Tuesday, December 28, 2010

If You Drive a Mercedes, You're an Asshole

You just are, and you fucking know it.

Mercedes makes big, clunky, gas-guzzling, ostentatious, expensive vehicles that are only purchased by people that are trying desperately to hide their insecurities.  If you're a guy, you buy one to make up for your tiny, tiny dick.  If you are a girl, you're purchasing power and masculinity.

What's worse, all of you Benz owners drive like you're the only person on the road, tailgate, speed, cut people off, don't signal, and generally behave like raging morons because you're staring down through that god-awful ugly hood ornament.

You and your stupid car are what is wrong with the world.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Direction of Blame

It’s the beginning of the Boxing Week season, and I feel for the people out there on the front lines.

I worked retail for a year or two when I was much younger.  Though I loved the people with whom I worked, I hated the job itself, and the pay was almost ludicrously bad.  Nothing new there.

You know what else shouldn’t come as a surprise?  I got yelled at by idiot customers on a regular basis.  They got mad at me for not having their book in stock, for not putting out enough seating for them, for not knowing the name of the product they wanted based on their piss-poor description of it, and for not having things priced the same as they have it on the website.

And 95% of these ass-hats were middle-aged women.

If you are one of these women (i.e. if you have ever been rude to a retail worker, under any circumstance, at any time) then I have something to ask you:

What the fuck is your problem?

Seriously, what is it that makes you such a stupid, entitled, miserable bitch?  Menopause?  Sexual frustration?  Drugs?  What?

You do realize that the kids getting paid minimum wage don’t make decisions, right?  You know that if they had their way, the stock would be full, the prices would be fair, and the music playing from the overhead speakers would be better.  But they don’t get their way, because they don’t have any fucking power or control! 

When you bitch at them, you do nothing but prove that you are a cowardly little shit that is so desperate to feel big that she’ll scream at an overworked, underpaid teenager about the checkout line moving too slowly when there are thirty thousand people in the store.  You prove that you have no empathy, sympathy, or respect for your fellow man.  You prove that you are a miserable person, a poor excuse for a human being that should do us all a favour by sailing into the wild blue yonder on a boat made out of crackers.

I don’t care if the retail worker was rude, ignorant, or unhelpful.  I don’t care if you couldn’t find what you wanted, or couldn’t find your size, or couldn’t reach the top shelf.  I don’t care because anyone that chews out a lowly retail worker is a piece of shit and deserves to be kicked in the throat. 

You want to yell at someone?  Go home, look up the number for the company’s head office, and scream at someone that makes some decisions.  Do some work to make sure that you are screaming at a person that gets paid enough to deal with it.  No one – no one – on the retail floor gets paid enough to take your shit.

Better yet, shut the fuck up entirely.  You don’t deserve anything from anyone anyway.  Be happy that anyone is willing to work at these stores and show some respect for the fact that they make no money, get no benefits, and work terrible hours so you can go out and buy your stupid shit at all fucking hours.

So the next time you feel like chewing out a worker at your local department store, think carefully about how much of an ignorant, small, stupid bitch you look like to the rest of us.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

You Suck, Part 1: Alicia Cox in Chatelaine

I plan on making this a very regular feature on Stuff by Sigmund.  And with shit like this article around, it will be very regular indeed.

Alicia Cox's "The Pros and Cons of Dating an Ex" exemplifies the kind of vapid, insubstantial trash writing that dominates the Lifestyle section of MSN.ca.  (The fact that it came from a Chatelaine article of the same name suggests to me that that magazine can’t be much better.  I can’t say for sure; not being a middle-aged woman, I have never read a copy of Chatelaine.)  It makes blogging look bad.  It drags down internet writing as an honest pursuit.

But that just seems like puerile venting when I write it like that.  Let’s be more surgical, shall we?   

