I work at a very small company, and a while back I was in charge of handling the customer service emails. For the most part, this is pretty routine, brainless work – perfect for the late afternoon when the sun is roasting me and my mind isn’t working all that well anyway.

Most of the emails I get are either polite, or curt (because, I’m guessing, they think a machine is at the other end, so there is little point in adding niceties). I don’t care either way and I respond in kind – politely.

Occasionally, you get a real dipshit that, completely unprovoked, lashes out in an email. In every single case I can think of, we have done absolutely nothing wrong–these people just have an axe to grind against the world and we’re just the most accessible target.

I don’t really lower myself to engage in a flame war with these people – but I will amuse myself at their expense. Talking down to these people is a lot of fun and pisses them off more than anything else.

Here’s an example.

In response to an automated signup confirmation email, one person wrote a pithy–and completely pointless–reply:

Your gay.

To which I replied:

Thank you for being our gay.

Funny, right? This guy didn’t think so. His response:

i am talking about you d i p s h i t

How dare he insult our automated email sender! I had to defend its honor. My riposte:

I suggest you take a class in b a s i c  E n g l i s h then. Terribly sorry about the confusion.

Heh.

Then we had “the doctor.” I got this guy’s email apparently the first day of a two-week vacation.

There is some personal information about me on your site that you must remove immediately. If you don’t remove it within 1 hour, I will sue you! (I am a lawyer AND a doctor)

So, I got back a couple of weeks later to read this guy’s email, and thankfully (whew!) didn’t see any papers served to our company. So I responded exceedingly politely, basically asking the guy what the hell he was talking about.

The reply went along the lines of:

I am in a relationship with a very nice French woman who was disturbed to find a personals listing I had posted a long time ago on your site. Please remove it immediately or I will sue you within an hour!

Since our company is the furthest thing from a dating service, I was still completely in the dark. I asked him ever-so-politely for a URL. In addition to threatening to sue me within an hour (for the third time), he provided a link to a review of an online dating service where this jackass had posted a personal ad in the form of a comment.

Let’s be clear about this: this guy was so stupid as to think a blog post about a dating service was the dating service, and that publishing a comment in the blog post would share his personal ad with thousands of eligible young women.

What a dumbass.

So I patiently explained in an email that this was not Match.com, that he had just posted a comment, but that I had deleted it. I wished him and his nubile French girlfriend a happy life together.

I got another panicked reply from Dr. Jackass later, saying that it was not removed. After a few back-and-forths later, it turned out that his girlfriend was still seeing the comment in Google search results. That’s because–you guessed it!–Dr Jackass used his full, real name in posting the comment. I explained that it would take Google some time for that deleted comment to flush out of their search results, and that he should take it up with Google.

Thankfully that was the last I heard from him.

Another person who didn’t understand the difference between a review about email providers and the actual email provider was a lady I’ll call Dumbelina.

I got an email from her saying:

I can’t seem to log into my email account. It says it’s locked or something. Please help me. There’s important mail I have to read.

I wrote back, and having learned from the Dr Jackass experience, asked her which email account she was trying to access. She said Yahoo Mail.

I wrote back.

You have reached us in error. We are not Yahoo Mail, and we are not in any way affiliated with Yahoo Mail. We’re [Our Company]. We have no way of helping you access your Yahoo Mail account, but you might consider contacting Yahoo if you’re still having difficulties logging in.

Crystal clear, right? The response I got back from Dumbelina:

I don’t know about this [Our Company] business. I ‘m just trying to log into my Yahoo Mail account. I can’t get in, and it’s been ONE WEEK since I’ve been locked out. There are VERY important things in that account that I have to access, and you are not helping me. HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Um, delete?

I can laugh now. Back then, I was cursing these people for being born.

In other news, the Super Bowl is this coming Sunday. The kickoff time is about 6:20 Eastern.

My generous employer gave us two options for breakfast this morning: apples and danishes. One high-fiber, one low-fiber. One rich in antioxidants, the other clotted with sugary frosting. One that Danes eat, and another only named after them.

I hungrily made my choice, polyphenols be damned. I apparently don’t have a drop of Danish blood in me.

Opened it up on the plane, and there were no ear plugs. No matter—I had my own Etymotic noise-blocking earbuds and they’re 1000x more effective and comfortable anyway. The neck pillow? I hate those things—feels like something squeezing my throat. (I use those bendable “flaps” in the headrest commonplace on planes nowadays)

Wore the sleeping mask, though.  A little flimsy, a bit tight across the bridge of my nose. But whatever. Blocked out most of the light. Enjoyed some fitful sleep even though my Italian neighbor was yelling all night long, and my other neighbor kept his light on the whole time.

Arrived, enjoyed the day in Cologne. Woke up the next morning, showered and ate breakfast downstairs.

On the way back up, I looked at this reddish band on my nose bridge in the elevator mirror. It was bumpy. Like 13-year-old kid riddled with acne bumpy.

Ran to my hotel room, and to my horror noticed about 10 (TEN!) huge zits right where the eye mask was sitting. I squeezed all of them. Could’ve filled a wine glass with all the pus. (Sorry—it really, REALLY was that disgusting) Disinfected my nose with every alcoholic beverage I could find in the minibar.

Threw the mf away. I’m guessing my packet had to have been opened and my eyemask used by a 56-year-old hooker as a maxipad. That’s after she unsuccessfully tried to use the earplugs as tampons (mercifully she threw those away).

On the flight back home, I found a Samsonite eyemask in the Berlin airport (no neck pillow, no earplugs, and 8 euros, or about $11). Tested the package to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. (Have never loved clamshell packaging so much)

My nose still looks OK. Lesson learned.

“Curvy.” J. looks at me, rolls her eyes: “Fat.”

