likely to lecture you on how amazing my life and friends are rather than rant about how awful this or that is and how I know better than them.

So I think it’s time to move on.

I’m not done writing. In fact, I’m just getting started. But I am starting a new blog, more suited to who I am now, rather than sitting here and trying to rack my brain for what’s pissed me off lately and how I can spin it into a post.

I’m going to leave this blog up and leave it open. Let’s face it, there are some GEMS in here, right?

I dont have the new blog yet, but when I do, I’ll probably throw the address up on here somewhere.

So I guess that’s it then.

Thanks for reading, for the comments, for the links and the friendships that have come out of this!

In which I geek out over ‘Old Book Smell’

I recently bought a Kindle. I LOVE it. I do. I can take it out and not have to search for my page while I wait for the bus, it weighs nothing and nobody can ever rip out that important page. It’s a perfect solution for travelling, when you don’t know how many books you’ll need, or if you’ll get bored and want to do a book polygamy thing and read a few different ones at once. It’s great and I adore it and I use it every day.

But.

It has no smell. It has no character. Nobody has written definitions in the margins, or underlined any passages that made them stop and think. There’s no way I can accidentally stain a page with coffee or pasta sauce and I can’t dog ear my favourite parts.
Sure, I can make electronic notes of my favourite parts, and have them all conveniently listed together in a file. But? I don’t care. I don’t want them listed in a file. I want to forget about them and rediscover them when I re-read the book and remember why that particular line mattered to me at that particular time.

Is there anything in the world better than the smell of a book?
If you are a nerd like me, then you know the answer is no. There isn’t.
Except……the smell of an old book. Nothing really smells better with age….but books dont’ follow that rule. The older the book, the more amazing the scent. Apparently it has something to do with decomposition and VOC’s, but those don’t sound nearly as romantic as ‘old book smell’. I’d prefer to believe that it’s the combination of all the places the book has been, all the people who’ve read it, the mustiness from sitting in a box somewhere for years. It’s way nicer to think it’s the absorption of the smells of time rather than the inevitable corrosion and breaking down of the paper and ink.

When I was little, I’d go to visit and stay with my grandparents (both sets lived in the same town 2 and a half hours away). A bibliophile from an early age, I’d haul along as many books as my tiny arms could carry. My mom would drop my brother and I off at the bus station in our city, and it would make the milk run through every tiny town and village before pulling into our final stop, making the 2 and a half hour distance more like 3 and a half hours. My brother would have run out the batteries on his handheld video games or whatever, but I was just happily finishing up a book when my grandma was there to pick us up.

After I’d settled in, my grandma would always take me to the same used book store downtown and buy me several old Nancy Drew books.

Always Nancy Drew, always used. I’d try to find ones that had old messages written in the front cover. People’s names and old addresses or phone numbers would be listed, or an Aunt would wish her niece a happy ‘X’th birthday and date it with the year.

My grandma also had a set of children’s books from when my mom would have been a kid, in the spare room that I stayed in. I’ve never smelled books as good as those ones. I have distinct memories of sitting in front of the two shelf bookshelf, opening and closing the books to hear the spines crack and to have that old papery smell waft up to me. I have no idea where those books went, and I’m almost scared to ask. I don’t think I could handle it if I found out they hit the trash or got donated to a Goodwill. I hope they’re in a box somewhere, waiting for me to adopt them.

My Kindle is white. With grey writing on the buttons. Sure, it’s modern and sleek and makes me look oh-so-techno-chic, but it lacks a lot in terms of the beauty of old books. Hell, even new books, but most especially old ones.

Old books just look so gorgeous to me. There’s no paperbacks, and they all had such simple, primary coloured spines with basic font. I don’t know what the covers are made of, but they have a really distinct feeling to them on the fingertips.

And you know what I just remembered? Remember going to libraries and signing out books int he days before everything was computerized? You’d fill in the card with your name and they’d stamp the date that the book was due back. Once in a while in a used book store, you can find those old library books, cards still in their envelopes, and I love seeing different signatures and old dates.

