Long, Pointess Entry With Frequent Gratuitous References To The Other Word For "Rooster"

(Note: I have absolutely nothing better to do today – stupid lazy posters have done a shitty job of posting the OYATM comics to the comics newsgroup once again – so this is going to be a very, very long post. I’ll try to break it up into sections to make it a little more readable, but you’d probably do well to either skim through it or skip it entirely.)
So here I am on the last – and what will most likely be the longest – day of manning the desk by myself.
Yesterday the manager of our group (my manager’s boss) called in and seemed less than pleased to discover that I was the only person working this desk, particularly as some of the other desks in our department were also short-staffed, so I suspect that in the future a greater effort will be made to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.
Beyond the simple tedium of sitting here with nobody to talk to, and the fact that there’s no one covering things when I get up to use the bathroom or something, it hasn’t really mattered, as it’s been inordinately quiet all weekend.
Of course the tedium has really gotten to me. Combined with the fact that I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep all weekend, I’m left feeling pretty well exhausted and eager for this day to end, even though I’m not even a quarter of the way through it.
As it had on Thursday night, the heat and humidity made my night restless at best on Friday night. That is, once the thunderstorm quieted down enough to allow me to even try to sleep.
The most annoying aspect of the storm was that it didn’t cool things off even a little bit. The air was just as hot, heavy, and still before, during, and after.
When I left work last night I was pleased to discover that both the heat and humidity had decreased significantly, and that there was a pleasant, cooling breeze.
Given that I was exhausted from a poor night’s sleep, an early rise and fairly vigorous workout, and a long, long day, I thought for certain that with the lack of mugginess I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
That more or less proved to be the case, but I didn’t stay asleep long, as there were some people making a lot of noise in the parking lot (apparently unloading something from a truck), and the dog upstairs was crying out against the injustice of his owner stepping out for the evening.
Fortunately neither noise persisted long, and eventually I drifted back to sleep, only to be awoken around 1 am by some people talking on their balcony.
And by people I mean drunk people, which means that they were talking to each other in volumes suitable for a visit with grandma at the nursing home.
Among the drunk people was a drunk chick, and let me tell you, no sound in the world carries like the voice of a drunk chick
As her voice reverberated throughout the parking lot and bounced in through my window it was if she were holding a bullhorn directly to my ear.
I was lying there, paralyzed with rage, considering my options.
Option One involved getting up, getting dressed, and going outside to politely request that they keep it down or take it inside and calmly explain that I needed to be up for work in a few hours.
Option Two involved getting up, getting dressed, finding a blunt instrument, and bludgeoning them into silence.
Option Three was calling the cops.
Option Four was waiting to see if someone else called the cops (which I’m amazed didn’t happen)
And Option Five, which occurred to me as I kept going back to Option Two in my mind, was to get up, close the window, and go back to sleep.
Given that it was a pretty cool night anyway (especially in contrast to the previous nights), I went with Option Five, which, except for a few brief moments in which the drunk chick redoubled her efforts to be heard by everyone everywhere and her voice came through the glass like a hot knife through butter, this proved to be pretty effective.
Of course, the frequent playing out of Option Two in my mind had gotten my adrenaline pumping a little, so it took me a while to get back to a state in which sleep would be possible.
It was at that point that I started hearing a very loud, very strange noise from upstairs.
As I walk around in my condo, I wonder there’s anything that I do that would make the kind of noises in the unit below me that I hear from the unit above me, because for the life of me I can’t figure out how some of those noises come about.
This one was especially odd, as it basically in the same spot, over and over again (said spot being almost directly above me).
I came up with two possible explanations.
The first was that the woman upstairs was home and having really, really, REALLY aggressive sex, causing her bed to thump up and down on the floor.
I dismissed this notion because the rhythm was off (it seemed to me, though at this point who knows how valid any of my recollections of how sex works actually are), and that with sex that vigorous I was bound to hear noises other than the thumping, which I did not.
The second explanation was that it was something the dog was doing. My guesses as to what that was specifically are that he was either trying to dig up the carpet, or he was chasing after a ball that kept bouncing back into the same spot over and over again.
In any case I was too damned tired and aggravated to do anything other than lie there choking on my rage until the noise finally stopped and I was able to get back to sleep.
