Friday, April 1, 2011

Joe

Joe is pretty much the most entertaining guy at my office.  He loves to talk/debate with people, and he's fairly loud, so I can listen in on almost all of his conversations.  His views on certain things are at times ridiculous, but he will defend them to the end.  I think the best way to go about explaining Joe to you guys is just to provide a list of random facts.  Here we go, and no, I'm not making ANY of this up.

1) Joe has a Jesus obsession.

Last year, his focus was on "Baby Jesus" and he would talk about him constantly.  I think he even had a picture of an infant Jesus somewhere on his cubicle.  In all conversations, he would talk about how Baby Jesus played a part in all his decisions.  This year, it's just Jesus in general, so I guess Jesus has grown up.  Joe says he's "really tight" with Jesus, so we should all listen to him when he talks about how we'll be judged and what Jesus will or will not like.  I don't consider Joe to be a religious person, so that just makes it even weirder.  I think he thinks of Jesus the same way kids think of imaginary friends.

2) Joe loves to sing.

He will sing 80's songs at least twice a day, and it's always in a high-pitched falsetto.  His favorite Christmas song is "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey.  He usually changes the lyrics to "All I want for Christmas is Joe" when he sings that one.  I once got into a debate with him about the lyrics to Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal."  Now, I'm sure you all know I am basically the MJ expert, but Joe tried for about half an hour to convince me that the song said "Eddie, are you ok?" instead of "Annie."

3) Joe has a fear of odd numbers.

Seriously.  For example, if you were to give him some candy, and you gave him 3 pieces, he would give one of them back to you.  He just can't handle it.  Although, trying to give him candy would probably never work because of the next fact:

4) Joe also has a fear of germs.

Now, this one is extreme.  He will not touch anything that someone else has touched without first sanitizing it.  He will not shake your hand, and if he has to, he will race back to his desk to use hand sanitizer immediately afterwards.  He will not use anything in the office kitchen for fear that someone else's dirty hands have touched it.  He will not share food or drinks with his wife.  Even if something is individually wrapped in protective plastic, he most likely still won't use it because people have touched the protective plastic wrapper.

5) Joe doesn't know how a lot of things in the real world work, and he is just generally odd.

We are currently doing a wellness program at work, in which, if you want, you can track how many cups of fruits and vegetables you eat each day.  Well, when Joe saw that email, he rushed over to my desk to ask me how big a cup was and how many did I think he could eat in one day.  He, having no concept of a cup, estimated that he could easily consume 24 cups of fruit a day, and I could not convince him otherwise for quite some time.  The wellness thing also includes wearing a pedometer to track your steps each day.  Joe informed me that his plan for this was to strap his pedometer to his cat and make the cat run around the house.

He also recently asked me the best way to go about begging people for money.  See, Joe is on this kick about asking strangers for "a dollar" until he has enough dollars to pay off his house.  He told me that he was just planning on going up to people and saying "Give me a dollar!"  I told him he should ask more nicely, and he said "Oh ok, so something like ... 'Give me a dollar?'?"  I told him to maybe use the word "please" or to at least invent some fake charity that he was collecting money for, but the most polite thing I could get him to agree to was phrasing "Give me a dollar" with a question mark on the end.

While we're on the subject of money, when Joe gave me permission to write this blog entry, he said that if this post sparked a book deal, he wanted 50% of all the money I got for it.  I told him my people would talk to his people.

Yesterday Joe stopped by my desk to say goodbye as he was leaving, and he chose that moment to impart some wisdom:

"Ashley, you should know this:  You can never trust a man who makes an appointment to get his hair cut.  You can also never trust a man who wears a bracelet.  Those are two hard and fast rules.  And I know the bracelet one to be true because I once got laid off by a bracelet-wearing man.  I thought for a year about blowing up his car ... but I don't know how to make bombs."

Believe me, that's not even one of the weirder Joe quotes.  In fact, I might start keeping a list of Joe quotes and posting entries on here that solely consist of all the weird things he said that week.

I love Joe a lot, and he's usually very nice to me ... but yeah, damn, he can get really weird.

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