All those in the know about the future of books are predicting that soon, we’ll all be Kindle (or equivalent) drones, reading our books on our electric screens, downloading the books in mere seconds off of satellites from space.

This kind of saddens me. For as a big of a proponent as I am for the Kindle (seriously, I love mine, go buy one), I still need my books. I still need to flip through them, and smell them, and collect them, and curse at their weight every time I move. I can’t imagine a whole upcoming generation not knowing what it is to crack the spine of a new book, or to be amazed at the age of an old one.

I get it, we can’t keep abusing resources unnecessarily and cranking out books, no matter what type of sustainably grown paper they’re printed on with vegetable inks, powered by low impact energy. I knoooooow. I see it inevitably marching to e-reader-ville. I just hope a balance can be struck.

And if not, then I really hope that these smell as good as they claim to smell.

I mean, it's not even OLD book smell

However, I’m no idiot. They’ll smell like crap. Trust me. I know things, I read books.

Window Farms. Dudes.

I really really love plants. Like, an insane amount. Not flowers, but plants. I’m more a foliage nerd than a flower nerd. Flowers are nice, they’re pretty, they’re a great bonus. But I just like foliage too. I have a particular affinity for ferns. I know……my nerd is showing. But seriously, they’re fascinating. They’re 360 million years old for fucks sake, they get cool points just for that. How old are you? Yeah, not 360 million years old.

You wouldn’t know this about me, since my house is completely devoid of them, but this is only because I move approximately 68 times each year and find that moving isn’t very conducive to keeping plants alive. They’re hard to pack and they’re heavy and they fall over and dirt gets in your car and then the dog tries to eat it and it’s just a shit show.

I worked at a flower farm for two summers during university and adored it. I’m pretty sure that if I could have a dream job, it would be just putzing around in a greenhouse. Day in, and day out. I love it. I love the way the dirt smells and the little baby plants and transplanting them and just everything. Plants do something to my brain to calm me down, and frankly, I’m a person who needs calming.

Alas, I don’t own a greenhouse and it would be hard to fit one onto my balcony. This summer, I did have the world’s tiniest garden before we moved, but since it wasn’t my space and I wasn’t going to be around for September to harvest a lot of it, I didn’t put that much effort into it. I had peppers and tomatoes and peas and carrots and cucumbers and celery. There was also a pot of strawberries. Well, the carrots part is a lie, cuz they didn’t do a damn thing. Lazy carrots. But I did plant them. I prefer to know where my food comes from and what was (or wasn’t, hopefully) sprayed onto it.

 

My point is, I like plants but I’m deprived of them due to living circumstances. I also like growing food.

SO. Imagine my JOY when I discovered this then……….Window Farms. I know you aren’t clicking, so let me blab about it and shamelessly steal photos off their website to try to get you as excited about these as I am.

They are what they seem like…..window farms. They’ve created a way to vertically farm food, at a high yield, in your house. You don’t need a yard. You just need a window. You can source your own food, organically, with minimal water and energy usage, using recycled or low impact materials. You don’t need to weed, you don’t need to worry about rain, you don’t need to figure out a way to keep squirrels and raccoons out of your garden. You don’t have to buy, and then consequently lose, new gardening tools each season.

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDES.

I know I’m kind of a hippie with environmental shit, but even non-hippies have to find this cool. At the very least, it’s super pretty.

You get the idea. There are schematics and technical mumbo jumbo on their website about the irrigation systems and the installation needs. Their website being windowfarms.org.

Just because you live in the city doesn’t mean that your food should have to be shipped to you from 1000’s of kilometres away, covered in pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and other icides and gross hormones and be burning up bajillions of litres of gas to get to you and taste like cardboard anyways. And come on, we all hear about the people who open up their California fresh (ha) lettuce to find black widows or whatever the hell who have hitched a ride. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t happen with this.
On the other hand, just because more and more people live in cities, doesn’t mean that we should be forced to  grow our food further and further away from us, and stress the increasingly limited arable land that we have. Again, I know, my nerd is showing. The window is dead space, may as well use it. Urban agriculture, kids, it’s the next big thing.

