There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2004-11-23

I'm pretty sure it weighed well over 3 pounds.

The setting: The cafeteria of a mid-sized company located somewhere in England. It is lunchtime, so the tables are crowded and there are several people milling around by the sammich counter.

Our protagonist has grabbed a diet Coke and a premade sammich which contains some unspeakable gray matter. She deftly (e.g., without tripping or dropping anything) wends her way around the small crowd to the cash register. Except she's the only one who thinks of it that way; the rest call it a "till."

Upon reaching said till, she sees a stuffed toy cat sitting in front of the cashier (tillster?). It has a sign in front of it that says, and I quote, "Guess the weight of Mrs. Slocombe's pussy. �1. Winner receives lunch for two." Well, it was for charity, so she asked Mrs. Slocombe if she would mind pulling up her skirt and dropping her knickers. She didn't know if anyone else had already seen it, so she didn't want to be disadvantaged. It seems she wasn't the first to ask that day -- when Mrs. S lifted her skirt, her knickers were already around her knees. Our heroine carefully made some calculations, put �1 into the jar, and wrote a guess on a slip of paper. Someone else eventually won the lunch, but if you knew Mrs. Slocombe, you'd know that all of those who participated were all really winners.

There's this guy who sits near me temporarily (since I'm here temporarily, I suppose that's redundant) and he is clearly a wanker of the sort that the other businessmen throw rocks at him and call him names in the boardroom. His name is Simon. I don't think anyone has wanted to sit with Simon at the lunch table since he first went off to preschool. He is just a pompous windbag. He is currently in India (business class, I'm sure) doing some kind of bidness. Last week there was a going-away lunch for someone, as there is weekly here. Who's left to do the work? Oh, that's right. They're very inefficient here, and no one really notices much if work goes undone. Anyhoo, last week Simon was on the phone, talking in his loud, pompous windbag voice, and he's trying to find out the location of this going-away lunch. So he gets back after lunch, like two hours later, and he gets back on the wind-horn again and starts calling people and bitching at them because he'd been told the wrong pub to go to for the lunch. Of course, they're trying to "explain it away" or something, but both Simon and I know that he was sent to the wrong place because he was a booger-eating bed-wetter back in boarding school, and to this day, no one likes him. I think I'll go take the mouse ball out of his mouse when no one is looking.

So, since others have had to do this 20 hours in coach thing, let me ask a few practical questions. How do you deal with your own body odor during the last few hours of the flight? How do you deal with the body odor of others, or are you usually the stinkiest? Do most major airports have a de-lousing station? Can you bring your own booze on board the airliner? Will I be cavity-searched for signs of mad cow disease? What do I do if I end up sitting next to Simon? What do I do if I've already seen the re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond that they're showing? Are we there yet?

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