Hey!  I’ll tell you some stuff that ticked me off. Because I never do that.*

1. I emailed a friend’s work address about three days ago and offered to give her a CD mix.  She didn’t reply.  I was vaguely annoyed, but then she called me and invited me to a party.  I said, “Do you want that CD mix?” She said, “What CD mix?” It turns out that she had just been laid off from her job and never received my message.

Is it completely unreasonable to put an out-of-office response on an ex-employee’s inbox? Or at least kill the box completely so emails bounce back and people get a clue that something might be wrong?  I’m not saying that this has to be politically correct or anything. I’ll settle for an animated image of a laughing skull & crossbones, with a computerized voice that cackles “YOUR FRIEND HAS BEEN TERMINATED.”

2. This weekend, at a place where there was red wine and dancing, everyone suddenly upped and started doing choreographed steps.  For a moment I thought I was having my recurring nightmare where I’m trapped in a Rogers & Hammerstein musical, but then my friend said it was a dance that everyone knew, “The Electric Slide.” She said, “Didn?t you go to high school dances?”

Well, yeah, but all we did was hop up and down with our white man’s overbite and try to convince girls that this was the right way to move to “The Reflex.” No one ever bothered me to teach me any kind of choreographed dance.  How did everyone else get to be six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon in Footloose? 

*Lest you think this is just another ranty post, I’ll point out that there were upsides to each of these incidents: I got invited to a party, and I got to dance and drink wine.  Which makes it a good weekend.  Much better than that one weekend that one time when I went here and I went there and then I got back home and realized my fly had been down the entire time.