Also, look at it! It’s so gorgeous. Now, due to my foliage love, I may be biased. But this is definitely more interesting to look at than the neighbouring apartment building, or your local garbage dumpster.

And how yummy would it be? Even if you’re all, ‘bleh, I don’t want to bother growing food’ you could at least be one of those cool snobby kids with a herb garden. You’d totally fit in with all the people who have their own yoga mats and everything.

Do I know anybody who has actually used this system? No. Are they paying me or have any idea I even care about this system? No. I just think it is insanely cool and want one, like, yesterday. Of course, they don’t ship to Canada. This aggravates me to no end. Canada is not some weird land mass in the middle of nowhere that is really difficult to get to. We aren’t Easter Island, people. Just ship it. On their website, they claim it is simply too time consuming and expensive to ship to Canada. Time consuming? Um, fill in the waybill and call FedEx. Expensive? Jack up the price, we’re used to it up here. We know that we get charged more on everything than our friendly neighbours to the south.  Anyways.

I dont know. I’ve never blogged about a product before. Mostly because the vast majority of things I see make me think ‘oh my god, we as a society wasted resources, energy, time and money on THAT?? We chopped down trees and polluted water for a fucking Snuggly?’ This didn’t make me think that. It made me geek out. I’m in love with this idea. And as soon as I know I’m going to be living somewhere for more than a few months at a time, I am so setting one of these up.

It’s never going to replace a real garden and getting your hands dirty, but I love it nonetheless for it’s enviro greatness and space efficiency and general amazingness.

Stay tuned for the painfully detailed day by day progress on my window grown parsley, if and when they decide to ship or distribute to Canuckistan.

Awwwwwww yeah. It’s a riveting life, folks. 

 

 

Smelly pig time.

Man walks into office, greets me with, “Bonjour Madame”

I respond in kind with, “Hello, how are you?”

Man glares at me, while my coworker happens to respond with, “Bonjour.”

Glare immediately melts into instant joy, happiness and rainbow-shitting puppies.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhh!” He exclaims, literally TURNING HIS BACK ON ME. He shifts over the five feet between my coworker and I.

“So THIS is the bilingual one!!” he says in English, just clearly enough for me to hear.

His wife walks in and makes the grave error of opening her mouth and looking at me, as though she was about to speak. Luckily, her husband quickly prevented her from wasting her time and energy on a stupid anglophone such as myself. “No no, THIS is the bilingual one!” he said with glee, like a kid who had just dressed themselves for the first time. He was prouder than proud that he’d managed to find a fellow french speaker.

She gave me a look as though I eat babies, but first, beat them up a lot beforehand. She quickly joined her husband on the french side of the desk.

They conversed in french, laughed all jolly-like, then took a seat to wait for their appointment.

As they were walking away, I MAY have said to my coworker, en anglais, ‘Ohhhhhhh, IIIIII get it! I don’t get the privilege of being spoken to cuz I’m a useless english speaker! My bad!’

I got the ‘shut your mouth, Talea!’ eyeball bulge from her, and just a shocked expression from mes amis francais.

I’ve had it with this fucking city. Seriously. The level of incompetency here that is accepted for the tradeoff of letting the french run amok is disgusting. You are literally hired here based on language skills, not job skills or work ethic. It’s disgusting and I’m done with it. You want to treat me like shit because I’m not fluent, then please, suck my balls. They’re allowed to be snide to me and I’m done just taking it.

BUT WAIT! There’s more!

So…….background story time. Yesterday, the bilingual coworker was sick.  Amongst other raucous pranks we pulled, we set her screensaver to come up after 1 minute of inactivity and to scroll the message, ‘Tu es un cochon puant’ across the screen. This means, ‘you are a smelly pig’. It was an inside joke from before. Anyways.

SO. As Monsieur et Madame Douchebag were leaving their appointment, my decidedly NON-bilingual coworker sat down at bilingual girls’ desk and the screensaver popped up.

