Who I hate today, April 6

In order to keep this site hip and "rad," as the kids say, I know I need to keep it fresh. That's why I'm rolling out a new feature. It's called "Who I hate today."

As I thought about this, I realized that it seemed a bit excessively negative and that's not supposed to be the purpose of what goes on here. I look down at the things I've written about and in general I see topics that have to do by and large with love: Mormons, prostitutes, NAMBLA, Canadians, and Nicole Kidman. So though the feature is called "Who I hate today," I will balance it by also listing something/one I love today. And I will have a surprise present for each! So away we go....

Who I hate today: people who, while ordering at a quick-service restaurant where your food is prepared directly in front of you - say, Quiznos - berate the server to give them more product than is supposed to go into a serving. For instance, if you order a tuna salad sandwich and the immigrant guy making $6 an hour has been told he is to only put two scoops of tuna onto that sandwich, don't stand there and yell at him and try to coerce him to give you more tuna. If you want more tuna, you have to pay for it. I imagine these are the people who try to "chew" people around everytime they make a purchase (again, what does this mean????). Here is my present to you, mean person.

Who I love today: The station manager at the Judiciary Square metro. What did he do? He came out of his kiosk to greet a metro rider he apparently hasn't seen in a long time but knows. She is blind. She had a walking stick pointer thingy. I think she was headed for an escalator that was out of service (why didn't her super-dee-duper hearing kick in and tell her it wasn't working??) and he came out and kindly redirected her, taking her by the arm. Then he said, without a sense of irony or meanness, just as kind as he oculd be, and I swear I am not making this up (nods to Dave Barry), "Hey, how have you been? Long time, no see." Here is your gift, nice station manager.

About whom I am ambivalent: This caricature of a guy who got on the metro today....he violated so rules of mine that would normally make me mad. I'm sitting on the aisle and at Gallery Place it gets pretty crowded....this man and a woman stand very close to me and you can spot them as tourists from a mile away. They start to talk. They are loud. They are nervous. And this guy's voice....he was so southern. I mean, his voice was almost someone doing a mean-spirited impression it was SO southern. If you went to the remotest part of Georgia - I mean like ass-rapin', pig f'ing, still-slave-owning, no-water-running Georgia and went to some diner and ordered a pulled pork BBQ sandwhich with sweet tea and pecan pie and that meal could talk...the voice of that meal is what this guy's voice sounded like.

They are complaining that there's no place to sit and the woman assures him that it will empty out and it doesn't, really, and he's really complaining. Serves you right for taking the metro and getting on at rush hour, I think. At Dupont Circle the woman to my inside needs to get off and so I step out and no sooner has she gone by me than Billy Bob Tobaccostain slides in behind me and sits down (a BIG metro faux pas, for those who don't know). Well, I know he's with Maribelle Clampett and while I have every right to sit back down and really send his plan out to the woodshed for a hide-tannin' from its pappy, I look at the woman and as unenthusiastically as I can ask her if she wants to sit down. She does. So I'm all ready to hate this guy but then I hear them talking (did I mention they were loud?) and it sounds like he's getting a little nauseated from motion sickness. And then, reflecting on their day, he says, "I'll never go to DC again (tourists love to call it "DC".....how quickly would you get shot if you kept referring to New York as "NY" on the subway there?). That there's more people than I've ever been around in my life." And she said, sounding hurt, "Aw, don't make me feel bad." And then I looked at the guy and he was all shaky, and did not look well (as one won't from years of living around raw sewage and f'ing pigs) and when I actually saw his face I saw that one eye was completely closed and the other was as murky as the gene pool from whatever hell-on-earth county that reared him. And then I started to feel bad for being so mean-spirited. I mean, WWJD?! And I thought about how much more he needed the seat than I did and that I shouldn't direct such negative feelings toward him on his one and only trip to anywhere with buildings with non-dirt floors. (Oh, and I noticed his hat was advertising some restaurant somewhere and made note of the area code.....it was 706. I just looked that up after writing all of this above and ya know where that is? That's right - he actually is from pig f'ing Georgia.) Anyway, here's your gift, sir.