Of Pee Shirts and Steamers and RTA Nazis

I'm sitting here in a hotel room in Cleveland listening to the ocean and seagulls, and now my shirt for tomorrow smells like pee.

"Why does your shirt smell like pee, Johnny?" you may ask.

"Because I just ironed it," I would reply, "and I am fairly sure someone recently pissed in the iron."

I deduce this because the steam emanating from it smells like the bathroom at work, had the bathroom at work been heated to two hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Gotta love these high-class hotels. So if I smell like pee tomorrow, it's not my fault.

Oh yeah -- if you're wondering about the ocean and seagulls, there's some sort of cheesy sound generator that takes the place of the regular old am/fm clock radio. I think it was upgraded along with the flat-screen TV that you can't change the aspect ratio on, so everyone looks short and fat. I gotta tell you though -- It proved to me that Evangeline Lilly would still be hot even if she was 4 feet tall and weighed 170lbs. Anyway, this thing is set to "ocean." Unfortunately, the only way you wouldn't notice the loop point on this piece of shit is if you have short-term memory damage and your melon violently resets itself every 15 seconds.

On the way out here this morning it was so foggy we had to sit on the runway for about 20 minutes waiting for the fog to lift. It was a pain in the ass, but I had the emergency exit seat with nobody sitting next to me, so I got to spread out a bit. The flight itself was fine, but the landing was a little interesting. For some reason, we hit pavement and we were coasting along nicely when the pilot slammed on his brakes and banked hard left. It was the airplane equivalent of driving down the highway in the fast lane and then noticing you were about to miss your exit and instead of just continuing to the next one, you cut across three lanes of traffic and hit the cloverleaf at 85mph. Not sure what that was about, but my nap was over.

I usually take the subway into the office, so I paid my buck seventy-five and sat down on a train that apparently belonged to Mr. T. As we were about to pull out of the station, a large bling-wearing black dude wearing an RTA coat yelled "DOORS CLOSIN!" and the train started moving. A few seconds later, he yelled at some poor white woman who had her bag about 3 inches into the aisle. "MA'AM! MOVE YOUR BAG to either the LUGGAGE RACK or the SEAT NEXT TO YOU. RTA REGULATIONS STATE THAT THE AISLE MUST BE FREE OF OBSTRUCTIONS AT ALL TIMES!" She jumped like she had been tasered in the ass and grabbed her bag off the floor.

At the next stop, a woman with a stroller got on and the stroller was in the aisle. Mr. T immediately sensed a disturbance in the subway force, and popped back out of his hidey hole.

"BREAK DOWN THE STROLLER AND GET IT OUT OF THE AISLE," he yelled in his bestest and loudest authoritative voice. "HOLD THE BABY ON YOUR LAP. THIS IS FOR OUR SAFETY AND THE SAFETY OF YOUR BABY."

I was a split-second away from doing what he said, and it wasn't even my stroller.

This woman, however, was clearly taking no shit from him. She yelled back, "IT'S BROKEN, IT DON'T BREAK DOWN, AND I AIN'T WAKIN' UP MY BABY." Case closed. He wasn't about to get in a fist fight with a 240 lb. angry black woman with cankles the size of my thighs, so he let it go. RTA regulations be damned.

When I de-trained, I stopped at Caribou Coffee (the resident Starbucks clone) to get a quick cup of joe before heading to the office. The guy in front of me illustrated exactly why this place was not, and never would be, any competition for Starbucks.

He walked up to the girl behind the counter and order something called a "Pumpkin Steamer." Maybe it's just me, but if I were in charge of the marketing department at Caribou Coffee I would know better than to open a store in Cleveland and put anything at all on the menu that involved the word "steamer."

And on a final note -- If you think blogging is a waste of time, it's nothing compared to this.

Freak.