She loudly stuttered out, ‘Tu…es….un…..cochon’ JUST as the couple was behind her, about to leave.

The gentleman (using the term loosely here, people) stops and goes, ‘Quoi??’ then starts blathering off in french, because she (as far as he is concerned) has just called him a pig. She at least didn’t get to the ‘puant’ part, so he didn’t know that he was on his way to being called a stinking pig.

She sat there stunned, as she doesn’t understand a single word of french. She then just smiled and told him to take care.

************

Sidebar: Yes. I am fully aware that this blog is turning into an ‘OMFG I hate Ottawa’ blog. Whatever. Deal with it. When I stop hating this city, you’ll stop hearing about it. Or, eventually I’ll move. One or the other.

Why leggings are to blame for the destruction of our planet.

Leggings? Are not pants. I’m not entirely sure who to point my finger at in blame for this recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed an awful lot of females wearing leggings. As pants. Pants should cover your legs and hide your skin and keep everything within them protected and safe from the elements. Leggings don’t meet these criteria. They cover nothing, they hide nothing, and good luck convincing me they keep the elements out.

First of all, I thought leggings went out in the late 80s. I should rephrase that….I had HOPED that leggings went out in the late 80s. My memories of the late 80s are foggy at best, and I’d hoped that my memories of leggings would remain as such as a consequence. However, barring any sort of head trauma, the images I’m compiling at the age of 27 are guaranteed to be more vivid, and far more difficult to dismiss.

I remember owning leggings. When I was 7. I think 7 should be the maximum legging-wearing age allowed.

If you are of the age where you can cross the street without holding someone’s hand, you should put on pants.

I don’t care if you wear a long sweater that covers your ass, it isn’t covering your thighs. And when you sit down? The material becomes see through. I’m not sleeping with you, I don’t want to see your thighs. You know what would fix that? Putting on some damn pants.

I don’t want to see every crevice, nook and cranny. Frankly, I don’t think I deserve that kind of visual assault. I’m no saint, but I’m not entirely evil. Put that shit away.

It’s beyond me why leggings are even made in adult sizes. You think you look sexy in them, but you just look like you have no friends who love you. If you did, they would discreetly tell you that you can’t wear those out in public. I guarantee you that if one of my friends asked me, ‘Can I wear these? Should I buy these?’ they would immediately get the look of  ‘um, are you a fucking maniac? NO. Put them back and never think of them again.’

If you are such a narcissist that you need people to see the true outline of your legs, go ahead and put on a skirt (of reasonable length and clinginess PLEASE) and put on some tights. You wouldn’t wear tights as pants, and really, we’re arguing semantics between leggings and tights.

Truly, I cannot think of a practical application for leggings. Any acceptable situation for leggings could easily be handled by some tights. So why are we even creating these horrible fashion disasters? Why are we allowing women to suction fabric onto their cellulite-laden legs in the name of hipster trendiness? Why can’t these people just put on pants??  There is no place for leggings in this world. Yeah. I said that.

In FACT, since leggings are so obviously completely useless (based upon my flawless and incredibly thorough argument above), they are entirely a waste of resources. We are raising crops of cotton, employing underpaid labour, burning through fossil fuels to transport these things and for what? For this?

People. For the love of the earth, put on pants. We can’t keep killing our world and wasting our resources so that these people can believe that they are skinny enough to pull these off. They aren’t. And if they are, then they’re emaciated, and I don’t want to look at that either.

If you love Mother Earth, put your pants on. Thank you.

An Open Letter to Ottawa and it’s Citizens

Dearrrrrr Ottawa:

– A mullet is not an acceptable hairstyle north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Please get thee to a fucking salon.

– Oui is pronounced ‘wee’, not ‘way’. You all sound like ducks. You claim to speak French, but you speak Quebecois. It’s an ugly language.

