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1. Carassment: You’re heading home from a hard day, so shagged out that you’re singing along with Ashlee Simpson without realizing it as you cruise down the one-way street in your neighborhood.
Suddenly, a driver texting on a cellphone is right on your ass. You’re doing the speed limit, but Earnhardt back there keeps giving you the horn or the highbeams, insisting you join the law-breakers club — or, worse, risk an accident.
That’s carassment.
His sentence is easy: A day of bumper cars with inmates from the local lockup.
2. Delay of meal: You’ve got all the ingredients for tonight’s dinner on the counter. But wait: outta tumeric.
So you grab a coat, throw it over your sweats and make what should be a quick run to the company store, feet flopping in your unlaced sneakers. You find the essential spice, no problem, but the self-service aisles are closed (Andy called out sick again).
As luck would have it, you end up behind a guy who’s loading the belt with two of those thin cartons of soda cans, various snacks and munchies, three rolls of toilet paper, a jar of peanut butter (die, you bastid!), a tiger-sized bag of kitty litter — and, oh, maybe 30 cans of Fancy Feast.
Time ticks by, minutes that you’ll wish you had back when you’re on your death bed. Finally, the last can is bagged and the total appears. Only then does Cat Daddy reach for his checkbook.
Couldn’t he have filled in some of the blanks and just left out the amount while he was waiting? Shoot, I’d have given him points for post-dating, seeing as how long it took to ring him up.
His sentence? Shovel detail at the Bronx Zoo.
3. Obstruction of Juiced-Ups: After nearly three hours of baseball, it’s all boiled down to this one pitch. Two outs, runners on second and third, your team down a run.
With deliberate patience, (insert name of your favorite player) has worked the count full. Now he holds his bat still above his shoulder, eyes fixed on the pitcher. And here comes…the entire row in front of you rising as one, not to do “the wave” or get a better look but to make room for some numbnuts who just had to get himself a big pretzel with mustard in the bottom of the ninth freakin’ inning.
His sentence? Reimbursing all the ticket holders in your row. If he came in from the side farther from his seat, he’s banned from baseball — for life.
4. Pomping a door: The grocery bags are millimeters from dragging along the ground, the handles stretched to their limits, cutting into your fingers, as you do this little quick-step penguin shuffle to your building.
What luck! Someone’s entering in front of you. Inexplicably, though, your fellow human lets the door slam thisclose to your face.
I can see a warning for a one-time offense. Any more must carry mandatory jail time — unless he or she actually looked at you first. Then it’s life.
5. Counter-feeting: You’ve mounted the cross-trainer, fired up the tunes and are starting to feel AC/DC when a strange voice cuts through the chiming guitars: “So I’m like, look, I’ve been waiting on this line for, like, TEN MINUTES. And she’s, like, well what do you want me to do? And I’m like…”
So you try the quick turn of the head over your shoulder, the Ellen Degeneres kind of move that sometimes works at the movies. Only she keeps yappin’ and pedaling (slowly, of course).
Never mind that it’s against gym rules to talk on the phone while on the machine. You’ve already pushed the level on Bon Scott’s bad boys past 20, voluntarily guaranteeing some type of ear trouble. Any louder and you might as well start learning sign language.
If I were the judge, I’d have only one question: “If the call was so important, why didn’t you stop what you were doing to deal with it?”
No matter the answer, I’d slap on an additional “aerobic narcissism” count and sentence the nitz to 300 hours of AC/DC — at level 30.
6. Under the influence: People should be able to sing in the shower, in their cars — y’know, places where the rest of us don’t have to hear them. Yet there’s always that one guy behind you at a concert or club who has to sing along, full throat, with the performer.
You’ve just donated a kidney to hear Bruce finally reprise “Jungleland,” only Guitar Hero is screaming the words in your ear, punctuating each verse with a blood-curdling “WHOOOOOO-HOO!”
Sentencing is easy: Here’s a broom, jerky. Clean up the joint after the show. And don’t forget to recycle those empties.
7. Embedelment: Your aunt just loves the Internet. Ever since she retired, in fact, her list of online pals has swelled faster than her ankles.
Now she’s got Dr. Phil on the tube, a pot of something stinky on the stove, and a keyboard beneath her perfectly-manicured breakfast-sausage fingers. No telling how much good she can do today.
Ooh, look: Here’s an e-mail she just got that she can forward to everyone in her address book: “Don’t mix ketchup and horseradish: It makes nitroglycerine.” Or this one: “Did you know a man once died from starvation rather than leave his computer?” (Wait while I grab a snack…. OK, I’m back.)
By themselves, the well-meaning messages are innocuous enough. But what if she’s dispatching young terabytes — worms and viruses and other malware — to unsuspecting friends and relatives? “Sorry I missed your 60th birthday, Auntie Maim, but I was busy cleaning up my harddrive.”
No prison time required in this case. That would be cruel. Simply confiscate the harridan’s computer for three months and erase everything. Then return it to her with snopes.com as her homepage.
8. Cinefraud: The movie listings say 8:20, but you know that’s not when the thing starts.
First you got the dancing popcorn boxes, then the “STFU” message, followed by — commercials? — and then, of course, enough trailers to start a white trash colony.
But here’s the catch: Factoring in the window, you can hit your seat just in time for the featured presentation. But what about the countless mopes who factor in the window as part of the “experience”? You know where that leaves you: Just below the window of the projection booth.
If the feds are gonna go after Ticketmaster, they should sniff around these gogleplexes, as well, and get us some truth-in-movie-time-advertising.
The penalty for violators? What else? Free Junior Mints for everyone!
9. Savor theft (aka “tuna canteening”): “Two?” the hostess asks. “Yes, thank you.”
She leads you to a huge dining room with some 20 or so tables, give or take the few that are actually occupied. She zigs and zags, with you in tow like baby geese crossing the highway.
You pass table after empty table, sometimes around a divider — “watch that little step there” — to your final destination: a short pole with a four-pronged base and what essentially is an album cover for a top. You instantly realize you won’t be able to clasp your date’s hands across the table — that is, unless a busboy removes the sugar, salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, hot sauce and silk flower jutting out of the white plastic vase.
“Couldn’t we have something a little roomier?” you ask.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, feigning empathy. “Those other tables are for larger parties.”
“But it’s 8:30 already. No one’s here. You expecting P-Diddy’s posse?”
As an employee of the establishment, of course, the hostess cannot be held responsible. It’s the owner who should spend the next six months washing dishes.
Mine.
10. Purgery: You get on the elevator with your neighbor after a trip to the doctor’s office. “How you doin’?” your neighbor asks. As you begin to explain how much larger the size of the spot on your x-ray got, your anxious co-passenger launches into a litany of how this driver who was texting on his cellphone wouldn’t stop honking his horn at him, then this other guy wouldn’t hold the door although he had an armful of bags, plus some moron at the gym kept talking during this morning’s workout — oh, yeah, and then the bitchskank hostess at the rat-infested chophouse down the street stuck him and his wife at a crummy little corner table with a fake flower in a plastic vase….
My sentence?
None. I’m pleading insanity.
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