Well, now to the part about the toenails.
One day, I returned back to the desk I reluctantly shared with Rita and saw something in the floor. I asked her what she tracked inside. I asked the question thinking it was small strips of hay b/c of her resemblance to a barnyard creature. She said, "I didn't track anything in; that is my toenails." I immediately thought that, if anyone saw those cheese filled things on the carpet, they would think the boy clipped them, not the girl. So, I told her to clean them up. She said not to worry about it because the cleaning crew would get it when they cleaned the office at night. I said, "No, I am not working until you clean that nasty shit up." She picked up all of the large pieces but left the smaller clippings.
That wasn't the only thing she did annoying at the desk. She would brush her big horse mane while sitting next to me. The mane was so tough that it sounded like when I clean the charcoal grill with a steel brush. It made me feel sad that she wasn't around when Old Yeller needed stitched after being attacked by the hogs b/c her coarse hair would have been perfect for that. I think the hair shed from her mane really was used to garrote Luca Brasi in the Godfather.
One of my biggest peeves is someone eating something after I am completely full. Well, Rita had an affection for rice cakes. She would eat them about 1:30 or 2:00 after I got back from lunch. When I say that she ate rice cakes, I should clarify: she ate a whole damn roll of rice cakes every single day. It seemed like it would take her two hours to eat them. After about five minutes of hearing her chomp them down, I wanted to grab them and shove them down her ugly ass throat. It wasn't just that she ate them. It was the manner in which she ate them. Ms. Ricardo wasn't just a bad Spanish teacher; she also didn't teach her daughter to eat with her ugly mouth shut. The rice cake crumbs flew out of Rita's chapped lips like chips flying out of a wood grinder. One day she got exceptionally carried away, and the crumbs landed on me, big hunks of crumbs with slobber all over them. I knocked them off of my suit coat, but they left their residue behind. Nothing is quiet like working in a senator's office with rice cake skeet displaying prominently on your shoulder.
Rita loved Riverdance, so she bought two concert tickets to see them in D.C. However, her mom went back to our state after spending a week with Rita in the college dorm. So, Rita had no one to go with her to the concert. She guilt tripped our boss, who at this time had no clue as to Rita's shenanigans, into going with her. The boss said that she would. So, they made plans for the concert. Right after the plans were made Ms. Ricardo called Rita at our desk. She decided to make another 12 hour drive back to D.C. to attend Riverdance. I hope you think that the Riverdance part is as funny as I do. Anyway, Rita only had the two tickets, so she put the phone down and asked me what she should do. I said, "How far is your mom from her house?" She said, "She has only been driving for an hour." I said well tell her to turn around b/c you have given the ticket to your boss. Rita then said, "But, I miss my mom, and I want her to come back up here b/c I am lonely." So, Rita went and told the boss that her mom was taking the ticket. I didn't think it was a very good way to make a first impression.
Well, Rita's mom showed back up in D.C. in a big way. She stayed with Rita for the remainder of our 6 week clerkship. Did I mention that Rita was 25 years old? Anyway, Rita's mom started coming to work with her and spending hours up in our office. She wrote poems for everyone in the office and all of the senators. She stalked the senator's and ran them down to give them her poems. She gave me a poem that started, "Hickory dickory dock don't turn back on Cousin Eddie or he will fast forward your clock." The poem was about 75 lines long, but that is all I remember about it except that each line was equally corny. Ms. Ricardo had one of her poems published in the Washington Post that was about illegal immigration. The article was making fun of her in an underhanded way. I got to work, and my boss was reading the poem to the office and bragging about how proud of Rita she was. I was in disbelief. There I was busting my ass to make a favorable impression, and this monsterfaced idiot seemed to be winning over my boss. I was living in an alternate universe for shizzle.
My boss has us working on group projects. In order to dodge Rita as much as possible, I told Rita that instead of working together on projects that we should split them, edit each other's work, and cosign off on the projects. She agreed. Well, we worked for a very conservative senator, and in the middle of Rita's work, she would right some bs about how we should advocate something on the liberal agenda like gay rights or who knows what. She had no clue the difference in conservative or liberal and didn't know which one our senator was. I tried to pull as much work away from her as I could and do it myself.
Everyday after work, Rita and her mother went to the gallery above the senate floor and watched the senators debate. They got so fired up over an imigration speech that started cheering and clapping and were escorted out by the guards. I wish the guards would have tazed them. A couple of thousands volts to the face could have made a huge improvement to their masks.