Today was going to mark the return to working out on all three mornings of my work week, but after the shitty night I’d had I reset my alarm for 5 so that I could get the maximum amount of sleep possible.
Which very clearly was not enough, and so I’m sitting here slumped over the desk with nothing to do, no one to talk to, and far too many hours before I can get the hell out of here for four days.

Even My Dreams Are Against Me Department:
Sometime after I did finally get to sleep for the last time I had an odd dream in which I was on vacation somewhere in Europe with my mom and dad and my sister Kim.
Though I was an adult in the dream, this seemed to be taking place in a time before my sister was married and had kids.
Despite this and other elements of unreality, the dream was surprisingly lucid at times.
For example at one point I took note of the fact that someone was smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, which is the brand that comic book character John Constantine, not to be confused with the almost totally unrelated travesty of a character of that same name portrayed by Keanu Reeves in a recent movie, smokes. This was interesting because earlier that day I’d read a comic in which particular attention was drawn to the fact that Constantine smokes this brand, which I actually brought up in the conversation I had in the dream with person smoking them.
The oddest part, though, was the women I had literally hanging on me the whole time. I’m not sure where in Europe I was supposed to be, but given the most likely cause for Europe to be on my mind, which I won’t get into (hint: it involves porn), I would say that I was either in the Netherlands or somewhere in Eastern Europe, like Prague.
In any case, these fairly attractive native women (there were like three of them), had basically glommed onto me and were constantly hanging on my arm and cuddling up with me and hauling me from place to place.
Now, this wouldn’t have been so bad except that they were sort of, well, I hate to use the term, but it’s something that starts with “cock” and ends with “teases.”
So that made things extremely frustrating, especially since they wouldn’t let me out of their sight and would swoop in and drive away any other woman I tried to talk to.

This leads me to another topic that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, which also involves the word preceding “teases” in the term describing my European hangers-on.
You’ve probably seen those Axe commercials in which they talk about “game killers.”
They say “game killers” because FCC regulations prevent them from calling a spade a spade, but what they’re really talking about are cock blockers.
The commercials get into some of the specific kinds of cock blockers that are out there in the world, but in my experience there are three basic categories of cock blockers.
First off, I suppose, I should explain what a cock blocker is.
Basically, a cock blocker is exactly that. It’s anyone, man, woman, or child, who prevents you from successfully engaging in relations with someone. While the term cock blocker seems gender-specific, it can be applied to anyone who interferes with you having sex with another person, whether you’re male or female or the object of your sexual intentions is male or female.
If sex is the goal, a cock blocker is the goalie.
In any case, while they can take on an infinite variety of forms (as indicated in the Axe commercials), each kind typically falls into one of three categories: Competitive, Malicious, and Oblivious.
The Competitive Cock Blocker (CCB) is arguably the most common. CCBs work to thwart your efforts in order to further their own. They’re blocking you so that they can get in and score before you can take your shot.
It’s possible for a person of either gender to be a CCB. I have had the experience of encountering a female CCB who was blocking my (perceived) efforts to woo a certain girl because she wanted her for herself. I say that they were perceived efforts because I wasn’t actively pursuing the girl in question, but the CCB viewed every male as a potential threat and made preemptive strikes to keep us all at bay.
There is actually a sub-category of CCB that is typically female, the Proxy CCB (PCCB), or “ The Matchmaker.”
PCCBs don’t thwart your efforts for their own sake, but rather for the sake of someone else whom they think is better suited for the object of your interests than you are.
I’ve had run-ins with this variety as well, most memorably, oddly enough, in an instance that involved the same girl that the other female CCB was keeping me away from. Again, this was more a matter of perceived interest on my part, as I didn’t really have any intentions of making a move on this particular girl.
It happened during my drinking years at an after-party at a friend’s (the PCCB in question) apartment. Things were winding down and the various people who were going to crash there were going off in search of places to pass out. I was preparing to stagger back to my own place, which was about a block away.
The girl who was perceived to be my Object of Interest (OI), had settled in one of the bedrooms. I had gone in to say good night to her before leaving. As was something of a ritual between us when parting, I leaned down to kiss her on top of her head.
