DOWN WITH PANTS!

Thanks to Kevin over at Kapgar.com for the props the other day. I always appreciate some positive feedback. He says that I "can rant and rave better than just about anybody". Well, my friend, you haven't seen anything. Reading a rant is nothing compared to my real life ranting. I've mellowed out a lot with age, and my wife doesn't appreciate a good rant as much as my old co-workers, but in my prime I was bar none, the best.

My greatest rant, which was more of a temper tantrum than anything, came one night while I was working for the Elmira Pioneers baseball team. It was, for whatever reason, one of our busiest nights of the season. We were short a few gameday employees and had to throw a bunch of people into jobs they had never done.

After taking care of some business in the press box I went downstairs into the concourse to help out where I could. It was there that I encountered the owner of the team who was in the middle of a fit. People were coming up to him and anyone else that would listen complaining about the wait for cotton candy. The new kids on the machine were struggling and people were waiting as long as three innings, maybe even more, for motherfucking cotton candy.

Since I was the first staff member that the owner found, I received the reaming. I got a solid five minute berating while I followed him around watching and helping him fuck it up even more. We all knew to, more or less, ignore our owners ideas and attempt to steer him away from whatever bug was up his butt at the moment. He had a knack of making everything more difficult than it needed to be and typically, if you could just let what he said go in one ear and out the other, everybody would be much better off.

That night was no use. He was on a tear and wanted to roll up his sleeves and get right in there. And nothing that I did was right. Nothing I did helped. Even though concessions wasn't my job, I took the abuse because I was the one that got caught and the concessions guy knew where to hide.

After the game when the park finally emptied the entire staff would meet, drink a couple of beers and unwind. With the owner long gone we all had an opportunity to vent and I launched into a 30 minute tirade. The first ten minutes were about our owner and what a jackass he was, the next twenty minutes were about the fucking idiots who stood in line for an hour for cotton candy.

I'm still fuming about it, even as I write this I am getting pissed off. My heart is starting to race. My blood pressure is spiking. My face is all red. Why the hell would anyone stand in line that long for cotton candy? Who are these fucking idiots? I think they deserved to stand in that long of a line just for being total fucking retards. I think we should have just called the ambulance, shoved them all into the back and sent them to the hospital to get their heads checked. They would have thanked us for helping them figure out why they were so fucking stupid.

Anyway, I think I smashed an old chair with a baseball bat, I tipped over a couple of tables and I had all of my co-workers rolling on the floor for a half an hour. For the rest of the season they always tried to bait me into a going crazy, and usually I gave them a command performance. Something always pissed me off (don't even get me started on the people who parked in the Dunn Field handicapped spots and then strolled into the ballpark with no problem).

You can't get the effect of a rant like that on a blog, so you will just have to trust me, I was once the greatest of all time.