Careless Whisper

I walk into the bathroom at my work to find a guy standing in front of one of the urinals, looking down, and softly talking to himself. I try not to stare.

“It’s okay, little guy, it’s gonna be okay,” he mumbles, staring intently downward. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his concerned expression. “You’ll feel better soon, I promise.”

He pauses for a bit, and then says, “Yeah, we’ll play tonight when I get home.”

I try not to show how creeped out I am.

“Okay,” the guy says as he flushes, turning around so that I can see the Bluetooth earpiece he is wearing. “Now give mom the phone.”

Not The Thomas Crown Affair

I noticed this news story today. To summarize, here’s the play-by-play:

A man gets a fake police car.

He gets a fake police uniform.

He pulls over a teenage girl driving alone late at night.

And then… he gives her a breathalyser test and lets her go.

Am I the only one who thinks that some people are really lacking in imagination?

I’d write more, but I think I’m going to fake some credentials, pretend to be a bank manager, sneak past security, break into the customer account records, and then generate some monthly statements for people.

Sharing is caring

I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, which made me think of an offer from a friend of mine to give me his memory foam mattress topper. I’m tempted to try memory foam in order to improve my sleep, but I’ve been contemplating the spectrum of hand-me-down acceptability: some things are perfectly okay to get used from a friend — coffee table or television, say; other things are clearly unacceptable — like toothbrush or underwear.

(By the way, this is all applicable to guys only. Girls seem to have no problems sharing things like underwear with close friends. Guys, on the other hand, know that even seeing another guy’s underwear makes them slightly gay.)

But anyway, back to memory foam bed toppers. I think a checklist needs to be developed to determine how socially acceptable it is to use a friend’s old belongings. For example:

• Do you have to wash it after at most 5 uses?
• In typical usage, is this object closer than 3 inches away from any part of the body other than the hand?
• If your parents asked to borrow this, would you feel weird?

A TV would score 0, making it totally okay to get from a friend. Underwear would score 3 points, making it clearly unacceptable. So would a toothbrush or, say, a vibrator. A porn DVD gets 1 point, falling into a gray area. A girlfriend would score 2-3 points, depending on your habits, making it a delicate proposition at best.

By this metric, I would be justified in taking the memory foam topper, since it only gets 1 point on the checklist (for being less than 3 inches away from the body during sleep), but I’m still unconvinced that this checklist is really the best way to measure things.

For instance, it doesn’t take into account my friend’s bedwetting.