…I think.

It isn’t entirely unexpected.

You see, my wife and I have been trying off and on to have a child. “Off and on” is the key phrase with how we’ve been going about the whole process. I’ll let you fill in the details.

A few weeks ago we were in the “off” stage and didn’t really think anything of it until my wife mentions that she is a little bit late.

“Late for what?” I ask over a cup of coffee.

“You know….”

“No, I don’t - Oh… Well….”

“Yeah…”

“Okay, then.”

And that is the end of the conversation for the day. A few more days go by and she buys a pregnancy test. But she doesn’t buy just any pregnancy test. No, I’ve taught my wife well. She buys a digital pregnancy test because anything digital has got to be good. She opens it up and unfolds a poster-sized instruction sheet and starts reading through all the intricate and detailed steps she has to take which basically boil down to: “Pee on stick. Wait.”

She puts the test aside and says she’ll use it “tomorrow” and we go about our business, not thinking much of it.

Today is “tomorrow”.

So this morning she wakes up and goes into the bathroom and follows the aforementioned complex instructions and, while she is still in the bathroom and I’m sitting on the bed reading the paper and again drinking coffee I hear her say, “Oh my god!”

I’m a guy and I’m pretty dense so I’m not entirely sure what this initially means. It could mean that she just read another disturbing bit of trivia about the Nick and Jessica breakup in People magazine, it could mean that she can’t figure out the instructions to the pregnancy test, or it could mean -

“I’m pregnant!” she says when she walks in the room a moment later.

I smile and she smiles and we hug and I tell her she’s going to be a wonderful mother and she says I’ll be a wonderful father and I ask her if she thinks it’s mine.

It’s remarks like that which keep a marriage lively.

Now, this was only one test. And even though the package claims to be “99%” accurate (they wouldn’t sell many tests if they were advertised as “71%” accurate, now would they?), we’re going to hold off telling anyone or even thinking too much about it for the moment. She’s going to take another test in a day or two and make an appointment with her doctor and go through all the necessary checks and balances.

We spend the rest of the day going shopping and fixing up the house and doing all the normal things we do on the weekend. Then, as I imagine most people do when they find out they are going to be parents for the first time we go out to dinner and drank beer and smoked cigarettes and come home and make love like crazed weasels, knowing that this night would be the last time we could probably do this for the next 18 years.

And, of course, we talk about the baby the whole time. Life is good.

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My office is filled with weaklings.

These are people who are afraid of running a short hundred mile marathon. These are people who can’t last a measly fifteen rounds in the ring with a grizzly bear. These are people who can’t catch a bullet in their teeth, karate-chop their way through a brick wall or even kill a man with a plastic spork.

That’s right. My office is filled with tea drinkers.

They come in with their lemon-rosemary (an unholy combination if ever there was one) scented cups of hot water and take a few sips every so often, exclaiming how soothing or soft the flavor is and how it really “takes the edge” off that hectic day when the phone rings twice. I come in with my large mug of steaming black java and down it before they’ve had time to stir in their two Sweet N’ Lows and four drops of non-dairy whole bean fat-free flavor filtered soy milk. I get into the office around 8:00 AM and I’m ready to take on the world by 8:03 AM while they’re still dunking their little soggy bags of leaves, moving their heads up and down in rhythm with their arms so the whole office looks like a Texas oil field.

And before I have the Celestial Seasonings Secret Police kick down my door with their sandals made of hemp, I need to publically admit that I have indeed tried tea many times and each time I wonder why on earth I did so.

You see, when a non-tea drinker and a tea drinker work together it is only a matter of time before the tea drinker tries to “convert” the heathens of the world like me. More than once I’ve had tea drinkers try to save my soul my offering me a cup of the mild warm beverage.

“Here, Tom, try some of this black moon dark tea, you’ll really like it!”

“Gladys, this tastes like dirt…”

“Maybe you’d be more into this vanilla green tea?”

“Very natural tasting…again, like dirt.”

“Oh, well how about this mint marmalade tea?”

“Refreshing dirt…”

“Perhaps you could add some sweetener.”

“Dessert dirt..”

You get the idea.

That alone, though, doesn’t bother me as much as the few weaklings in our office who think they are coffee drinkers, but they’re really tea drinkers. My boss, Dick Lumbergh, is one of them.

Dick sometimes comes in before I do and when he does he usually makes the “coffee” such as it is. I’ve watched him careful measure out four small spoonfuls of grounds for the filter and then fill the pot to the brim with water before pouring it into the machine. Then, using all of his years of management experience and training, he leans against the wall and watches the entire pot brew right to the last drop. Dick is a true inspiration for Teamsters everywhere.

The end result is always a pot of brown tinted liquid which, when you hold up to the light, casts a soft golden glow all around you. Yes, it’s very pretty, but that’s the problem. If you can actually see through the pot, then you haven’t made coffee. You’ve made coffee-flavored tea which tastes just like regular tea, except crappier.

I like real coffee. I like coffee so thick you can not only stick a fork into but you can also cut off a slice and make a sandwhich with it later in the week. I like coffee so black that when carry your cup into the room the lights seem to dim. I like coffee so strong that it jumps out of the pot and wrestles me to the ground, making me scream for mercy before it finally agrees to climb into my mug and let me drink it.

This is why when I make the coffee in our office, people know it. Productivity skyrockets, meetings that used to last two hours are over in four minutes, and everyone is running around like Benny Hill skit where the women are running around while a dirty old man chases them.

So there it is. I’m a coffee drinker stuck in a tea-drinking office, and that’s okay.

I’m not bitter… but my coffee is.

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Sure.. You hate clowns. We all do. But do you really hate clowns, or are you just some wanna-be clown hater? Now it’s time to find out… If you really hate clowns, then you’ll love this site. It’s an entire website devoted to clown hating. The link? What else? Ihateclowns.com.

This isn’t just some website devoted to wacky rants about some childhood trauma centered around gobs of bleach-white greasepaint and a circus tent… No, this takes the idea of not liking something to another level. This guy offers a I Hate Clowns store, plenty of I Hate Clowns video games, methods for jointing the “anti-clowning” community, a few free I Hate Clowns items and an entire message forum devoted to hating clowns.

And don’t think this guy is selective. Not at all!

He also hates mimes.

And, like any good internet entrepreneur, he also has a site dedicate to that. I’ll let you guess the website address. Go ahead. I dare ya.

Man, I admire him.

If, by chance, you’re one of those few people who actually like clowns (and I mean really, really, really LIKE clowns) then maybe you should run a quick Google search for “clown porn”. No, I’m not making that up. And no, you probably shouldn’t do that at work.

Unless you work at some big electronics retailer and can surf the web on 45 monitors and wall-sized plasma TV screens at once. Then you should definitely look it up at work. And lock the PC cabinet. And take a long lunch.

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