VISIT YOUR LOCAL BLOODBANK

Yesterday evening I came home to discover Savage Kitten flaked out exhausted in bed.
She was pale and wan, and too tired to even eat (and being Cantonese-American she pretty much LIVES to feed - seeing her fiercely hunt down helpless comestibles is a sight to behold).
No, not a cold, nor flue. Not even the monthly .... errm, you know. Instead, something far better. She gave blood yesterday.
[Please note: the 'monthly .... errm you know' is pictured as a large porcupine wearing granny-glasses and native-bead necklaces who does a fearsome rhumba. I just thought you should know this. She visits us every .... errm, month. Yes.]


Giving blood is a fine thing, entirely a commendable practice. It is one of the best things you can do, and you should make it a practice to do it regularly.

Just never gonna do it myself. I'll leave it up to you.
I got a needle-phobia going on.

The last time a medical person drew blood out of my arm, I took one look at the hypodermic slowly filling with warm pulsating blood and went into shock.

- - - - - - -

Now, where was I? Oh yes, warm crimson fluid filling up a glass tube ......

- - - - - - -

Please understand that it isn't the blood. I have no problem with blood. Seeing the back of the driver's head explode from a sniper bullet in Mindanao was not a problem, and attending a boucherie is always fun - especially if they cook the odd parts. Horrid accidents absolutely fascinate me.
I would not object at all if they allowed me to donate blood by gashing myself fiercely. But needles, are, well, an issue.

One of my earliest memories is being chased around a doctor's office by an ogre in a white lab coat intent on giving me a wholly unnecessary flue-shot. This memory got relived and refreshed every year for fifteen years until I finally had the stones to rebel against egregious needling.
[And then promptly spent three weeks having the worst flue ever - that entire holiday season is a solid blur of buckets, shaking fevers, and hallucinations.]

In my youth it seemed like the solution for every conceivable medical issue involved a sadist, reeking of antiseptic, in a white lab coat, holding an instrument of punctuation. That drop of fluid expressed from the tip in preparation of the inevitable jab is enough to .......

- - - - - - -


There is a small bright side to the needle-phobia, though. I am entirely unlikely to ever become addicted to injectable substances. Even the mere idea of swabbing an area near a vein, boiling a solution in a spoon, tying off the arm, and sticking a shiny sterilized needle ........

- - - - - - -

Yes, the thought of doing something like that is entirely unappealing. And heck will freeze over before I even come close to it. Needles disconcert me that much. Because of that phobia, heroin will never be part of the programme.
But this is not as comforting as you would think.
You see, it wouldn't be possible EVEN IF I didn't have the nee ... nee ... nee ...

- - - - - - -

Why is the n-phobia not the main reason for avoiding poppy derivatives?

Because opiates send me into shock. The last time I had a root canal (2002), the dentist prescribed painkillers for when the novocaine wore off. So I took one (just one!) before leaving the house that evening. And then spent over an hour sitting on the cold pavement with sweat pouring from every pore, ready to pass out.

There were thirty pills in that bottle when I got it - there are twenty nine of them left. The expiry date was five years ago.

I now carry a card in my wallet that instructs emergency personal to under no circumstances give me any codeine, penicillin-type anti-biotics, or raw bananas.


Anyhow, it is both good and noble to donate blood. I thoroughly encourage your doing so.

GRANT PATEL, BEYOND ALL BOUNDS

Frequent commenter Grant Patel seems to have gone all loopy. The results, from the point of view of this blogger, speak for themselves, and disclose utter volumes.

The vast majority of my far too few commenters are utterly sane, and very real individuals. Not so the perverse Patel. Who seems, with each passing day, to be in ever fiercer competition with himself for most eccentric statement.

Mr. Patel has bugs up his donkey about several things.


But mostly, it seems, the following four:
CHEESE
PANTIES
PAKISTANIS
SNOOKY WONG
[The last subject mentioned is rumoured to be a petite Chinese-American female. She also comments here, so please, no stalking. It would upset both this blogger, and Mr. Patel, as well as infuriate the subject herself - you really do not want a small Cantonese woman angry at you (trust me on this).]


Mister Grant Patel (Esq. & Perv.) inhabits a unique universe.
I flatter myself that this blog encourages him to occasionally come down to earth, though not, alas, establish a firmer bond with reality.


Grant Patel on the subject of CHEESE:
* "Beautifully hued, like a saffron orange. The precise colour of silk on blonde skin. Yummy and sweet, my precious, yummy and sweet."
* "Do either cheese or teatime snackypoos offend the bollocky Muslims? They can stuff a kipper in it, and pound it sideways, is what they can do."
* "If the Jews desire feta, they should by all means have it."
* "Ooooo, stinky stinky!"

Grant Patel on the subject of PANTIES:
* "I needs must retire to fondle my collection of fine laundered panties for solace. So very buggery sad."
* "I, of course, think panties better. So soft. So smooth. So tight. Definition adding, and flattering to any form."
* "But I wear a starched dhoti."
* "ATBOTH's only obsession is probably panties in size 'teenager'."

Grant Patel on the subject of PAKISTANIS:
* "The Brits are becoming all Paki in their sensitivities. It is a shame. What is this world coming to?"
* "Buggery bollocky Pakis, finally halfassedly admitted that they planned the Mumbai massacre. Can't trust those sodding bainchotes."
* "And their camels! Meh, I say, meh! My emotions are numb. Time for a beating party. With cream pies. Oh indeed."
* "Lying like a sawar is second nature to the Pakiwakkis."

