History 301: Caffeinated History
Things involving coffee....ah, coffee,
the fuel of our lives and mother of
that wonderful thing called caffeine.

October '97
Twas about 2:00am when Jen and I finally got to Super Wal-Mart.  This was the next logical step in the night, since we had just finished off about 2 pots of coffee each. What else are you supposed to do? Sleep? Nope, you go shopping.  As we wandered through the toy aisles, (cuz they are the most fun) I encountered upon a brand new toy, (that looked harmless enuf) Tickle Me Elmo. On the front of the box, it said "touch my tummy and I laugh". Thinking how incredibly cute this was, I had to try it out.  So I touched his tummy, and Elmo replied in his cute little Elmo voice, "that tickles!".  How cute! So I called Jen over to see this and touched his tummy again. It was at this point that he started shaking violently all over the shelf. I screamed, in which caused Jen to scream, and backed up against the other shelf, staring at the horrendous creature. When Jen realized why I was screaming she ran out of the aisle laughing hysterically.  At the exact same moment that I had screamed, the zamboni guy had entered the aisle, so he was laughing thinking he scared me. I am, meanwhile, staring at this oh-so-evil toy, trying to figure out what would cause it to move erratically across the shelf. Because, no where on the box did it say, p.s. I shake violently.  The women who were working that night came to see what was wrong. Jen is still laughing and I am staring in fear of this child's toy.  As we explained, they shook their heads in disgust and walked away.
[editor's note: I am still afraid of Elmos that move in an unnatural way, that's just wrong.]

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Sometime in '94 (I think...)
After going to a show, a large group of us went to the local Denny's for the nightly ritual of caffiene and french fries.  There was quite a large group of us, we had about 40 people stuffed into all the tables and all but one booth in the smoking section.  After we had been sitting there for a while, two drunk rednecks came in and took the empty booth.  Not long after they sat down, they started making fun of the people at my table which was directly in front of their booth.  We were making remarks back and forth, thinking of how incredibly dumb these guys were to do what they were doing.  They were making incredibly rude remarks about our clothing and calling us freaks. Now, we were not all that upset about it, quite frankly, we found it funny that they had enuf balls to make fun of forty people at once.  At one point, the entire smoking section was quiet besides the bantering going back and forth.  Each time our table made a comment, there would be a burst of laughter from everyone.  It still took them a while to figure out what was going on.  It wasn't until they called us freaks and people from the back booth started singing, " 'cuz I'm a freak", did they realize that all forty of us dressed in all black were together (duh!).  At that point the smarter of the two tried to convince his friend to finally shut up realizing that they were outnumbered.  And it still took quite a while and his friend telling him, "Shut the fuck up, man!!! They are all together!!"  with the most frightened look on his face.  With that comment we all laughed hysterically and his friend looked around the restuarant scared as all hell. It's safe to say after that they did finally shut up.  It's hard to believe that there really are people that stupid in the world.
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