Thursday, September 18, 2008

A Letter to Helpers Concerning Helping

Dear thickheaded, obnoxious people who think they are helping,

You're not.

I feel like there has been some kind of line crossed in your head where you think you can contribute to what I'm doing. Well, let me assure you, that line is still very much there, and will continue to be there until I have some sort of brain trauma or you reveal to me that your stupidity has been a large practical joke on your part this whole time.

Well, if it was, you got me. Because I was just sure that you were a complete fucking moron.

So here's the deal. I'm going to do the thing you asked me to do, and you aren't going to be involved. You're not going to be involved because you can't fix it, which, and follow me here, is why you asked me to be here in the first place. And, yes, I know I'm wasting my time with just coming out with the point of the letter like that right off the bat, but don't worry. I know you have trouble understand sentences that don't have words like "hamburger" and "Deal or No Deal" in them, so I'm going to walk you through this.

I get that you want to be part of the process that makes things that are broken, into things that are working. I get it. But, you have to understand the situation from the point of view of a fixer. I get there, shit is fucked up, and the only thing I see is you standing there kind of shrugging with your arms out.

So, you broke it, and now what? You want to help? What could you possibly bring to the table besides the skill of seeing if something CAN be broken?

Let's imagine this situation in a different setting. Pretend I'm not in your store fixing your computers. Pretend we're in a kitchen and I just found out you ate all the cupcakes for the big bake sale, which is in just two hours. And, with your mouth still stuffed full of chocolate icing and yellow cake, you mumble that you need me to make another batch of 40 and to hurry because I'm going to make us late.

Then you look at me funny when I threaten to jam a soft rubber spatula into your abdomen.

So, now that I've established that I'm mad because you did something you weren't supposed to, let me get on to what you can do to help me fix your situation. It's very easy to remember. Try chanting it, as a little mantra, to help solidify it into memory.

Get the fuck away from me.

Get the fuck away from me.

Got it?

Get. The mother fuck. Away. From. Me.

And while we're at it, here's a heap of things that you can print out and read before I show up to the call in the first place.

1. Don't watch what I'm doing at a distance that allows me to feel the heat of your testicles against the back of my neck as I crouch down to pick up a cable.
2. Don't sigh at the Windows errors EVERY FUCKING TIME THEY POP UP.
3. Don't stand in front of the thing I'm trying to fix. Just writing that one down makes me wish you were dead.
4. Don't ask me what I'm going to try next and expect an explanation you can understand.
5. Don't offer me tools like a hammer and saw and think you're being funny.
6. Don't talk to me about your grandchildren while I'm trying to read through a database.
7. Just don't talk to me at all.
8. Oh really? Your daughter recently decided to become a bail bondsman? That is so interesting. No, I mean it. I'm really thrilled.
9. I lied. I would react to this conversation the same way whether you told me you had just won your weight in gold or if you just told me that the previously mentioned daughter was killed in a car accident. And you were the murderer. Because you had gotten her pregnant. I don't want to talk to you THAT much.
10. Get the fuck away from me.

You have to understand that I have a stressful job. I come in, look down, see the aftermath of your wrath, and am just expected to know which one of these eight atrocities is the problem. It's going to take an investigative team weeks to sift through this wreckage.

If we had robot equality rights, what you just did to this pc would be considered aggravated rape of a minor, and you would go to robot jail. Where they would robot beat your shit and robot pound you in the butt all day while they robot sell your pink ass for robot cigarettes.

But as it is, there won't be any Enforcers bursting through the windows any time soon, so I just have to piece together the poor girl knowing that as soon as I leave, you're going to have your way with her again.

I also have the added bonus to this line of work that after I leave, and you break this thing again, then it will be my fault. Because when dealing with technologies that knuckle dragging dipshits won't take the time to learn, responsibility lies with those who last laid hands on said technology.

It's like a cursed statue to you people.

What? The screen is making beeping noises? Call Chiggie, he touched it last.

But I fixed your printer. I didn't touch your monitor. What? The cables connect everything?

Well, the roads connect the nation. I was going to blame that big turd in my front yard on the neighborhood dogs, but, seeing as there are roadways that would allow you to make it to my house, I'm going to go ahead and blame it on you.

So I'll come fix your screen, if you promise not to shit all over my driveway. You know, like you have been lately.

It all comes down to this. You broke something and need it fixed, and I would be happy to do so. Without you there. Think about other people that fix things. Mechanics tell you to come back later. Doctors make you sit in a little room. Dentists, contractors, electricians, plumbers, all don't interact with you unless absolutely unavoidable.

I'm no different. And you're being a jackass.

Get the fuck away from me.


Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen
Did you pour antifreeze all over the cooling fan? No, it doesn't work like that.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

A Letter to Living Zombies Concerning Actual Reality

Dear inconsiderate walking slobs, so caught up in your own little universe that you can't even hear me right now can you? Hello? This letter is for you, you ass.

Fuck it.

I write to you today to try to pierce the diamond palace you've built for yourself and educate you on the world outside. That, while uncultivated and dangerous, is full of adventure and fortune.

