The Red Herring

Dear William Shakespeare: Fuck Off

Years ago, there existed a bald, fairly unattractive, English man named William Shakespeare. Currently, most know him simply as the scribe responsible for penning the basic plot to such groundbreaking films as Romeo Must Die, High School Musical, and Ten Things I Hate about You. However, he also (apparently) wrote some other stuff. One such “some other stuff” includes the oft’ repeated Sonnet 18. To the layman, people who had sex in high school, or anyone not pursuing a degree in literature, it is most recognized as the one that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” only to continue with “thou art more lovely and more temperate.” Now, I really don’t want to be the one to call out William Shakespeare, the man indirectly responsible for the baffling fame of probable transvestite Zac Efron. However, Willy Shakes’ admiration for summer forces me to call him out, and call out I shall.
When Shakespeare attempts to lay down some serious Mack - sonnet style - he begins by comparing his lady fair to the inherent temperance and loveliness of a summer day. This seems to indicate beyond a doubt that Shakespeare is not only a horrible flirt, but also a fucking idiot. Summer is not temperate nor is it lovely; it is a soul crushing and brutalizing time of year where one (read as: any university student) is willing to sell their young fragile life to the highest bidder. I am one such student; who has for years been confined to this endless drudgery, otherwise known as “The Summer Job”. WHY WILLIAM?! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?!!!
Most of you are probably thinking I’m just being dramatic (after all, wasn’t the author of this article the lead in a high school play titled “Orange, Talk, Door”?). Very astute observation, faithful reader (and likely stalker): I assure you, however, that my summer employment experiences eclipses any agony you have yet to encounter in your bambi-like existence.  Since I’ve entered the workforce at the tender age of 16 I’ve worked six different summer jobs. On a whim of charitable kindness I’ve decided to traumatize you, the reader, with a description of only three of these experiences. I have listed them in chronological order, so that I can faithfully represent my digression from David MacLean: Human Being to David MacLean: Sadness Incarnate.

Job: DDDN Pizzeria
Date: June 2004
Age: 16
Status: Human Being

I will never forget my first job working at the local pizzeria DDDN; where the D stands for digestive, delectable, or delicious, depending on which D you’re talking about. The N stands for nutritious. Curiously, there is no letter in the pizzeria’s name to represent the phrase “shitty name for a pizza place.” My official duties at this pizzeria were, to the best of my knowledge, (my boss only spoke and understood Korean) to wear a red apron-skirt, a red shirt, and a red hat emblazoned with the letters DDDN. On busier days, for some inexplicable reason, I was trusted with handing out free pizza to people on the most populated street in my neighbourhood; this was often accompanied by a spectator chorus of, “Holy fuck, that kid is lame.” Eventually I just stopped coming to work; a decision I reached once I realized my boss had decided that she would pay me in pizza (one slice a day). I have yet to formally resign or quit. I am technically still working there.

Job: The Brick
Date: May 2007
Age: 19
Status: Overlord of Hobbits and Eczema victims

The Brick, to all you unfamiliar, is a furniture warehouse store most noted for its no money down financing options and its immunity to all forms of combat. Nobody beats The Brick - ever. I worked in the warehouse at The Brick for all of five days before handing in my two weeks notice. However, in those two and a half weeks I was given an astounding glimpse into another world, which previously I had assumed existed only in the works of JRR Tolkien. I worked with 5 men at the brick, three of which I’m fairly certain were hobbits. Now, in any other scenario I would have been psyched to stumble onto such an oddity. However, I was forced to move furniture with these tiny boy-men, which was difficult for my 6’ 2” frame. Luckily, there was one other man working there of moderate height. This man was “Guy with really bad Eczema.” His skin was so incredibly dry that his eyes would periodically water and tear while you were talking to him. This made for fairly awkward conversation (do I look at the eyes, do I not look at the eyes?). The story does end happily, as he left me alone with the hobbits for a week so that he could attend his wedding and honeymoon. This was a major blow to my ego at the time, as I hadn’t had a girlfriend for over two years yet eczema man was a hot item. Other highlights at the brick include convincing an obvious drunk driver that it would be impossible to load a fourteen-piece furniture set into his Geo, building a BBQ with my bare-hands, and attending to a man who insisted on referring to each piece of furniture as “Mr.” I had to move Mr. Couch beside Mr. Bench so that there’d be enough room for Mr. Desk. The Brick is where happiness comes to die.

Job: Gardening Assistant
Date: July 2007
Age: 19
Status: Sadness incarnate

Gardening sounds like the perfect summer job. You get to work outside, enjoy the sun, play around in dirt and build a close relationship with our large silent friends, the trees. This was exactly my thinking when I showed up for my first day of work. However, I soon realized that in order to enjoy the sun, the sun actually has to be shining. During the summer, I live in Vancouver, and it rains…a lot. It does not rain as much as it does in the winter, granted, but still for the first two weeks of my employment I was soaked, covered in mud, and desperately trying not to pass out in my horribly unbreathable company-supplied rain jacket. Once again, I’m sure some of you will respond to this with a simple shrug and a “whatever, that’s not so bad.” Well fuck you guys, because my job was made exponentially worse by a little variable known as Paul. Paul was my strict, Italian, David hating boss. At first I thought he’d be a nice guy, based almost solely on his uncanny resemblance to Luigi of the Mario Brothers. However, after a while I learnt that this cartoonish resemblance to my favourite Mario-kart character was in fact a cruel deception so vile that it had to have been inspired by some sort of summer job anti-Christ (I believe that the Old Testament refers to this character as “Sumjo, Usurper of the Mellow.”)  Paul didn’t like me to begin with. I wasn’t hired by him, I didn’t really know what the fuck I was doing, and I kept pulling up tomato plants, thinking that they were weeds. All this culminated in Paul’s decision to make my life a living hell. When it rained I couldn’t sit in his truck, I had to sit under a tree; when I slammed the door of his truck he told me, in Italian, to “Fuck a Cat.”  Once I actually showed up to the wrong building and arrived to the actual job site a half hour late. My Italian is kind of shaky, but I’m fairly certain that he was accusing me of raping an orange. However, the very worst part of the gardening job was not my dispassionate boss but the fact that I had to pick up leaves in some very sketchy parts of Vancouver. To all of you not familiar with Vancouver, this means several close encounters with Hypodermic needles. Now, I suspect that many of you had unpleasant jobs over the summer. However, unless you were, on several occasions, inches away from a possible HIV infection, you better shut the fuck up. There’s really very few things comparable to nearly becoming HIV infected.*

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So William Shakespeare, if you’re reading this article, I hope you’ll reconsider a few of your most famous lines. “Beware the Ides of March” might be more relevant today if it were worded “Beware the Aids of August,” and “Now is the Winter of our Discontent” line should probably read “ Now, finally, the Winter; David MacLean is Contented.” I would also like to apologize for calling you a fucking idiot. I have on occasion been incredibly moved by your work. I particularly like the line from Taming of the Shrew Act II scene i, “Asses are made to bear, and so are you.” Finally, something I can relate too.

- Dave MacLean

The Red Herring

Vol. XX no. 0.5

Editor’s note: Just so that all you ladies out there know, David MacLean is 100% STD free (except for this one where his penis periodically recites the alphabet backwards).

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• Posted on September 17th, 2008
• Written by editorial staff
• Articles, Dave “White Wine Spritzer” MacLean, Web-only