Topic idea from The Daily Post at WordPress.com:
Who is the last person you’d want to be stuck in an elevator with? And why?

That would be the person I’ll refer to as JF. Such a jackass. I have a knee-jerk reaction to him as strong as the one that Michael Scott has for Toby Flenderson.

I met him at my place of work, way back at the start of the millennium. He was doing some research in our library, seemed friendly, and was reasonably cute. He spent the entire afternoon in the office, and even helped me troubleshoot a computer problem. I asked him out for a drink.

When we met up, he asked “why are you all dressed up?” (uh, because I thought I was on a date.) This was one of his MOs — complete lack of ability to grasp subtlety, or to use tact in any form. No, he did not suffer from any autism or Asperger’s. He was just an ass.

I invited him to a Halloween party in October 2001. I dressed as a witch, and when he saw me, he grimaced and said “do YOU like that outfit?” Keep in mind this was a short time after 9/11 — people were a little delicate and the general feeling in the air was jumpy. This did not deter JF from picking arguments with my friends (strangers to him) about terrorism, anthrax, or other party-inappropriate subjects. When he wasn’t enraging people with his backwards politics, he spoke in long paragraphs while impersonating the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. My friend Nancy, possibly the sweetest human alive, took me aside and very calmly said “I hate him.”

When I last saw him, he was starting the process of donating bone marrow to a stranger because he “thought it sounded noble.” At lunch, he freaked out when he suddenly realized he had tripled-booked that block of time — he had missed one audition and one job interview because we were having lunch, and somehow he felt it was my fault. I snapped and told him LOOK we just can’t hang out any more. He slammed out of my car. “Not AGAIN,” he said.

I don’t know if this tale adequately illustrates what a jerky man he was. But trust me. Trust me.

The absolute irony is that he was extremely handy and knowledgeable about useful things. He helped me through the process of buying a car, showing me how to navigate Consumer Reports and to deal with used car lots.

Even though he’d be able to figure out how to restart that damned elevator and get us the hell out of there, I would happily choose to be stuck, stuck, stuck.

[JF makes a brief cameo in this post from 2007 — look under Consumer Reports)