I am not a negative guy. I get along with pretty much everyone. But still, there are people who annoy me. But to annoy me this bad, you really have to work at it. Here we go:

 

 

There is a woman at the metal shop where I work. She's the receptionist but she thinks that she runs the place. Like, I get a call from my attorney,  and she (the attorney) has a few points to discuss with me. So I take the call, because did I mention that this is my attorney, and can you imagine that sometimes attorneys are busy and you have to talk to them when you can? But this receptionist woman walks past me and notices that I am on the phone, and she goes and tells the owner about it and then she tells my supervisor about it, and then she comes and says "You need to take all your cell phone calls on your breaks!"

 

Now let me reiterate: She has no authority over anyone, and she already talked to the two people there who actually did, and neither of them gave a crap. So then she confronts me, and basically none of this is any of her damn business, and she knows it.

 

Everyone knows someone like this, and you've probably worked with (or for) more of them than you want to remember. They are extraordinarily unhappy with their lives and their careers, and they compensate for it by making everyone around them miserable. God forbid one of them should get even a little bit of power or authority.

 

It's like they reach a certain age and they know that they will never get any further than they already have, they'll never be any better looking or make much more money than they already do. Basically, they've reached their personal and professional peak and they realize that their life sucks and it will never get any better.

 

So, they convince themselves that they really are more important than they actually are and they overcompensate by being total jerkwads.

 

Not someone who asks you questions, but someone who makes you ask them questions. Like this one chick I knew who I always wound up having conversations like this:

These answers despite the fact that you don't know Dave, or anything about a party, or even where Breckenridge is. You have to ask. And every question you ask branches off into three or four more questions:

I've known several people like this and it's always frustrating, especially in the end when you find out that 90% of what they say is made up anyway and half the people they talk about aren't even real.

 

It's like, I was reading this comic book where Nightwing went to the batcave to confront Batman about secretly controlling The Outsiders through his contacts at Wayne Enterprises, and at the same time Arsenal met with Batman on a rooftop but it turned out to be Deathstroke who was secretly manipulating the Outsiders. And it was cool knowing that Nightwing used to be Robin and that Deathstroke had been an enemy of the Teen Titans and all the backstory and seeing how all the pieces fit together. It's kind of like when you watch The X-Files, or Lost, and keep up with all the conspiracies and betrayals and secrets.

 

This how these people want their real lives to be. They have a cast of characters and backstories and motives and how everything fits together. Some of the people they talk about may be real, but most of it they've just made up.

 

I dated a girl for a whole year and found out that everything I knew about her past and where she came from and all the people that she knew were just made up. It's my own fault for staying with her so long, because our conversations had kind of devolved from this:

To this:

"What are your plans for Thanksgiving?"

"John called and said that Randy and Melissa are having everyone from Seton Hall get together in Vancouver."

"OK."

 

Unlike the first two on the list, these are people that I can actually be friends with. I'll just always be thinking how pathetic it is that they live this way. This is someone (and it's usually a woman) who adopts something, and it doesn't matter what, and then just talks about it all time. Usually its someone else's kid, or a dog.

 

Like I knew this woman once, and she wasn't very bright and she wasn't very attractive, and I don't mean to be mean about it because I know lots of girls who aren't bright or attractive but they still have a great attitiude and are fun to be around, but in this case, this particular girl was none of those things and no one really liked her. She acted slutty around guys because she thought it was the only way to get attention, so no one even really respected her. And then she wondered why her life sucked.

 

But there was one thing she did that really annoyed me, and that is that she went around talking about "her little god-daughter" all the time. It was like her best friend's kid or something, and she would pull out pictures and go "That's my little god-daughter" or she'd talk about the weekend and she'd say "I'm taking my little god-daughter to the circus." It was constant. It's not even like it was her own kid, which is bad enough....and don't get me wrong, let's all thank God that she had no kids of her own to emotionally scar, because I get the sense that even if she had a boy she'd make him wear a dress til he was ten and he'd grow up to be a serial killer.

 

This happens in degrees, too. Like when you go to dinner with a young married couple and they call themselves mom and dad to the dog, that's ok. Going shopping for sweaters for the dog because they promised it something nice to wear is not ok.

 

I used to have a guy who worked for me who used to talk about the Air Force all the time, and that almost seemed like the same thing. Every third sentence started with "When I was in the Air Force..." and it got so bad that we started calling him Air Force Johnny. It was like that was his whole identity....which actually would be ok, if he was still in the Air Force.

 

And I know this is really really weird, but twice in my life I've met really hot women who were obsessed with Germany. They grew up there in the military, and it's all they ever talked about. When it just happened one time, it was weird, but when it happened twice I started to wonder. Because once on Star Trek: The Next Generation all these guys from this one away mission from years before all started turning into these glowing lizard things and took over the ship so that they could return to the same planet, and I am starting to wonder if Germany does that to hot teenage girls so that when they grow up they have to return there.

 

This is the guy who laughs at all his own jokes, and also laughs at yours a little too loud. If he likes your joke he will reference it 10,000 times, but usually just the punchline. I think he does this just so that no one else gets it, like when you're waiting in line or something he'll go "Hey I wonder if that guy owns a lawnmower! Ha ha ha ha!"

