We All Have Our Cross To Bear
While I was on vacation I had to take time out for an investor teleconference, so my assistant helpfully booked me a room with a speakerphone at a nearby La Quinta hotel (since the beach house had no phone at all and my cell coverage could best be described as somewhere between "spotty" and "non-fucking-existent"). So I rolled up there Monday morning in my little silver rental car and got set up in the room. Everything went fine, except that the room at my end smelled like the scene of a crime involving sex with fish, and the room at the other end apparently couldn't hear much of what I was saying. I therefore was able subsequently to claim that it was all brilliant. So after an hour, my job done, I filled my pockets with free hotel candy (it was in the dish and I wanted my money's worth), paid the bill and headed out to my car.
I had checked out the hotel the night before, since it was close to the gym I had found, and nothing spells "fuck up" quite so much as finding out five minutes before you're due to speak to a crowd of assembled investors that the directions you received and trusted don't in fact take you to the hotel at all, but to a strip bar or Mexican restaurant. This is what they sometimes describe as a "career limiting move". Anyway, that's not the point. What is, is that when I got to the hotel there was a bloke wheeling his luggage into the foyer on one of those gigantic hotel luggage things which have a four foot square wheeled base and metal bars on two sides reaching up about six or seven feet. And this plonker had it completely full, to the point that he was almost incapable of manoeuvring it through the door.
When I arrived at the hotel the following day, for my teleconference, I watched another family pushing one of these things to check out, and it too was full with bags, cases and board games. And when I left there was yet another bloke emptying what seemed like the entire contents of a minivan into the same wheeled luggage carrier, stacked so high that bags were falling off six feet to the ground.
Whatever happened to traveling light? I know we had it easy because there was a washing machine in our place but we packed for the week in two wheeled carry-on bags, for three people. And this included my gratuitous Mr Bison t-shirt. (One day someone is going to stop me in an airport, I just know it.) People who cannot pack a reasonable quantity of shit for a trip should be separated from the line at airports and humanely destroyed, before they can attempt to cram some blatantly oversized holdall into the overhead bin, get it stuck, remove it, remove nineteen pairs of underpants, zip it up, push it back into the bin, remove it again, etc etc, until the flight attendant pulls her head out of her arse and puts a stop to the whole ridiculous charade. But that's just my opinion...
We did encounter one bloke in Oregon who clearly knew how to pack light. He was walking up the side of the highway with a cross. And nothing else. It was a large wooden cross and he was dragging it, presumably in some fervent display of Christian fortitude. He had however exhibited foresight apparently lacking in our savior, in that he had attached a wheel to the bottom so that he didn't have to "drag" it so much as "put it on his shoulder and wheel it". The answer to the question "What Would Jesus Do?" appears therefore to be "Remember To Put A Wheel On The Sodding Cross". Although this example was a pretty big cross it wouldn't meet what I would assume would be "building code" for a cross expected to hold a fully grown man in his death throes. (They were very capable engineers, those Romans.) It was more of an Ikea cross - good value but not built to last and probably prone to split if you attempted to actually nail anyone to it. Does this count? Shouldn't it have to be a "standard issue" full-scale Roman crucifixion device?
Anyway, my principal concern was not for the quality or durability of the cross. (He didn't seem to make much progress in any case - we saw the thing two days later about a mile up the road and the bloke was nowhere in sight.) I was fully expecting, however, that come time to fly back to St.Louis I would find the twat in question vainly attempting to stuff his wheeled cross into the overhead bin on my plane. That's the kind of people I meet...
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
I had checked out the hotel the night before, since it was close to the gym I had found, and nothing spells "fuck up" quite so much as finding out five minutes before you're due to speak to a crowd of assembled investors that the directions you received and trusted don't in fact take you to the hotel at all, but to a strip bar or Mexican restaurant. This is what they sometimes describe as a "career limiting move". Anyway, that's not the point. What is, is that when I got to the hotel there was a bloke wheeling his luggage into the foyer on one of those gigantic hotel luggage things which have a four foot square wheeled base and metal bars on two sides reaching up about six or seven feet. And this plonker had it completely full, to the point that he was almost incapable of manoeuvring it through the door.
When I arrived at the hotel the following day, for my teleconference, I watched another family pushing one of these things to check out, and it too was full with bags, cases and board games. And when I left there was yet another bloke emptying what seemed like the entire contents of a minivan into the same wheeled luggage carrier, stacked so high that bags were falling off six feet to the ground.
Whatever happened to traveling light? I know we had it easy because there was a washing machine in our place but we packed for the week in two wheeled carry-on bags, for three people. And this included my gratuitous Mr Bison t-shirt. (One day someone is going to stop me in an airport, I just know it.) People who cannot pack a reasonable quantity of shit for a trip should be separated from the line at airports and humanely destroyed, before they can attempt to cram some blatantly oversized holdall into the overhead bin, get it stuck, remove it, remove nineteen pairs of underpants, zip it up, push it back into the bin, remove it again, etc etc, until the flight attendant pulls her head out of her arse and puts a stop to the whole ridiculous charade. But that's just my opinion...
We did encounter one bloke in Oregon who clearly knew how to pack light. He was walking up the side of the highway with a cross. And nothing else. It was a large wooden cross and he was dragging it, presumably in some fervent display of Christian fortitude. He had however exhibited foresight apparently lacking in our savior, in that he had attached a wheel to the bottom so that he didn't have to "drag" it so much as "put it on his shoulder and wheel it". The answer to the question "What Would Jesus Do?" appears therefore to be "Remember To Put A Wheel On The Sodding Cross". Although this example was a pretty big cross it wouldn't meet what I would assume would be "building code" for a cross expected to hold a fully grown man in his death throes. (They were very capable engineers, those Romans.) It was more of an Ikea cross - good value but not built to last and probably prone to split if you attempted to actually nail anyone to it. Does this count? Shouldn't it have to be a "standard issue" full-scale Roman crucifixion device?
Anyway, my principal concern was not for the quality or durability of the cross. (He didn't seem to make much progress in any case - we saw the thing two days later about a mile up the road and the bloke was nowhere in sight.) I was fully expecting, however, that come time to fly back to St.Louis I would find the twat in question vainly attempting to stuff his wheeled cross into the overhead bin on my plane. That's the kind of people I meet...
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
5:28 PM
1 Comments:
Well I just spent half an hour writing the funniest joke in the universe only to have my comments deleted when I signed up for Google.So fuck it.
Now I know how that little Mexican shit felt at the beginning of The Magnificent Seven.
'Clap Hands?' My arse.
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