dW

Amazing Stupid People Stories

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An experience I had at work today made me begin to remember the multitudes of situations I’ve been in involving stupid people. My father owned a business and told me repeatedly when I was a kid that the best way to learn how stupid people are is to work in retail. It’s just amazing to me how truthful that is.

Today when I get to work I get a reply to an email I sent in 2007 from a woman that I sent an email to yesterday with a proof of the shirt “design” (you can’t call it that) she wanted. That is odd in of itself, especially when it’s July 2008. It’s a nasty email from that woman bitching at me that I keep sending her the same old artwork over and over and that I don’t know what I’m doing. I know that she’s probably using Outlook or Outlook Express and checking email in those programs isn’t exactly a small task, but– really– how hard is it to tell one email from another? As Bill Engvall would eloquently say in reply to a situation like that, “Here’s your sign.”

This next one will take a bit of explaining. Retards here in the South have elaborate ways to waste gasoline. There’s an entire culture of retarded people who race with trucks with customized independent suspensions and super sized motors in mud holes. Well, truthfully, to call them retards would be doing retarded people a disservice. We have the unfortunate situation of having to do t-shirts for them. This man comes in today with a large picture of half of his truck with him in it giving a thumbs up to the camera.

“Take me out of the photo and draw the rest of the truck there.”

How in the hell was I supposed to know what the rest of his truck looked like? He left– pissed off– because he had to go take a picture of the entirety of his truck without his being in it. This same afternoon he comes back with a new photo, except the front and rear bumpers are cut off. He responds, “You can at least draw the bumpers on there, right?”

About three weeks ago a woman walks in and tells me what stupid shit she wants on her shirts. I take the order, she walks off to go give the shirt count and sizes. She comes back and asks if I’d finished her artwork yet. She throws her a big fit because I hadn’t even started on it yet. Believe it or not situations like this are the most common types of stupidity that occur here. I’ve even had a woman call and curse me out over the phone because I didn’t finish her artwork an hour or so after they gave the order. After she started repeating herself I stopped her mid-sentence and told her that if she was a man she’d have gotten a five knuckle introduction. Her husband calls afterwards to irritate me, so I invite him over to get a hospital room number; he never showed up.

I hear doing freelance web design for clients isn’t much better.

Too Much Coffee

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There are times in which I go for long periods of time without illustrating a single thing worthwhile. I’m a graphic artist, and I feel perfectly at home designing webpages and whatnot. I tend to use illustration to calm myself down. I don’t really need to churn numbers, CSS properties, and HTML elements in my head while illustrating. I can sit down at the computer and paint or draw away using my Wacom tablet. Before I know it it’s 6 hours later, and I’ve listened to the same Rush song about three times because the playlist has repeated itself. This weekend I thought it was time to tell everyone to go to hell and lock myself away in my room.

This is an illustration of Espen Øverdahl as Too Much Coffee Man. Why would I do something like that? Probably because I was bored shitless. The idea came to me originally from a post on My Opera where Espen was shown offering free coffee. He’s made himself a reputation of being a heavy coffee drinker, so he’s like a real-life Too Much Coffee Man. I wanted something to illustrate, and well this idea seemed better than the previous ideas I had. I did this illustration in American movie poster dimensions, exactly 27×40 inches. Viewing the largest image size on Flickr by clicking the image above would yield an image only 25% of the original image’s size. I like to work big. The image is painted as an oil painting typically would be without the mess and cost in Corel Painter X.

When viewing photos of Espen on his own My Opera log this might not appear to look a lot like him, and it doesn’t. I doubt Espen is able to make his eyes bulge like that, but he’s had about his 1000th cup of coffee, so they should be falling out of his head by now. I just wonder what his response will be if he catches a glimpse of this.