The Witnesses are pretty active in my neighborhood. You know, going around with all that witnessin’ stuff. I’m actually a pretty mellow guy with regards to their activities, being generally tolerant of things theological, and usually even leaf through the issues of Watchtower that they leave behind. I figure I better know what they’re thinking about, since they just built a big Kingdom Hall about a mile and a half away, all the better to organize in greater numbers and sally forth from their strongpoint to preach to us infidels, I suppose. Gotta know what they’re up to over there.

After having completed construction of Fort God, they have started to appear in greater numbers. They seem to be attracted to my street in particular, and often park right in front of my house when they deploy. Most Saturday mornings find a minivan Jehovalopy not a dozen paces from my front door, with at least four well-dressed (as in go-to-church-meetin’ clothes, of course) people clutching briefcases and leather book bags stuffed to the gills with the True Word, and saccharine Bible parables for kids, and copies of Awake! warning about the dangers of blood transfusions, and showing pictures of the idyll that is at hand, where all mankind will lounge about in fruit-filled meadows, tigers and lions frolicking in sun-dappled glades bearing happy, small, prey animals on their back, because everyone and everything will get along just as soon as we accept God’s word.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for paradise, but I’ve always thought that the image of huge apex predators snuggling up to little fuzzy bunnies is weird on two different levels. The first one is obvious; the juxtaposition of creatures destined to be food, being chummy with killing machines. It’s absurd. The second is that, if all God’s creatures are going to be so friendly with each other, doesn’t eating one seem like a rank betrayal of trust? Who knows? Maybe when His Kingdom comes to Earth, we’ll all be vegans or something, though I can tell you that I hope He won’t skimp on the miracles required to make tofu actually taste good.

Anyhow, like I said, I’m usually willing to chat with these folks, but a lot of times they show up at the ungodly hour of 9:30, Saturday mornings. I’ve usually only just gotten out of bed. I look like hell; even more so than normal, if that can be believed, and I’m not exactly thrilled about talking to anyone. The kids have usually been up for a couple hours at least, and the front door is open, so I can’t exactly hide behind a closed front door; even if I kept the door locked, they’d be clamoring for me to open it, and I can’t bring myself to be rude enough to not open the door if the person on the other side knows I’m home. I’m just another victim of ettiquette. Sometimes I just don’t feel like talking to anybody, and my wife can somehow make herself scarce or conveniently indisposed when they arrive. I don’t know how she does it.

Thank God, though, for Sun Tzu. I have carefully studied the weaknesses of my mild-mannered, even-tempered, and well-dressed adversaries: their clothing and predictable timetable. All that is necessary is that I attach a cheap lawn sprinkler to a hose on the front deck and irrigate the holy beejeezus out of my front lawn, a wide, spitting, sputtering arch of municipal water that jets directly over the concrete walk every Saturday morning, starting around 9:00. Works like a charm. I get to continue to be a wuss, by not directly confronting them, telling them to sod off forever, that I likely can’t or won’t be saved; they don’t stroll up my walkway, wasting everyone’s time, for fear of getting their best suits drenched. Oh, and my lawn gets watered. Everyone wins.

I’ve tried to be good. Really, I have. I’m also not fixated on things scatological, I swear. It’s just that the office bathroom continues to be a rich vein of stories to mine. It’s not like I’m setting any of this up. It just seeks me out and presents itself.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I have all the imagination of a microencephalic toad, so when easy material presents itself, I greedily clutch at it, like a greasy-fingered hobo in a sudden downpour, desperately attempting to catch a wet bottle of Night Train, as it suddenly plunges through the bottom of its sodden, ruptured paper bag. I understand that a lot of creativity occurs when artists are drunk as hobos, or otherwise out of their gourds, behaving in an antisocial and scandalous manner. Maybe I should start hitting the sauce. It would, perchance, lessen my reliance on Weird Tales from the Water Closet (wasn’t that an old EC title?).

I’ll keep them mercifully brief. The first one is that, apparently, some poor sap is running around our office with a set of itchy balls. On three separate occasions, I’ve found open packets of medication sitting atop the urinals in the men’s room. The little packages read, in bold red print, “MAXIMUM STRENGTH HYDROCORTISONE ANTI-ITCH CREAM”. Now, if I’d just seen that the one time, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought -bathrooms have all kinds of random detritus in them- but three times? I mean, seriously, if you’re standing in front of the urinal, you’ve got your package in your hand. Why our mystery itchy-balled colleague does not choose to apply this soothing salve in the privacy of a stall, I cannot fathom.

I seriously hope that the first anecdote does not tie directly into the second. I have actually refrained from publicly discussing this previously, but we’ve got a dry-wiper running amok here in the office. That’s right, a fella who doesn’t deign to wash his hands, or even rinse, three out of four times he does his business. Normally, this would be only moderately distasteful, but when we found out, we all suddenly realized that practically the whole floor was in the habit of rummaging through a huge bag of peanut M&Ms that was continually replenished by a generous soul in our department. The same bag that the dry-wiper was in the habit of constantly raiding. It’s one thing to know that somebody has less-than-sanitary habits, but quite another to know that for several weeks, you may have been unwittingly ingesting someone else’s urine, feces, and sweat, not to mention skin flakes from an itchy scrotum. The fact that the quantities involved are minute does little or nothing to assuage one’s disgust, no matter how sanguine one’s outward appearance..

