An Open Letter to the Guy in the Locker Room at the Gym

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Rob Pollak

Hi. You probably don’t remember me, but I was the only other guy in the locker room when you went to the gym today. If you don’t remember that, let me give you a few details that might help.

This is just an estimate, but I think the gym had about 1200 lockers. They were divided into three rows of lockers, with a bench in the middle and lockers on both sides of the bench. As far as locker rooms go, there was nothing that was extraordinary or unusual about this particular arrangement. The locker room was well lit and quiet. It was the early afternoon when I was finishing my workout.

The reason I am writing to you is that I found your locker room etiquette to be, how should I put this, annoying.

Your greatest error was one of locker selection. As I mentioned above, the room had approximately 1200 lockers in it. Of those, the only occupied locker was the one that was occupied by me. I was sitting in front of it. It had the number 340 on the door. The door to the locker 340 was open. I was staring into it. My clothing was hanging on a hanger in that locker. I had a towel around my waist. I had clearly just returned from the shower and was about to prepare myself for departure from the gym. All of the other lockers in the gym were closed and pretty clearly unoccupied.

At that point, you had an option of choosing one of those 1199 unoccupied lockers as your own. While there is no law about this, the generally understood law of being a human being is that you should begin your quest for an open locker at the point furthest away from where I sit in various states of undress and continue to work towards me until you find a locker that is available.

For some inexplicable reason, you decided to start with locker number 342, which as I noted, was unoccupied. Finding this locker unoccupied, you chose it as your own. You sat down next to me and removed your shirt. Then stood up and removed your pants. Then you turned towards me and removed your saggy underpants. Underpants is the only appropriate word to describe those monstrosities you chose. In an effort to avoid eye to penis contact, I looked over to the mirror to confirm that I was not invisible. I wasn’t.

Although this too close for comfort arrangement was not ideal, I did not become enraged until you started coughing. Loudly. Uncontrollably. In my direction. That pushed me over the edge. I hate you. I hate your face. I hate your phlegmy cough. I hate your fruit of the loom underpants. I hate your unclipped toe nails. I hate your poor locker room decision making. I hate that you ruined the joy I take in cooling off with a cool eucalyptus towel. I hope you forgot to clip the emergency stop thingy onto your shirt and fell off the treadmill, you dick.

Best regards,

Rob

Some random thoughts

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Rob Pollak

As I continue my interminable defensive driving course, I thought I would use the excess time between slides to write down some random things that I’ve found troubling recently. I’ll also intersperse some of the more useful tidbits from the course.

– Why doesn’t anyone care about Powerball when it’s 50 million dollars? When it gets up to like 200 million, the whole world is in a tizzy. But no one gives a shit when it’s a smaller, yet still massive amount. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and the only differences I can imagine are the following: (1) If I had 400 million, I could afford to wager 50 million on one spin of roulette at a casino. If I had only 50 million, this would probably be unwise. (2) If I had 400 million, I’d immediately buy a jet. If I had 50 million, I’d just join NetJets. (3) If I won 400 million, I’d share it with Anne. If it was only 50 million, eh.

– When you park your vehicle, make sure the transmission is in “PARK.” Seriously, they just told me this.

– This article summarizes my opinion of half the baby pictures I see on facebook. The other times, the pictures include afterbirth or other types of overshare.

– My dad’s in the other room, and just heard him use me as an excuse to get off the phone with his friend Vinnie. He said, Robert’s here, so I have to go. He won’t talk to me for at least another hour. This is also a test to see if Uncle Vinnie reads my blog. If so, Hi Vin! If not, you’re a fucking asshole.

– Highway hypnosis generally occurs when drivers have been driving for too long without periods of rest. After onset, highway hypnosis generally results in periods of unawareness when a driver is unable to recall specific portions of a trip. It also can result in the hypnotized person forgetting his own name or barking like a dog when he hears certain words.

– Googling things that hypnotists do just cost me an extra 15 seconds on that last slide.

