The High Point of the Bell Curve

Retail Drone 3 or The Joy of Gullible Colleagues

2008-02-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

I love working with gullible people.
This is opposed to working with stupid people which is no fun at all. Stupid people are too dumb to be gullible. They just accept any bovine excrement you care to pour past their trusting, imbecile eyes and down their gaping maws. There's no challenge. For true gullibility goodness, the target must be smart, or at least have some sense of credulity. Anything else is cheating.
I've had some fun at my new job. Several of the staff are young, which is a good start. Two didn't know who Chuck Norris was. I mean, come on! Chuck Norris!
My linux-loving colleague Karl is possibly the best target. This is because he knows about four things in life:

Linux
High-definition TVs
Computers
Computers that run Linux. (In HD.)

Most of the other basic elements of human interaction entirely escape him. Like happened today.
Some kid was fiddling with one of the computers we sell. Karl was drifting around not doing much, so I said:

"Hey, Karl. Is it bad if that kid is, um, editing the registry?"

Karl went completely white.

"Yes, it is bad! Stop him!" he screamed, much too loud.

The kid, who was playing Peggle, bolted. The rest of us had a good laugh, except Karl, who didn't quite get it and kept trying to explain that editing the registry was a Bad Thing.

There's plenty more of this kind of thing, but I'm tired from a long Sunday at work and can't remember any. I guess I'll start keeping a bit of a list and blog 'em as they happen.

Other things that come to mind:

More Hillbillies: We had some real class acts come in today. Two guys and a girl. One bloke had the best (worst?) sideburns I'd ever seen and a tattoo of his name on his neck. His neck! The other sported a gut that could only be the product of a diet of beer, chips, lard, and tapeworms. Neither wore shirts. The girl was special. She looked like she'd fallen pregnant at 12, aborted, and consoled herself by eating solidly for the next six years. None of the staff went anywhere near them. White trash tend not to buy things anyway, unless they've sold a real good haul of weed or the caravan's burned down and they're pulling an insurance scam.

The Assistant Manager quit: Sad, because he was a good bloke. Happy, because this gives Karl the chance to fulfill his life's dream and rise to Assistant Manager.

Rap Sucks: We recently got the TVs fixed and now they're tuned to C4 all the time. Apparently C4 could change its name to The Rap And RnB Channel and no-one would notice. It's all they show. Which raises some questions:

Why do rappers all include the phrase "in da club" in all their songs? Is it a pre-requisite of some kind?
Why are all rap girlfriends (bitches?) called "shorty?" Is it a dwarf fetish thing?
Why is the median strip on a busy motorway the perfect place to sing a heartfelt ballad to your beloved?
Why is it surprising that police would try and catch a man "rolling with the gangsters," riding dirty? Isn't that what gangsters do, generally?
WHY, IN THE NAME OF GOD, DOES ANYONE LISTEN TO THIS HORRIBLE, GENERIC, USELESS, SOUL-CRUSHING MUSIC!?!?!

Look what they made me do. All caps and four exclamation marks. The world is screwed. Seriously.

Retail Drone, Part 2

2008-01-19T02:03:00.001-08:00

Well, work sucked today. There were two good customers the whole day. The rest were a happy mixture of morons, tyre-kickers, and the purely evil. Not to mention I think Cute Girl has a boyfriend, which is always the way.
I’ll make a list of the idiots who came in today, for my own satisfaction.

Moans For Kicks Man:
This guy was what Gollum would look like if you stretched him out to six feet tall and took away the nice bits, and gave him cancer of the personality. He came in for no other reason but to moan that we’d caused him trouble trying to get in a microwave he was happy with. The story was he’d bought a microwave. He brought it back to the store because it was fogging up when he cooked stuff in it. Microwaves do this. He obviously didn’t know, and wouldn’t accept any of the staff’s explanations (I wasn’t there at the time) that it was perfectly normal. So one of the staff – Cute Girl I think – rang the manufacturer and got some retard who didn’t know that microwaves fog up sometimes. So we got him a new microwave. Which he decided was not big enough. “Product knowledge,” he said, wagging his finger under his tumour of a nose. “Product knowledge would have saved me all this hassle.” I was a spectator for most of the time while he berated the girls, who are just out of school and in their first full time jobs. When he started getting heated I butted in, asking what the trouble was. He told me, in great detail. I tried to explain that the girls could hardly be expected to magically know everything about all the products in their first two weeks on the job. He didn’t care. He just wanted to bitch and feel a little power in his impotent veins. I said (politely as hell, of course): “So you just came in to tell us how unhappy you are?”
Him (entirely missing the sarcasm) “Yes. I am very unhappy”
Me: “There’s nothing else we can help you with?”
Him “No.”
Me: “Well, go shove your face in a blender and do the world a favour, you stupid, imbecilic, narcissistic fucking excuse for a human being.”
I didn’t say that, but I bloody well should have.