Needless to say, the popularity of the candy, and communal foodstuffs in general, plummeted, once the word got ’round that, however minutely, that there was more than one variety of nuts in the big yellow sack. I don’t eat anything communal that isn’t in a factory-sealed pouch anymore.

Yesterday while in the parking lot of a local grocery store, I saw a woman wearing a frilly bib apron. Granted, she was old enough to have been wearing them since they were still commonly encountered in American households, but it was still anachronistic enough for me to steal a few furtive glances. I know that’s not much of a post, but it’s all I got right now.

I’m pretty sure the elevator in our building has some kind of sinister designs on my life, soul, or perhaps both. When I arrive at or depart from our building, the elevator door opens as I pass by it in the front lobby or the upper landing, then slowly shuts, all by itself. I’d say it does it about 25 to 33% of the time.

I don’t use the elevator, since I only work on the second floor. I have no idea why it opens as I walk by. I thought it was odd, of course, but then it started following me. I’m dead serious. When it opens, about half the time the car follows me -up or downstairs, depending on where I’m going- and opens for me on the next floor. It’s really pretty creepy, especially in the early morning when nobody else is here.

Come to think of it, it only follows me when nobody else is around, though it does simply open sometimes, when I’m not alone. It’s definitely weird enough that I will never use that elevator, ever. Ever ever. It used to really creep me out, but then I realized that as long as I wasn’t foolish enough to fall for the bait and improvidently walk into that hydraulic steel tomb, it was powerless over me. Now I smirk and give it the finger, mocking its malign offer of easy transport. I’m convinced that the very moment the shiny doors of that vertically mobile casket close behind me, I’m a goner.

I guess it still freaks me out a bit.

Yesterday the IT gnomes here at Apple delivered a new PC to my desk. Since we build a cross-platform application at this division, it’s actually not as heretical as it sounds. I rejoiced, because that meant that I could devote my laptop entirely to schoolwork, meaningless blog updates, downloading pornography, and sending threats of no consequence whatsoever to friends, with a greatly decreased risk of getting caught at it by any coworkers or supervisors. Life is good.

Little did I know how good it was going to get, my friends! As I set up the new computer under my desk, and unpacked the cords and cables, I saw that I had been graced with a powerful new computing accessory. A keyboard.

What’s that you say? The keyboard is nothing to be excited about? Au contraire! I am shocked at how little regard people give to such shining beacons of modern technology. Seriously, folks, the keyboard- at least this keyboard- is the Last Word in input devices. Don’t believe me? I pity da fool. I have photographic evidence! Cardboard boxes don’t lie, my friends!

That’s right. The Ultimate Input Device. This thing has it all. Keys, lights, even a cable to connect it to the computer! This thing rocks. When the system showed up at my desk, I was initially dismayed to find it came with a ball mouse instead of an optical mouse, like all the cool kids are using these days. But when I saw the box for the Ultimate Input Device, I knew why no laser-guided, three-button scrollin’ wonder was in my cubicle. You gotta scrimp here and there if you want to save up for the big guns where it counts.

I now held in my trembling hands the very apex of human-machine interface engineering. I suddenly felt, though, that the box, while possessed of a certain austere beauty, was somehow lacking. Its severe and confident assertion of supremacy, not unlike Apple’s advertising posters or Stalinist architecture, did not fully convey the magnitude of its glory. This, I thought, was intolerable, a slight to the prowess of its designers and manufacturers. The very progress of all mankind was getting short shrift from the thoughtless philistines of some nameless container design committee.

Clearly, something had to be done. If not me, who? If not during my lunch break, when? I resolved to act, to erase this grave injustice and do no less than invigorate a tragically slumbering humanity with concrete evidence of its own resplendent triumphs. I set to work at once.

The first step was obvious. This keyboard is “Xtreme”. Anything superlative is “Xtreme”, denoting that it is a product or substance that can only be truly appreciated and properly used by the youthful, athletic, sharp-witted, and exuberant flower of our species. The kind of item you take along when you paraglide out of your hardbodied girl/boyfriend’s helicopter down to the ten-diamond snowboard run down K2, armed only with your five tongue studs, neon-colored sports beverage, and a whole lotta ‘tude. There’s probably a “tribal” tattoo and a soul patch in there somewhere, too. At any rate, clearly, if this keyboard is “ultimate”, it’s gotta be “Xtreme” as well.

As soon as I made the keyboard Xtreme, I realized that it was only the first step. What else, though, could successfully and dramatically illustrate just how impressive this thing really is? For answers, I turned to proven real-life displays of superiority. Everybody knows that if you attach enough fiberglass to a four-cylinder Asian car, the resulting vehicle is the finest automobile on the road. With that in mind, I made further modifications to the box.

THAT’s more like it. Now just about anybody can tell that this keyboard is gonna rock your world the second it gets plugged in. Only one element is missing: that high-tech look. Technobling. And nothing says high-tech like ultra-bright LEDs. Nothing.

Behold! The Ultimate Input Device now has a box worthy to hold it. Awww yeah. This is goin’ up on the cube wall for sure.