Incompetent Meteorologists

On the list of things you want your kid to acheive in his life, "working at the dump" is probably slightly higher than "becoming a Judy Garland impersonator."

We do not get a huge pile of respect here at the ash heap of civilization. Nor do we expect respect. We are contemptuous of respect, to tell you the truth.

Our jobs consist of tasks that many illegal immigrants would refuse to do. Sweeping up. Hauling rubbish. Sorting cardboard. Hiding cadavers. Trucking refuse. Recycling batteries. Cleansing metaphors.

But today I came in early because of the big storm. I wanted to get my snowplow crew set up so we could knock down the snow early. The forecast was up tp 12 inches in the Boston area. I activated the notification transponder. This sent a signal to the drivers to come in early and report for duty. Throughout the metro area, beepers were going off, waking up the slumbering plowers of snow.

Then the phone calls started coming. Nearly all the dumpfucks were calling in sick. George was feeling "croupy". Bill refused to come in to work if anyone else was sick. Rajeed was recovering from his vasectomy. Lonny's anal warts were acting up. And Melvin had died during the night - choking on a ham sandwich, according to his mother. Only Lardass, that faithful, noisome piece of work came in on time.
"Hey Chief!" he greeted me when he arrived. I was never more happy to see him. "I heard on the radio that the storm was cancelled."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, it went out to sea. We're getting a dusting. Where do you want me to start?"
Management shows it's mettle during these types of crises.
"Get that shithouse cleaned up, LA. It's an ungodly mess."

Etymologically Speaking REVISED

George asked "Why are you always calling it a "cobb" house?"
I thought for a minute, "Dunno, it reminds me of one of those shacks that ice fishermen use for protection. Up in New Hampshire, I think they call them 'cobb' houses."
Lardass let out a whoop "Yoiks! You must have been really bleary on Yukon Jack. The word is not 'Cobbhouse', it's 'bobhouse' you numbnuts."

"Bobhouse? Hmmn. Perhaps I had misheard when I heard the word uttered by the guy who was building my Newfound Lake weekend cabin."
"Nope. It's a bobhouse." Lardass was never surer of anything than he was right then.

Well, I went out to the Internet and googled on Ice fishing to see what ice fishermen were calling it. I found a great website called iceshanty.com, logged onto their forum, and asked the question. No one had ever heard of the term "cobbhouse."

If I was less certain of my aural memory, I might admit error, and henceforth make the correct reference when I refer to the building which houses my office at the dump. The metaphor is still apt. Ice fishing is an excuse not to have to stay home and deal with the family and inlaws. A chance to consume malt beverages. Perchance to hook a lunker. Pretty much why we go to the dump.
But, after serious reflection, and a scanning of the email responses on this topic, I have concluded that I am in agreement with me. It's a fucking cobb house. We cobbled it out of recycled lumber and cement. We even have an autographed photo of baseball legend Ty Cobb on the wall. So we wiill continue to call it what it is. And if anyone doesn't like it, (s)he can kiss this! (points to nether region).

I was at my desk in the cobb house working on my theory about the Bird Sightings column in the paper hiding secret terrorist messages. Someone claimed to have spotted nine snow geese at Plum Island and a Eurasian Widgeon. Come on folks, there is something fishy going on here!
Who knows what a Barrow's goldeneye looks like? Loons, grebes, goshawks, fox sparrows, catbirds, kittiwakes and for chissakes - harlequin ducks! Don't try to tell me this verbiage is not some kind of arcane code for: Let's crash Air France flight 222 into the QMII - or something sinister like that. I was trying to work out the anagram when Lardass barreled through the door, bringing with him a blast of sub-freezing air and the aroma of shit that clings to his work uniform. He ignored my annoyed look.
"Hey, the new phonebooks are here!" he announced with inordinate enthusiasm. It was always a busy day when the phone company delivered their newest issue to homes in the community. It was inevitably followed by a glut of old phone books in the dumpsters. What is more useless than last year's yellow pages?
"It's freaking crazy out there," he declared. "Some moron just dropped off a truckload of Ice at the take and leave. Ice! Why the fuck would you bring ice to the dump?"
"You should have stopped him. We don't need any more ice." I frowned sternly.
"Perhaps there was a minor bribe involved..." He feigned a look of mock incredulity. The word bribe got my attention. When I looked up, Lardass was slowly teasing a $20 bill out of his front pocket.
"Dude." I smiled approvingly "Let's go get some lunch at Tien Fu."

Like a lost lottery ticket in a snowstorm, the truth is often elusive. So it is here at the Dump, where we conduct a 24-7 experiment in searching for the Truth with a capital T. Sometimes, the Search for Truth is a lot like searching for cashews in the snack bowl that they put out at the bar to make you drink more beer: you probe the bowl with an unsanitary finger (that same finger has not been washed despite several bathroom visits - without the momentary feeling of guilt that you have contaminated the rest of the contents of the bowl. Other times, Truth is found in the reactions of those who do not welcome being "crotched" by your dog.
Yes, 'Tis is a noble calling...
Ha!, you might interrupt. How are you going to find Truth ruminating in the symbolic garbage of suburbia? Isn't your so-called Dump merely a fictitious creation of a warped imagination depicting the entropy of our post-modern world? A place where you can lampoon your friends' personal idiosyncrasies and even make a lot of stuff up, all the while making You - the DFM - seem like an innocent, defect-free character?