Waste All My Fucking Time Woman:
This bitch came in asking about a laptop, as her last one had died. Lots of questions, which I answered. Then moaning about the price. I figured it was going downhill fast, but I said I’d see what we could do with the price anyway. Now, the computer was already discounted right down, almost to cost. I took 50 bucks off and explained. Was she happy? No. So I saw the manager and asked if we could take any more. I got another fifty off. I should explain about discounts and how we calculate them. Discounts eat into the shop profit. The more we discount the less the shop makes. Company policy is we can only discount down to a certain margin (it’s not supposed to be lower than 15 per cent) otherwise the company isn’t even clearing staff wages. The way I’d sussed this laptop, it was barely scraping the 10 per cent margin. It was, without a doubt, the cheapest retail laptop in the country. We were literally paying her to take it away. What did she do?
“Oh, for god’s sake. I’m not paying that much for a computer. I’m going to go next door (there’s another electronics shop next door. God knows what they were thinking) and get one there.”
She’s welcome to it, not that a cheaper one exists in New Zealand. I hope it explodes. Her last one probably committed suicide.

The Person Who Made Me So Angry I Can’t Remember Anything About Them:
I don’t know who this person was, what they wanted, or what they said to piss me off. All I know is that I swore and ground my teeth and fumed for about ten minutes after they’d left, enough to start worrying my co-workers. They understood, though. Everyone agreed that it was the worst day for customers we’d seen in ages.

The funny thing was, we made quite a lot of money for the day. We should have Satan’s minions in more often. They’re pricks, but they’re big spenders.

Life as a Retail Drone, Part One

2008-01-18T01:12:00.000-08:00

New mediocre moment: I got me a drone job. In retail. If I hang in there long enough I might rise to supervisor. Yus!

Work can be fun. Nothing interesting happened today, but there’s been some interesting stuff. I work with a pretty good crew. They’re all relatively non-stupid. One girl is really cute, which is a bonus. We were working with a gay guy called Raoul who I didn’t mind (despite his being a little bitch) but he opted to shoot through on Monday on account of breaking up with his shit-sack of a boyfriend. I’d met the guy when he came into the shop on occasion. Total fuckwad, gives gay guys a bad name. I’d advised Raoul to break up with the him, and he did. And shot through to Auckland, leaving the shop in the lurch. The interesting thing is the tills hadn’t been balancing for some reason and no-one could figure out why. Well, I guessed someone had busy fingers. Now Raoul’s shot the tills have balanced perfectly every day. Hmmm.
I’ll remember Raoul for one thing, apart from the bitching and backstabbing and reluctance to work. It was probably the only time we’ll ever agree on an assessment of a woman’s attractiveness. Picture this. I’m standing by the counter about four feet from the automatic door. This dude slopes in. He’s blond and shabby looking – one of the hillbilly types we get in fairly often. His smell followed him in about a second later. Then came his wife (sister? Both?) who was the fattest partial solar eclipse of a woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Many obese women look a bit like the spinnakers on racing yachts but this one shamed even them. She blotted out the sun. Small objects orbited her. Parents screamed and clutched their kids close. She was almost perfectly spherical on account of her tits sagging around where her belly button would normally be. Rolls of fat escaped her already plus-size clothing. She was, of course, wearing the ubiquitous uniform of the hideously obese – trakkie daks and t-shirt. She heaved and snorted with each wobbling step. Her smell outdid even her husband’s impressive effort. Other customers swiftly began to leave. The entire staff of the shop managed to avoid getting near or making eye contact with the couple, in a lovely example of ignoring the glaringly obvious. The couple began to roam the now-empty store. I hid behind the counter.
Raoul, of course, needed to say a few words. The poor guy was almost dry-retching at this woman’s undeniable awfulness, and I was about as sick as he was. “God!” he said, sweating. “How could she wear that? How could she be like that? It’s so disgusting!”
Meanwhile, Partial Solar Eclipse woman and her hillbilly satellite were ambling over to where another colleague, Karl, was fiddling with the computers. Karl is a tech guru – he uses Linux, which should tell you all you need to know about him – and, while he remains a genuinely decent guy, he is not brilliant with people at the best of times. I watched, deadly interested, to see how this exchange would turn out.
Karl looked up and went white. Perhaps it was the woman’s gravitational field getting hold of his blood. Or it could have been the smell. Ever smelled rancid grease? Well, add a dash of Cabbage Juice, the stuff you get at the bottom of fridges, and a healthy smattering of Eau De Two-Week-Old-Dead-Possum, mix and marinade for an hour, and you’ve got it. Anyhoo, the freaks come up and ask him if we’ve got Microsoft Office (which is prominently displayed on shelves they walked past at least twice.) He answered in the affirmative and got the hell out of there. Then, thank the gods, they left.
Karl came up to me and Raoul afterward and told us that when the hillbilly dude talked to him, you could see fat lice crawling around in his sparse blond hair.
RIP, Raoul. You’re in a better place now, I hope.

