Monday, November 15, 2004

Triple X

This week’s Horrible Crap Temp Job Hit Parade takes us to the Orange County Convention Center, which seems a nice enough place, free of elevator-riding engineers and sexually harassing mice.

The Convention Center is like all convention centers, which for some reason are very carefully designed to maximize confusion and general butt-ugliness. Ballrooms sprawl, meeting rooms number according to lunar phases, and the Grab Your Ankles And Take The Ticket parking lots are conveniently located in southern New Mexico. And yet, I think I need to take up residence here. The hallways? Are phenomenal. You could sail the Titantic through the main lobby. I want to turn handsprings and backflips all the way down the horrifying carpet, if I could do so without cracking off various vertebrae.

I have ascended from putting my MFA to work making copies to applying eighteen years of education in handing out T-shirts. This is an athletic business conference, which, disturbingly, is attended by a great many people who-- let's put it this way, good thing those hallways are so frickin' huge.

This has been an exercise in why the citizens of Orlando pretty much hate every single person who ever visits here. Never mind 99.999999999 of us would be wandering the streets without the tourism industry; we hate them. Largely for reasons such as this: Directly behind me rested a gigantic sign reading “T-SHIRT SIZES: LARGE AND EXTRA-LARGE,” which of course immediately forced the question, “What size T-shirts do you have?

“Large and extra-large,” I would say.

(Pause)

“Give me a small.”

Compensating for all this, however, was the five-foot-one man who asked if we had any triple extra-larges back there. Not sayin' a word...

get your T-shirt at blondechampagne@hotmail.com

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