I’ve had a few jobs in my days as a person. The first one I had was a back yard maintenance crewperson for a Midwestern bank executive and his wife. They provided room and board from ages 0 to 18. Sometimes they would pay me $10 for the lawn mowing. Sometimes they would hug me, which was annoying, because they knew I wasn’t a hugger.

Then there was the job making pizzas for Little Caesar’s, where I would sit in the back and flatten dough through a machine and answer phones (an ancient device that people used to order before apps were invented), while the rest of the crew looked at me with scorn before I was fired from my first job.

My failures continued with jobs at Target, a craft supply store, a furniture delivery store, and a construction company. I’ve always been really bad at jobs, but there is one job that I hate more than any other. I’m not talking about delivering things, that I can do. I hate delivering messages. Let me tell you something. I’m not e-mail or a mail carrier. I don’t deliver messages.

For instance, my wife will often tell me that the kids need to go to bed. Instead of telling them herself, she tells me that I have to tell them. I’m like, they are right upstairs. You can just walk, scooter, text, Facebook, Instagram, or even Tik Tok them. But she continues to use her favorite form of communication of having me tell them.

I’m like if it was your idea for them to go to bed, shouldn’t you tell them? After all, I don’t care if they go to bed or not. If they are tired, it’s their own darn fault. But no, I have to stop my important job of leveling up my character on Gears of War to go tell some ungrateful kids that won’t listen to me anyways, that they need to go to bed.

My least favorite form of messengerboyness was being the guy between the rock and the hard place of a boy and girl prelationship. Boy wanted me to ask girl if she was interested. I tell girl, then girl asks if boy thought girl was cute. Then I am in the vortex of back and forth and get blamed when they get married.

Then there is stupid work messenger boy thing. Boss asks you to ask another boss about training. Then that boss asking what the other boss is talking about. Then I start working and both bosses want to talk to ME about how we need to communicate better in the office.

If you can’t see why I don’t like being between a rock and a hard place, let me make this message Krystle clear. Since I don’t care about either side of the message, I’m going to go out of my way to make sure the message is miscommunicated. Kids won’t know what mother wants, boy and girl will hate each other by the end, and bosses will end up firing each other. You don’t want me delivering a message.

Here’s one last message for you: It’s time for the Bitter Friday Giftures:

If you need a message delivered…

Or a cat…

Or perhaps call…

Or even try calling…

I could always screw up your message…

The nice thing about messages…

E-

Instant…

Faceb…

Or even on T…

But the bottom line is…

Nobody miscommunicates more than…

The best part about not having me deliver a message is not having to deal with the RBF (Resting Bitter Face) that is included with each message. From now forward, if you want a message delivered from me, I will be charging you money and it’s going to get more expensive for each message. Until you go broke just to get a badly delivered message.

ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH

Bitter Bad Messenger Ben