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