Line Snakers and Eye Shakers

You know how sometimes you're feeling extra good-natured, so you decide to hold the door to a store open for a fellow human being, even if they are far enough away that you could let the door slam and not lose sleep over it? And then they enter and proceed to get in line in front of you, and then they pull out their list of 7 different sandwiches that they have to order for all the people at their office? And you just needed a quick sammie, nothing fancy, an easy order, but now you have to wait for this whoremonger to finish the longest, most complicated lunch order in the history of the free world? That bugs me. These dumb bastards invariably fail to understand the basic protocol for ordering as well, and have apparently never been to such obscure restaurants as, oh, I don't know, Subway, or DunkinDonuts.

I've decided to have a little card printed up that I can pass out in such situations. It will read something like this:

Dear Friend,

I graciously just held the door open for you because I cherish you as a fellow human being, and I want to show that maybe there are some decent polite people left in this world. In doing so, however, I did not express or imply any suggestion that I am relinquishing my place in line. I own that space, and reserve the right to take that place. Until I smile graciously and say, "oh no, please go right ahead, I'm in no hurry", that spot is mine, and I will defend it as ferociously as the Lakota at Little Big Horn. Should you choose to ignore my sovereignty and recklessly snake my position in line, dear friend, I will have no recourse but to:

a) rabbit punch you in the kidneys until you pee yourself

b) beat you about the head with a loaf of Italian, Wheat, Honey Oat, or Italian Herbs & Cheese bread, bread, which happen to be the bread choices at Subway, you ignorant bitch, or

c) scowl menacingly while saying really horrible things about you and your sexual proclivities under my breath

Thank you for your cooperation,

The anonymous tall, dark, and exceeding handsome dude who is about to squash you like a rotten grape.

As long as I'm talking about significant pet peeves, let me get one other issues off my chest. We just switched to a new font at work, Adobe Jensen Pro. This font looks amazing in printer paper form, but on screen, it is just slightly less painful to the eyes than putting in your contacts just after chopping a fresh bushel of habaneros. It is one of those fancy fonts that displays differently at different zoom levels, and the appearance is really best on a new 2009 21" LCD high res display, but unfortunately I am stuck on a 17" Gateway monitor from 1996.

On my crappy screen, the font is fuzzy, and the kerning is all wrong. In case you didn't spend the majority of your college career in a cartography lab, kerning is the spacing between characters in a font.

Most other fonts assign real estate based on the letter width... skinny letters like i and l are given narrow spots, while fatter letters get wider slots. Regardles, though, the spacing between letters is consistent... until you get fancy fonts which display crappy, in which case the spacing is crack-whore-esqe. Certain letters are smashed up together like 5 kids in the back seat of a Buick Country Squire on the way to the waterpak to all get wicked sunburns and mild cases of food poisoning from soggy tuna sandwiches that weren't kept quite cold enough. Other letters seem to float lonely and distant in the midst of crowded conditions. Take a look at this noonsense:

Look at how this word displays:

co mp le t e

What is so special about m and p that they have to get all snuggly in the middle of a word. It is like a consonant public display of affection. Totally inappropriate in mid-word.

Now think about a whole document that is , aside from being tremendously boring, is also

di spl a ye d in a f uck ed up m a nne r.

That is enough to drive me fucking ballistic. (Wow, two F-bombs in the space of two sentences. Dang, this is one edgy blog!) Not only is the general fuzziness of the font on screen maddening, even when displayed at ludicous sizes, but the font creator over at Adobe had to get all righteous and mess with the lower case t. Remember back to grade school printing lessons: there were short letters, there were tall letters, and there were short letters with hangy-downs. The only exception to that was the glorious t. Not too big, not too small, just right, Goldilocks-stylee. (Yup, I just said "stylee"; this here blog is edgy and hip.) It was tall like the others, but it also had that sweet crossbar which was often in the nebulous grey area between short and tall. You probably don't believe me, but check this out:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

The t is like a last speedbump in a long string of low letters... except in this crappy new font, which squishes t down to small round letter proportions. Check it:

It is like t barely even exists. There are nice tall b, d, f, h, k, and l, but somehow t got the frickin shaft. That's bullshit, Adone Jensen Pro. Give t the respect it deserves. It is a shame, too, because this font is generally gorgeous. Don't make me call in the special forces on this one, because I know one mean mofo who will not stand for such injustice.