Overnights! And not the good kind, with pillowfights.

So I work overnights now, at a crappy insurance company (in the event someone important is reading this, they should know that when kids today say “crappy” they mean “awesome”—true story). What I do for a living is as unimportant as ever and the reasons for switching are relatively unimportant (other than the fact my girlfriend works overnights too, and now I can touch her boobs while I’m sleeping). One plus about overnights is that between calls I can write blogs that reveal far too much personal information.

I thoroughly enjoy my new hours. However, there are many mysteries and... I won't say interesting, because that's not true... we'll say socially inept characters to deal with when working overnight shifts. Here is one example of each:

Character: The 38 year old guy (Matt) who is way, way too impressed with his sports card collection. I’m not knocking the guy for liking or collecting sports cards. I’m not interested in it, but then I haven’t time traveled back to elementary school in 1964 and I can afford to buy gum without sharp edges (barely).

What I don’t understand is why this guy flaunts his card collection so much. One day he walked inside my cubicle (shattering my personal bubble) with a small, nondescript cardboard box. He then started to bang said box on the shelves in my cube.

He wants me to ask him what’s inside the box, I thought. Then I didn’t ask him, because he’s annoying and I wanted him to go away.

Matt then attempted to endear himself to me by praising the movie Transformers while denigrating Superbad, one of the best comedies of all time.

Sidebar: When I started to list off some of the 4,000 reasons Transformers is a giant steaming pile of cinematic bullshit, he told me “you just have to accept it for what it is.” Uh, no, I don’t. I like big dumb action movies as much as the next guy, I just don’t like lazy ones where four story alien robots can hide behind trees in the middle of the fucking suburbs, and I don’t like when the normally reliable John Tuturro is so ridiculously terrible he embarrasses the entire movie making industry. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one other performance that bad, which came courtesy of William Hurt in A History of Violence. But at least Billy “Volume = Acting!” Hurt has the excuse of always being worthless.

Sidebar 2: I also understand that I've probably thought about the movie Transformers more than the people who actually made it. But isn't that the problem?

Sidebar 3: I don’t know how to make an actual sidebar appear, so I’m assuming it is acceptable to just say “sidebar” and digress in the middle of a story. You know, kinda how Congress passed that law that says you can just say “stop” and drive straight through stop signs, instead of having to slow down? Washington really got that one right.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. So he finally realizes I’m not going to ask him about his cardboard box, so he does a casual back stretch (honestly) and gives me a “Yeeeaahh… These are my trading cards. Probably got about $8000.00 in this box.” Wow. The conversation continued:

Him: “You want to see them?”

Me: “Nope.”

Of course, he opened the box and showed them to me. Including one that had pieces of jersey in the card! Oooh!

I don’t have anything else to add to this story. Sorry. I hope you learned something.


Mystery: Hey America! It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game…

Douche bag or malfunctioning robot?

I play this game every Friday when I work with a guy I’ll call “Carl,” because that’s his name. Now, the first time I met Carl, I thought he was just a dumbass. However, Carl’s behavior the past several Fridays indicates he could be a malfunctioning robot from the future.

Peculiar Behavior #1: Carl’s hair is bleached blond and gelled into a plastic harder than 1970s breast implants.

Debate: I’ll admit this one seems easy at first. I mean, we all know bleached blond hair on a dude is a key indicator of douchery. But what if this hair doesn’t just look like plastic? What if… it is plastic? Maybe the robot overlords of the future couldn’t find a good wig and just made a weave out of the tops of old Ken dolls.

Verdict: Douche bag 1, Robot 0.

Peculiar Behavior #2: Carl wears a very tight leather coat. It might also be a woman’s coat, I can’t tell. There does seem to be tiny air-breast bubbles in the chestal region.

Debate: This one is easy. The harrowing documentary Terminator 2: Judgment Day taught us all that robots from the future love leather coats. Scientists (namely, Jeff) are still working to determine why this love affair exists, but this little piece of evidence certainly furthers my robot theory. Also, we can assume post-apocalyptic robots place little emphasis on gender, which explains why Carl might be wearing a woman’s coat.

Verdict: Tie ballgame!

Peculiar Behavior #3: This isn’t behavior per se, but Carl’s voice sounds like Kermit the Frog, if a drowsy Kermit swallowed a bug while mainlining Quaalude.

Debate: Well, Carl is either a person that gets kicked in the throat a lot or a robot that accidentally wandered into a giant microwave and partially melted his voice chip. Both scenarios are equally plausible, but in this instance I’m leaning toward the latter.

Verdict: Douche bag 1, Robot 2.

Peculiar Behavior #4: Carl beat boxes to himself between calls. One night he used his cell phone to record himself beat boxing and played the recording back several times, giggling.

Debate: This one is tough. I’ve only known one good human being to beat box, and he’s a short Italian with a large penis. He was also going through a rap phase at the time. Carl isn’t short and I assume he doesn’t meet the other qualifications either. This line of logic definitely leads down Douche Bag Lane (the same street Carlos Mencia lives on).

But what if that is how robots communicate? Maybe he wasn’t playing a recording of himself, maybe he was having a conversation on speakerphone and I couldn’t differentiate between the two voices. Like when Jay overhears Asian people talk and he just hears “Ping pong ping pong ping pong.”

Verdict: I was tempted to give Team Douche Bag 200 points, but instead I’ll just tie up this mystery at two points each.


Final Verdict: Can robots be douche bags?


Well, that’s all for to day. I’ll leave you with this week’s installment of…

Things I’ve (honestly) been forced to tell my girlfriend:

1. The “suck it” gesture is not a dance, no matter how much you want it to be.
2. You can’t say “I’ll wash your underwear” in a sexy voice. It doesn’t work.