The Manuel Files

Sometimes, there are too many Yikes moments to keep up with. Sadly, these past few weeks where I’ve been absent from writing have been due to that exact thing. It makes me stop and ask, what should I put out there first? Would my seven viewers prefer to hear stories of idiotic dating experiences? Would they perhaps prefer to hear a story of retribution? Issues with friends? My apartment complex? My new roommates (cockroaches check in, they don’t check out wah wah wah)? Ex-drama? Singles events? Sibling idiocy? Bizarre nightmares?

Well, good news…we have a little bit of everything. I started writing a blog about the last three dates I went on, hoping to lump them together and then became dissatisfied with the stories. As I learned in undergrad from one of my favorite writing teachers when discussing the problem with budding writers: “The main issue is that everyone thinks they have something interesting to say. If it’s not interesting, don’t f’ing write it down.”

Thanks Steve.

So I decided to let the viewer…s…vote. And here is what I decided you guys wanted to read about FIRST!

The Manuel Files:

In a previous post, I’ve talked about my touched co-workers…who provides us endless hours of entertainment. You may remember him from the famed blog, “Dialing out for love,” where he made the awesome decision to call Live Links and have a fling with a girl who turned out to resemble Precious. We love Manuel, because he just rattles off the most insane stories and says the most interesting stuff… So, as an update from the last time he was discussed, I present you with his most recent work.

Hungry?:

Recently, they moved my team and I over into a different room that we now share with about 10 people. To celebrate the move, our boss treated us to Publix subs. As the sheet was going around the room taking everyone’s orders, Manuel walked it over to me. I’m looking at the list to see what everyone else is ordering to see if I get any ideas about what I might want and then I see it…

Manuel’s Order: Foot long buffalo chicken sandwich, lettuce, tomato, hollapinos.

I walked over to where he and the other four guys sit and just held the paper up in sheer disbelief, my mouth open and head cocked to the side as if to suggest… “Really?!”

He looked at me confused. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Hollapinos?”

“Yeah I like them.”

“How do you spell it?”

He looked down at the sheet and began laughing. The other guys immediately took interest… “What’d he do??”

“He spelled Jalapeno h-o-l-l-a-p-i-n-o!” The room erupted in laughter as we tried to decide the last time we saw a gangster pepper…but next time we do, we’ll “holla.”

Manuel is also famous for sayings such as, “Eat a hotdog and die slow,” as well as our favorite… “Detachable meat.” Although he’s known for this sort of stuff around the office, we found this next incident to be uniquely disturbing and entertaining simultaneously.

In our office, Blue Bell ice cream oftentimes makes deals within our advertising department allowing us to enjoy free samples. This time, they brought in about 7 gallons of ice cream, to which Manuel has been enjoying every single day since it go here. As he dug into a freshly opened pineapple yogurt, through our headphones on blast, we hear him announce… “WOW. This is like a warm nipple on a summer day.”

We don’t understand it. We can’t explain it. BUT…we laughed until we cried. The next day as he was scooping the hardened ice cream, he cried out, “Damn! This is hurting my ankle!” We’re pretty sure he meant his wrist…but we never know with him.

More Office Antics:

Just today, when I was thinking that we hadn’t heard or seen anything idiotic out of Manuel for quite some time, he broke his non-idiotic streak.

“Guys. I was in the water yo, and I swear…what’s that fish? A jelly fish? It stung me.”

I figured there was nothing else in that conversation for me to hear, as it seemed to be getting boring, so I walked back to my desk. Next thing I know, the guys are laughing and signaling me over to their desks.

It was to show the picture Manuel had drawn of what he had been stung by…which looked like a giant sperm. Not surprising at all, the guys looked at him and said… “So this is what you were stung by?”

“Yes!”

“HE WAS STUNG BY SEAMAN!” (Laughter, laughter, laughter)

“That’s what I SAID bro!”

It took Manuel a little bit to understand what had just happened…regardless…hilarious.

The last office story stems from the fact that we’re always making fun of Manuel and telling him he’s gay. Mainly because (as the last blog about him says) he’s infamous for making statements like, “If you don’t shut up, I’ll lick your neck bro!” We know he says things just for the attention sometimes, but then there are times we’re like…either you weren’t thinking about this prior to you saying it, or you just don’t think!

Two of the guys came in from the weekend and were talking about how they saw Coraline, Tim Burton’s animated kids movie that’s been out for a bit. While they were discussing it, Manuel stopped them and said… “Wait, what? I’m going to be riding whose core, on whose line?”

Stories From The Outside:

These last two stories from the Manuel Files, deals primarily with his personality out of work. And, we voted on some of the best stories he’s provided and these two made the cut!

To understand this first story, you need to know the following…Manuel lives with his 76 year old grandfather, who has a girlfriend 20 years his junior and is for all intensive purposes…getting more than Manuel and it’s not a secret. Also, he lives with his cousin and her daughter who takes great pleasure in torturing Manuel.

Who stole my favorite hats?

The other day Manuel came in looking pretty frustrated. When asked why the long face, he told us he had gotten into an argument with his grandfather over some stolen condoms. Apparently, Manuel had borrowed two and his grandfather was pissed, demanding the two condoms back…with interest. Three condoms had to be replaced in order to stop the fight and needless to say, the issue was eventually…wrapped up.

Who’s afraid of the big bad…ghosts?

Manuel is a really hard sleeper, but his cousins daughter, who is 3…is not. She is afraid of the dark, and so is Manuel. A few nights in a row, Manuel was feeling a draft in his room in the middle of the night and would wake up with a sore face. He couldn’t understand what was happening and why his face would sting for prolonged periods of time and just chocked it up to him imagining things. One night, when he wasn’t really sleeping so well, he woke up in the middle of the night to find his three year old cousin, nose to nose with him. She whispered, “Max…psst….pssssssssssssst.” Manuel (whose family calls him Max) opened his eyes and just as he could fix his eyes on his baby cousin, she slapped him in the face, giggled and ran out.

For weeks he was coming into work telling us, “I think I’ve got ghosts.” And he’d been sleeping on the couch in the living room. Now that he knew his baby cousin was behind this…he had to pay her back. He stayed up until she entered the room, waiting for her to reach up and slap him. As she raised her hand, he grabbed her, tied her up with a bed sheet and locked her in a dark room. Sometimes a three year old must be taught…not to get tied up on silly games! Three year old baby cousin-3, Manuel-1.

On a side and final note, she was also there when he decided that it would be a good thing to kill an ant with a BB gun. It should shock absolutely no one that he in fact…missed the ant, and shot his foot.

There’s no telling how large these Manuel Files can grow…but I have a feeling, this is not the last we’ve heard from him.