This is not a good thing. Everytime I stumble, bleary-eyed, into the office, there she is on the phone chirruping greetings to some client or other. I barely have a minute every morning to enjoy my own cantankerousness when she's not warbling over the phone to somebody who might be of some importance to some drivelling cretin in accounts. She can't be as happy as she sounds - nobody could be as happy as she sounds.
What can I do to escape this relentless cheer, this assault of niceness, this barrage of bland?
14 comments:
Lunch beers, moved forward to breakfast. Think of it as daylight savings with a special rate of interest.
No not, on any account, rub her lucky tummy without her prior written consent. Nor should you ask her for her written consent to your rubbing her tummy without prior written consent.
Thanks for that helpful information, A. Rubbing a care bears stomach without asking them first is, I suppose, like stealing the tail-feather of a phoenix?
And an excellent suggestion, DD. If hangover occurs, I shall have to make sure to prescribe myself medicinal doses of... lunch beers. Moved forward or back to whatever time of the day is appropriate.
I think that care bears, like listerine, should not be taken at face value. One of my oldest friends managed to combine the largest collection of care bears at her primary school with an extensive collection of horror flicks that was not rivalled by any other child.
Chirpiness is always just a little hysterical. I'm sure she really hates you all.
Pistols at dawn. It's the only way.
We have to be irritatingly cheerful on the phone but we make up for it by hanging up and telling the phone, and the room at large, exactly what we thought of the mindless fucking cunt of an excuse for a human being who just hung up the phone.
Excessive cheerfulness in general is rather frowned upon.
This afternoon I logged onto YouTube, downloaded some Care Bears videos, and pissed myself laughing. The evil dude in 'The Care Bears In Land Without Feelings' is brilliant. Their song 'Everyone has feelings' in part two is particularly sickening, but at least they get a bit of crap in the third episode before the sickly-sweet ending.
And Uncle Wikipedia has this to say:
The Care Bears' ultimate weapon is the "Care Bear Stare," in which the collected Bears stand together and radiate light from their respective tummy symbols. These combine to form a ray of love and good cheer which could bring care and joy into the target's heart. The Care Bear Stare has several different looks. One has a beam coming from the tummy being made up of several replicated images of the symbol. Another variation forms a rainbow when multiple Bears and/or Cousins are involved. A yellow beam with red hearts is sometimes seen as well.
I'd choose eternity with the vampires in I am Legend than with a Care Bear, anyday. But it's a close one.
Some of those Care bear clips are nine or even nearly ten minutes long! How do you have the stamina for that? The Care bear stare certainly sounds most insidious. I'm sure various militaries must have had a bash at copying it somewhere along the line.
The ideal youtube clip would be something like this: under a minute long and I still laughed so hard I almost gave myself concussion (and then proceeded to fantasise about being a soapie scriptwriter in the 1980s).
I remember reading a review of 'Pollyanna' where someone said that she was irritating because "Noone is that happy all the time"!
How come when you get some pathetic grump on TV, people don't go on about how it's unrealistic to have someone who's THAT grumpy or upset all the time!
I think it's like the human condition is set at "unhappy", happiness is some unnatural form of being that sometimes we clamber out of, that's why being happy even fairly often is incomprehensible to most people, whereas being a grump all the time is considered annoying but understandable!
Isn't it more like our responses vary hugely every day, swinging from one emotion to another, many of which have nothing to do with happy or sad? We might feel melancholy one moment, and bored the next, and tired after that, and queasy after that, followed by itchy, slightly hungry, curious... etc, etc, etc.
Such an overwhelmingly positive and happy response just seems dishonest. It avoids anything that makes life interesting, and paradoxically prevents the talker or listener from actually being happy.
As for grumpiness and unhappiness, I suppose I do make that my default mode sometimes, but only because what I say seems more honest and therefore entertaining and interesting that way.
Well, hopefully entertaining and interesting. Others would probably find what I say boring and witless.
Tim's post actually reminded me about a little item I read in The Guardian a few months back. It had just been discovered (to much consternation) that the kitchen in which Nigella Lawson appears in her latest TV series is not actually her kitchen but a recreation of her kitchen built inside a studio. The writer ended the piece with something along the lines of "And she isn't licking her finger at you either, you sad git. Secretely she hates you all!".
I don't think happiness is somehow less authentic or necessarily suspicious, but when it's the sort of happiness which seems blithely uncritical and accepting of whatever the circumstances are you do wonder if there isn't something else behind it, something rather like fear or nervousness perhaps.
And you're charmingly gruff, Tim!
I remember seeing the Care Bears movie at age 9 or so...it had a great baddie, he was a tall lanky dude who conned the Bears into a sack race and stuffed them into a huge bag, then took them to a place where he shrunk them down and imprisoned their souls in shiny red gems. I don't know why. Maybe he just hated bears. As a kid, I was hoping he would win.
Perhaps that's what you could do to your co-worker? It would be a kindness in the end, Bears aren't meant for this nasty, cynical world.
But you must admit Coldheart Castle is a kick-arse name for a dwelling.
The carebears villian is pretty funny, but he's no Purple Pieman. They should face off.
Too easy: pull out all of her stuffing and she will die.
BTW - there are people in the world who are unrelentingly chirpy little cherubs, this is their true nature. Think: "glass perpetually overflowing with bubbly". Yep, they do exist and they are no more fraudulent than a pretentiously angst ridden goth, indeed, they are significantly less fraudulent than the goth.
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