Walter Engrid

Sometimes I like to drive slowly in the left lane, just to irritate certain drivers around me. I feel like if you’re the type of person to go 20 miles over the speed limit and tailgate those that don’t choose to adhere to your level of idiocy, you deserve some opposition.

When someone is riding my bumper and flashing their lights at me I also like to speed up just enough so that I ensure they’re stuck behind me and whoever is in the right lane.

I guess you could call me an aggressive driver. I like to think of myself more as the deliverer of highway justice. Either way, I’m not a lot of fun on road trips.

By the time I arrive at work at around 9:20 (punctuality has never been my strong suit) I’ve already manage to seriously enrage 5-10 people. If that’s not a successful commute, I don’t know what is.

I don’t like the Styrofoam cups my office watering hole provides so I bring my own coffee mug. It’s not a traveling one either, just a mug. For some reason I always lose the tumblers, but my ceramic cups I drink out of on my morning drive usually make their way home. Plus it only leaves me with one thing to wash at the end of the day. That and the plastic togo containers that my Chinese takeout comes in. I don’t know why I save them, I never use them, just can’t seem to bring myself to throw them away.

I have a lot of moral stances I’m inclined to take. Such as the ones against dumbass drivers and against the environmental massacre we’re all involved in. As self-righteous as I am, I’m also intelligent enough to be fully aware of the fact that nothing I’m doing is actually making a difference. But anyone can recycle.

I got my job straight out of a prestigious university when I was 21. I wasn’t interested in perfecting my beer bong skills so I devoted my energy to getting out of that societal hell hole a little early. I’ve been in that office for 13 years now. I don’t love my job by any means. But as much as I love whiskey and my pitbull, I can’t imagine there’s much room for anything else anyway. So I figure I’ll stay there for the foreseeable future. The dental coverage anyway is amazing. I’ve only gone to the dentist once in the last decade, they told me I had two cavities. Once it hurts enough to interrupt my sleep I plan to go get them taken care of. If you can sleep through it, it’s not that bad. And I like knowing it will only cost me 50 bucks when I finally choose to go back. I hate paying for misery that’s supposedly for my own good. If I was into that kind of thing I’d have a girlfriend.

The only downside to the gig, other than the mind numbing monotony, is that the pay pretty much sucks once you factor in student loans and my online shopping problem. I could stand to cut back I’m sure, but I’m not willing to live a life where I can’t buy a solar powered battery charger if the desire hits.

I took a part time serving job awhile back. The money was enough for me to seriously doubt the validity of my choice to waste 15 years of life on school. But after losing it due to 7 complaints in 2 months I realized it was probably best that I worked in the computer field. In my defense, if someone fails to use basic human courtesy in the form of a “thank you,” I feel that reminding them with a slightly sarcastic “you’re welcome” is more than fair.

At the end of an 6.5 hour work day (can’t really call it an 8 hour day when you factor in being 20 minutes late, leaving 15 minutes early, and taking an hour lunch, although my time card would say differently) I pick up my dinner and have a rousing drive home listening to NPR and pissing off some more drivers.

To your typical outsider my life appears pretty mundane. But just as some find joy in drunken encounters with strangers who piddle their nights away at noisy nightclubs, I actually savor and enjoy the repetition of my life. Why order the Orange Chicken when you already know the General Tso’s is more than satisfactory?

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