 

He's oblivious to how annoying he is.

 

He talks about how close you are and isn't afraid to wear his heart out on his sleeve and tell everyone that you're like family and he loves you. If you ever need a favor, he'll be there for you but for about six weeks afterwards you're going to have to listen to him talk about how he loves you like a brother. You wonder if he's homosexual, all the time. He's married but there's no doubt that his wife is totally in charge, and if it's possible it wouldn't surprise you to find out that she keeps his nuts in a drawer.

 

The worst part of it is, you have to be his friend. If you ever even suggest that he's a pain in the ass, he'll be so withdrawn and humiliated that you'll find him hunched up in a corner rocking back and forth. And then you'll feel bad because he's a pain in the ass....it's like when you have a stray dog, either they stay around your house begging for food all the time, or you have to drive them way way waaaay out in the country to get rid of them. There is no in-between, no comfort zone.

 

I know about four guys who are just like this. If you're one of them, and if you're reading this and wondering if it's you, don't wonder. It is.

 

When I used to work at a pharmaceutical company I had to edit the memos and reports that all the Ph.D.'s would write to each other. I'm really good at spelling and grammar and crap like that. They would write out these rough drafts and I would change this or that, and put my initials at the bottom. Most of them liked to use big words, which was ok since they were all research scientists. I get that. Their work is very precise and it required precise language.

 

What I didn't like was the ones who had to word things exactly their own way. There was this one guy who would barge into my office and actually, physically yell at me that what I wrote was wrong and what he wrote was correct. He was such a douche bag that he would even tell me how to put in dashes and semi-colons when I could show him in the dictionary where he was wrong.

 

But the worse thing he did was that he loved the word "utilize".  He would use that word every chance he got. And you couldn't talk to him about it, and tell him how much that word sucks. Seriously. Why is that even a word? There is no instance at any time where the word "use" couldn't replace the word "utilize" or even the much more unweildy "utilization". People who say this word do not sound smart; they just sound like they want to be smart. If you look up the word "utilize" it says "to put to use" and there's no reason in the entire world not to go on and use the shortest word possible to express yourself. I'm not going to be here on this earth that long and I don't have time to listen to some scientist use big words.

 

When you go to a Waffle House by the airport at 3 in the morning, there are truckers there who get up that early every day because they have to, there are old guys who come in there so much that you wonder if they have a cot set up in the back or if they even sleep at all because of so much coffee they drink, and there are barflies and drunks who stop by to get something to eat before they stagger home, wherever home is. And, without fail, you'll see her.

 

The first thing you'll notice about her is that she's fat. I don't mean overweight, or pudgy or any of those other euphemisms you might expect: She's fat. Her clothes are too tight and would be too revealing on anyone but a Victoria's Secret model: blue leopard tights, tube tops, micro-minis, just lots of lycra and spandex. And, she's drunk. Totally drunk. And loud.

 

But the strangest thing is, everyone is paying attention to her. No one respects her, or even seems to like her very much, but everyone is paying attention to her, laughing at her and groping her. In a way, she's the Belle of The Ball. If they had formal balls in Hell.

 

If you say hello to her, or in any way acknowledge her, she'll hold up her hand and go "I have a boyfriend," which is totally inconsistent with the slutty way she's acting with everyone else. She's acting stuck-up. She's acting like she's the hottest thing in the room, and if you look around you'll notice that, sadly, she probably is.

 

Now, anywhere else in the world, people would be walking right past her. Or calling the cops on her. Or shielding their children from the sight of her. But here, at a Waffle House or a truck stop at 3:00 am, she's awesome.

 

Have you ever wondered if monkeys, or cows, or slugs recognize each other and have a social order based on how attractive they are to each other? It would be like, to us, all slugs are equally disgusting, but to other slugs, some are babes and some are just gross? And there are probably slugs who are all snobby to each other, but to us they're all disgusting? That's kind of how this is, and this chick knows it. She knows that she's a slug, but for a few hours at a Waffle House by the airport, she's a queen. In a way, I don't fault her...except that she's being snobby to me. And that's annoying.

 

Once I knew this guy who said that Peter Pan was a girl. Not Mary Martin, or Sandy Duncan or Cathy Rigby, who played Peter Pan, but the character of Peter Pan in the original play. And I know that in the grand scheme of things it makes no difference how big a dumb ass he is, but since I was like 16 years old at the time it seemed reasonable to punch him in the face.

 

It's not that he was wrong, or that it was an incredibly stupid thing to think: It's that he was so sure of himself and spoke with such authority, and it didn't even seem to matter that Peter Pan was one of the Lost Boys or that even his first name was a euphemism for male genitalia.

 

I'm just talking about people who say things and act like they know so much, which is annoying even when they're right. But especially when they don't know what they're talking about, and they're usually just repeating made-up shit that can easily be debunked by visiting snopes.com.

 

It's especially annoying when you have to kind of not say anything, because you can't prove your point and it's usually stuff that doesn't matter anyway, like "If you have a big meal in Germany, they'll get all pissed if you don't loosen your belt after you eat" or "The CIA is run by Jews". Just crazy, stupid crap that normal people don't even believe or care about.