– Potholes happen. I’m not sure where this group phobia comes from, but you are all terrified to drive through them. You swerve, you brake, you slow down to 2 km/hour to avoid them. You all drive shitty cars, why are you slowing down as though you are terrified to hurt them? You’re in a 1993 Toyota…..GO! You can’t hurt it, it’s already dead.

– Speaking of driving, I can guarantee you that your car goes faster than 40 km/hour. You wouldn’t know that, since none of you ever drive any faster than that, even on roads with a limit of 80, but I assure you it does. You should try it out sometime. It will save me having to kill you, and/or me giving myself a stroke due to the rapid increase of blood pressure I experience every time I drive behind one of you at 40, as we pass a speed limit sign stating 70 km/hr.

– Cashiers don’t care about your life story. Stop speaking. Pay them, and leave. Why you all insist on telling everyone everything that has happened to you today and your thoughts on all of those occurrences is beyond me, but I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop. I don’t want to spend my day waiting in line behind you.

– Why does every english sign have a french counterpart, but not every french sign has an english counterpart? Why??

– Stop complaining about ‘downtown traffic’. Just. Stop. You know not of what you speak.

– You have a really messed up idea about what a bus stop is. It is a sign erected on a street, indicating to potential bus riders that if they stand there, the bus will stop and allow them to board. In Ottawa though, it’s just a sign. The bus drivers may or may not heed the whole ‘stopping’ part. I should NOT have to flag you down like a fucking taxi just to get you to stop. It’s a bus stop. STOP.

– Why are you all so directionally disabled? When I give you the address of my workplace for your appointment, that should be the end of the convo. But you ask for detailed directions. You ask where parking is. You ask what the inside of the lobby looks like so that you’ll know you’re in the right place. It’s called Google Maps, you idiots! Or, failing that, a phonebook. They have maps. FIGURE IT OUT. I hate hate hate taking 10 minutes to explain directions to you, then having you call later from your cell, all confused cuz you weren’t even fucking listening.

– I will give you credit for one thing: I really love your readily accessible poutine. It’s everywhere. And even though I rarely partake in it, I like knowing it’s there if I ever need it.

That’s all. If you could just please stop telling me that Ottawa will grow on me, that’d be great. You know what else ‘grows on you’? Fungus. Mmmmhmmmmm. Think about it.

In which I make one of the best decisions of my life. OR, ‘Oh no you di’int! Well fine then, I QUIT!’

Everybody has a breaking point.

I think that most people assume mine is way lower than it really is. I am not a patient person, but I will tolerate a lot before I’ll lose it. Oh, I’ll mutter and fume and vent and make shaky fist motions behind your back and maybe pretend that your face is in my pillow as I beat the everloving shit out of it, but am I REALLY about to snap? No.

At my last job, I learned even more how to put up with TONS. OF. SHIT. Everybody says that about their job, but I truly mean it. This job started out good. Great, even. But as the recession took over, the company seemed to lose all sense of reality and any knowledge on how to deal with human beings (read: employees). Every time I turned around, I tripped over a new spreadsheet and I had no time to go to the bathroom, lest I miss another hour long conference call.

There were many days I felt I couldn’t take it. There were many days where I flat out couldn’t take it. There were two or three days where I shut my office door and cried. There were two or three times where I got into flat out yelling matches with clients. There were MANY days where I threatened to quit.
There was even the day where I’d had enough by 10:30 AM, and realized that if I didn’t remove myself from the situation, I was going to do something very regrettable. So I gathered up my stuff, screamed, “I’m going home, I’ll be back tomorrow. If anyone needs me, they can suck it!” and then made my huffy exit.

I always came back though. Despite what it may seem, I really do have a good work ethic.  I threatened to quit so many times, it became a running joke. ‘Haha, that Talea! She’ll never quit! She always just SAYS it! Uh, but seriously, you might want to let her calm down for a bit right now, she’s a bit tense…..’

Then.

THEN.

Then came the day where I made one of the greatest decisions of my life.

After doing the work of 3 people for a few days (both of my comrades had valid reasons to be out of the reason, however, one was unforseen), I had apparently woken up one day to come face to face with my breaking point.