Grant Patel on the subject of SNOOKY WONG:
* "Who is this Telmacky daddy-o? Some kind of stalker? A fetishist? A tulmud-whacker? A very hungry teenager who lusts after the presumably hot young bod of the fabulous miss Wong? Girlie, you have a fan! Congratulations! Do we need to advise you on your legal rights vis-à-vis restraining orders? [skip to next comment] Give me a call. Let me speak to you of legal issues. Contracts, and prenupts. Your rights, privileges, and pleasures. Exchange cell-phone numbers, take my card. Lets do lunch."
* "First a gibber-rant about a teenage girlie without panties, then a long diskvisition about tobacco without panties."
* "To me it sounds as of the notorious panty thief ATBOTH needs a span in the military himself. It might do him some good, and keep him from harassing little Chinese girly bloggers."
* "I say take that evil minks off your blogroll. You devote FAR TOO MUCH time to the huggable Cantonese bints. It is a shandah!"


Perhaps the most telling communication from Mr. Patel is the statement he made at the end of January: "I am by no means off my meds. Who told you that?!?!"

Lets just say it was an educated guess. But if you insist the contrary, we shall just have to take your word for it, mister Patel.
Thank you in any case for sharing your marvelous thoughts with us. We are honoured.



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INVENTORY OF WORK SPACE

The items that one surrounds oneself with say a lot about a person. Especially the things in the place where one spends the majority of one's waking hours - the office. Personal effects are often a louder statement than any curriculum vitae.


Follows a list of "decorative items" in my cubicle.

Eight Israeli flags.
Three American flags.
One "destroy Hezbollah" sign.
Seven assorted other protest signs.
A dancing robotic Woman in Black.
Six month supply of pipe tobacco.
Dolls: daemon, joker, frog, evil mouse.
Plush: mostly rodents.
Plastic animals: rabbit, lizard, dinosaur.
Three realistic heads, one of which is a mutant alien baby.
A knit kippah (blues and greens).
Framed Smicha (Yeshiva Chipas Emess).
Three Chabad baseball caps.
Three paintings (one of which represents Nick Berg and three Islamic militants).
Over a dozen "test tube babies", one of which is large and adrift in yellow liquid.
Two dozen books, of which half a dozen are linguistic reference.
Eight umbrellas.
Nearly three hundred empty cigarillo tins (brand: Panter).
A stuffed armadillo (real, dead, rotund).

And a cheerful Totoro, who encourages me with his dazzling smile.
[He is sitting on the Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, by Jan de Vries (fourth edition, published by Koninklijke Brill in Leiden in 1997).]


The children of coworkers avoid my area when they visit the company. It is very wise of them to do so, even though I no longer bite. My cubicle is a cacophony.

FIGHTING FAX WITH FAX

Two weeks ago a young lady left a message in my voicemailbox, as she had done several times before. She needed me to do something for her, to satisfy a certain requirement, to provide her with......

Wipe that silly grin off your face, that wasn't what she wanted. She needed me to fax her a W-9.

[The W-9 is a form that provides a company's tax identification number and has checkboxes for the kind of entity which the company claims to be. It must be signed by a U.S. citizen or other U.S. person. The W-9 is formally known as 'Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification'.]


The young lady in question had already faxed over a blank form to be filled-out at our end.
Fifteen times.

We had faxed her a completed form.
Fourteen times.

Her several frantic messages insisted that we fill out her form, not just send her the one we keep ready for just such occassions. Her form. Not any other. Hers. Hers only, only hers. Why would we not fill out her form? Why did we keep sending our form? She needed hers! Did we not understand? Hers, hers, hers!


Half-way through this two-week fax-fest I noticed what made her form different. Hers was the October 2007 revision - we were using the November 2005 revision.


The 2007 revision has added the following text UNDERNEATH the fill-out and sign part of the form: "General Instruction - Section references are to the Internal Revenue Code unless otherwise noted".

That's it. That is the only difference. Thirteen extra words in a non-legally-relevant blurble section of the form. The layout remains the same, and all of the other text is the same. The font is the same. The fields to fill out remain the same: name of entity, address, status, tax id, and signature by a U.S. citizen or other U.S. person.

She already had the information she needed, in the format in which it was required, with a signature by a U.S. citizen or other U.S. person certifying that the information was correct.
Either version of the form is valid once signed by a U.S. citizen or other U.S. person - whence this banal anality?

So I called her, to explain the sameness and find out why she was being nuts. As such insistence clearly proved her to be. Red-tape vampire hag-bitch from the bottom rung of the brimstone bureaucracy. Neurotic, bonkers, twisted. Daemonic braindead nerdette. Possibly a half-wit, more likely simply a badly trained clerical gibbon given too much freedom. A pencil-pusher without the capacity for independent thought. Severly ineffective.

She understood why I called. And gently explained that it was her corporate masters that insisted on the October 2007 revision, and refused to accept the information if it was proffered on an earlier version of the form (such as the November 2005 revision). She had no choice or stake in the matter. Corporate HQ demanded absolute uniformity.


In addition to my other qualities I am a U.S. citizen or other U.S. person, so I have filled-out and faxed her the October 2007 revision.
It is now hanging on my cubicle wall as a reminder of my capitulation.