How Did He Know?

So, I was up at the store trying to get some shit framed and they are chronically understaffed (I debated about naming the store, but I go there often and like it and the people who work there are lovely and it’s not their fault they’re perpetually understaffed, plus I’m about to tell you a story that could get the guy I ended up liking in trouble, so… no name).

I’m waiting for someone to come help me and a woman and her two kids join me. They’re getting a Hatch poster framed. Since there’s nobody there, she goes behind the counter and starts pulling frame samples off the wall. When someone finally comes to help us, I insist she goes first, because mine–the tarot cards–are rather complicated.

The guy helping us is almost immediately snotty to her, telling her that her one choice of frame is crappy. I was a bit taken aback but she seemed completely oblivious and then she proceeded to be atrocious to him, but in that really smooth, almost subtle way. She complained about the price, telling her daughter that she’d framed a poster for her “at that other place” for half the price. And then, when the guy told her she could pick it up in a couple of weeks, and she was all “And how will I know to pick it up? Am I supposed to just check in every day?” and then her little son was all “But I thought you needed it by Valentine’s day” and she was all in a stage whisper to the kid “Well, I guess it will just be late” before the guy could tell her “No, they would call her.”

So, at first, i was like, oh god, if he’s that hostile to her, he’s going to loathe me with my big complicated thing. But he could not have been nicer or more helpful and got me all set up and even stayed after his shift ended to do it.

And I know, reading this, it sounds like he was the aggressor and that it went downhill from there. But watching it play out, it didn’t seem that way and it became clearer and clearer that he had been trying to be preemptively hostile. Somehow he knew that this woman was going to be an enormous pain in the butt.

But I don’t know how.

I wonder if it was that she went around behind the counter when there was no employee there to get the frame samples? I mean, that seems like a huge issue. Customers do not go on the same side of the counter as the drawer. That’s just a big no-no.

I’m not sure, though. I feel like I missed some important social cue. And not that he handled that cue all that gracefully, maybe, but he recognized a good five minutes before I did that she was a pain. And now I wish I knew what he saw.

Just Putting This Out There To Tempt the Chicagoans

One of you knows where this is, which can tell us what direction this asshole is driving into the city from, which will, in turn, tell us again what a big fat terrible friend/brother/horse dude he is. “Oh, sorry, I could never come to see you, my Clydesdale buddy. I didn’t know how to get to St Louis, even though I apparently have no trouble navigating Chicago.”

Super Bowl Ads

–I loathed the Budweiser Clydesdale one, even as I found myself tearing up over it. What kind of jerk lives close enough to Chicago that he can just drive in to see his old horse and it’s all emotional and they miss each other, but he never could bother to get to St. Louis? Fuck you, dude. She’s not too big for you now, you’re too small. Good thing Illinois has two state fairs so that she can just go to the DuQuoin one and not have to see him moping around the one in Springfield.

–I also loathed the Samsung ad, partially because it started out so promising. If it had been 30 seconds or a minute of Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd being assholes to each other using Samsung products, I would have loved it. But no, they had to have someone playing a douchy Samsung employee whose whole purpose was to make Rogan and Rudd feel like shit. Samsung, you want me to play with your products, show me people playing with your products. Don’t show me an employee of yours being an asshole to people who are excited about your products.

–I know this makes me old, but my only thought about the GoDaddy commercial was that the boy looked like he was, maybe, seventeen, so it was kind of creepy to see a grown woman kissing him. I knowI was supposed to be creeped out because it was a beautiful woman kissing a not-hot dude, but a.) GoDaddy, maybe you should have turned on a television once in the last 75 years and gotten a clue that we watch TV shows in which that’s the case all the fucking time, so it’s not that weird to see on TV, b.) He looked like an okay kisser, so why wouldn’t she want to kiss him? I think there’s some weird gender shit along the lines of women are sexy for men and we do sexual things only for men and not because we enjoy it. So, I think the ad is supposed to work on the level of “Ha ha, isn’t it gross that this hot chick has to kiss this guy who totally doesn’t deserve her?” As if it’s just not possible or even enter into it that she could want to.

–The Budweiser ads for their new dark whatever were terrible, but we couldn’t decide why. Just that we laughed every time they came on.

–The VW hotbox Jamaican ad was, we all agreed, racist, and probably still the most memorable in a good way one of that half.

–I was watching with men and even they thought the Audi commercial where the dude grabs a girl and kisses her and gets punched for it should have ended with either her having been the one who punched him or her calling the cops. I don’t sit at home preaching about feminism (Hard to believe, but true), so I think there’s just been enough of a change in public attitudes that such a scenario reads as alarming, not awesome. And how weird, because they could have fixed that by either, yes, having her be the one who punched him (though that wouldn’t have looked so great for their brand) or having her in the car with him at the end, like “Finally, you got that I like you. Now I’m running away with you.”

–The Farmers ad was terrific. Here’s the problem with it, as I see it. I can’t remember what damn truck it was for. But I do now know it means that there are years of Paul Harvey footage that you can, apparently, license. So, it was a really effective ad for the Paul Harvey estate.

–Also terrific was the warrior princess on a pony and the Doritos commercial with all the men at the tea party. I only wish both ads weren’t premised on, in the first case, “I married an idiot” or, in the second, “I married a bitch.” That was one nice thing about the commercial with the Flaming Lips. The whole family went on these grand adventures together without someone in the family having to be the outsider.

 

Representative Jeremy Faison is a Jackass

This:

The sponsors say they’re merely legalizing what is already a pervasive practice.

“Let’s be honest. There’s not a parking lot in Tennessee today that doesn’t have a gun inside the car,” Faison says.

Parking lots with weapons in glove boxes include the grounds of the state capitol. Faison admits to keeping firearms in his vehicle while in Nashville.

“I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll tell anybody that,” he says. “I’ll tell the highway patrol. Listen, that’s just part of life.”

Faison, however, would still be breaking the law even if his legislation passes, at least as written now. While the Cocke County representative says he’s “carried a gun all my life.” He says he’s never sent in the paperwork for his handgun permit.

“One day I’ll probably get caught if I don’t get a permit, and I’ll get in trouble,” he says.

He tells the media that he illegally keeps a gun in his trunk while at the state capitol, a gun for which he does not have a permit. This is a man who feels free to make laws that I have to follow. Fuck him. Under this logic, why isn’t weed legal in Tennessee? Hell, you’re a million times more likely to need weed to cope with driving in downtown Nashville than you ever are to need a gun.

Here’s the thing. There’s just an enormous unbridgeable gap between people who think they need a gun every single place they go because shit could break out at any moment and people who don’t. As much as I appreciate that people who carry would like non-gun people to acknowledge that there are safety issues, I think non-gun people would like some acknowledgement that, if you’re a 36 year old white guy who works in a building that already has armed guards, you’re not actually in that much danger from life. Which means you certainly have time–plenty of safe time–between the moment you decide you want a gun in your car and the moment you should actually put a gun in your car to get the proper permit.