There was a horrible awful beast of a project that all of the locations had to go through. EXCEPT MINE. My situation was so bad at my location, that we were exempt and were instructed to do nothing but wait for the professionals swoop in. Fine by me.

I tried to relay this to the appointed project manager. I tried to be nice about it. He insisted on being a dick about it. I may have asked him to kindly stop speaking to me like I was a retarded 9 year old….I dont know. But I did it over the phone, so go ahead and try to prove it!

Anyhow, our animosity towards each other built and built until that fateful day in December when I politely emailed him yet again telling him that I was not going to be completing the task, so not to wait until my ‘all done’ email to mark me as complete, as I was exempt. He responded with this precious little love note:

“Talea. Do you even bother to READ the emails we send you? Do you not UNDERSTAND what I’m telling you?”

That. Was. It.

It was one of those amazing moments in life where the next step is crystal clear. The answer, the solution, is staring you directly in the face and the sense of peace is overwhelming. I just knew. I had hit my breaking point.

I had no job lined up. I had no job prospects lined up. I was in the middle of a recession.

But my sanity, my dignity and my life were not worth being talked to like that. I don’t take well to being talked down to like that. So?

I quit.

I gave them precisely two weeks notice. But really, it wasn’t two weeks. Christmas holidays made it more like a week, and one of the two people at the office wasn’t due back in the country until my third last day, so good luck training her!
In those two weeks, I had them grovelling with me, offering me raises which I turned down, and trying to make deals with me to get me to stay for a month so they could line up a replacement.

I told them I wanted a $10K raise (HA!). They promptly came back with, ‘Nice knowing ya!’ The joke was on them, since I’d already quit and had nothing to lose and probably wouldn’t have stayed even for 10K more.

Every single day since then, I have rejoiced at my decision. Not ONCE have I regretted quitting. I knew I had been stressed, but I had no way to know HOW stressed until I was out of there.

There is one thing that I regret. I had an archnemesis within the company, whom I had dreamed of telling off. Unfortunately, since I had no job lined up, I couldn’t afford to go tell her to eat shit and die, since that may have made it through the company grapevine while I still needed glowing references.

But hey…….if she’s reading this, she knows who she is. So hun, please, go eat shit and die!

And to the guy who sent me the email that was the final straw? I really loved your immediate and awkward, ‘Gee golly I’m sorry! We must have miscommunicated! Fist bump and make up?’ email that you were clearly forced to send to me about 20 minutes after I handed my boss my resignation letter. That was a great laugh. It wasn’t your fault I quit, you were just the final straw. And honestly? Thank you for pissing me off and pushing me into a blind, fearless rage.

Thanks.

 

Chickens and People…..all the same, really.

I have terrible taste in TV. Terrible.

So tonight, I was watching Kate plus Eight (shut up, I already know I’m a bad person for that). In this lovely episode, amongst other things, they got themselves some chickens.

I was watching, enraptured, as eight small children stared down at chickens and waited for their eggs.  Indistinguishable child number whateverthehell reaches down and grabs a fresh egg.

Without any hesitation, I turn to the beau (who is innocently sitting in the same room, trying to ignore my disgusting television choices by reading some academic paper or some such thing) and shamelessly say, “So, what? Chickens just walk around with like, a hole in ther abdomen with a space for an egg to grow until they…..?.” and then I made a motion indicating the passing of an egg out of a chicken’s….area. “That’s so fucking weird.”

He stares at me.

I stare back.

He stares at me like I’m the dumbest fucking idiot he’s ever laid eyes on.

Then I realize…….I AM the dumbest fucking idiot he’s ever laid eyes on.

“Huh….that’s exactly like how women walk around with a space in their abdomen to grow a human being. Right. Shut up Talea.” I said to myself.

He stares at me.

I start laughing ridiculously hard, and manage to drool on myself in the process.

I went to University. I even graduated. I swear.

