or FIGtastrophe
or
The 7th Circle of Hell is Full of Figs and I Can’t FIG-ure It Out

It was supposed to be a simple process. My friend, Justice Harlow, drew a logo for someone. A company called The Hairy Fig. We were going to scan the drawings and then import them from the scanner to Paint Shop Pro, where I would resize them according to the needs for the website, and for business cards. Somewhere in the middle of all this, something went terribly wrong.

It began when my friend asked me to place all the large versions of the 4 different fig designs on one page and print it out. And to put all four of the smaller ones on a page, too, and print that. When inserting the large images onto my web site design software page, they were HUGE. I mean, like Figs from Space. It even crashed my program after getting some pesky memory overload error. I looked at the image dimensions, and it showed they were huge. Like Texas– Huge. But when I would print them, they would be half-size. When I resized them, they printed even smaller.

She became so upset, waving her arms and saying, “What the hell?” that she knocked over her Sam’s Diet cola, and made a huge spot on the rug. We blotted that up, and pressed on.

No matter what I did, I could not get those damn figs to be the right size. Go FIGure. It became a comedy of errors after that. And since it was in the wee hours of the morning, This incited screaming meemies in me me. I mean in me. Perhaps it was just a FIGment of my imagination, but these figs had a mind of their own.

Justice wondered aloud if maybe all the images on both our websites were also too big, but for some reason we couldn’t tell, because our software showed them smaller. This was a horrible thought, because I knew we had hundreds of images. I told her to stop fucking with my Chi, and we moved on…

Meanwhile, the Velveeta and Ro-Tel cheese dip we had consumed earlier, began to turn on us. We suffered gastrointestinal distress, and I was experiencing vertigo. We knew it was the Velveeta and Ro-Tel, because we had had the first part of it the night before, with the same results, but only the second time did we make the connection. What are they putting in cheese these days?

While I strained my brain to FIGure This out, my partner left and came back with a fresh bottle of Mocha Frappuccino, but couldn’t get the lid to screw off, so handed it to me, feeling I was the stronger of the two of us. (A myth I perpetuate by calling myself the “husband.”) After several tries in which I felt I had totally lost my ability to grip (or couldn’t get a grip?) I reminded her that we had appointment with galleries early in the morning after our meeting with the Fig Client. We needed to go to sleep….but she made this whimpering sound. It seems that Mocha Frappuccino is an excellent substitute for her chocolate craving–the one that usually has her eating candy bars or Snickers Ice cream cones purchased from Walgreen’s at 2 a.m. She also pointed out that since the Mocha Frappuccino only had one gram of fat, but was like eating 10 Snickers bars, it was a health conscious for her to drink it.

But I couldn’t get the lid off it.

More screaming meemies, and the added enjoyment of peeing in my boxer briefs. I finally used scissors to remove the plastic coating around the cap, but entertained images of gouging the scissors into my hand–This made me laugh so hard, that tears rolled down my face. I finally got the cap off without mishap, but then I was still taxed with the dilemma of the figs. The cute little cartoon fruits that had become my nemesis.

I went on a potty break, and saw that my Christmas lights in the bathroom had burned out. I like Christmas lights in the bathroom because it’s just enough light to keep me from stubbing my toe or missing the toilet, without having to suffer the glare of the overhead lights. There have been times that I wore sunglasses into the bathroom when I did not have Christmas lights…but I digress..

Back at my desk, and the Fig Fiasco, I opened a new Aqua filter to attach to my cigarette and the innards came out of it and dropped to the floor. I laughed some more, and peed in my pants again.

Finally, Justice said she would just go to her office (in the next room) and use her computer to print out what we had. She brought back the sheets and the tracing paper wrinkles were now showing up bolder than ever, even though this was the same file, printed on the same printer. The Fig Files were now becoming more wrinkly (older?) as they rested on the floppy disk.

Then she said, “Don’t you think I ought to color a bigger version of the figs, in case the client wants to use it on the web site?

Some days it just doesn’t pay to gnaw the straps off…

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illustration by JH ©2002