– I recently discovered reddit, and it has ruined the rest of the internet for me. I realize that everything funny I see on other sites has already been on reddit. Speaking of which, I should probably just post this directly there. Here’s something I saw on reddit today that you will probably see in the next week somewhere else and now you can be all, “yeah, I saw that already, bro.”

– I find it incredibly unfair that fantasy football scores include stats from overtime. That makes no sense to me. It’s not like a real game where both teams are physically on the field during overtime and play exactly the same amount of time. If you have a QB that gets overtime, then you are basically cheating.

– That being said, I don’t even care about fantasy football anymore. It stopped being fun when everyone in the world has immediate access to the same information. I could literally not pay attention to anything in the off season, not read a single article before the draft, not watch a single game all season, and then follow a few tips along the way and still field a competitive team. I’ll have you know that I did exactly that this season and my teams are 1-12, 3-10, and 4-9 and I missed the playoffs in all my leagues. But other than that, I stand by this theory.

– The defensive driving course has periodic checks to see if I am still here. They use five security questions that are supposed to prove that I am who I say I am. I hope the CIA uses better security questions to determine identity. So far, I’ve gotten “What color is your car?” and “Is your a car a sedan or SUV?” Also, at the beginning of the course, I chose the questions and the answers myself.

Defensive Driving

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Rob Pollak

Thanks to an unfortunate speed limit in Central New York, I have been taking an online defensive driving course. It is an excruciating experience. The course is a mandatory six hours, which means that the viewer can’t advance to the next slide until an allotted amount of time passes. The only explanation for how the time limits were created must be that the person who set them did so to optimize my frustration with the situation.

For example, the slide titled, “Should I wear a seatbelt?” had a 100 second playback. The short answer is yes. Also, the long answer was yes. When I smashed down on the next slide button, a screen kindly reminded me that I was required to wait 100 seconds before I could advance to the next slide (as required by New York State law). It also was kind enough to remind me that the time it took me to read that notification would not count towards the time limit.

The worst part of this whole process is that the time I wait for the next slide just fills me with road rage. And as I learned from a 450 second slide, road rage is bad. Another problem with the program is that the timing of the slides isn’t usually long enough for me to go and read something else somewhere on the internet. I’m too nervous about going one second over the time limit and having to sit through extra minutes of the class. I hate them.

One important item I learned is that AAA no longer recommends 10 and 2 as the ideal hand positions while driving. 9 and 3 or even (gasp) 8 and 4 provide the driver with ideal hand position for safe deployment of the airbags.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve recently been thinking that the speed limit everywhere in the country should be raised by 10-15 MPH. For as long as I can remember, the speed limit has been the same, but cars have gotten safer and stronger and better in every way. One would think that we could now safely drive 65 on I-95 (everyone drives 80 anyway). To make my case even stronger, the defensive driving class told me that the majority of injuries from accidents happen at intersections not on the highway.

Welp, time’s up for the “Headrests” slide, so I guess I’m done here.

Note – If anyone from DMV or traffic court is reading this, please keep in mind that I was probably hacked.

A Birthday Video for Anne

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Rob Pollak

There are many reasons why being married to me is very difficult. Probably the least of which is that I have a blog and take advantage of that to poke fun at my lovely and amazing wife, Anne. As my reader base has grown from zero to slightly more than zero, I’ve come to realize that some people may only know the Anne presented on this blog – That is, the sour milk swilling butt of all my jokes.

While it’s true that Anne is the source of a lot of entertainment in my life (which I do exploit in my constant attempts to become internet famous), all of the jokes and digs come from a place of love. I always hope that the takeaway from my relentless and hilarious jabs at Anne is that I think she’s the greatest person in the entire world.

So as Anne celebrates her birthday this week, I decided to honor her in the only way I know how: By making a poorly sketched web video wishing her a happy birthday and explaining once and for all how great she is.

It may be the best thing I’ve ever done, so I hope you enjoy it and make Anne a viral sensation on her birthday (which is actually the 25th, but I can’t wait until then). That would really buy me a lot of credibility the next time I call her out for drinking a chunky glass of milk.

Happy birthday Anne!

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)