8 a.m.

• And what is Hitlery going to do when some Muslim country rags on her for being the White Devil/Great Satan/a general bitch in nature?

Hillary Rodham Clinton threatened yesterday to pull out of an upcoming debate hosted by MSNBC after one of its correspondents said on air that daughter Chelsea was being "pimped out" by the campaign to win votes.

 

"I, at this point, can't envision a scenario where we could continue to engage in debates on that network, given the comments that were made," said Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, calling the comment "beneath contempt."

Wow. She won't appear on OMGFAUXNEWSLOL2008 and may not appear on MSNBC-sponsored debates. I thought the purpose of the primary season was to get on lots of media outlets only to run and hide once elected to office?

You know, I remember when Rush Limbaugh did some dog-fades-to-Chelsea image on his television back in the early 1990s, and he got rightfully blasted for it. However, if Hitlery is going to use her adult daughter to hawk for votes, then using the “p” word is seemingly appropriate. Besides, “pimp” has gained more of a meaning than its original intent. Say, what better time to take a trip down memory lane?

And here I wanted to talk about my last Saturday at my place of employment and how this would be the last time I'd do my job with it being a winter month and the air conditioner turned on. (Well, maybe not the AC, but something blows out of those vents during the weekend when the building's owners are there and it's not heat.) Boy, did I go off the beaten path on this one. While I’m on my former job in Ohio, I almost want to bust out the “clerk pimp” story, but I just don’t feel like it at this time.

Well, now I feel like it.

When I was at the test-scoring facility in Ohio, we scored some state-assessment projects via computers and others by hand. The latter consisted of the students’ actual test papers and were delivered to us by mail. These papers were grouped in booklets, and there were a bunch of them to keep organized. To aid us in properly sorting out these hundreds (maybe even thousands – I can’t remember) of packets, we hired clerks. Basically, these were high-school students doing the summer job thing.

Well there was this one particular project in which we had a really good clerk, or at least that’s what I was told by my boss. Shrug. I didn’t mind getting up and taking my test-scoring group’s completed packets and putting them back in their initial boxes – it gave me a chance to get up from my chair. Then again, I’m sure the big bosses wanted someone who made less money to do this basic function, so I don’t blame them for getting us these assistants. Anyway, our clerk (I’ll call her Jen) was going to be out for a few days due to some operation and I wanted to know if we would be given another clerk or if our project was going to be clerk-less for a time. No big deal either way. I went to Jen’s boss Joe and asked him about this. Joe was a very soft-spoken guy and was great to work with. He was one of those guys who would hardly say a word, but then when he did it would be a great one-liner. When I asked him this question, he thought about it for a second and then said he was going to get this one clerk from this one project to help us out on one day. He then said that he would get this other clerk from this other project to aid us on another day. As he was mulling his options, I made the following remark, “Doesn’t this kind of make you like a ‘clerk pimp’?” He gave his usual laugh and that was that.

Or so I thought.

The next day my boss came up to me and was freaking out because two other people in this project who were also at my same management level were freaking out. When I asked why, my boss said that Jen wrote a letter to the clerks who were going to be help us out. This letter was just a basic “here’s where you put these completed packets/etc.” guide. However, there was one passage that brought on my co-worker’s ire.

Jen used the phrase “clerk pimp” to describe her boss Joe. The sentence read something like “Depending on which day the clerk pimp decides to send you over to our project…” and our two older co-workers read this and were enraged. I then responded to my boss that I was the one to came up with the “clerk pimp” term. He then laughed and said something like “Why am I not surprised? Well they are PISSED at Jen.”

Too fucking bad.

The only time I said “clerk pimp” was to Joe, so logic told me that Joe had to have said this phrase to his clerks. If Joe doesn’t care and Jen was writing a note that was intended for her fellow clerks, then my fellow test-scoring supervisors needed to take the sticks out of their respective asses. If not, then they need to get pissed at me because I’m the one who made this oh-so-wretched description.

As I went to my desk, I could tell these two older women were pissed. I can’t remember how this started, but they mentioned this offensive letter and I went right at them and said I was the one who came up with the term in a conversation with Joe and anyone had a problem with the choice of words then they should deal with me rather than Jen, who probably heard “clerk pimp” from her boss. The one lady then said the following:

“Do you know what a pimp does?”

I laughed. I laughed quite a bit, actually.

After a few days of pseudo-drama, the “clerk pimp” saga ended, although Jen was a little jittery once she heard of the OUTRAGE her letter caused. This was before I told her to let me know if anyone gave her grief about the phrase because I was the “clerk pimp” originator. Of course, nothing ever came of it, which didn’t surprise me. It’s a wonder how we got any work done there at times.