Names have been changed because it’s cool to say “names have been changed.” Also, I’m not keen on losing my job.

Behind the Grassy Knoll

2007-12-03T01:49:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine - you know who you are - and I have a terrible running joke. I don't remember exactly how it got started (okay, I do. I'm just not going to say right now) but it involves accusing each other of being the sort of person who sports sunglasses, pulled-low trucker caps, dodgy facial hair, drives vans with the windows painted over, has a mysterious mirthless smile, and hangs around primary schools dispensing free candy.
Paedophiles, namely.
I said it was a terrible joke. It is. It gets worse.

Picture this: I'm on holiday in Australia and Movember is about to finish. So far, boring. But stay with me. My mate and I are comparing pictures of our horrible facial hair via the majick of the interwebs. He has a sparse Tex-mex porno mo. I have a mo-goatee combo that looks like I've glued pubic hair to my face, while suffering from acute Parkinsons.
I tell him he looks like a rapist.
He tells me: "You know you have to get a photo taken outside of a primary school before the month is over."
I'm a sucker for taking people up on stupid dares. Luckily there is a primary school just down the road from where I'm staying. It finished a month ago. I figure, cool, I'll nip down there with a trucker cap and sunnies and snap a pic, all without getting arrested or within miles of any actual kid.
I didn't, though, because I found something even dodgier.
On Saturday I went into Brisbane for a concert. I was a few hours early so I went to Southbank to kill time. I figured I'd have a swim while I was there - Southbank's got this big fake lagoon thing, and it was piping hot.
I get there and the lagoon's shut for repairs. The only area open is the kiddy pool, and it's crowded with around 400 kids. I thought: photo op. There's no way my mate will be able to top this for sheer dodgyness.
I was, excellently, wearing sunglasses and my awful facial hair.
I snapped a picture of myself with my best smirk. Parents moved their children away from me. I don't blame them. Then I moved away, feeling pretty gross.
But it was hot. I think the day topped out at around 32 degrees.I fancied I was getting heatstroke. I wandered around in an agony of indecision for about twenty minutes. Then I said to the lifeguard "Can you take my bag for thirty seconds?" and went for a swim.
Well, not a swim. The pool was about a meter deep, so all I could do was lie down, like a big bath. Within seconds, I'd cleared an area of a good thirty metres square, with parents sensibly dispatching their kids to the far regions of the lagoon. I got out pretty smartly, took my stuff back from the bemused lifeguard, and nipped off to get dry. Did I mention I didn't have a towel? I didn't have a towel. There was a little grassy knoll about twenty metres off to the right, so I went there to dry off and inadvertently discovered Kiddy Fiddler Country.