At least, this is what I would say to someone with a legitimate reason for becoming detached from the world, like, a plane crash victim or a soldier back from war. But, for you, the average modern human, I would put it a little different.

Something like, "please take your eyes off of your iPhone long enough to see that you are pressing against the chair rail on the wall instead of the handle on the exit door. Your outstanding idiocy has reached a level that is actually frightening the other people at the Pizza Hut. You fucking moron."

Now, of course, along with that phrasing I'd also have to scream at the top of my lungs, as well as physically shove and shake you to get your attention. Since in your world of instant-low cost-Bluetooth enabled-wireless internet-phone-plans, complete with mp3 recognition, video camera, and high tensile steel grappling lines, if a person isn't acting like he's afraid of a mummy in an old black and white film reel, well he just isn't even there is he?

At first, I was actually surprised that you even bothered me, being bit of an escapist myself. Ever since I first owned an mp3 player I have rarely left my house without one. I just find that music is such a pleasant contrast to what real life actually sounds like, that it has pretty much become a requirement to me. But, in my defense that's mostly because real life is full of stupid ass people like you. I'm an after effect. A symptom of the illness.

It's the all encompassing entertainment boxes that you carry around that make me cringe when I see them. Because I don't see a GPS that is going to help a lost family find a Holiday Inn Express, or an mp3 player that saves a beach party after someone forgets the CDs, or a video phone so that grandmothers don't ever have to miss their granddaughters' recitals. No, I see a 16 year old girl with a tramp stamp and huge bug eyed sunglasses, moving in slow zigzags in front of me in a Fossil outlet barring my passage to the door.

And what are you wearing? An animal print skirt and cowboy boots? A denim jacket over your t-shirt when it's a hundred and four fucking degrees outside? Dear lord, child, you look like a basket of clothes my mother once gave to Goodwill. Did the [b]phone[/b] tell you to dress like that? I would avert my eyes but that would just sweep my vision to three or four other carbon copies of this girl, all looking at their feet, all slowly wobbling to find their footing as they attempt to walk. If this was a movie and violin music was playing, I would be allowed to shoot you while trying not to be covered in your infected blood.

Of course, the walking dead of Teen Magazine are nothing compared to the bewildering road behavior of those taken over by the thin digital siren call. It's like I've been sucked though the hole from Sliders and shot out in a universe where everyone makes driving decisions like they were the Captain of the Titanic. Just briefly looking up to see a turn coming, rotating the wheel, and expecting everything to go to plan as they glance back down at a clip from the Daily Show. Content that their massive vehicle and slim to none chance of there being anything in front of them make up for acting like a complete retard.

I bet the designers of these devices never even thought this breed of people would come about from their creations. They were thinking Tricorders from Star Trek, Ziggy from Quantum Leap, Rimmer from Red Dwarf. Thinking that the faster Man could receive information the faster he could use it to better his life and his enjoyment of that life.

What they probably didn't count on was you. And by "you" I mean complete idiots. A population of stumbling mouth breathers that have turned Steve Jobs into Herbert West.

I don't mean to attack all internet phone users. There are lots of people I see use them the way I would expect a balanced person to. Getting the phone number to the theater or passing a joke back and forth between friends while they wait on a bench outside a restaurant. The ones I can't stand are the people that can't seem to stop playing portable Bejeweled long enough to keep themselves from rubbing their genitals all over me as they stumble onto my seated form while I wait for a take out order at the deli.

Yeah, that has happened to me, more than once.

Is the draw of entertainment just that powerful? Are you so devoid of any substance whatsoever that you have to fill your every waking moment with nonsensical input from a little portable oracle? You make me scared for the future of our planet. I see you frantically texting your girlfriends while your children sit across from you at the Applebee's doing the exact same thing and all I can think about is how Futurama warned us all not to start making out with robots.

Electro Gonorrhea, people.

Or maybe it's not the pleasure of it. Maybe you just can't stand to be inside your own heads for more than 15 minutes anymore. Is that it? I'm just asking, because without knowing, I just have to assume you are buried in your phone all day because you hate being with yourself.

To me a life full of entertainment is a life devoid of introspection and experience. I picture you on the deck of the Santa Maria as the sailors point to the beautiful naked Indians and you are thumbing through your Yahoo news. I picture Dave texting Frank about how his "round ass" space pod is "so lame" and not noticing the corridor of flickering light opening up before him. I picture Leonardo snapping a quick pic of a pretty brunette with a subtle smile with his 5 mega pixel camera phone and calling it a day.

I don't know. My phone is circa 2002 so I can only report on what I've seen other people doing. Maybe your life, that of a lump of shit staring into a one and quarter inch screen, is a life of pure happiness. Maybe it's like modern meditation and you are one iTune download away from true enlightenment.

I doubt it, but maybe.

For now I will be content with having a Zune for mp3's and podcasts, a cellphone for calls, a computer for the internet, and a GBASP for the occasional traveling game of Metroid. Because, frankly, iPhones and the phones like them, are starting to look like evil goddamn Skynet brain slugs to me.

