May 21, 2011 was a typo.
It was a Monday morning and Harold brought me over this crumpled up sheet of notebook paper that literally looked like he had pulled it out of a McDonald’s to-go bag. He’s 89 years old, you know, and sometimes he gets confused. One time he gave me a plastic cup from Six Flags and told me it was the Holy Grail.
“What the f#ck is this, Harold?” I asked him. Traffic had been an absolute bitch, and I really just wasn’t in the mood. I mean, the page was totally filled with chicken scratch - even into the margins. Usually I’m pretty good at deciphering his writing, like when he asks me to type up a blurb on annihilation. I can always pretty much tell the difference between “complete obliteration of all mankind” and “writhing helplessly in eternal torment,” even if his “n’s” sometimes look like “u’s.” It just takes a little bit of practice.
But this thing was ridiculous. It was all kinds of crazy calculations that he must have spent the entire weekend working on even though it was 75 degrees outside. He was somehow multiplying words like Trombonement (or maybe Atonement?) with other words like Heaven and then squaring whatever bat shit crazy number he had come up with. At least I think he squared it. Maybe he just drew a little seagull next to it. It’s hard to know for sure since my boss is a stark raving lunatic. In any case, when I got to the end of the page it said:
Judgment Day =
But where it had a date, he had crossed it out and rewritten a new one over it. But then he crossed that one out too, and he circled it and drew an arrow pointing to the back of the page, and then on the back of the page he crossed that date out and drew another arrow to the front of the page, and then I had to turn the whole thing sideways and follow another arrow down to the footer and there, in between a note about the Great Tribulation and something about his car being ready for pick up at Toyota, please see Rick in the service department, it said “May 21, 2011.”
Except he had spilled some kind of dark beverage all over it, so maybe it really said March 21, 2017 or May 21, 1986, or maybe it said “Judgment Day = 6 rolls of toilet paper from Target.” I really couldn't tell. I was so frustrated by that point that I was pretty much just praying for the world to end as soon as possible. Unfortunately it didn’t, and the next thing I knew Harold had grabbed the paper from my printer and was announcing to the world whatever date I had half-assedly typed.
Now normally I would apologize to those of you who gave away all your earthly possessions on account of my mistake. But unfortunately, they do not pay me enough to care.
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