Mistress Squidia's Death List of Ire

I see in my post on how Other People Drive Me Mad, that I mentioned that I have a Death List of Ire. Maybe I'd better make one, eh? Here we go, possibly in no particular order:

1. Movie Division
a) I known I've written about this before; but, People Who Talk and/or Cause a Ruckus During Movies make me crazy. Please people, you are not in your living room. There are some cultural issues here—people from the South seem more likely to shout back at the screen than we supposedly reticent Seattlietes do, but then the very old are often guilty of this heinous crime as well. Stop it now, because I'll get you with my rusty spoon. You're not using your spleen, right?

b) Also mentioned before—people who leave snow drifts of garbage for the ushers. Were you raised by wolves? Apparently so. (Apologies to wolves everywhere.)

c) People who constantly check their cell phones. Guess what? The cool full-color extra-large screen on your rampantly over-priced new cell phone you got for Christmas can be seen by everyone in the theater, including the people in the front rows and shuttle astronauts. DO NOT "multi-task" by sending text messages 12 to 17 times during the movie. Does it make you feel good to know that someone a few rows behind you is plotting your immediate and gruesome death?

d) People who kick. This is so common it hardly merits a mention. Do you want to keep the use of your legs? I thought so.

e) People who bring their very small children to violent R-rated movies. What, do you think they won't remember later? Years ago, Total Recall was ruined for me by the 2-year old who kept asking (plaintively), "Mommy, what's happening to that man's head?". More recently, I was shocked and appalled at the number of parents who DELIBERATELY took their kids of all ages to see The Passion of the Christ, which is basically a two hour snuff film. On the down side, as a direct result of this movie we probably will have a generation of sociopaths to look forward to; on the plus side, this movie will (hopefully) cause an entire generation to question the "values" of the Christian church.

As a side note, I have to laugh: the same theater which gave no hassle at all to parents taking very small children to The Passion, gave a lot of hassle to parents with older teenagers who were going to see The Girl Next Door. Let's see, the message this sends is, "Extreme violence and torture = 'good'; teenage sex = 'bad'". The Puritans would be so proud. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd rather my 16 year-old was having sex than beating the flesh off someone for 11 minutes straight with a steel-tipped whip. (And no, I don't think The Passion teaches people about how much Christ suffered for our sins. I think it teaches us that Mel Gibson is a full-on psycho whack-job pervert.)

2. Highway Division
a) People who shift lanes without signaling. Well, I'm happy you think I'm psychic, but perhaps some warning would keep me from having to release my harpoon?

b) All those yahoos who drive up real close behind me and honk, and then speed around me only to cut back into my lane six feet in front of me just because I happen to be going the speed limit. I don't mind you speeding, 'cause the cops will get you eventually, (therefore giving you something to rail and rant about at in the bar), but leave me alone to avoid tickets in my own way, umkay? Oh yeah, and your dick is fun sized.

c) People who drive angry in general. My ex-husband and most cab drivers I have known exist in this category. Please—we who are your passengers and fellow drivers don't need the profound experience of you speeding up to 50 miles-per-hour when you see a small opening, and then slamming on the breaks when the gap dries up (lather, rinse, repeat). Shaken Baby Syndrome can happen to anyone. I'd shoot you with my harpoon, but at these g-forces, aiming is difficult.

3. Co-Worker Division
a) Office Suck Ups. I once worked with a woman who's gross incompetence lost my (small and barely profitable) company over a quarter million dollars in sales on just one project. But, because she flattered the boss and took him out to lunch all the time, she wasn't fired. Over the years, every time she screwed up, the boss "promoted" her laterally, but in such a small company potential lateral moves eventually ran out. In the end she was running the division for which she'd originally lost so much money, and then the company went out of business. Being the office twinkie may get you a long way with the philandering boss, but if you must be a slut, please try to back it up with at least a modicum of competency. Do you know how many lethal weapons can be constructed out of average office supplies?

b) Time Wasting Morons. I worked with a guy who told me on the first day I met him that he hated meetings, "I hate it when people waste time talking and talking." I couldn't agree with him more...until our first meeting together. This guy spent each and every meeting blabbing away about stuff that had almost no relevance to anything—each meeting was at least 45 minutes to an hour longer because he loved to flap his gums. On the other side of the spectrum, when my evil ex worked at Microsoft and I went to visit him, I noticed that people there spent at least two hours a day yacking in the halls (admittedly, this was a while ago, but I doubt much has changed since). Office pranks were common, with loads of time expended on planning and execution of said pranks. In fact at the time, how funny you were was an integral part of your success at Microsoft. Now, I'm all for having fun at work, but not if it means I have to spend 12 hours on-site to get six hours of actual work done. I also have to wonder if this is part of why Microsoft Windows sucks so hard—a little more time testing things before launch maybe would be good?

c) People who pretend they are sooo over-worked. In any office, there are the 80% of people who basically do busy work and hide in their cubes stealing office supplies but who at least get some work done, the 10% of people who actually do most of the productive work of the company, and the 10% of people who complain constantly about being overwhelmed by their workload and yet who never actually seem to produce anything. For some reason, these people are often managers, but I've been a manager, so I'm on to you—if you are so over-worked, show me the results. Something. Anything. A toaster even. Next time you can do that last minute budget proposal yourself.

d) The 40-hour work week that is really 60+ hours long. Again, Europe is laughing at us. While we toil away on "Amazon Time" (as in amazon.com for any of you non-Seattleites) to pay for homes and children we never get to see in daylight, those willy Euros are working 35 hour (maxium) weeks and lazing on beaches in Thailand with their socialized medicine on their six-week-long vacations and sending their kids to university for free while snorting legal marijuana off their licensed sex-worker's taut and naked stomach. Meanwhile, we have to mull over whether or not we can afford the deductible for that broken little toe or small heart attack we suffered during the mandatory "team building" soccer game we were forced to play in during "lunch".

e) And finally, because they are such a common type of co-worker that they must be lumped in together: people who don't give a shit about anyone anywhere. These are the ones who don't make make more coffee when the pot is empty (or who spill coffee grounds everywhere and don't clean it up), who pee on the co-ed bathroom floor, who break equipment and don't tell anyone, or who, in extreme cases, leave their shift without telling anyone that something life-threatening is happening. This actually happened to me once—the engineers later told us that if we'd taken 15 minutes longer to fix the problem, there would have been a crater the size of two city blocks left where the building had been—and the day shift knew about the problem when they left. (Of course, that's back in the day when I briefly worked for bona fide Nazis. My shift supervisor had been in Hitler Youth. But, that's another post.)

4. Also-Rans
People who don't call back when they say they will; parents who make six times what I do but send their kids out to events with us with no cash on them (and who expect us to do all the driving); George Bush and all his cronies who think they can use whole countries to re-shape the globe for their own personal profit, (is Halliburton the real shadow government?); MTV and Hollywood for making women even more insane about their bodies; Christians, who think their their religion is so great even though it has been directly responsible for so much sickness, misery and death over the centuries; department store greeters; and finally, people who pinch the cheeks of small relatives. Even after all these years, I'm still sore.

Unlike Stephen Colbert, I have nothing against grizzly bears, even though they sometimes eat people. Or maybe especially because they sometimes eat people.

And there you have it, as of this date, Mistress Squidia's Death List of Ire. In the immortal words of Eugene Levy in Splash, "I'm a lovely person. If I had any friends you could ask them."