HB2ME

My blog is two years old today, and as always I thank the few and faithful who read my posts. I thank the readers who no longer post, the commenters, the nice selectors who occasionally pick a post of mine for wider dissemination in fleshbot or some other location. Thank you for your patience, thank you for your understanding, thank you for your continued visits.
Oh shit, just thanks.

The Curse Of Being An Accountant or Shortchanged #3

The chronic curse of being an accountant is that you remember all sequenced numbers---old phone numbers, license plates, house numbers, ID numbers...sometimes you don't remember what or who the numbers belong to or why they're important. But they all stay with you. I once had occasion to call someone who I hadn't spoken with in at least forty years, and the only way I could get past his secretary and prove my legitimacy was to run his old phone number for him.

A more specific curse comes at the end of dinner out with friends, after cocktails and several bottles of wine, when the bill comes and it has to be divided three or four ways, and they always look to me for a dollar amount, and I'm three sheets to the wind. But hey, I'm the accountant.

Yesterday I went into the retail section of one of my favorite restaurants to buy some food for dinner. I ordered a piece of chicken al mattone, rigatoni primavera, a loaf of bread, cookies...OK, remember this is New York---the bill came to almost 50 bucks (it did suffice for two meals for She and I). The chicken and the pasta are taxable here, the bread and cookies not...trust me, I know it's arcane, but that's sales tax in the Big Apple, and the bread was $7 and the cookies $12 (remember, it's New York). My point is that I was charged too much.

And once again, I should have said something and did not.

Activia....Activia???

Every male reading this blog knows that there are things about women that men just don't know, and we NEVER find those things out. There's an upside to being of either sex---men think with their dicks first and foremost, but also perform extraordinary feats of strength and endurance. Women sometimes tend to get cranky every 28 days, but can cum ad infinitum and they tend to be better cooks and bakers than men do (tend to, not an absolute rule). Men tend to be open books, women have secrets that men never find out about. We never ever ever get clued in, and perhaps that's alright...nobody needs to know everything.
Last night, while watching tv, an ad for Dannon Activia came out, emceed by Jamie Lee Curtis, and it's part of a current ad campaign that I've seen, mock interviews with women of all ages. The idea behind the product is that it helps you to your normal regularity, and that if you eat Activia, you won't be constipated. The ads only feature women.
Did I miss something here? Is this a women only problem? Is it associated with menstruation? Do women wait and not go to the bathroom when they need to?
Can someone help me out here? I'm truly mystified.

Earworm-The Swingle Singers, A Capella Mozart

The Object of Lust

I can see her weekends at the beach, and perhaps for the entire month of August. She always arrives with a deep tan, the exact antithesis of everything that turns me on. She is tall, close to six feet tall, and well muscled, always wearing a string bikini that reveals far more than it covers. She has the small breasts of an athlete, and has occasionally mentioned that she either trains or participates in triathlons. She is definitely built for speed and not for comfort. Her mouth is large and wide, and she has thicker lips. Her voice is loud and boisterous and deep, her language full of "fuck this" and "screw him". She is tattooed and may well be pierced in places I can't see. She has the intellectual sophistication of a teenager and cannot seemingly carry on a conversation for more than a few minutes. She is not young by any means, the single mother of three children mostly ignored, at least at the beach when I see her. We've never exchanged anything more than passing greetings for the last I don't know how many years.
She is the object of my lust summer after summer, the one that I watch from behind the dark glasses.

Shortchanged #2

Back in the day, when dinosaurs did indeed roam the earth, if you worked as a cashier in a retail location of any sort, you needed to know how to make change...cash registers didn't yet have the option of punching in the amount tendered. Whether it was a grocery store, gas station, coffee shop, you needed to be able to ring up the sale and mentally do the arithmetic to make change if necessary.

All this changed many years ago, when McDonald's became one of the first chains to put in cash registers that had the +/- feature that enabled salespeople to just hit the button and calculate the change, thereby insuring that neither the store nor the customer was shortchanged.

I have a few clients that pay me in cash rather than by check, and so sometimes I'll make purchases using actual greenbacks. Twice in the last few weeks I've received less change that I was supposed to get, coincidentally each time from a butcher, different stores each time. Each time it was a difference in coins, receiving 25 cents instead of 75 cents, or something like that. The amounts aren't large, but I'm wondering if, each time, it was a conscious mistake, just carelessness, or something else.

And each time I said nothing...I wonder what that says about me in these situations.