Complaining For The Sheer Joy Of Complaining

Bitch:  To criticize spitefully, often for the sake of complaining rather than in order to have the problem corrected.  (Ed. Note:  This is an outstanding definition.  I love the concept that to bitch is to complain only for the sheer joy of complaining and for no other reason.  The bitching person doesn't even want to solve the problem.  Brilliant.)

And because Bitching Is My Life . . . . 

And because I can't come up with a form of bitching more joyous than bitching about an experience in Hawaii . . . 

The condo/time share complex we stayed out had a presentation every morning where five or six vendors would come in and give a brief presentation of their tours and services.  It was actually helpful to get an overview of the kinds of activities available.  There was this one dude whose company offered a combo tour that included a plane ride and a boat trip, with stops at a couple of landmarks, all in a chauffeured van that held eight or ten people.  The price was pretty reasonable and it seemed to be a convenient way to include a few different experiences in a hassle free fashion.

The one niggling concern I had was that the guy giving the presentation (and running the tour) was kind of schmucky.  He was sort of a cross between Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, and you young people can look those references up.  He would say things like: "Sir, where are you and your wife from?  If that lady sitting next to you is actually your wife wink wink yuck yuck yuck."  It seemed to me that about a third of the old people in the room thought this was hilarious while the rest of us were rolling our eyes.  I signed up for the tour because I didn't think that he could keep up that stale and inane banter for seven and one half hours, and boy, was I wrong about that.  By the end of the day I was pondering jabbing sharp objects into my earholes, hoping that I could damage my eardrums enough to drown out the sound of his voice (his electronically amplified voice) once and for all.

"Where's Seaweed?"

"Oh, he threw himself out the door a couple of hours ago, right at the crest of that mountain precipice.  The last we saw of him he was still plummeting, with a big smile on his face."

The real problem was that it was raining that day.  Nonetheless, Henny loaded us all into his van, drove a couple of minutes down the road, then started calling the air and boat tour operators to find out if their portion of the day was still viable.  Which they were not.  I thought this was a sneaky rip off; we were prisoners in the van at that point with no way to escape. Henny filled a good chunk of time driving us around to easily accessible and fairly obvious overlooks, droning on and on like an evil clown sadist.  As we were to learn at the end of the day Henny must have made much of his income on tips because he began to shamelessly harangue us (amplified, electronic) about the size of his tip by drawing an analogy about how much you should tip a hotel valet to park your car, and comparing this to how much work he did, what with all of the driving us around to see things that we had already seen, in the rain.

Well, at that point I had smoke coming out of my ears, and I have pretty big ears.  We disembarked from the van and I kept walking.  The thought of giving this man any more money strained all credulity.

As I got about twenty feet from the van, moving purposefully away, Henny actually shouted after me: "Seaweed.  What's the matter?  Didn't you have a good time?"

"No, not really," I replied, over my shoulder.  

I had to give him his props.  He harangued me for a tip and then he harangued me when I didn't tip him, in front of everyone else, and I'm really seriously good about tipping.  I tipped everyone else on the trip and no one else asked me to do it.

I will never, ever forget Henny.  He was a highlight, of sorts.  In Hawaii.