On the grassy knoll were at least five adult men. Genuinely sinister looking blokes. The one nearest me looked like Ernest Hemingway shortly before his suicide, if Ernest had ever kicked back in black Speedos and litres of fake tan. He was "reading," within eyeshot of the entire kid's lagoon. I would put money on the book being upside down or something. My skin actually crawled. I used my t-shirt to dry off and got the hell out of there.

I sincerely hope the cops have that area well staked out. Happily, I've now shaved, and look part-way respectable. But I have an unbeatable photo to remember Movember by.

By The Rivers Of Babble-On

2007-11-17T01:45:00.000-08:00

So this post is a thing a mate posted somewhere. As far as I can tell, it's an Internet meme that claims to be "real metaphors" taken from "real essays" somewhere. Where they're supposed to be from changes a lot, as do the metaphors from time to time. I think the idea is to point out how stupid the students who wrote them are.
So, two things. The grammar Nazi in me wants to point out that they're not metaphors - they're all similes, dumbshits. Also, they're not stupid. They're brilliant. It takes real imagination to come up with stuff like this. I wish more people wrote like it. Except the one with the bowling balls - that's a Douglas Adams rip-off.

Enjoy.

The following metaphors were found in New South Wales Year 12 English essays in 2003.

* Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

* She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature prime English beef.

* She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

* Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

* He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

* The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

* The little boat gently drifted across the pond - exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

* He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

* McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

* From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Sex in the City" comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

* Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

* The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot oil.

* John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

* He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

* She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

* She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

* It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

* Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

* The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

* The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

* "Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted; her breasts heaving like a university student on $1-a-beer night.

* He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

* The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

Things Are New

2007-11-04T16:36:00.001-08:00

So I just got this Blogger account. I posted all my old blogs to it.
Now, I have a MySpace, a Bebo, a Facebook, a Livejournal (I don't use it, I couldn't be bothered learning the system or whatever) a thing called a Ning, and this. My friend also suggested getting a Deviant Art for my art-related stuff.
That's too many internet-based social-networking time-eaters.
The only thing I use them all for is not keeping in touch with friends. I mean, it's kind of cool to see your old friends from school or whatever (and in many cases it's far from cool, because you hated them) but I think it's got to the stage where it's just not worth the time having all these things takes up.
Why can't people all just use the same one? Or, preferably, none at all? I swear, life was way simpler before all this shit came out.
Then, if it wasn't for social networking, you would probably not have the profusion of happily disinformed (new word, I just made it up) rants about Some Guy's average life. Like this one.

Why am I doing this? Well, my journalism tutor suggested it was a good thing to have a blog that prospective employers can check out. Apparently it's the done thing to Google someone if you're thinking of giving them a job.
So it's like a CV, except one that includes all the minutiae of everyday life. Like interesting coincidences, the fact I don't like beekeeping, or my old car (RIP, baby) or wearing tight pants.

I swear, if anyone hires me off the strength of a blog, I'm going to seriously reconsider the job I'm applying for.

Stuff and Yossarian

2007-11-04T16:35:00.001-08:00

There is a lot of stuff that isn't great. I have a long list. Here are a few things I particularly feel like bitching about.

Selling Your Awesome Old Beat Up Car:

I had a car. It was a white, 1986 Toyota Corona station wagon and it was the best car in the world. Sure, it was kind of crappy. If by "kind of" you mean "extremely," but it was mine and I'd put literally hundreds of hours into it keeping it alive and warranted. I tentatively called it Yossarian, after the character in Catch-22 who objects to being killed. It was my beach car. We did countless runs to awesome Northland beaches down incredibly shitty roads in it, stuff that you wouldn't expect of a four-wheel-drive. I had dozens of near-misses and two accidents, one my fault, the other not. People had spewed in it. It was full of sand and fossilised garbage. There was a slightly tangy smell about it I suspect came of too many fishing trips and missing bait. It was rusty, and obnoxiously noisy, because the previous owner had seen fit to equip it with a loudening exhaust. I had racked up thousands of dollars in fines in that car, much more than it was worth. I had even made out with girls in it. I made a hood ornament for it with a Dragonball Z figurine – Goku – which I super-glued to the front bumper. It was the greatest.

