Where there's smoke there's fire!

Recently I experienced a lateral move in my company. This move requires me to know and do more and get paid the same, corporate America's finest paradigm of professional growth. This was not really a sacrifice as I would gladly trade phone time for all of the wage related apathy that my company cares to provide. The sacrifice: I'm now unionized. I have joined the local 323: Sleep Deprived Zombies United. My shift changed only 3 hours but now resides in the block of morning hours where I usually get the only three solid hours of sleep I manage to eek out of each day. As a result of the shift change, I'm tired and unfocused, couple this with my angry hate-filled personality and you have a dangerous cocktail resulting in conflict and woe.

I don't drink coffee in the morning or other wise, at least not for it's fatigue combating properties. Thusly walking the few feet between my car and the entrance to the building I'm usually subdued enough to let the other people pass without commenting on the ridicules thing they say or do. I spend the rest of my day envying this trance-like state and the idiot shield it is, I one day hope to master this condition to be able to call it on command, one day I'll say, "shields up" resulting in glassy eyes and a walking coma.

Several mornings ago however, as I marched toward the building entrance, barely able to control my drool reflex. I noticed something that even my befuddled brain could recognize as idiotic behavior; a woman, standing next to her car, smoking. Now you may say that smoking is not a crime nor is it even unusual, but there's more; this woman enjoying her morning fix was at least 30 months pregnant either that or she had a regulation size basketball with life like navel style air valve tucked under her tank top.

I missed a step and nearly stumbled when I saw this, I wasn't quite sure if I should say something or just pretend it was just a hallucination generated by my oxygen and sleep starved brain. But being in the cantankerous state I was with little, and by little I mean no, reservations for the feelings of others I offered a polite suggestion to the pregnant smoking woman; I yelled, "what's wrong with you? Don't you know you shouldn't be smoking?" I figured that I would be met with a simple dignified "fuck off" but to my surprise I was offered a multi-syllabic response, the pregnant smoking woman returned, "I have to smoke here, I can't smoke in the car my daughter's in there!" I looked and sure enough there was a toddler in the back seat chewing on the upholstery. I was floored, I couldn't believe what was happening, the world had truly gone mad. Probably for the first time in my life I was too stunned to offer witty remarks or psyche slashing advise, I simply picked my jaw up off the pavement and stumbled into the building. I have yet to see this woman out side waiting for whom ever she had been waiting for that morning, perhaps she was smoking in bed and though judicious use of justice-filled fire deepened the gene pool.