With a capital M

Ramblings Post #167
Because the period between when I got finished my first round of education and the part when I start raising kids is using the term "decade" as a measure (and still isn't over yet) there are a great many stories I've seen, heard or know of. Most of them are true. This because in the Spades game of life truth has all the trump and fiction may have to renege just hoping to get to board.

Chicken plucking does strange things to people.

One of my coworkers got just got married. He let our manager know by informing her in passing that he had to leave early, because he was getting married later that day. That was it. Then he went and got married. Now, he's from Europe originally, so maybe its the cavalier attitude of the continent, but that seems just a little too casual for me.

But it also reminds me of another interesting story of a guy who got married while working at Le olde Chicken Plucker...

He wasn't a great chicken plucker. He was more a journeyman plucker, someone who could do the job and for the most part make those things that needed to happen go on and happen. He once lied to a client that you couldn't pluck a chicken after hours because the heat in the building turned off promptly right after the evening whistle blew. Like many of us working there at the time, he was usually bereft of serious funds, lived for the weekend and stayed with a roommate in a apartment for which he claimed the combined rent was $400 a month. But what made really made him interesting was his approach to dating and women.

He was looking for a woman with three specific qualities: she needed to overweight, have low esteem, and possess good credit.

That is not a joke.

Now he wasn't a pretty boy type. And admittedly, myself nor none of the guys I hang out with resemble male models, and as such we usually understand that supermodel types are not the kind of women who would normally jump at the chance to be with us. I mean, you have to realize what league you're in if you're going to play the game. A guy like me is more prone to use good conversation, an exciting personality, memory, and this thing I do with my....um...er, nothing. Not to say that we don't occasionally end up with all aces, but reality is what it is.

However, in his situation, when your requirements are...um, particular, you have to wonder about the motivation. I mean, you have to. He was dead serious about this, and would dutifully report back failures and follies of the Friday and Saturdays looking for the "perfect" woman.

In any case, as luck would have it and because Atlanta has ALL types, he met a woman who apparently met those qualifications. And then in the space of say...three WEEKS, talked her into a Wednesday afternoon courthouse wedding.

I know it was three weeks, because he met her the last week of March and they got married in mid-April. I know it was a Wednesday because it HAD been planned for that Friday. I know it was to have been a Friday, because that Thursday we were going to go out to the poor man's bootleg gentleman's club - Hooter's - and give him a thrown together bachelor-ish gatheration type party thing. And then he took Wednesday off that week to "take care of the some wedding details" and came in Thursday and said he'd just go on ahead the done it Wednesday.

Now, I've met her and she's nice. She did fit the physical requirement, but had a lovely bubbly personality, at least when I was around, and she surely was affectionate towards him. But I have to ask the question of a what appeared to a reasonably intelligent woman: why would marry a man you just met?

She moved him into her house, she eventually found him a better job, and they're apparently very happy together years later. Go figure. But at the outset, let's just say there were a whole lotta ways the whole shebang could have taken a wrong turn.

Ah, the life of a chicken plucker.

And women say they can't meet anybody. Apparently they just aren't trying hard enough.

Barkeep, because I just remembered this story....light me up!