Gen Y stinks

It's not as though anyone pretends to love catching the tram to work ... especially at this time of year.  I mean it's crowded, damp, cold; there's never a seat for you to park your weary butt after dragging it across city blocks in order to hook-up with the illogical tram routes, and people are generally rude and as grumpy as you.

As if all that's not bad enough, this morning I had to stand next to two young guys who I am pretty sure ... hang-on ... [sniff sniff] ... yeah, I'm sure they had both been rolling in poo.  I lifted my nose (now on auto-shutdown) over the top of my magazine, and dared to view the source of this funk, but on viewing these fragrant specimens, I could see no brown smears, nor any other visible sign of soiling on their outer garments.  But I could smell them ... perhaps not poo after all, but certainly a rather putrid mixture of cigarette smoke and the stale odour of unwashed bodies.

As I retched and searched around for a place to stand at the other end of the carriage, these two stinky youths started talking about a girl of their acquaintance, whom they supposed was "going to be there later", and who they were expecting would bring some of her friends, and, from their leering tone, these two were pretty certain they were going to see some action as a result

Whaaaaaah?

Now I've never pretended to be an attractive Donkey, but even back in the day, when I was even more pimply, whiney and awkward than I am now, I still went to a lot of trouble to make an effort, and one of the first things one learnt when one was trying to attract a mate, was that the reek of unwashed adolescent boy was almost certainly the first criteria on that massive list of rejectable pre-requisites that the Presentation Nuns used to instil in their young borders, right from Day 1 (I know what you're thinking, perhaps Donkey might have had a little more luck if he'd cast the net a bit wider than the local Catholic girls' school – but we'll deal with that another time).

But the point is, one made an effort ... if not to smell like the Celvin Klein counter at Myer, then at least not to reek like stale faecal matter.

Still, these young turds thought they were in with a chance, and from the sound of their conversation, they didn't appear to be complete strangers to the female flesh.  So was it the young Donkey who was wrong? – going by my track record, it's possible – or are young women these days into the stinky stuff?  Either way, Melbourne's unfortunate commuters ought not to have to eat the shit sandwich yet again, this time by being forcibly exposed to the offensive courting rituals of Gen Y.

"Yeah Dude, let's go get some action".  Pic : http://8mm16mmfilmscollectibles.com

Cracking the Mousey Browns

So we're just sitting here watching the box the other night and out of the corner of my eye, I see a farking mouse!  Well, I'm hoping it's a mouse and not a rat ... but Fark!  A Farking mouse!

Now I don't wanna say I was born with a silver spoon up my arse, but I have managed to get through the first 36 years of my life without having had to deal with mice!  Sure, I've had possums, snakes, massive cockroaches and ridiculous, steal-your-baby-sized tropical spiders ... but never mice!

Makes me feel like I've failed 'cause my place is now so dirty that vermin wanna live here.  Gross man.  It's always the way; you finally give-in and get a cleaner every 2 weeks 'cause you don't have tome to live and clean, so instead of actually cleaning  a bit here and there every few days, you do absolutely nothing and let the place turn into a cesspit for 2 weeks until the cleaner comes, just so that you get your money's worth ... well, that's what we do, anyway.

So my first step in 'Operation Eliminate Jerry' was to ignore it all and hope it went away.  The next day, I find the end of an open banana gone.  Mr Belfast tells me that traps work, and that yes, they really do go for cheese, so against all my innate, animal rights sensibilities, I went and bought some traps and set 'em up with cheese.

The next day, the bastards had eaten through a plum, another banana-end and a tomato (which they carried half-way across the room in a parody of one of those old-school Disney, ants-at-the-picnic cartoons.  The cheese was untouched.

So I bite the bullet and decide that if they don't like cheese, but they eat bananas and tomatoes, I'll set the traps with that.  I also vacuumed the Begeezus out of the space behind the oven.  Since then, nothing on the traps has been touched, so I'm tipping they're either US Military-prototype Cyborg Mice with enhanced intelligence, or they've farked-off somewhere else.

Not sure which I'd prefer.  But I still feel dirty.

Cute, my arse!  This little, smug bastard was the nastiest piece of work going.  That big, fat, black lady in the stripey socks just couldn't ever see it.  Pic: http://4photos.net

What'll it be, Gents?

I'm about to head-off to the pub.  Perhaps that's not a very remarkable statement to you, and indeed, not five or six years ago, it might have been a statement I'd have uttered two or three times a day.  But at my current stage of life, visiting the pub on a Sunday afternoon is somewhat of a foreign experience ... and I'll admit to being a little nervous.

I wonder what happens at the pub these days?  Will we nonchalantly drink our beer at a ridiculous pace in order to passive-aggressively assert our manliness over our friends and their girlfriends?  Will we all fall over ourselves to reach the bar before each other in order to buy more jugs of beer before the ones we have are even empty?  Will we stand on the tables, crushing ashtrays and knocking glasses over as we shout Irish rebel songs to unknown women across the thoroughfare?  Will we spill beer all over ourselves and walk around looking as though we've wet ourselves?  Will we wet ourselves?

I really don't know what happens at the pub these days, but I am hoping that my years of training have prepared me such that I'll be able to blend right in.

This was too good to pass-up; this pic that came up on a Google Images search for 'beer'.  The source is The Tele (http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au) ... need I say more?

Inglorious Basterd

No prizes for working out where I’m positioned within the pecking order of my organisation; I share an open-plan office ‘pod’ with Dr Crikey, a man whose talents and intellect are inversely proportional to his standards of personal and work-station hygiene.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wanders past during the course of a day with a screwed-up nose to offer some ‘totally unexpected and incredibly witty’ remark about Crikey’s “open wardrobe” strewn across the sparse office furniture, and in particular, his sprawling floor display of fragrant, ageing footwear.

But despite the general abhorrence for Dr C’s organic art installation, another colleague, Professor Super, took advantage of Crikey’s characteristic tardiness earlier today by borrowing a black belt from a mouldering pair of daks in order to appropriately accessorise for an important meeting.

They call it ‘glass half full, glass half empty’; it is interesting how one man’s trash can be another’s treasure.

My colleague; “Will do public health work for food”.  Pic: http://theincompetencefiles.blogspot.com