Rita didn't even know the name of the committee office for which we were working. The committee had a sophisticated sounding name. We were supposed to say it when we answered the phone, but Rita would get it all bumbled up. She would say it wrong about five times, put the phone down, take a deep sigh, and ask me the committee's name. It was recockulous.
Rita's mom came into the office one day with a box of pizza for us. In my best Leave it to Beaver impersonation, I said, "O, this is real swell of you to bring us this pizza Ms. Ricardo." She said, "Well, I wasn't the only one being nice. Some man gave me that pizza out on the street." Dumfounded I asked, "Was he working for a pizza company?" She said, "No he was just some scruffy looking fella that was real nice." I opened up the box and slices were missing and all of the toppings were slid off the pizza. She took a box of pizza from a homeless man and wanted us to eat it. No shit!
Eventually, one of my friends in the office ran into my boss in a bar. She told my boss about all of the Rita stories. My boss was so busy that she had no clue about Rita. She felt really bad about the whole situation but got a kick out of all the stories. The next day my boss called me in and asked why I had not said anything about Rita. I said that I figured it would all come out without me having to point it out. She then told me to tell her all of the stories. Everyone besides Rita gathered up in the office and got a good laugh about it. My boss moved me into her office for the last week that I was there to relieve me from Rita. Rita could not understand the move, but I didn't worry about it too much b/c Rita didn't understand much of anything.
D.C. wasn't the last time I ran into to ole Rita. I was taking the bar exam and looked over and saw Rita and guess who, her mother waiting in the lobby of the testing area. Rita's mom was at the bar exam everyday of the test, waiting outside for Rita to finish. Somehow someway Rita ended passing that exam. That really diminished my accomplishment of passing. If you are lucky enough to have her as your attorney, no represenation is made that the quality of the legal services being performed is greater than the quality of legal services performed by other lawyers.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Rita Ricardo
So this is the story about the "Toenail Girl."
I had a summer job working for a senator in D.C. Before I left home, the senator's office told me the girl that would be working next to me was named Rita Ricardo (my made up name). Upon hearing the latin sounding name, I am picturing working in a cubicle next to some petite dark-headed goddess with a seductive accent and decked out with hot office chick glasses and a mini skirt.
Well, I got Rita Ricardo. Rita was big. Not fat but big, as in all over. She had a set of manhands, complete with mechanic calluses. It was apparent that she had never gotten a basket of Bath and Body Works for Christmas. Her hair was dark just like I had hoped, but it was tougher than a brillo pad and had probably not ever been cut. Her face looked like it had been shot more times than Fifty Cent and Tony Montana combined. She used cheap makeup that looked like wet clumps of baby powder. She wore some skirts, but in true Rita Ricardo fashion, she wore old-school pantyhose. These were the same sort of pantyhose that, as a kid, I dropped canned dog food inside and threw in the water for fishing chum. Anyone could take one look at this girl and realize that she was the type of girl that wore granny panties. Some people call those bloomers, but nothing was blooming down there, unless gangrene blooms. Nearly everyone in the office called her Repunzel, and I had the pleasure of sharing a desk with her, hip to hip, for nearly six weeks.
My boss was really busy when Rita and I started our employment, so she had no clue just how stupid Rita really was until the end of our six weeks came.
Even though this girl had just been pushed out of the ugly bus, I decided to be nice to her, at least until she started talking. She said that her mother had brought her up to D.C. in a car (it is a 12 hour drive or so from my state) and that her mother was staying with her in a college dorm for a week until she got adjusted (Rita was 25 years old when this was going on). I was trying not to ask any questions in order to avoid conversation, but she kept going like an ugly sewing machine. She said her mother was a Spanish teacher.
That is when it hit me. I knew the last name Ricardo. I asked whether her mother used to teach at XYZ University, and she said yes. Her mother was my Spanish teacher for 2 semesters in college. This woman was one of the dumbest people that I had ever met. She was "white, not Hispanic" just like the little check boxes on standardized tests say. She was one of those hippy sort of foreign language teachers that acted like the culture of the people who spoke her language of choice was the greatest ever. She got the last name Ricardo from hooking up with Rita's dad in a Mexican version of Las Vegas style wedding. The poor guy must have burnt his brain with all that hot sauce.