Then it opted to start overheating every time I turned it on. The last time I drove it (unregistered, unwarranted) was when I moved house. I had an actual tonne (or more) of stuff in the back and a double bed on the roof. It was overheating like mad and so I drove fast (more air keeps the engine cool, better than idling) and took a lot of back streets and ran a red light or so. Despite everything, it got me moved. I think I may have patted the dashboard and said "thanks." After that, it sat in my backyard for a couple of months until I decided it was time to flick it. It had gotten to the stage where getting any amount of money for it was a better deal than me spending money to fix it. So I sold it for $150 and boy was I cut up. I'd had it for nearly five years. Luckily, it was bought by the next-door neighbour and so I get to see it every day when I cycle past. It's up on blocks – the neighbour was quick to scavenge my crappy mag wheels – and I think his plan is to fix it and give it to his mum. I hope so. I'd rather someone was driving it than it getting turned into scrap straight away.

Whoa, that was lengthy. I've forgotten everything else I was meant to be complaining about now. Oh well. I'll remember.

The Advantages of Tight Pants

2007-11-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine showed up the other day wearing tight pants. Not spandex-tight, but definitely tight jeans. Black. This isn't his usual style – he's been stuck in the baggy pants limp bizkit late 90's sk8er rut as long as I have. Now he was bowing to the new fashion gods. The ones that wear tight pants.

I asked him where he'd got them.

"Demo Streetwear are having a liquidation sale," he said. He'd gotten the pants – worth around $125 at the usual RRP – for thirty-five bucks.

Well, this was good, so I arranged to meet him at the shop the next day.

I ended up getting a new pair of Lee jeans (whoa! Labelled! Go sweatshops!) for $35. They were worth $160, so I think it was a good buy. Only thing is, of course, with the kids these days wearing what they do, they were a bit… tight.

I decided to wear them for a bit before deciding whether to put them on TradeMe.

Well, two days on and I'm still wearing them. (Not two days straight, but you get the idea.) They're good. And they kind of make my old ones – all of my old, baggy pants – look sorta stupid.

Oh man, I knew this would happen one day. I'm slowly turning metrosexual. Hmm, there's a word you don't see that much anymore. That's because I'm five years late to the trend, of course.

But there are some good reasons for wearing tight pants. I've been coming up with a mental list for the last couple of days. Here are some of them.

They keep everything in its right place, like the Radiohead song.
When you're biking (I bike everywhere, except when I take the bus) the chain can't eat your pants leg. Unlike my other pants, which I have to tuck into my sock, like a crazy old man.
You look a bit more emo. Or fashionable or whatever. Which leads to emo girls looking at you (maybe) and emo girls are hot.
You feel like a rock star – possibly because you can sing a bit higher than before.
Your friends age 16-22 think you're one of those old guys who still "have it."

Well, that's all I can do for the advantages. There are plenty of drawbacks.

Your friends age 16-22 think you're one of those old guys who still "have it." I hate those guys.
Your old mates think you're a pillock, and will continue to until they get with the programme
It's hot and there's no ventilation
All of a sudden, all of your shitty old shoes are obsolete, because with tight pants they look like clown shoes. Ditto pretty much everything else in wardrobe.
Your sperm die. You can just tell.

I think I've come to realise having even a microscopic amount of fashion-consciousness is a slippery slope. A slippery, expensive slope, studded with infected razor blades. Still, time and fashion will roll on, everyone's baggy jeans will wear out, and by 2010 everyone will be wearing tight pants, whether they like it or not.

Cool. It'll be like the 70's, only with global warming and deader Beatles.

