Crap, Wouldja Lookit Sourpuss!

I've been all over the world, I've seen all kinds of things, and I've done even more of them, and I've seen even more types of people than I've ever really wanted to ... but this beats the cake hands down. It beats the cake so bad that the cake has decided to go home and call it a day, and is now seriously considering a Restraining Order.

I never in my life imagined that there really are people who like they've sucked on a lemon. I always assumed it was a kind of metaphorical sourpuss, you know, someone who's just so damned crabby all the time that you can't help but assume there's some kind of lemon or equally citrussy (?) sour fruit action goin' on.

Enter Sourpuss, stage left.

Sourpuss came from the Land of Express Personnel, that freaky, weird domain that manages to catch people in it's all consuming, entirely misleading ads (Want to Work in the World of Retail, call us 1-800-EVIL-LIARS and start today ... two weeks later you're digging ditches in abandoned mine shafts, hoping that the bird in the cage doesn't die). Sourpuss had some kind of bizarre Machiavellian response to the limited and suffering hierarchy of power, probably operating under the delusion that since we called her back more than once, she was in like the proverbial Flynn.

Silly Sourpuss, we hire people from Express with the ... express ... purpose of using you like human chattel. But I digress.

Sourpuss immediately went to work on pitting the other few woman against each other by doing the usual combination of backstabbing, lies, misrepresentation and at least one attempt at character assassination. What she failed to realize was that every single person she talked to went immediately to the person being gossiped about and warned them. The whole time she was there, I don't think she said a nice thing about another person, and yes, her face did in fact look like it was being consumed from the inside out by the GrandMaster of All Lemons, a mighty citrus fruit god that hovers on the brink of existence, merely waiting for the moment when Sourpuss herself finally figures out a way to bridge the gap.

Sourpuss was also a knowitall. There is only room for one knowitall in any one place, because the concentration of knowledge is simply too dense to support more than one. Trying to cram two knowitalls into the same space/time is roughly like trying to fit Andre the Giant and Louie Anderson into the same Volkswagen Bug.

If you had been to the Andes, she knew someone who had climbed to the top. If you graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law, she had traveled back through time to lay down the shaky ground rules that would result in the laws we follow today. Get the picture? Somehow through this, her lips, cheeks and even her forehead maintained that swirly position you get when you taste something truly awful.

If you can't tell, I hated Sourpuss more than anything else in the entire world. During her time there, I think I said three words to her. I was physically incapable of saying anything to her. Simply looking at her made me want to reach out and snap her Sourpuss having, Knowitall doin neck and then throwing her out with the trash. Too harsh? You didn't witness her making the same mistake twice.

There's a saying. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice shame on you. Usually it applies to liars and the lied, but it works in this situation.

One of our packing lines has a free standing metal detector. The sealed product comes down the conveyor belt and goes through the metal detector. If we've put razor blades and used hypodermics in there, it goes off, and the mini-conveyor belt stops to let you know you've got Chernobyl in a bag.

The two conveyor belts are seperated by a small gap, and actually move in different directions, so if, IF, IF you are stupid enough to try and stick your arm in there, the motion will actually pull your arm in right to the armpit. It's not incredibly dangerous (I did it one day just to see if I would be able to pull my arm out ... I did and I got caught and reamed out like a bad day trip to OZ), but it's not advisable.

Sourpuss was working that line at the end, throwing the bags onto the skid. She spent too much time writing the next great planetary opus or drooling into her coveralls, because more than once, the bags got all squished up by the metal detector and we all had to stop and watch why she tried to yank the bags out with brute force instead of simply turning the belts off. The first (notice FIRST) time she almost got her arm caught in the conveyors should have been indication enough that it was DANGEROUS to stick your hands in MOVING machinery.

Not so.

Not 3 minutes later, I got the awful joy of watching her shriek her freakin' head off as the conveyor belts grabbed hold of her hand like a possessive mother and yank her right down to the armpit. Now me, because I a) knew she was in no serious danger and b) hated her ass more than anything else since the Major Ass-Hating of 1997, I didn't move. I watched as the linesman calmly flicked a switch to stop the belts from munching her armpit and then laughed my ass off while everyone had to get involved in moving all the conveyor belts and metal detectors and skids full of product so we could extricate her without further damage.

It was a three ring circus, lead by the Sourpuss Knowitall, complete with soundtrack provided by White Zombie (the track Living Dead Girl played through my head that week non-stop).

COming up sometime soon ... Slowpants Bewoop and "I-Was-Gonna-Say"