Anyway, when I had Ms. Ricardo as a teacher, she would leave classroom a few minutes after class started to get something out of her office that she had forgotten b/c she was an absent-minded idiot. I came up with the idea to move the clock on the wall of the classroom forward when she walked out in an attempt to fool her into letting us out of class early. The first time I only moved it up five minutes. It worked like a charm. She looked up, saw the clock, and let us go. The class was only a 50 minute class. I think it started at 11:00 am. I eventually started moving it up 30 minutes at a time. This dumb hippy would come back into the classroom 20 minutes after it started and say, "O'dear time has flown; see you later." I played the clock trick for the better part of two semesters until some rat bastard told on me. They believed I was robbing them of their education. Ms. Ricardo just asked me to stop.
Besides being succeptable to the clock trick, Ms. Ricardo was just a horrible teacher. My roomate and I talked to the administration about all of her problems, and I think everyone of her students complained about her until she was fired. So, I told Rita about having her mother as a teacher and left the part out about helping get her fired. Her mother remembered me and my clock trick.
It didn't take but a minute to realize that Rita was even more off her rocker than her mother. We were assigned to go into the Congressional Library and make some copies of legal treatises. I don't know if you have ever seen a legal treatise, but they are the same size as a common encyclopedia. Rita started slamming the treatises onto the glass of the copy machine causing everyone within an earshot to stare at us. I said, "Hey don't slam that book on the glass. You could break it, and we would have to pay for the repair. That could be expensive." Her reply was priceless: "Yeah I know it is expensive. I busted the glass on one at my school this year." That was the first of many times Rita Ricardo made me ask myself, "Self, am I living in an alternate universe, or is this honanny one fry short of a happy meal?"
TO BE CONTINUED
I had a summer job working for a senator in D.C. Before I left home, the senator's office told me the girl that would be working next to me was named Rita Ricardo (my made up name). Upon hearing the latin sounding name, I am picturing working in a cubicle next to some petite dark-headed goddess with a seductive accent and decked out with hot office chick glasses and a mini skirt.
Well, I got Rita Ricardo. Rita was big. Not fat but big, as in all over. She had a set of manhands, complete with mechanic calluses. It was apparent that she had never gotten a basket of Bath and Body Works for Christmas. Her hair was dark just like I had hoped, but it was tougher than a brillo pad and had probably not ever been cut. Her face looked like it had been shot more times than Fifty Cent and Tony Montana combined. She used cheap makeup that looked like wet clumps of baby powder. She wore some skirts, but in true Rita Ricardo fashion, she wore old-school pantyhose. These were the same sort of pantyhose that, as a kid, I dropped canned dog food inside and threw in the water for fishing chum. Anyone could take one look at this girl and realize that she was the type of girl that wore granny panties. Some people call those bloomers, but nothing was blooming down there, unless gangrene blooms. Nearly everyone in the office called her Repunzel, and I had the pleasure of sharing a desk with her, hip to hip, for nearly six weeks.
My boss was really busy when Rita and I started our employment, so she had no clue just how stupid Rita really was until the end of our six weeks came.
Even though this girl had just been pushed out of the ugly bus, I decided to be nice to her, at least until she started talking. She said that her mother had brought her up to D.C. in a car (it is a 12 hour drive or so from my state) and that her mother was staying with her in a college dorm for a week until she got adjusted (Rita was 25 years old when this was going on). I was trying not to ask any questions in order to avoid conversation, but she kept going like an ugly sewing machine. She said her mother was a Spanish teacher.
That is when it hit me. I knew the last name Ricardo. I asked whether her mother used to teach at XYZ University, and she said yes. Her mother was my Spanish teacher for 2 semesters in college. This woman was one of the dumbest people that I had ever met. She was "white, not Hispanic" just like the little check boxes on standardized tests say. She was one of those hippy sort of foreign language teachers that acted like the culture of the people who spoke her language of choice was the greatest ever. She got the last name Ricardo from hooking up with Rita's dad in a Mexican version of Las Vegas style wedding. The poor guy must have burnt his brain with all that hot sauce.