Yes, the universe IS out to get you

2007-11-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

This is a weird true story that just happened so I think I'd better write it down while it's fresh. I think it's proof that the universe is messing with me. Read it and you'll see.
About a week back a friend of mine lent me a book - the Collected Short Stories of Mark Twain.
I was keen to check it out, because I'd read Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and liked them.
"There's this one short story, near the end," said my friend. "It'll blow your mind. It's the ending that's crazy.
There's just no other way to end it. You'll see."
It had been a weird night when I got the book. A discussion about assorted stuff had turned into talking about the
meaning of life, the universe and everything. And quantum physics. I don't know any quantum physics - I just know about them, and like what I've heard. My friend, on the other hand, actually knows stuff - he's done quantum physics at uni - so it was enlightening.
The discussion eventually ended up at books - stuff we'd read, stuff we hadn't. We talked things as disparate as Douglas Adams and Dante's Inferno. Sometime around now the subject of the Mark Twain story came up.
I took it home and to Auckland with me. I didn't read any of it - I was busy with another book. Then, this morning, it was raining, I got up late, and I didn't want ride my bike into town to do magazine work.
I decided to read the story over breakfast. Procrastination. Kind of.
The story was called "The Mysterious Stranger." There's no way I can write this story without providing a plot summary of some kind. It goes a bit like this; there is a kid in a medieaval Austrian village where they're still firmly stuck in the Middle Ages. Him and his mates meet an angel called Satan. (Not Satan satan, but it may as well be. It's complicated.) This angel has the power to do pretty much anything. He is interested in humans in much the same way as scientists are interested in bacteria. He sets about messing with their lives in ways that seem to the humans in the know to be positively barbaric, but are to him neutral, because he can't tell good from evil. He doesn't much care for humans, seeing us as below the level of animals, and derides morality as a farce. He also takes the boys on instantaneous trips around Earth explaining the human condition. The boys he meets in the village beg him, as he's essentially omnipotent, to change the lives of the villagers for the better. Satan, seeing no reason not to, does - usually by killing them of making them insane.
One of the cool ideas is Satan can only alter their lives along the lines of probability, and can see their futures extrapolated from events in their past. The smallest event in the life of one person changes their future. Satan, who is apparently outside of time, does this all the time. Why is never really explained, but the best reason seems to be "because he can."
Then the story ends. How? Well, it's crazy. And there's just no other way it can end. Read it yourself. You can check it out here.
Now, about half-way through the story - before I got to the bit about life and choice being just one big chain of unalterable circumstance - I nearly rode into town. It had stopped raining, and I had plenty of work to do. But I didn't go. Because I wanted to finish the story.
So I read on, and got to the bit about choices, coincidence, chaos and circumstance. I've read this kind of stuff before, but it still blew my mind.
I finished the story, wondering how my life would have been unalterably different if I'd left half an hour earlier. But I hadn't. Argh, mental mouse-wheel!
I got to the office, and within five minutes, the editor goes:
"Hey Josh, have you read any Mark Twain?"
I swear, I knew where it was going before he said anything else.
"I read a story by him this morning," I said. Or something similar. And the editor types in a web address and brings up a video on YouTube. Inevitably, maybe, the video is part of a claymation series called "The Adventures of Mark Twain. The one he's showing me is called "Satan Visits the Children."
It's the same story I'd read that morning. The stripped down, animated version. If anything, it was creepier than the written story was.
I told the editor the full story. He was mildly impressed. I'm still wondering what to make of it. If anything.

I hate bees

2007-11-04T16:30:00.000-08:00

I hate bees.
Most people don't mind bees so much, unless they're allergic. They probably figure having delicious honey is worth the occasional sting to a bare foot. Not me though. I work as a beekeeper sometimes. I have a right to hate the little bastards.
You may have seen beekeepers doing their thing at some time, perhaps removing a swarm. The guys moving around slowly in their white suits with the hoods, bees flying about. Looks placid, doesn't it? Kinda fun? Nah. Beekeeping is about as much fun as a descent into the seventh circle of Hell. I'll explain.

I don't think many people realise exactly what it is beekeepers do. They vaguely imagine beehives going into a factory and honey appearing out the other end, magically, Willy-Wonka-style. Well, that's what I used to think. Of course, the reality is way different. Most people also think that the problem with beekeeping would be getting stung. Wrong, again. Getting stung is a minor problem compared to the main business, which is mostly lifting things. Heavy things. Beehives, namely.

