The Regulars

A bad week for encountering my least favorite patrons--the mentally deficient, the hopelessly inept, the lonely who turn for companionship to those suckers unlucky enough to work public service stations. Already I've put up with several of the most intolerable frequent offenders:

Assburger's foolish soliloquies about the Library of Congress and staplers and tape dispensers are driving me mad; Gimpy Bill's "hey bro!" and lascivious comments about co-eds are painfully unfunny; Pride and Joy's pointless Christian evangelism and porn-viewing on public PCs (I'm sure he only visits those sites to email about the states of those poor nude young women's souls) make me cringe; Dante Inferno's insipid re-telling of the reasons why he got fired from KFC wasn't interesting the first four times; The Turk's ability to torment me via phone (now that he's living in Ephesus he can no longer visit) still surprises; Ataxerxes' request for "help" with his "research"--which, as usual, translates from the Persian into "do this work for me", peon--remind me I need to find a new job.

And of course, there's the despicable Tiny Drum, daily confounding me with requests to edit his scrawled PhD(eficiencies). I just told him I can't read any more of his papers because he needs a tutor badly, and his face dropped. "You have major problems with subject/verb agreement, your tenses are all over the place, you don't have an inkling about the appropriate articles to use before nouns, you randomly pluralize, you've never in your life written a sentence free of comma splices, you use semicolons in place of commas, and are completely incapable of putting an apostrophe in the proper place on any possessive. On top of all these problems, your writing is vague, unclear, and disorganized. Go to the Writing Lab. I'm not going to be here forever, and so long as I keep editing this stuff your writing will not improve." His response: "I know, but I don't have time to go over there." My response: "I don't have time to keep reading these papers. Editing won't help--you need a tutor. I strongly recommend it."

I feel better now. Sorry for the rant.