Anyway, when I had Ms. Ricardo as a teacher, she would leave classroom a few minutes after class started to get something out of her office that she had forgotten b/c she was an absent-minded idiot. I came up with the idea to move the clock on the wall of the classroom forward when she walked out in an attempt to fool her into letting us out of class early. The first time I only moved it up five minutes. It worked like a charm. She looked up, saw the clock, and let us go. The class was only a 50 minute class. I think it started at 11:00 am. I eventually started moving it up 30 minutes at a time. This dumb hippy would come back into the classroom 20 minutes after it started and say, "O'dear time has flown; see you later." I played the clock trick for the better part of two semesters until some rat bastard told on me. They believed I was robbing them of their education. Ms. Ricardo just asked me to stop.
Besides being succeptable to the clock trick, Ms. Ricardo was just a horrible teacher. My roomate and I talked to the administration about all of her problems, and I think everyone of her students complained about her until she was fired. So, I told Rita about having her mother as a teacher and left the part out about helping get her fired. Her mother remembered me and my clock trick.
It didn't take but a minute to realize that Rita was even more off her rocker than her mother. We were assigned to go into the Congressional Library and make some copies of legal treatises. I don't know if you have ever seen a legal treatise, but they are the same size as a common encyclopedia. Rita started slamming the treatises onto the glass of the copy machine causing everyone within an earshot to stare at us. I said, "Hey don't slam that book on the glass. You could break it, and we would have to pay for the repair. That could be expensive." Her reply was priceless: "Yeah I know it is expensive. I busted the glass on one at my school this year." That was the first of many times Rita Ricardo made me ask myself, "Self, am I living in an alternate universe, or is this honanny one fry short of a happy meal?"
TO BE CONTINUED
About This Blog
The idea to start this blog arose from the need to keep track of all the crazy shit that happens to me on a seemingly daily basis. When shit happens and I feel the need to share my shit with other people, their response is either "that shit didn't happen" or "you need to write a book about that shit." Well, shit happens, so I am going to try to keep track of it through this blog.
The title comes from the question I constantly ask myself: "Am I living in an alternate universe?"
I ask myself the question when my old fart of a co-worker, who allegedly (keyword is allegedly) did three tours in Nam, slings open my office door without knocking, starts yelling about blasting someone's ass, uses my phone, and starts doing all of his work on my desk.
Along the same lines, I once asked myself the question when I had to work in a cubicle with a girl who clipped her toenails in the cubicle, left the toenails in the carpet, and proceeded to tell me not to worry about it because the cleaning crew would clean it up.
I ask the question when I am getting a steamed-towel treatment after a haircut, feel a stylist sit in my lap while the another one is washing my hair, and after I tell her to get up, hear her blab about how that wouldn't happen to me if I didn't come in "dressed so damn cute."
I ask the question when one of my close relatives hires another one of my close relatives as a stripper.
I ask myself the question when the stripper relative is scheduled to go on Jerry Springer.
These are just examples that I am coming up with off the top of my head. Hopefully, once I start keeping track of my stories through this blog, you be able to get a better understanding of why I may be living in an alternate universe. If you know me and have heard some of my stories that are worth sharing, remind me of them, and I will try to find time to share them in the blog.
I am going to try to keep this blog as PG-13 as possible. However, sometimes the shit that surrounds me is rated R, and the language is needed for you to get a complete view of my universe.
The title comes from the question I constantly ask myself: "Am I living in an alternate universe?"
I ask myself the question when my old fart of a co-worker, who allegedly (keyword is allegedly) did three tours in Nam, slings open my office door without knocking, starts yelling about blasting someone's ass, uses my phone, and starts doing all of his work on my desk.
Along the same lines, I once asked myself the question when I had to work in a cubicle with a girl who clipped her toenails in the cubicle, left the toenails in the carpet, and proceeded to tell me not to worry about it because the cleaning crew would clean it up.
I ask the question when I am getting a steamed-towel treatment after a haircut, feel a stylist sit in my lap while the another one is washing my hair, and after I tell her to get up, hear her blab about how that wouldn't happen to me if I didn't come in "dressed so damn cute."
I ask the question when one of my close relatives hires another one of my close relatives as a stripper.
I ask myself the question when the stripper relative is scheduled to go on Jerry Springer.
These are just examples that I am coming up with off the top of my head. Hopefully, once I start keeping track of my stories through this blog, you be able to get a better understanding of why I may be living in an alternate universe. If you know me and have heard some of my stories that are worth sharing, remind me of them, and I will try to find time to share them in the blog.
I am going to try to keep this blog as PG-13 as possible. However, sometimes the shit that surrounds me is rated R, and the language is needed for you to get a complete view of my universe.
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