Retarded

A pearl of wisdom from The Office:

You don't call retarded people retards. It is bad taste. You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded. -- Michael Scott (Steve Carell)

A pearl of wisdom from My Name is Earl:
Do monkeys worry about their looks? -- Randy Hickey (Ethan Suplee)
If monkeys worried about their looks they'd wear pants.-- Earl Hickey (Jason Lee)

In other news, today was my company's day to attempt redeem our collective souls for the damage that we do to our society. Today was the day that my company donated it's employee's time to Christmas In October. We were told that it was going to be organized chaos. That was the truth. I'm not sure exactly how many houses we did, but I think we took on a total of eight houses. I spent some time working on two of them. The first was a large family's house. We spent most of our time painting. I hate painting so I looked for something else to do. The bottom two of their basement stairs were loose and likely to kill someone if they didn't know it. Me and a coworker spent most the morning patching together new bottom stairs. When they were done, they were functional, but by no means pretty. Fortunately for us the whole mess was covered by carpet. After we'd finished with that, most of the painting was done, so I wandered off to find something else to do. The other four houses in our neighborhood were in about the same shape. There were just a few jobs and in most cases there were twice as many people as needed working on them. Most of us were just standing around picking our noses. At about that time, the organizer of the event drove up and asked if anybody had a hammer. I raised my hand and they asked to borrow it. They said they needed it to rebuild a porch. I told them that I had a screw gun and a bunch of decking screws. At that point they nearly dragged me into their SUV and whisked me off to the other house. That is where things got pretty miserable. The rest of the day was spent pounding together a porch for a little old lady. It was raining the whole time and we were all wet, tired and miserable by the time it was over with. The little old lady ended up with a very nice astro-turf covered porch and bead board wainscoting on half of her kitchen. I then spent about 45 minutes trying to retrieve all of the tools that I'd brought to the house. One of the things I hate most about these types of events is that if you have tools you are always asked to bring them. On top of that there is the expectation that you will allow other people to use them. People are never as gentle with your tools as you'd be. I'm now missing one extension cord and am now the proud owner of three stripped driver bits. Oh well.