Hey, don't shoot the messenger here. At least I never bet against the team. I had a stop order on those shares of Imclone. I would slit my wrists before I would harm a child. And I did not have sex with that woman - Miss Lewinsky. Truth.

Note to Customers: At the Dump, we are going back to the Threat-level-lower-than-Orange.
Due to budget constraints, we will be dismissing the security guards that we hired to guard the plutonium and anti-matter recycle areas. Hmmn - checking the attendance records, it appears that none of them have reported for duty since Boxing Day.

I was studying the bird sightings report in the newspaper when Lardass came in. He had been put in charge of the security detail, so I asked him how come they had not been showing-up.
"Aw, I canned them last week." he said. "I mean, what do we need guards for? Why would anyone want to blow up a dump? Besides, we shipped all the recyclable WMD components to the Moustapha Childrens relief fund."
I gives me a warm feeling to know we are saving the children through our parsimony.

Lunatic Policies?

The Wolf moon brought with it a crystal clear mass of arctic air that howled at the gates of our region. The friendly warm winds from the southern hemisphere skittered back to their equatorial latitudes. The weather forecasters made jokes about politicians being so cold that they had their hands in their own pockets. Har dee har.

I was in the cobb house, sitting at my desk, glad to have attained management status, and not required to work outdoors. My crew were just coming in to spend their coffee breaks - huddling around the Franklin Stove which I had cranked up with dry birch chunks. The sides of the cast iron stove glowed cherry red.

As usual, George was first through the door. He likes to lead and Bill doesn't touch door knobs so in they came, winding down on some argument they had been having outside. The gist of it seemed to be about the new Bush immigration policy.
"Rewarding the crimaliens! What is the message here! Fucking Bush should be impeached!" George threw his hat down to emphasize his point, and sat close to the stove, rubbing his hands to bring the blood back to the surface.
"It's not enough," insisted Bill "We need these people to do the jobs no one here wants to do. They are the bullwark of our economy, for chrisakes!"
Rajjid, the new guy, was scratching his head. "This is not a good thing." He knew that he was the most vulnerable worker on the staff. "Last in first out" is not just our motto, it's our philosophy too. Rajjid was safe, but I didn't want to give him a reason to get too content. I paid him in Canadian dollars, so he was well under the minimum hourly wage that would be demanded by the former illegal aliens.
Lardass had also come in from the cold. He blew his nose in a filthy rag of a hankercheif and put it back in his hip pocket. "So when are we gonna get some illegal aliens in here to do the jobs that no one wants to do?"
The question hung in the air like the stink of sewer gas.

Clean Start

New Years day. The dump is closed, but some of the guys come in to sit around the office anyway. The alternative is to be home with their wives, being harrangued to go to the mall or to to the home decorating store. Women tend to take the new year seriously as a raison to kick off new projects. Most of the guys have learned to find a reason not to be around when the whim strikes.

I was at the desk pretending to do desk work. In fact I was reading the “bird sightings” column that appears each week. This is purportedly a diary of bird sightings as reported to the Audubon society. It seemed to me as a perfect medium to transmit secret codes to terrorist cells operating in deep cover. One brown pelican, two short-eared owls, a rough-legged hawk, 40 wilson snipes, a dozen razorbills, 25 Northern shrikes. What possible use does this information hold for anyone? Is it some sort of competitive game that birdwatchers play? Or does it hide secret messages about troop movements and locations of secret weapons caches? Robert Redford discovered a similar plot in Three Days of the Condor. I decided to keep this theory to myself.

George had a nasty head cold and was sitting sniffling in the corner working on last week's New York Times puzzle. We all regarded him with a wary eye, looking for signs of Mad Cow disease: lurching gait, drooling, inability to make proper change.

None of us was more leery than Bill, whose anxiety about illness and disease has become an obsessive compulsive disorder. He has taken to wearing rubber surgical gloves all the times.
He will not grasp a door handle even with the gloves; he will wait for as long as it takes for soeone else to open a door, and then he holds it with his elbow and passes through never touching the bacteria infested doorknob. Bill was starting to reminds me of Jack Nicholson in that movie with Helen Hunt. Of course any similarity between Bill and Jack was only in the bizarre behavior. The funny part about this is that Bill's constant companion is a filthy offal eating dog who likes to roll in a pile of feces. Bill will not go anywhere without his dog. We make him keep the beast in the car. Dump rules prohibit live dogs wandering around.
"Hey Bill," croaked George, "You wear those gloves when you are whacking off?" But Bill would not dignify the taunt with a reply, other than to display his "fuck you" finger.

(Bill once confided to us that he was so monogamous that he thought about his wife while masturbating in the shower. You can't give that kind of information away and not expect it to bite you later. Like a dog)

Lardass ( who had been in the crapper for about 40 minutes) came out with the newspaper he had been reading. The faint odor of sewer gas followed him across the room.

Bill shouted at him, "Hey, Lardass I didn't hear you washing your hands. Dump Rules say you got to wash the hands before returning to work"
Lardass grinned diabolically. "Didn't you know? We're trying to conserve water this year. Heck, I didn't even flush!"