Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Jerks’ Category

The food court was alive. Tables were double-booked. It was a sea of trays and Gap bags.  There was a TV on without sound and music in the background that lacked any sort of soul.

I was a boy having lunch with his mother.  I was twelve. Give or take.

One man sat one table over.  He was in a suit that wore him cheaply. Even then I could see the frumpiness of it all.  He was wearing the required uniform and they did each other no favors.  He may have worked in the mall or perhaps the car lot across the street.  His lunch was in a brown paper sack as wrinkled as his jacket.  The shadows against it fell from the cloud looming above him.  His tension was cartoonish.

One man had a hampered gait and a fast smile.  He moved as quickly as his body would let him, darting between the busy tide of people to which he was all but invisible.  He took trays and wiped tables and he sang a little something to himself that echoed of happiness on repeat.  His manners were impeccable.

The crumpled man in the crumpled suit crumpled once more his once crumpled bag. He was careworn. He wore the ill-fitting suit like it had once been his father’s and the faded tweed was a weave of ghosts and disappointment pressed firmly across his back.  The cloud above him was dark and full of rain.  He rose from the table, put his hands in his pockets and walked away with far too much focus for a man of his nature.

The bag sat in the center of the table, a monument to his once was.  It sat there and slowly unraveled.  Time marched onward and the bag remained just one less thing that the man had to carry.

The man with the song on his breath circled the shrine.  Then again.  His eyes restless.  His mouth never stopping.  He searched the crowd for shades of tweed and finding none he took the brown bag and placed it in the trash.  He wiped the table until it glowed. And then his attentions were needed elsewhere.

I sat with my mother and ate my lunch.  Perhaps we chatted.  Perhaps my gaze returned to the quiet television.  Perhaps we were already done.

The man in the suit seemed taller when he returned.  His chin was firmer.  His face more red.  He stood at the glowing table and asked above the din as to the whereabouts of the bag he had left.

“The guy tossed it,” someone had said and suddenly the guy was standing there, no longer singing but looking sheepish and lost.  He tried to apologize but his tongue failed him.  He tried to apologize for doing his job.

The man in the suit proceeded to belittle, deprave and defame.  The man in the apron grew smaller and smaller.  The sparkle in his eyes turned soft and gray. His simple song fell muffled beyond silence.

The crowd marched onward. They cast glances and even looks of disgust, but they had trays in their hands and Gap bags on their wrists and there was something on the TV without sound that they could hide from their life in.  Theirs was a sound lacking any sort of soul.

“Stop it,” said a shaking voice from my shaking mouth. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Mind your own business, kid,” replied the man, more or less, and his look was for my mother.

“You left the bag on the table,” I continued. “It was trash.”

And then he said other things that I can’t recall because I was overcome with anger and by that time someone much bigger than myself had decided that shouting at a child for defending a man with needs was even more than they could ignore. As the crowd grew bigger his cloud did too, and then the angry man went away for the second time without his bag and I think he looked at me but I wasn’t watching him.

I was watching a spark of doubt grow where happiness used to be.

By now you’ve heard the story. Basically, professional waste of space Michelle Malkin, who has done nothing but try to polarize America and give conservatives a bad name, went on a tirade about the scarf that Rachel Ray wears in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad.

Malkin said that the scarf, a black and white paisley number with some fringe crap hanging off of it, was, in fact, a nod towards the keffiyeh, which is worn by some terrorists, but is not in itself a terrorists (just like leather isn’t gay). She insisted that the ad was showing support for terrorists and demanded that Dunkin’ Donuts address the (non) issue.

Granted, Rachael Ray was an idiot to advertise something as nutritionally offensive as a donut franchise. Not only does it hurt her credibility as someone that supposedly knows what good food is, but it pushes fat on a society that is choking on it. Still, if Bobby Flay can sell his soul to Applebee’s, then I guess anything is possible. What’s next, Emeril slinging Big Macs?

I don’t necessarily hold that Dunkin’ Donuts, or McDonald’s for that matter, is a bad thing. Sure, they want to make a dollar- and they don’t care if it kills their customers in doing so, but they’re no big tobacco. They’re only killing the actual consumer, not everyone in the vicinity.

If anyone is to blame for the effect that fast food has on society, most notably children, it should be the parents, not the clowns. Of course, that’s basically the same argument as “guns don’t kill people,” and I’m against firearms, but whatever. I’m still making more sense than Malkin.

It’s.A.Scarf.Bitch.

The point here is that Dunkin’ Donuts pulled the ad. They let an idiot airbag bully them into a corner, which is proving to be a much bigger public relations nightmare than anything they possibly could have faced by ignoring said airbag.

They should have shoved a donut in her pie hole.

Michelle Malkin is a bigger drain on common sense and decency than Ann Coulter. Sure, Coulter is a woman that hates women, but Malkin is a woman of color that hates people of color. Stuff like that gives Dick Cheney pause, usually alone and possibly with lotion.

Dunkin’ Donuts let Malkin’s insane accusations alter their course, and while I don’t care if they lose a few bucks, I do care that a loud-mouthed vessel of hate could have such a huge influence on supposedly intelligent people.

Michelle Malkin’s agenda is letting the terrorists win.

