On Tardiness

I am too punctual. I like to be on time every time, and this is probably why my social life is awkward. When you're habitually on time to a party that is meant to actually be arrived to in a less than timely manner, it leads to silences that are hardly desired. Unless I'm around my very closest friends I always feel awkward, and unfortunately it's never my closest friends throwing the parties that I arrive on time to.

If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late. If you're late, you might as well put a shot gun to your head and pull the trigger because you are completely unacceptable as a responsible adult. This is the philosophy I adhere to, and I am very rarely late. Today, however, I'm trying to justify my tardiness (45 minutes!!!) to work. My boss has forgiven me and has expressed that I not worry myself about it, but when you wake up at the time you should be clocking in and putting on your badge, your first thought (if you're me) is going to be 'UTTER FAILURE, TIME TO LOOK AT A JOB BOARD'. I thought this within a minute of waking up; immediately after an appropriate explicit word and a run down of my emergency daily routine checklist. Shower. Clothes. Makeup. Door. That is the bare minimum, but today I skipped through the whole thing and went from Thinking about a New Job to Realizing I had No Time for a Shower to Clothes, Throwing Food at the Dog, and then ending in GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST I'M STEALING A CAR!

A car stealing blaggard.

Yes, I stole a car. More like borrowing. Without permission, but I had every intention of bringing that car back to my roommate in one piece, which I managed to do. She, however, had left her phone in the front passenger seat. So when I tried calling her later in the day to explain the predicament at hand, she was home freaking out. From her account, she had heard me shuffling around in a panic, and said it sounded as though the dog were being tortured. When she noticed the car gone, she began jumping to the conclusion that the house had been broken into, the dog traumatized, I was kidnapped and dead in the back of her stolen vehicle, and she couldn't call the police because her phone was also missing. I could have been expired under mysterious circumstances and in the middle of the Salt Flats where no one would find me for weeks. No one has ever had to endure hours of worrying about me like that before, and I was sorry it had to happen. BUT IT HAD TO HAPPEN.

I'll tell you why, and this is where I justify my tardiness to work and grand theft auto. You see, I tend to care too much about people. I try too hard to save them, because they need saving. I'm the only person qualified to do it too, because I'm more intelligent than they are. I don't like people. I don't even necessarily like the people I try to help the most because of the simple truth that they are imbeciles. The people I like the most are people who are already capable of taking care of themselves, and while I care about my friends, it's nice to not have to worry about them. Because I could. I would, in fact, because I am such a worrier. I worry sometimes about things that involve my friends, but I can trust that they don't need me. If I don't have to give a crap about you, I probably like you all the more for it.

But when you're working in a mall full of retarded consumers perusing shops that sell over priced and under qualified merchandise that I guarantee will fall apart after one wash, you have to worry. And when that mall is surrounded by certain death and these idiots are all in danger of an early demise, you have to save them.

I suppose this is what watching documentaries about deep sea creatures does to me late at night. I've never had nightmares about shrimp, but if you've ever seen a gulper eel, you'd be a bit terrified yourself. They come from space. I should know, I witnessed it through the large entry way windows at the mall I was working at last night. They were the size of whales, and came slithering down from the night sky in dozens, landing in the emptying parking lot where they proceeded to devour anything that moved. I had to go into action. The doors were immediately barricaded, and when you have lock down a shopping mall, immediately means about half an hour. Those eel worm things were all over us, trying to push their way through the doors, but we kept them out.

The British man told me these things can swallow ANYTHING.

My next move was to gather everyone into what I deemed was the safest store in the mall, which happened to be a Hot Topic department store. Why? I don't know, maybe the darkness of the decor's soul felt as though it would envelop us safely, while the neon colours of band shirts would keep our spirits up in the dim lighting provided by the moon shining through the glass ceiling above the mall promenade. Or maybe if the worms got in, they would be intelligent enough to assume we'd lock ourselves in Abercrombie and Fitch, safely guarded by the hot models in the photos hanging in their windows. We'd fool them in the end!

These gents may have the athleticism to intimidate giants worms...

but I doubt they can screech lyrics to make a worm brain slushee like these fellas. 

Now, when you're locked down and safe, and everyone is accounted for, the next thing to do is to find a way out. Or at least gather food. So I went out on my own to do this. I could hear the worms outside trying to knock over cars in search of prey, and I knew we had to think fast. By we, of course, I mean me, because apparently the people in Hot Topic were skipping the whole escape PLAN bit and were going to just escape through the back door. Note the emphasis on the word plan. They lacked it.

This mall I worked in had no food. It also was NOT a mall that had one of those crazy Asian stores with swords and knives in it, which would have been better than nothing. I had the custodian climb crazy Guinness Book worthy ladders up to find an escape to the roof where we could at least shout for help and sit it out a la Kevin Bacon in 'Tremors'. Nothing happening there. Meanwhile, one of my lackeys left in charge of the HT came looking for me. He told me that people had walked out and brought attention to the employee door, where there were now worms waiting. The attempts at escape were, of course, fruitless, and this dream (I don't think I mentioned yet that this was a dream) had suddenly turned into the most cliche alien invasion flick ever, including stupid people who die because there are ALWAYS stupid people who die. YOU'D THINK WE'D LEARN! I knew what I had to do.

These are scifi movie survivors.

I told lackey to go back to HT and tell everyone to start being noisy. We'd been in this mess for almost the entire night without any casualties (at least not any at anyone's fault but their own), which had to mean that these worms, though very large and very hungry, did not have the strength to do structural damage. Looking out the glass doors, I could see that they hadn't even managed to knock any cars over. The plot hole was discovered and these monsters were the biggest pussies ever. The plan? Attract the attention of every motherflipping worm in the lot to the one door and then gradually sneak people out to safety through the others. It would only work for a while, but it was a start.

The process was slow going, but I am too dedicated to my task to give up. THAT is why I was late to work, THAT was why I got away with a felony this morning, and THAT is why I will never watch deep sea documentaries deep in the night ever again.