Tag Archives: good times at everyone else’s expense

When Adult Diapers Come in Handy

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 4, 2009 – 2:13 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, good times at everyone else's expense
Tagged as ,

Having been raised on a Midwestern farm, wanting to be polite is a natural part of my personality that I have to really fight sometimes in order to keep myself from getting mugged, raped, and murdered. So when I saw a man about to sit on a puddle of water in the bus today, I couldn’t help but stop him. And the woman after him. And another man after him.

I suppose the window had been left open all night, and a spot of water about the diameter of a baseball had gathered in the butt groove of the seat in front of me. The cloudy sky kept light from bouncing off of it, so it took the unnatural obsession with not sitting in gum, body fluids, and spilled coffee of someone like me to look hard enough to see it.

At the next stop, more people filed in, and as the bus was starting to fill up, the empty row in front of me became too enticing, and a middle-aged man in a casual business ensemble practically dove to plop down in it. I winced at having not been able to say anything about the water and waited for him to notice that his rear end was soaking and to jump back up. I felt all of the people I’d warned not to sit there watching him from behind me.

But he just settled in with his newspaper to enjoy the ride. Sadly, I had to get off the bus before he did, so I didn’t even get to enjoy watching him stand up later, pants dripping.

(also posted to Examiner, Facebook, my Gmail chat status message, anywhere you are likely to be driven insane by it)

There’s a Reason That Train Car is Empty

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 15, 2009 – 12:05 pm
Filed under fun times on the subway, good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as , ,

I love riding the R train because of the complete lack of other people using it. Even though it’s one of the slowest lines with some of the oldest trains, its frequent stops and guaranteed room for sitting make it perfect for playing some New Super Mario Bros. on my Nintendo DS on the way home.

Yesterday afternoon made me question my love, though. When I stepped into a car near the end, I was met with the overpowering stench of excrement. Terrible smells are par for the course in New York, so I tried not to overreact and took a seat. But the odor was SO BAD. I looked around me and noticed people covering their noses with their hands, burying their faces in their coat lapels, so I knew it wasn’t just me.

Then I looked around some more and noticed that everyone was crowded at one end of the train car. Some boys had rushed by me in a hurry to get to the opposite end of the car as I’d taken my seat, but I didn’t think anything about it until I realized that literally everyone but me and a man across the aisle were huddled together against the door leading to the next car. I craned my neck to see what they’d all run from and realized that a person, a man, was lying down on one of the sets of seats at the far end of the car. Evidently his stench was so overwhelming that it’d filled the entire place.

I like to consider myself an understanding and nonjudgemental person, so I decided I would stay planted where I was, showing the world that I accept homeless people and know that they can’t help the lot they were given. If fat people can take up two seats, by God, filthy people can stink up entire cars! But then I started thinking about the canvas bag full of clean clothes I had with me and how all of them were going to be soaked through with the worst smell imaginable by the time I got off at Union Square.

So at the next stop, I hustled out of the car, onto the platform, and into the next car with everyone else. I yelled to a man who was entering the foul car, “DON’T GO IN THERE!”, and he scampered along with the rest of us. From there, it was as if we had all survived a natural disaster and were brought closer together because of it. People were being polite and actually laughing with each other, and the boys who had rushed by me in the smelly car now stood in the aisle of this clean car and watched people at every stop as they entered the realm of the rankness, scrunched up their noses, and ran back out onto the platform.

When I got off at 14th Street, I walked past the cars and saw that all but one of them were being filled like normal by commuters. And there in the seat where I had originally sat was one lonely woman, mired in the stench, looking as if she was about to pass out.

(x-posted to my Examiner)

Don’t Do Something We’ll Both Regret

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 27, 2009 – 11:30 am
Filed under everyone's married but katie, good times at everyone else's expense, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as , ,

Today at noon, I leave for three days in Ohio and then two days in Kentucky to see my baby sister GET MARRIED. Seeing as how we agreed long ago to never, ever wed, I obviously feel very betrayed by this. She and her fiancé have been together for more than three years and already own a house together, so this marriage is totally unnecessary and clearly just a way of hurting me.

However, I’m going to look awesome in my dark red bridesmaid’s dress that she picked out, so I forgive her.

But just in case this wedding is only a means of making it more socially acceptable when Joanie and Josh start having millions of babies (in Kentucky, no less), I just want to remind her of this picture of her holding our cousin’s son during Thanksgiving dinner:

Take the feeling you felt here and multiply it by ten thousand, Joanie.
And then imagine feeling it every moment of every day.
This is what it’s like to have a baby.

(Thank you and goodnight to all of my baby-owning friends out there.)

Pretty Much the Least Grateful Party Guest Ever

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 8, 2008 – 4:22 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, good times at everyone else's expense, it's fun to be fat
Tagged as , , ,

Saturday night was one of my friends-from-when-we-worked-at-Barnes-and-Noble-together’s birthday party at a bar with the least character possible. Dominique was turning something ridiculous like 38–even though she acts more like eighteen–so it made sense that the party started at SEVEN P.M. And that everyone therefore left at nine.

I didn’t want to make polite/faux smalltalk with old co-workers and her family members who had driven in from Pennsylvania (what?), so instead, I sat and talked to my friend Nastassia all night and showed her my best seated dance moves, which are apparently not so impressive. The highlight of the night, though, was scraping all of the icing off the cupcakes Dominique had made–no doubt from the The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook–

eating it, and wrapping the cake back in some used wrapping paper. I thought the crinkled mess would tip her off that it wasn’t really a gift, but she opened it with all of the gusto of Christmas morning:

And this is why I don’t have more friends.

If I knew for sure it wasn’t illegal to post other people’s phone numbers in my blog, I would do it SO FAST right now.

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 28, 2008 – 4:53 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, jobby jobby job job, my uber-confrontational personality
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In my incredibly important role as an executive assistant, I have to talk to a lot of really retarded people (none of which is my boss, I’d like to emphasize, in case he ever reads this). But none of these is more retarded than the IT telemarketer. This is the guy who never EVER bothers to look up the name of the IT manager at your location but just calls and casually tells you–obviously on speakerphone, because his legs are kicked up on his desk and he’s busy practicing his old frat’s secret handshake–to connect him to whoever happens to be the head of your IT department. Having a superiority complex and an intense desire to lose my job over something stupid like being snotty to salesmen, I make absolutely no effort to mask the loathing in my voice from these cretins.

HOWEVER, I just received a call from one at an NYC company called Axispoint and was uncharacteristically nice to him, simply because I was coming off a delicious chicken meatball lunch and had really enjoyed IMing Dr. Boyfriend about being excited to “warm up my ‘balls” all morning long. But as soon as I uncharacteristically nicely told this guy that we don’t even keep an IT department at our location–particularly ironic since we’re a software company–he just went and HUNG UP ON ME.

Can you believe it? I am the one who hangs up on people. I am underpaid one who has to talk to retards all day. I have a singsong voice that demands telemarketers to stay on the line longer. But not this guy.

I checked my call log, and of course I have his number from my caller ID. So what should I do with it?