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Seriously, what is up with Dunkin’ Donuts brand coffee? It’s one notch above truck stop java. Just because someone puts the cream and sugar in your coffee for you doesn’t mean it tastes better. If someone pours a Bud Light in a frosty mug and hands it to me, it’s still Bud Light.

For the above formula please apply the following: Bud Light = crap.

People love throwing that out there. If you do this or that the terrorists will win. It’s all bull. Usually.

CBS is the exception. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a poor display of judgment as they’ve shown tonight and I just sat through 8 years of Bush. Yes, my team lost- something that has triggered some terrible outbursts from me in the past, but I can’t even be mad about it. I don’t even care. I am too busy seeing red over the fact that CBS showed the entire UCLA game, a game they won 70-29 (it wasn’t even that close) when there were three other very competitive games on.

Who makes that call? Who decides that they should show every single minute of a game that has been lopsided since tipoff over 3 games that go down to the wire? That person should be fired, and possibly kicked. It’s embarrassing.

That’s why I’m going to boycott CBS. Aside from sports the only shows they have worth watching don’t come on until after my bedtime, so it will be pretty easy to do. However, I am not alone. I am in the unique position of having a collective readership of over 8 million people per month. I think I’ll share my disappointment with the masses, loud and often.

The NCAA could fix this. They could offer games on demand. Sure, they are free on the internet, which is how I watched my team lose. I had a houseful of people come over to watch at least some of the game on the actual TV, but instead we stood two deep around my laptop to watch a grainy, delayed and tiny broadcast. All the while songs were sung around us of Kevin Love despite the fact he sat on the bench most of the second half.

The NCAA offers a package deal to get the games- all the games, and I’m sure that makes them money, but they would earn so much more if they offered individual games on a team by team basis. I won’t spend $69 for the entire tournament, but I’ll spend ten bucks for one game, and so would a lot of other people (NFL, take note). It’s stupid and I’m pissed.

I know where the headquarters to CBS are located, right next to the Grove. We go there often and next time we do I’m going to spit in their general direction. Fucking terrorists.

Back when I worked at the Place That Must Not Be Named, I had many buttons ripe for pushing, and that is just what happened. My buttons were tweaked, twisted, and pinched like the Braille on a sow’s underbelly. I was angry, and my buttons were red and tender.

I tended bar, usually, but there were other shifts that I handled as well. For instance, every Saturday night I took over the front of the kitchen. I was responsible for ensuring quality of product and service. I was the liaison between the cooks and the servers.

Your server, that was running around like a chicken with it’s yada, yada, yada, well they only had 4 tables. I had every table in the restaurant. Basically, so as not to make it sound more important than it actually was, I was the captain on a ship of fools- rising up to hear the bells and bugle trills that were the demands of your order and frankly, the bane of my existence. Tempers ran high.

There was a cook there, briefly in the big picture, but forever when you stood there waiting for a new batch of gravy, that, on a good day, could be the poster child for meth. He barely had a hold on his surroundings, and his teeth had a grasp even lighter. You could see the nerves stretching like bungee cords between tooth and gum. His tongue paced behind the sparse teeth, looking like a prisoner in a jail of slack jawed mumblings. He was terrible at his job.

I walked a line roughly 20 feet wide, with this cook being on the far end, separated from me by heated shelves and 14 years of education. Of course, who was I to point fingers? I was way too old to be doing what I was doing, still, the cook was older.

One night, like every night, he was bringing the restaurant to it’s knees by doubling the time and texture of every item he was responsible for, the least of which being corn dogs. My four-year-old could heat up a corn dog (but I don’t let him). This night, with the time for food to be served dragging over 30 minutes, I could feel my frustration rising. I had been running in place for nearly six hours, and more pressure than anyone in a kitchen should ever feel was upon me.

I must have had him make five or six new corn dogs in a 10 minute period. Servers were yelling, other cooks were yelling, this cook, this dipshit that couldn’t cook a damn corn dog, was screaming obscenities and threats. His tooth was mocking me.

To this point I had remained stoic. I was the captain after all, and I needed my people to feed off the calm I carried. Yet, inside I was boiling. The tooth, that damn tooth, I swear it winked at me just as I was handed, literally, another frozen corn dog with the tiniest of childlike attempts engraved in the rock-hard batter. I broke.

I hurled that frozen corn dog twenty feet, past trays and heads and glasses of beer. I threw it long and I threw it hard. My aim was true. Time stopped as every face turned to watch this weapon of frustration fly cleanly between shelves and straight at the cook, surely clutching in it’s frozen batter his very doom.

“Quit giving me fucking popsicles!” I yelled. I yelled louder than the dipshit and the fools, louder than the cooks and the servers, and still louder than the throngs of the unhappy that filled the restaurant.

The cook fell backwards towards the fryer. His tooth held on for dear life. I turned and walked out of the kitchen, past the sad kids and cold plates, straight out the door and to my car. I had been working the job for six years and hated most of them. I got in my car, told myself that I was through and prepared to drive away, forever.

My car wouldn’t start. I got out of it, cursed the wind, put on my hat and apron and walked back inside to right the ship. I stayed there until we closed that night, and I stayed there for two years after.