(While I would have willingly gone for it if given the opportunity, I was not actively attempting to pursue a sexual relationship with this girl; our relationship was entirely platonic, and I recognized that there was no changing that, which is why I made no “moves” on her.)
The PCCB saw this and yelled, “Jon, no!” She got up, grabbed the other guy whom she wanted to see hook up with the OI, dragged him into the bedroom, pushed me out of the room, slid the pocket doors shut and leaned back against them, arms spread, to physically bar me from attempting to re-enter.
That was my most extreme encounter with a PCCB.
Alternatively, a CCB (of the either the main category or two sub-categories) may actually be competing for your attention, thwarting your efforts because they want you for themselves.
Personally, I’ve never encountered this sort of CCB, but it is at least conceivable that it could happen. The closest I’ve come to this is the experience of having a woman who had no interest in me become jealous when I expressed interest in another woman. She didn’t want me the way I wanted her, but she also didn’t want me wanting anyone else.
Another sub-category is the Protective Competitive Cock Blocker (PrCCB). This is typically a female friend of the OI who simply feels that you aren’t good enough, or who just want s to prevent their friendship from being damaged by the OI entering into a relationship. While she is most likely not competing with you for the OI’s sexual favors, the PrCCB is competing with you for her attention.
The next category is the Malicious Cock Blocker (MCB), while the CCB may, in fact, be malicious, this category is distinguished by the fact that the MCB doesn’t stand to gain anything from blocking your cock; they do it for the sheer, malevolent hell of it.
MCBs can be difficult to spot, as motivations are not always readily apparent. Someone you think may be an MCB may, in fact, be a CCB. Overall, recognizing the MCB is a matter of determining whether or not the blocker will somehow benefit from blocking you. I would suppose that an ex (yours or the OI’s) would be a pretty likely MCB candidate.
Because I can’t say for certain whether something other than pure evil motivated the actions of the blockers I’ve encountered, I can’t point to any specific instances of encountering MCBs, but given the perverse aspects of human nature I can’t help but assume that they exist.
Oblivious Cock Blockers (OCBs) are, therefore, the second most common category.
These can be anyone, male, female, young, old.
OCBs do not deliberately thwart your efforts. They have no agendas and bear you no malice. Usually they’re just friendly people who intrude on conversations, totally oblivious (hence the name) to what’s going on. They don’t know that you were just about to get the OI’s phone number when they came stumbling along. They aren’t purposely dominating the conversation and preventing you from getting a word in edgewise.
I think I hate OCBs most of all simply because you can’t really get mad at them.
Despite the fact that they’re destroying your chances, they don’t really intend you any harm, and for whatever reason they just can’t understand that when you were talking to that chick you weren’t just being friendly you were trying to get laid. They’re like some big, dumb dog that comes in and leaves muddy footprints all over your carpet; they didn’t mean to make a mess of things and they don’t understand what you’re so upset about.
And that’s what makes them so infuriating.
There was a guy who used to work here who, back in Tucson before I transferred to VA, and well before he did, who was a huge (literally) OCB. There was an OI working there in whom I was extremely interested (read: obsessed with). Because most of my time at work was spent on the phone, there wasn’t a whole lot of time to socialize other than on breaks and during lunch, so I had to make every second I could get with this OI count. It was difficult to get any time with her because she was very attractive and thus there were quite a few CCBs that I had to contend with.
But every time I had her to myself, this guy would come waddling along and interrupt.
(It’s worth noting that I had ZERO chance with this girl anyway, particularly given that she was in a relationship, but that’s hardly the point).
Given that he was married I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he wasn’t a CCB, he didn’t seem to be malicious, and he genuinely appeared to have no idea that he was interrupting – or blocking – anything.
I have countless examples of run-ins with CCBs and OCBs, and I myself have actually been a CCB and an OCB on occasion (though I’ve never done the MCB thing), but I’m sure you get the idea, and I’ve probably put more thought and effort into writing about this subject than is necessary, but give me a break: I still have almost 6 more hours left here.
Actually, at this point (after a bit of a break) I have about 4 hours left, and someone from the weekday shift has come in to help cover the desk, so I suppose that, finally, I will bring this entry to a close.