Office Jargon Decoding, 101

The office environment is riddled with inuenda, hidden meaning, reading between the lines and flat out lies. Terms have been created to make things sound much more PC and acceptable in today’s over-litigious world. If we said what we meant, we’d all get our asses sued until next Tuesday. Or whatever that ridiculous saying is.

For all of you lucky bastards who don’t have to work in offices, or even for those of you who do and are just to naive to realize what people are saying to you, please to be allowing me to decode these cryptic office terms. Also, there’s a few wonderful tips on how not to talk to someone who is answering your phone call in here.

Ahem:

• “I’ll have to look into that for you.” = For the love of all things holy, you have asked me the same question 17 times, you are just rearranging the words and I am so over it, you dumb fuck. I don’t know why you don’t understand when I say ‘I don’t know’. I am not Google, I do not spit out answers in 0.17 seconds when you ask me questions. I really want to tell you to go DIAF, but instead I am going to politely cut off this conversation at the knees, hang up and breathe deeply before I sucker punch the next person who walks in the door.

 

• “I’ll pass that along, thanks!” = You stupid prick. You really let that bother you enough to bring it up to me? Holy shit, I wish I had a life that was so vapid that I could worry about the ridiculous things that you do. I feel sorry for you that you just wasted your time and energy like that. It must be really difficult to go through life getting so worked up about minutae. Oh, and by the way, there is absolutely no way I am passing that along. I will get laughed out of the office if I bring it up. But I’m sure you feel much better now that you’ve let me know that you don’t love the hold music. Carry on.

 

• “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I didn’t catch it.” = I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I didn’t catch it. It doesn’t mean I didn’t understand. I don’t want you to launch further into a story when I don’t even know what it’s about. And please, do not get mad at me when I don’t understand your name, especially when you are mumbling and english isn’t your first language. I’m not stupid, you’re just incoherent.

 

• “Yeah, I totally emailed them to follow up! I can’t believe they haven’t answered me yet!” = Shit. I totally forgot about that. You told me, then I went back to playing bejeweled online. I never once gave it a second thought. But I am totally going to throw the intended email recipient under the bus, so that I can save my own ass. This time, I really WILL send the email. Probably.

 

• “Sorry, I’m not sure we’re on the same page….” = Nobody in the history of the world has ever been more wrong than you are right now. OMG, you hurt my brain. Let me explain this to you one more time, before I pull out the finger puppets to try and act it out for you.

 

• “Please advise” – I’ve given you one option in this email. There’s nothing to advise. I’m moving forward whether you like it or not. But I don’t want you to feel like you’re being overruled and backed into a corner. Anyways, nice chat.

 

• “Let me review the contract and get back to you.” = I know I’m right. You are wrong. You signed for it, sucker. Now I’m going to go dig it out of the file and blockquote the exact condition that you’re arguing. Then, I’ll scan it so you can see your pretty pretty signature right underneath that. That’ll learn ya to disagree with me. I’m also going to forward the email I kept in my archives where I explained that condition explicitly to you and you said, ‘Okay, sounds great!’. You’re gonna feel soooooo dumb.

 

• “I haven’t forgotten about it. It’s on my list” = Yeah. It’s there. And sliding further and further down it every time you ask me about it. Go ahead, ask me again. I dare you. You have fallen waydown the list, below my bejeweled playing and sorting through my elastic bands to see which ones have become brittle, because you keep bugging me. Stop it. I hate you.

 

• “Thanks for letting me know, I’ll definitely talk to them about that. Yeah, no, it’s important to know, so thanks!” = Go away, you douche. I’m not yelling at my staff cuz you got all butthurt when they didn’t roll out the red carpet for you. They deal with crap all day and I’m fully aware that they snap ocassionally. But they show up on time and generally manage to complete their tasks, so I’m not about to go berating them on your behalf. But yeah, totally, thanks for the feedback! I can’t wait to use it to improve our efficiency and general operations!

