I came into work today thinking that I’d had a bit of a rough weekend, which is to say that it was rougher than usual. I’m the kind of guy that really enjoys the weekend and feels the need to make as much of not being at work as possible at the end of a long week, and last week was a long week. So my kid has a cold and was acting fully two years old for the most part, and I thought he put my wife and I through the ringer a bit.

Well then I came to work and heard about the weekends of two of my co-workers (names will be altered to protect the identities of these poor saps).

Let’s start with Mr. Smythe:

I don’t really have to say much about Mr. Smythe’s weekend, except that he had to endure survive enjoy the singular experience of taking the eleven year old scouts on an overnight campout, including a five-mile hike. As is the case with every scout troop, it seems, one of his scouts is severely smitten by ADD (also known as “The-Kid-Is-Deathly-Hyper syndrome”). So the short version of the story is that HyperBoy is one of those kids who can’t stop running his mouth under any circumstance, and one of the other boys, we’ll call him Gigantor (you all know the kid: the one who at eleven looks like a caveman, the one who’s twice the size of any of the other kids when they stack on each others’ shoulders and who has had to shave twice a day since he was six), well Gigantor is the kind of kid who responds to the constant needling of his peers with, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. PUNCH!”

So the combination is volatile, to say the least.

As might be expected, at 2:00 in the morning, HyperBoy is screaming and sobbing, and Mr. Smythe comes out of his tent to see what all the ruckus is about.
   Hyperboy is sobbing, “He ch-ch-choked me! I c-c-can’t BREATHE!!!”
   And Gigantor is red in the face and fuming and muttering, “I warned him. He just wouldn’t shut up.”
   And Mr. Smythe is secretly pleased and wants to high-five gigantor, but what kind of message would that send?

And if you thought that was bad, let’s move on to Mr. Crater:

Mr. Crater has a new baby, and this weekend he and his wife were planning to perform a religious ceremony celebrating the birth of said baby. So Mr. Crater had his family coming to stay with him in his cozy house, which has, according to him, a maximum occupancy rating of 9.

So his family shows up on Friday, but the real fun starts on Saturday morning when his cousin calls. Apparently his cousin’s power has gone out, and he needs power to run his computer to do his online finals, so Mr. Crater, being the generous soul that he is, says, “Come on over,” and in pour the cousin and his wife and three kids, who we will call Godzilla, Captain Ramrod, and The Sampler (I’m exaggerating here, as Mr. Crater did not actually specify which kid was which in his telling of this tale. It seems that in his mind the kids were a collective, multi-headed act of destruction, sort of like the Hydra).

So the house is getting very crowded and very, very…how can we put this delicately…active, we’ll say. So the cousin gets his computer up, but it keeps re-booting on startup. So what does he suggest? “Hey, can I take apart your computer and hook my hard drive to it to see if I can get to my finals?” That sounds like a genius notion if ever I’ve heard one, but Mr. Crater, being already primed to explode, agrees to this because at this point he is going insane from the crowd and the hydra running about completely unsupervised, destroying his newly purchased home.

What can you imagine that would make this situation even better? The air conditioner dies. The temperature in the house spikes immediately to 92 degrees. So they call for a repairman, and while they’re on the phone with him, somebody opens the fridge and says, “Hey, why is it warm in the fridge?” So now the fridge is dead too, and the same repairman who is supposed to fix the A/C is being sent by the home warranty company, so he’s supposed to look at the fridge and also the microwave, which has its own issues, but the rocket scientist on the phone who’s writing up the ticket doesn’t think to consolidate the issues into one visit, and they charge per visit. So the repair guy shows up with two tickets that are timestamped (and I’m not making this up) three minutes apart, each of which incurs a separate service charge.

Well to top things off, the next day when the actual religious ceremony is to be held at the house, 20 more people show up than were planned, and there are a total of 12 chairs. The A/C is working again, but struggling to keep up, so the house is still uncomfortably warm, and it’s standing room only with a total of 50 people, who all, for unknown reasons, decide the best place to congregate is the kitchen.

In the meantime, Godzilla is running around pushing over the 12 chairs, Captain Ramrod is sitting on the coffee table and launching himself off backwards onto his head on the floor, and The Sampler is picking up pieces of watermelon, taking a bite, then putting them back so he can move on to another piece of watermelon, of which he takes a bite, then puts it back. Some conscientious cousin from the other side of the family sees this and asks the child the question that everybody in the house has been wondering all weekend, “Where are your parents?” To which the child’s mother responds by turning around to see what he is doing from her vantage point of two feet away with her back turned. By this time The Sampler has already moved on to opening the coolers that are holding the contents of the as-yet-unrepaired refrigerator, pulling out cans of soda, opening them, taking a sip, putting them back, and repeating. Mr. Crater’s dad has gone to pick up the celebration victuals from the nearby grocery store, but they party platters are not ready yet, so he’s running a half an hour behind schedule, and all 50 waiting guests are still standing around the kitchen.

So I want to thank Misters Smythe and Crater, because by comparison, my weekend suddenly feels restful, rejuvenating, and thoroughly satisfying. Thanks for taking one for the team, fellas. Working men everywhere are tipping their hats to the both of you today.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Assorted Randomness, MightyThor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.