Posts Tagged ‘roommate’
Couches are like cats. Once they’re outside, they don’t easily go back inside.
One of the typical hang-outs for my circle of friends has a collection of ratty couches we keep outside, on the concrete patio or unmown grass. It’s perfect for barbeques, as long as you don’t mind your cushion full of dirt, spiders and dried cat urine.
For whatever reason, a roommate at that house I helped move decided to bring one of these couches along for the ride to his new school district. After a year-and-a-half as an outside couch, he’s going to bring it inside, to his spacious shiny new apartment. I know that new middle school band directors don’t get paid much, but this still has to be a bad idea.
Even as we loaded it on the truck, it leaked filth onto the floor of our U-Haul. One of the guys, full of charm and wit, said:
I have never seen couches shit.
We all have, now. This is one couch that won’t easily go back inside without stinkin’ up the place. It’ll need two bottles of Febreeze and three days worth of vacuuming before it even nears cleanliness.
If ever I visit, I hope I don’t catch any diseases.
Thanks to the futzing of a roommate, I don’t have Internet, and I probably won’t until after Thursday. I’ll still keep up with daily posts, in part because of a national chain that tries way too hard to be trendy. In short: Thank you, Starbucks.
Even though your employees know absolutely nothing helpful about troubleshooting your free Internet, and even though “free” means “buy a $5 gift card and register it online to obtain Internet access,” it’s the thought that counts.
I don’t mind the gift card requirement — I knew you had the best intentions. As such, I went out of the way to make sure you didn’t end up a liar. I had my roommate buy a $5 gift card, using only negligible coercion of my own. As it turned out, she immediately used the card to purchase herself one of your many fatty, sugary, overcaffinated drinks, and she gave me the rest of the gift card.
Sure, there’s only 70 cents left. That’s still enough to register the card online to get my despite-your-best-efforts-still-free Internet.
I don’t even mind the two-hour limit on Internet use. I figure that this is for my own good. Without an artificial, largely arbitrary restriction, I’d stay on all day, and that would sorely diminish the chances I’d ever finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Thank you, soulless, corporation of gargantuan proportions in every concievable sense. I will be a happy patron of your comfortable chairs and free Internet, and I’ll show it. Until your Internet policies inevitably change, Starbucks will be my exclusive source of iceless water in a pretentiously named large cup.
Please don’t take any of this personally. It’s just that if I at all behaved differently, my Internet wouldn’t be free.