For now I'll continue to keep my technology separate, so that I may remain separate from my technology.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen
He probably wrote this letter with a pen, how quaint

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

A Letter to Movie Goers Concerning Theaters

Dear loud, annoying, sacks of, you know what? You don't deserve an intro.

Dear fuckers,

Yeah, fuckers. You know who you are.

This building we're in, that's called a movie theater. This is a place where people go to see films. Films are like pictures except they move and have sound. They are like really big and really long Youtube clips, and, instead of imbedded in your Myspace page, they play on that big white sheet in the front of the room.

We know where the front is because that's the direction all these chairs are turned, so that people can relax in a position that allows them to see the screen. The screen the movie plays on. Because they, and I, paid to be here and watch it. And when I say watch, I mean see, hear, absorb, understand, and interpret.

I don't mean look at the picture long enough to commit that ironic one liner to memory and repeat it to your friends immediately after hearing it like you're that first ant that finds food and rushes back to the hill to inform everyone that food does, in fact, exist.

Now, I don't expect you to understand that some people watch movies like other people listen to music or read books. And by music and books I don't mean Hannah Montanna, and Hannah Montanna's biography.

No, I don't know if she actually has a biography. I was just using an asinine example to illustrate, oh fuck this!

Here is a list of things that aren't acceptable in movie theaters. Don't worry about why. You're too stupid to understand, I promise.

Number 1: Don't buy more food than you can handle when you are sitting down. You're going to be in that chair for, what, 2 hours? Maybe. Do you really need a large bucket of popcorn, a box of nachos with the cheese in a little cup right in the box, 2 hotdogs, a box of bunch'a'crunch, and three 92 oz. Diet Cokes? If I laid all that out for my dog he wouldn't be able to finish it in two hours. Because his body would violently force it back out of him before he was half-way through.

This is one of the only times during the day that it's critical that you not get out of your fucking chair for a period of time, and you decide to begin your movie by wolfing down a large sack of junk that your body can't even begin to process as nourishment.

Now you've got to hurry down a flight of stairs in the dark while trying to hold in a good 7 pounds of waste that your body just basically refused to acknowledge as food.

Honestly, I don't know why I don't see more people in movie theaters tripping and crapping their pants during their tumble down the stairs.

Number 2: When it says "Silence your Cellphones" it's supposed to be a general statement about not USING cellphones. Not something that you can side step on a grammatical technicality.

I know that it doesn't seem like a big deal to send a "quick text", as I've heard it called, but, when you open your fucking cellphone in the middle of a dark theater and I'm in the seat behind you, that 9 million candle watt beam you call a backlight shines out of your phone, ricochets off your fake lopsided tits and shoots right into my goddamn eyes.

Honestly, Dollywood, what fucking world do you live in where something can be both urgent enough to interrupt everyone else and not important enough to take yourself outside at the same time? It's a movie. A MOVIE. Get your shit handled enough that you can go a couple hours without checking in with your dog's hair stylist every 5 minutes.

I remember going to movies and after I got out having to push quarters into a payphone to tell my mom to come pick me up. I'm guessing you're so far up your own butthole that you didn't even understand half the words in that last sentence.

Number 3: Stop laughing out loud when people are being attacked and/or tortured on screen. No Country For Old Men is not a comedy. If you can't handle the subject matter then leave. Don't chuckle and act all casual like what you saw didn't almost make you pee on yourself. Be a man and deal with the message, or get the fuck out of the theater.

Number 4: If your foot touches the back of my head I will keep it.

Number 5: Don't take your fucking kid to see fucking Wanted at fucking 11 PM. What is the matter with you?

What is the matter with you?

Are you really surprised that they are pitching a fit? It's nothing but gunfire and blood and shouting. Your kid isn't being a "dick." She's crying because she doesn't understand why she has to stay up and watch people being killed over and over and over again when all she wants is to go home and lay in her tiny princess bed and dream about being Dora the Explorer.

You are a fucking psychopath, you know that? What you're doing is unbelievable to me, and I don't even like kids. This goes beyond kids. You are torturing another human being.

Yes, that's really what I believe you're doing. You're a shitty parent, and a shitty person, and I hate you. I hate YOU, for what you're doing, when it is so avoidable and unnecessary.

You can't go see the grown up movies because you had a baby? Tough shit. End of story. You had a kid, things change, get a DVD player and some headphones you worthless sack of crap.

Number 6: Don't wear your hat cocked to the side. You look like a walking turd.

Oh, I'm sorry that's a different letter.

Real Number 6: Go do something else. You shouldn't need a list. The theater isn't a diner or a fucking 4H building. It's like a library, but one where everyone can enjoy the story at the same time and take the journey together. If you don't want to take a journey, or don't even know what that means, just walk away and never look back. This place isn't for you, and it never will be for you.

The only exception I will accept from this rule is teenagers trying to get it on.

It's dark and your parents aren't around, I get it. People got needs, I feel you. Just go in the back, please.

Don't fuck so close to me that you rock my chair.

For the people that like my list, enough said. We are all on the same page. No instructions necessary.

For the people that might respectfully disagree with the ideals I was going for, go fuck yourself. I hate you, and if you sit in front of me, I will kick you in the head hard enough to kill you.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen
Film Enthusiast