Mister Potato Head and the Pope

I was forced (nearly at gunpoint) to deal with one of the IT/computer/whatzit guys at work last night. He was very cute in a dumb surfer way but I'm not sure he's from this country or even this planet. It went something like this:

Him: "You're off the LAN? WHOA, that sucks."
Me: "Yeah, I can't upload any of the tiffs for the albums."
Him: "BUMMER. So you got an alert?"
Me: "Yeah."
Him: "That's BAD! Yeah, that's a bitch when that happens. Hey, do you SKATE?"
Me: "Wha? No, I'd shatter a hip."

(At this point I noticed he had an entire package of taffy candy in his mouth and was talking around it, filling the air with this gross fruity smell.)

Him: "This is like the BEST! Want some?"
Me: "No thanks. You think you can fix this?"
Him: "Oh yeah, SURELY. I got called topside for this way bad fuck up with one of the routers. Hey, what's THAT?!"
Me: "It's the icon for the Photoshop program."
Him: "Cool! Pictures!"

Two hours later, having finished his taffy and gotten my keyboard all sticky, he wandered back from whence he came ... I think that office at the end of the hall with the closed blinds and the eerie light coming from underneath the door.


MISTER POTATO HEAD!

In a few months, his ilk may be called up in a draft to go "paint" military targets with laser beams so "smart bombs" can kill everyone in the area. Or, perhaps, he has a brother who already works in one of the four armed services and monitors missile silos or mans a chair somewhere.

Being old, I just keep thinking back to that scene in Wargames when Matthew Broderick went to see his uber Geek buddies and the really socially retarded one kept interrupting the slightly less demented one who screamed: "MISTER POTATO HEAD, MISTER POTATO HEAD!"

Our credit ratings, our medical records and our very lives are in the hands of young, shiftless wonders who can't carry a lucid conversation with anyone for more than two minutes. Most of them can't get laid because that would involve doing the above first. They live for video games, bad music and poor fashion choices. Morally, they're like vacuous blackholes who don't flinch at subscribing to porn sites that feature simulated rapes or someone strangling kittens. They think pictures of dismembered people in some war Over There are downright funny. And they have our lives in their hands.

But that's okay. As a baptized catholic (I'm Buddhist now) I'm relieved to report we have a new pope. Ratzo Rizzo. Pope Ratzo spiritually shepherds one billion people and is in favor of: uncontrolled population growth, burning Beatles albums and excommunicating gays.

Father Guido Sarducci, where are you?

-- Mz M.