Bees make honey. You knew that already. They make it in hives. You knew that too. What you might not know is that a beehive full of honey weighs about 60 kilogrammes. When taking honey off hives, beekeeping involves lugging lots of these heavy-ass things onto a truck. As honey is made in summer, this means this job usually takes place in sunlight and hot, hot temperatures. In any other job, this would be alright. You could take your shirt off. Of course, beekeepers wear a bee-suit, to prevent the angry insects whose food you are stealing from killing you with a thousand vicious stings. The bee-suit is made of heavy canvas, and there's as a pair of thick leather gauntlets that come up to your elbows. The hood (or veil) is thick mesh, which you can see out of but - somehow - contrives to keep fresh air out. The ensemble is complete with a set of heavy rubber gumboots. The result of wearing this get-up is that you get ridiculouly, stupidly hot, very, very fast. You sweat actual buckets. Sweat makes the suit even more impervious to air (and makes it easier for the bees to sting through, wich I'll get to shortly) and you soon feel like you're stewing in a hot, wet, canvas oven. The sweat gets in your hood-mesh and makes it hard to see. Your face itches. You scratch it, or wipe moisture away, and - surprise! - a bee stings you on the face. Now the urge to scratch is even worse.
It gets better. Bees, as you'd expect, fly all over the place, and land on your suit. Because bees can smell bee venom, and it pisses them off, and your suit is liberally coated in stings because bee-suits have been used by about ten other part-time beekeepers and has never ever been washed, the bees land all over you. Sometimes they just want a bracing drink of sweat. Mostly, they want to find a hole in the suit (and there are always holes) and sting you. Most of the holes are around the cuffs near the boots, where the elastic tends to go. This soon results in the indescribably hideous sensation of bees crawling up your legs, stinging as they go. This usually happens at a terrible time - mostly when you're carrying a fucking heavy hive full of honey - and you have to stumble to the truck, load the hive, and then go into a kind of leaping, desperate dance while you try to squash the bee in the folds of your pants, or failing that, forcing it to sting you before it heads too far north. The sacrifice is worth it, as I hear a sting to the genitals is amazingly painful. No jokes about swelling either, please. Ironically enough, if you're stung in the equipment, it won't work for the next week.
Bees get in everywhere, even where there aren't any holes. I don't know how. They make regular and unpleasant appearances inside your hood. This is horrible, because they're hard to kill without them stinging you somewhere very painful, like in your eyes. The best method, I find, is to bash them into your forehead. Seasoned beekeepers don't bother, as you're going to get stung anyway. A plus is that you get immune to the stings after a while (not that they get any less painful.) A drawback is that there's a fine line between "immune" and "suddenly really allergic for some reason." There are plenty of cases of blase beekeepers dropping dead of anaphalactic shock when they've been immune to stings for years.

This brings me to the guys I work for. They're insane. Not only do they wander around with no beesuits amongst swarms of angry bees, but they work the most ridiculous hours. The head guy, Peter, habitually works 18 hour days, sometimes turning in 90 hour weeks. No kidding. It's an interesting fact that Sir Edmund Hillary was a beekeeper before turning Everest-conquering mountaineer. It's not surprising. Our guys could saunter up Everest before lunch, and they'd poke around for a bit to see if they could put hives there too. That's another thing - our hives are in the most inaccessable locations. Many sites can only be reached by adventurous four-wheel-driving, which makes things interesting when you are coming back with two tonne of hives on the back of the truck. Working long hours has a certain effect on the bee-guys' social lives. Peter didn't know the Twin Towers had been toppled until three days after it happened, when he was asked his opinion on the matter. Their tastes in culture are strange. Most subscribe to Peter's theory that music calms the savage bees. They get their kids to make them mix CD's, (somehow they found the time to get married) which are often a bit strange. It's slightly surreal listening to "Ring of Fire," (very apt) followed by Celine Dion and a bit of Westlife, and then some Nirvana. I have a theory that the bees are angriest during Westlife, which is funny, because so am I.

So why do I do it? Well, the money's good. But only if by "good" you mean "11 bucks an hour." So maybe I do it for the nice sense of accomplishment you get from doing a job you reallly, really hate, and fact that once home, you will be free of bees for 12 whole hours.

Okay, this isn't exactly true either. You see, when you have been working with the horrible little bastard insects for fifteen hours straight, you find that when you shut your eyes you see bees everywhere. It's like being on a boat, getting off, and finding yourself still rocking back and forth on dry land, except in your eyes. If this wasn't unpleasant enough, when you sleep, you dream of bees.

Oh wait, there is a plus side. I get free honey. But when you've been cooped up with and covered in the stuff for days on end, are very familiar with the little stinging shits that make it, and have personally loaded tonnes and tonnes of the stuff, you really do get a bit sick of it.