Old As Hell

I know I haven't been around for a bit. Well, actually only about a week. I've been busy catching up with things at work that hadn't gotten done due to the weather. I've got a side project that's taking up my time at nights as well. And, well, you know what they say, "If you can't say something nice..."

However, this is my blog and I do like to complain. Apparently, some people are interested in reading my rants, so I thought I'd pop in for a little-bitty bitchfest. Today's topic is: old people.

I am sick and tired of old people using their age as an excuse to be rude. Apparently, wisdom does not always come with age. My grandmother's got to be, what...80-something? She's not a bitch at all. In fact, she totally rocks and she's the nicest lady ever (without being irritating). She might say, "I'm too far along to put up with ___," but she's not crotchety and cranky in her oldness. Following are two cases of the old-n-crankies I have come across in the recent past.

There's a woman who works here who seems to think that it's okay to be a cranky bitch. I've heard people describe her as that cartoon...whats-it-called...the one about the cranky old lady? Well, it's irritating anyway. I think the cartoon is amusing to an extent, but when people compare the real life woman to the cartoon version, it's almost as if they're giving her an excuse to act the way she does. Yesterday, I was at the copy machine, making copies (duh) of something that needed to be duplicated exactly the way it was. That means staples, clips, sticky notes, tags, all need to be replaced in exactly the same place on the original and duplicated exactly on the copy. So, it's delicate work. Along comes Hag-woman to wait her turn to run photocopies. She's sitting there, trying to carry on a conversation with me, when I say, "I might be a while, I have to sort and staple everything in this stack." She gets up from the chair by the machine, reluctantly and slowly, and she mumbles as she walks off, "You should have done that at your desk." Maybe she's cranky because for someone who's been around for so long, she doesn't have a better position than I do. She's just an admin like myself. Therefore, she's got no authority over me - as if authority would be an excuse to mouth off to me anyway. Secondly, she has no idea what I'm doing or copying or how delicate and precise I need to be with everything. If I'd have prepared this at my desk, I never would have remembered where all of the tags and stickies were. It just pisses me off that she thinks she can get away with being a cunt just because she's old and she imagines that people will excuse her because of it. Not me though.

This morning, I encountered another stupid old woman who thought that it was okay to be rude to me. I was downstairs in the cafeteria, purchasing a bottle of Mountain Dew in hopes of waking myself up. An old lady I hadn't seen there before rang up my drink at the register.

"$1.19" she tells me. So, I dig a dollar twenty out of my pocket.
"Can I have 10 more cents please?" says the woman in a snotty, sarcastic tone.
"Oh, I thought you said one nineteen" I shot back, nearly as snotty and sarcastic.
"Well, it's $1.29 with tax."

Since when do you give someone the total for something pre-tax?! How retarded is that? And then to act like I'm the one being stupid. Sheesh!

Yeah...so old people can just go ahead and drop off already (for the most part). They certainly shouldn't be allowed to drive..but that's another rant.