Wimp documents

The word 'packet' is bandied about much too freely in offices these days. Every set of forms is now apparently a packet. Membership packets, application packets, information packets.

Two stapled sheets do not a frickin' packet make. A packet is a big fat honkin' slab of paper enclosed in a PACKET. A packet lands on desks with a satisfying fly-swatting, dust-kicking thud. Rule of thumb: if I can blow my nose in it and crumple it into a ball, it's probably not a packet.

And what's up with the "cards"? Any rectangular slip of toilet paper is now a card. I can actually see right through my car insurance identification "card." Rule of goddamn thumb: if I can't poke your goddamn eyes out with it, it's not a goddamn card.

Vomiting from helicopters

When I hear a traffic report on the radio, I feel like they just puked on me from their chopper. They hop onto the airwaves, unleash a diarrheal barrage of freeway numbers, and ten seconds later they're gone. An untrained ear might mistake it all for a final frantic mayday. This is not information. This is my radio blowing chunks at me.

Since the damn report isn't useless enough as it is, one station here makes it a point to overlay thrashing metal guitars on top of the entire performance, every single time. All it conveys to me is miles of highway going up in flames. Why is this being done? What is so orgasmic about a traffic report?

Someone explain wide pelvises to me

What is this about a wide pelvis helping with childbirth? Does the kid come out of the vagina or does it shatter the abdomen to burst forth into the world? Any kind of pelvis is a good pelvis as long as you can spread the hell out of the legs. I'm not seeing a genuine issue here.

Just how dumb are the Japanese supposed to be?

All right, I've had it with all the advice on all the cultural sensitivity that must be exercised when negotiating business deals abroad. Let me clue in the well-meaning folks who emphasize this type of thing: We're not negotiating inter-galactic buyouts with Klingons, you fuckwits. All the wheeling-dealing happens to be strictly intra-homo sapiens.

Wouldn't a Japanese fellow have to be really badly adjusted to take offense every time an American acted American? If I met a Japanese peevish enough to go sobbing in one corner of the conference room every time I tried to shake his hand or didn't use a chopstick, I'd ask him to go develop some fucking self-esteem and come back when he's done growning up.

Businesspeople aren't babies. A chick in a kimono probably knows her American counterparts don't begin every meeting with incense and cross-legged tea drinking. Neither does she go "You crack joke during multi-trillion yen deal! How perfectly peculiar! I spit wasabi on you, uncouth bitches!" So everybody just chill. People on every side of the planet have brains.