 

• “Good morning, Office ABC” = Good m0rning, Office ABC. I know where I work. Please, don’t ask me if this is the Canadian Alien Contact Embassy or whateverthehell. When I repeat myself saying, ‘Office ABC’, don’t ask me if I’m sure. I am. Shockingly enough, reciting the phone number you called isn’t going to change that. Also, telling me that your friend Martha gave you the number cuz Jim recommended the place and you’re calling now cuz you’re on your lunch break since you took it early today cuz Janet has to leave at 4? Doesn’t change anything, you have misdialed. It happens. Put on your big boy pants and move on. You’re wasting my time, I have a game of bejeweled to get back to. Some people.

 

• “Well, see, I can’t do that. Corporate policy. Head office would kill me!” = I don’t really feel like going out of my way for you. I dont see any point in exerting myself more than necessary. So I’m going to pass the buck and blame the faceless ‘corporate’ people. Hate on them, not me please.

 

• “Regards” = I’m not sincere, I don’t want to say cheers, I don’t want to say thanks, and I am trying to mask my disdain for having to deal with you. I can’t just say, ‘Do this now, bitch’ and then sign my name. I need some type of closing line. So, regards it is. Warm regards means I really hate you but I’m trying to cover it up with syrupy sweetness, which is totally transparent if you know me, but I don’t care.

Now, go forth and spew bullshit! Or at least get unfoundingly offended when you hear one of these terms, cuz now you’re wise to the hidden meanings. You’re welcome.

Deadly fruit, OR, learn to spell.

Pinapples.

Not pineapples, mind you. Pinapples.

That was the first thing I saw when I walked into my local grocery store, written out by hand on the little produce signs.

The spelling and grammar nazi part of me starting having a mini rage attack, without the mini part. I looked around quickly to see if I could find the marker they used and quickly insert an ‘e’ into the word. I didn’t want people to think that a new fruit had been invented. God forbid someone who was allergic to pineapples picked up one of the fruits mislabelled by the dim supermarket employee. They would go happily on their way, looking forward to their fruit salad snack later in the day, only to die a horrible suffocating death when their throat swelled up and slowly it dawned on them……….it wasn’t an amazing new fruit, remarkably similar in appearance and taste and name to the pineapple….it WAS a pineapple!

Choose carefully. Amongst these pinapples is one deadly pineapple.

I am assuming that the speller in question was a pimply 16 year old boy. Why the hell can’t this current generation (Generation Me, I think they’ve been dubbed) do the simplest of things like get their damned hair out of their face or SPELL? I hate you emo kids! These kids have grown up, suckling on the teats of spellcheck, and when they leave their computers behind they fall apart. They’re essentially illiterate. How are they passing spelling exams? Do they still have them? Did this same thing happen to math after the invention of the calculator?

It saddens me that a basic pillar of human civilization has fallen apart in one generation. Thousands of years to build it up and poof, we have pinapples. Granted, I’m as guilty as the next of using lolspeak and texting in phonetics, but for actual correspondence where I want to appear as though I am someone who isn’t a moron, I whip out my mastery of the English language. There was a time when people were judged for bad spelling. I miss those judgemental times.

Everyone else is slowly adapting to spellcheck laziness too. Someone I know put up a new website and implored me to look at it. The spelling mistakes and misuse of words (their, they’re, there; to, too, two) were rampant! It was a damned spellingmistakepalooza! Reading it made my head explode. True story.

And another thing! You can’t just rely on spellcheck. It isn’t smart. It just isn’t. Observe:
“There going to go their with they’re friends.”
Spellcheck would have absolutely no issue with that non-sensical sentence. Everything is perfectly fine in the spelling department. However, it is a major fail in the ‘What the ass are you talking about?’ department.

I know all you bleeding heart liberals are going to cry out in defense of those with dyslexia and who are ESL. Well, my first rebuttal is why are you on my blog? Get off. Second, this isn’t about those people. I am speaking of perfectly abled, native English speakers who are just lazy and apathetic.

To end my pointless rant on how angry improper spelling makes me, I will close with this eloquent photo. It conveys my sentiment and makes me a massive hypocrite all at once. Frankly, I find that funny:

Indeed.