“Drinks socially.” I correct: “Alcoholic. Wake up in my own sick at least 3x per week.”

“Seeking long-term relationship.” J. snickers: “Meaningless fling. I don’t want to see you when I wake up in the morning.”

OHAC.

???? What? An acronym we’ve never seen before.

J. furrows her brow, taps her chin with her finger for a minute, stares up. She turns to me with a devious smile.

“One Huge ARRRRSE…and cunt.”

Man, that was the shortest trans-Atlantic flight I’d ever been on.

We board a tram to Overtoom, punch our strippenkaarts, and take a seat. In the seat in front of us are two people.

To the left sits a Thai (maybe Malaysian or even Indonesian – I couldn’t say) tranny. Tall, thin, caked with makeup and flouncy, long hair. She has a colorful dress on, pretty sure it had sequins on it (maybe rhinestones). She smells more flowery than the fields of tulips we passed on our way up from Rotterdam. If she were any more an over-the-top Asian tranny, she’d be Lil’ Kim.

To her right, a short, stubby, exceedingly pale butch dyke, wearing full-body denim and a (naturally) denim cap covering her short blond hair. Little greasy glasses are perched at the end of her nose. She looks like a dyke friend of mine, who is allergic to the Y chromosome.

They start making out, messily and noisily, the tranny’s high-pitched titters barely drowning out the grunts by her dyke girlfriend. Not sure if I’ve ever seen such a passionate display of love in public before, least of all in staid Holland.

Yes, I’m serious.

D. turns to me. “What exactly are we looking at here?!”

I’m probably too cynical to be moved to tears by his speech, but I was impressed by how pointed some of his points were. He made it clear that anyone who would “stop clenching their fists” would be welcome as part of his program. He also said that those abroad in the practice of blaming everything on the West (read: the US) will have to answer to their own people for their actions, not ours.

Obama’s presidency, obviously, means the world to African Americans (and black people everywhere, probably) for its historic significance, and the fact that the highest glass ceiling has been broken. It doesn’t mean that racism is gone; it just means that racism alone can’t prevent someone from achieving their dreams. Powerful. I felt my lip tremble seeing older African Americans in the audience watching with a mixture of pride and unexpected joy.

For many more people, those of us who are just a shade (or two) darker than the typical person in high office, and those of us who have funny, unpronounceable names, we feel a bit of a barrier broken, too. Remember, Obama’s first name is routinely misspelled…and he still won with a healthy margin in the election. For those of us with “foreign-sounding” names, that gives us hope, too.

I’m also struck by how louder the celebrations are this time around, compared to 2000 and 2004. But, then again, I’m in the Bay Area, most of my friends are college-educated and Left-leaning, and Hollywood and newsmakers tend to be, too. I’m sure there are thousands of Pentecostal churches across America (80 million Americans are Pentecostal, mind you) with millions of weeping, mourning congregants.

The honeymoon will eventually end, and the backlash by conservatives will eventually mount, but Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t plan a Rove-like war for its own sake. Reasonable pushback from the opposition is always healthy, if “reasonable” is still in the GOP dictionary. Let’s hope the Republicans can take the next 4-8 years to grow up.

Rich Lowry (National Review) was talking about Bush’s sincerity and honesty, as he leaves the White House, and I thought of what George Constanza said, when Jerry asked him how to lie: “It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true.”

But I will say this: Obama is a moral person, he’s stuck pretty close to his word (with a few exceptions, >ahem!< FISA, federal matching campaign funds, >ahem!<), and he's extremely strategic in his thinking. I've said before that you shouldn't underestimate him, or judge him too early. I did so myself, and learned my lesson early on.

My guess? Obama’s going to make a big pro-gay announcement (either to repeal DADT, or, hopefully, give federal recognition to same-sex partnerships) soon afterwards, and he wants to make it very clear that he made a big, public concession to “the other side of the aisle” before he does that. The fact that the uproar among LGBTs and their supporters has warmed up evangelicals to their president-elect nemesis. That goodwill might be what he needs. He’s pissing off the Left now; hopefully he’s preparing to piss off the Right soon. Politics always involves pissing somebody off, right?

Let’s wait and see.

This one’s a gem. Money quote:

The occultists are “weaving lazy 8’s around McCain’s mind to make him look confused and like an idiot”. Bree K. said we need to break these curses off of him that are being sent from Kenya.

1. John McCain says in an interview with a Spanish-language radio station that, when asked if he would sit down with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, he will continue to work with Latin American leaders [sic] and that he would stand up against those who would do harm to the United States [sic]. Everyone is confused as to what the hell he is talking about.

2. On Tuesday, McCain tells Katie Couric that his favorite movie is Viva Zapata! The movie is about Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican (Latin American) revolutionary who fought for peasant rights and land redistribution (what a Republican would surely consider as ideas that would do harm to the United States).

Hmmm….

Rubin, Volcker, and Summers. These guys are brilliant. The guy who ended the stagflation problems of the 1970s? Volcker. The guy who engineered the budget surplus of the Clinton Era that spurred the stock market and economy? Rubin. (Followed by Summers)

Now McCain’s camp? Economics is a weak area for McCain (pretty much everything outside military matters is). His advisors? Phil Gramm, who pushed banking deregulation through the Senate, and who said Americans are a nation of whiners, and cosponsored legislation with the “Enron loophole“. Incompetent and irresponsible. Doug Holtz-Eakin, the guy behind the McCain tax cut plan, that gives EVERYONE a tax cut, the largest, naturally, to the richest 0.1%, people earning more than $2.8 million per year (remember, we’re in the middle of a war that McCain wants to continue to wage, and we’re running the BIGGEST tax deficit in history—where the hell is the money coming from?!).