The worst lunch ever

Two posts in one night. Yeah, completely different topics.

Worst... lunch... ever. This past Thursday.

My class schedule is such that I have classes from 9:30 until practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then I have practice until dark. Between Russian and International History of the Cold War, I have one hour to get lunch. Plenty of time, seriously.

First stop, Au Bon Pain (ABP? No. Au Bon Pain. They're both three syllables. Deal with it.) As many of you may know, I prefer to have soup for lunch before practices. It gives you some electrolytes, some extra water, a bunch of carbs, a little protein, and it certainly doesn't weigh you down. What kind of soups do they have? Potato Leek. Some horrid Southwest Bean somethingorother that looked like Montezuma's Revenge isolated to a crock pot. Where is the chicken noodle, or French Onion, or even a pussy Minestrone? How can this place possibly think that it can make more money selling Potato Leek than chicken noodle? I don't even know what a leek is! And for $4.80-something a bowl, I want to know what's in my god damn soup!

Next stop, J-Street. This... was a bad choice. I walk in, looking at the Jamba Juice line as the first line I can see in the food court. Not bad, I say to myself, foolishly making the number of people in the Jamba Juice line the standard for the establishment. I walk around, check out what's in the District Market Express ($6 for a ham and swiss? I'll district your market...). Subway line? Pff. In your dreams kiddo. The morass of Aramark has allowed the line to grow to lengths surpassed only by the infuriatingly ever-present line at package services.

Then I find one of my best friends at GW. Pleasentries are exchanged, rudimentary conversation is initiated, then someone else we know is just walking in - several meters away. Like a fat kid ditching a stale cupcake, I am physically left flapping in the wind in favor of the newcomer. Rude? Maybe. At the time, given my increasing alarm at the prospect of going to practice lunch-less, yeah, I was pissed. In retrospect, an "excuse me," or "hey, it's [that person]," would have significantly improved my day. But once I turned around, and saw that the Jamba Juice line, my last fruity resort, had grown to elephantine proportions, I knew the street vendor hot dog was inevitable. And so it was. Thus, the worst lunch ever, and the rest of the day followed in that mold.

But now is no time for bitching. A well-cooked meal of marinated chicken, noodles, and cut corn - plus my all-time favorite movie, The Usual Suspects on AMC - has improved my mood significantly. Now it is truly time to put this week, and Thursday's lunch, behind me.

My name tag gave me a purple nurple!

Many of you may have heard the news that I'm now working. No, it seems that my penny pinching and non-drinking are not enough to keep my checking account as thick and juicy as I want it to be. I made an assessment of the skills that I had. It went something like this-

-Hey nut job, what can you do right?
-Not much, what's it to you?
-Fuck you buddy. Seriously we need money, what is your slut ass good at?
-Um. I don't know but they liked you back at the town hall.
-So bureaucracy ehh...

And of course, the inevitable conclusion was, hey, I was a paper-pusher for three summers - what's the most bureaucratic office on campus? Why, CLLC of course (housing department). Thus, I'm working at the CLLC Resource Center, a.k.a. CLLC At Your Service a.k.a. CLLC Resource Desk a.k.a. CLLC. Basically all day I direct people's calls and tell people "no, you can't switch into Ivory Tower even though your friend's roommate got the plague."

The people are cool. The process of "contact logging" is not. Imagine that you work at a gas station. It's very accessible to passing traffic. People know that you pretty much know everything there is to know about the surrounding area. But your ability to help them is very specific, i.e., you're not the Home Depot, you're not the Community Center, you're not Wal-Mart. You're a gas station. You sell people gas and maybe some delicious snacks, but that's about it.

Imagine though, that not only do you have to answer the most random-ass questions you can possibly think of, but you have to write it all down and then input it into a computer system. Not only that, but when people come in actually asking about GAS, you still have to write it down and type it in. When someone comes in and buys a Charleston Chew, yup, still gotta write it down. Furthermore, whenever people call you, to ask how your supply of Virignia Slims is lookin'... you still gotta write it down.

Basically, that's my job. Really it's supposed to be helping people manage their housing, but in fact, we have to help everyone who comes in. And we also have to keep records of it - "it" meaning everything. I've worked in a Congressman's office, and a municipal office, and never have I seen anything like this. Contact logging is the devil.

Furthermore, as the title indicates, one of my titties did indeed get twistered today... by my fucking name tag! Working the Friday night shift is gold - you don't get a single person coming in, and you can just sit and hang out for three hours (at $10 an hour, mind you). So in the interim, I was fiddling with my nametag compulsively. It's one of those deals where it's a nametag with a piece of metal on it, and a second piece which is a strong magnet. Needless to say my nurple was purpled by the magnet piece as it was drawn to the back of my nametag.

Are there standards anymore?

Let me make this perfectly clear. I do not think it is acceptable to bring up your sexual exploits in a group setting. And I'm even more appalled that this even needs to be said. Since when is it acceptable to be sitting down for lunch/dinner/whatever and start talking about how you banged some sorority slut last night? IN A PUBLIC PLACE no less! I'm not going to say no one wants to hear it, because clearly other people do for some reason. Whether you think this affirms your manhood, or whether you just want to keep up your image as a man who gets around, I don't care. Some things you just don't talk about in a setting like a restaurant. This isn't entirely the fault of the story-tellers either. Most of the time, others request that the whole lurid tale be spewed forth to the group. The instigator(s) is/are just as much at fault here.

I can't think of a single time in my life, other than times I've been sitting down with my team here at GW, that anyone has gone into as much embarassing detail about their lives in the bedroom. Not even when I was at a different university playing with a different group of guys. Not even when I was in high school and everyone was just getting into sex and all that. I don't care if everyone else wants to hear about it and I'm the only one who doesn't. Save talking about your conquests when you're in a more isolated setting. In public, it's uncouth. It's embarassing to people like me who try to adhere to accepted norms of behavior in public places. It's rude. It's totally inappropriate. And I lose respect for people when they engage in it because it reflects poorly on you, on the team, and on the student body as a whole. Furthermore, I can guarantee if someone on the team were openly gay and started telling stories of their exploits, everyone would be appalled.