  1. If you need to read an article in order to know when it is appropriate to date your ex, you are a fucking moron.  You clearly don’t have an ounce of common sense, you are likely self-destructive and needy, and I want you out of the gene pool before you pollute it with idiot children.  Be in a relationship or don’t be.  Set your boundaries and grow the fuck up.  By writing this article, Cox is enabling thousands – perhaps millions – of insecure, clingy, dependant women in their Sex and the City inspired quests for Mr. Big.
  2. This title makes no sense at all.  This is not a pros and cons article.  You would think that a professional writer would remember learning about a “pros and cons” structure in the seventh grade, but clearly Cox missed that day because she presents nothing more than a list of scenarios and generalities.  In fact, she doesn’t even do that.  Items 1 and 2 (“The Wedding Date” and “The Work Party”) are situations, while 3 (“The Random Hook Up”) straddles between a situation and a person, and 4 (“The Lingerer”) isn’t a situation at all.  It’s a person.  What’s worse is that Cox starts the damn thing talking about there being “two types of break-ups: the ones that stick and the ones that slide.” She then ditches that structural concept in favour of… well... whatever-the-fuck it ends up being.
  3. Melissa, Kyle, and Erin are useless idiots.  I don’t know who these people are, and I don’t care.  I can tell that at least two of them are loose as blouses and the third, while happy, is a slow learner.  In addition, the info is so vague and useless that it could as easily be made up as derived from interviews.
  4. People can comment on this flimsy excuse for writing.  I’m sure that it’s a standard thing on MSN.ca, but the bottom line is that there are few things less brainless than a bad article on relationships.  Other than, of course, unsolicited commentary from even stupider people. 
  5. “Information is current as of the original date of publication.”  What the fuck?  What information?  There is nothing in this worth calling information.  It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking sad.
This is shit, pure and simple.  Anyone can make it, there’s no shortage of it lying around, and all of it smells.

Texting Truck Drivers

Yeah, I’m calling you guys out. 

In the last month, I have almost been run down by at least a half-dozen transport trucks driven by morons.  Each and every one of these jackasses was using a cell phone, iPhone, or Blackberry at the time, either surreptitiously thrust down between his legs or being held up in front of him like the idea of positioning something in the way of the windshield is a safer option.

I get it.  You have to work out of your truck.  But there’s a reason why it’s illegal to drive and operate a mobile device in every province or state not run by an idiot.  You can’t concentrate on the road and on QWERTY keyboard at the same time.  No one can.  It’s been studied and proven and quantified, so quit think that you are the exception to the rule, buddy.  If you were that brilliant a multi-tasker, you wouldn’t be hauling crates of cauliflower for a living.

Pull over or invest in a fucking Bluetooth.

Don’t start on me about how people driving cars are doing it too.  A Ford Edge weighs 4000 lbs.  Your vehicle weighs upward of 26 000 lbs.  You have to be more careful because you have more freaking mass, more potential for destruction, and – consequently – more responsibility.

And while we’re on the subject, stop thinking that because you drive the biggest thing on the road you automatically have the right of way.  When you decide to pull out in front of me from your greasy-spoon truck stop on to an 80 km/h road with about 10 metres of space between my front grill and your ass end, you are being a dick.  You can’t get up to speed before I have to hit the brakes.  God help us if someone does it to you; we all get to enjoy the sound of your over-compensatory 195 decibel horn blasting away when someone cuts you off.   

I’m half tempted to plow into you just so you miss your deadline by having to fill out a police report.

In short, drive your goddamn truck the way you would drive a Civic, not the way you dream about driving an Abrams Tank.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Nature, Nurture, and Mothers

I take a lot of shit for being cynical.  And fair enough, I would say, since it isn’t easy being around someone that loathes everything, but I do feel a teensy bit justified in being a chronic pessimist. 

I was born to a woman that thinks she’s psychic, a man that has been married four times in three decades, and a family that includes a bipolar grandfather, a philandering prospector grandfather, and an honest-to-God axe murderer only a few generations back. 

Think about it: I have nature and nurture both horse-fucking my life. 

My mother dumped me off to live with my father so that she could follow her dreams of being a “real writer,” so I always felt like a burden to my current caregiver.  She has recently decided that the way to atone for this is to try to force her love on me.  She’s like a kindergartener trying to convince you that the macaroni-and-glue craft project she made is worth taking a framing and putting up in the hallway.  You don’t want to crush her spirits, but let’s be honest when we say that the picture looks like ass.

About Me, My Family, and Why I'm More of a Mess Than You

I’ve been blogging for more than a year now, but I made the silly mistake of doing it under my real name. 

Why did I do this? 

Simple.  I wanted to be a writer.  I was between jobs and I was writing a novel and I thought that it would be a perfect way to try get some attention.  As it stands, that blog has 35 000 hits, a regular readership, and a handful of decent incoming links that keeps me working at it three times a week.

The downside to this is that my family reads it, my friends read it, and conceivably, my boss could read it.  That means that everything has to be family friendly, work appropriate, and non-confrontational. 

Well fuck that.

This is a free space that will be safe from that bullshit.  This will be the forum for all of the bile that gets hidden away on my regular blog.  Not being able to directly appeal for readership, it will likely be read by no one and loved by less, but that means far less to me than the freedom to write in a way that haunts, appalls, and entertains.

Cheers!

“Sigmund”