It’s Christmas Eve and we’re at our favorite watering hole preparing for our last Christmas in Dallas and everything was going great.  And then this dickhead engineer (we’ll get to that part) sits down next to us.

Mandy and I are both on our iPads, drinking our beers, talking about our upcoming trip and very obviously doing something else when…”Hey,  could you look up Christmas Eve midnight masses in Dallas?”

“Uh…maybe” Mandy answers.  This is a white guy in his 40’s, big belly, drinking a dark beer wearing glasses and he’s got a huge duffel bag in the seat next to him.  I could tell right away that this was going to go south. Being the nice person that she is, Mandy starts to google but she’s having trouble coming up with anything concrete.  He continues to ask her to look up certain areas of Dallas and certain denominations of religions and it occurs to me that if this guy had a church he attended, he’d be going to it tonight and wouldn’t need strangers to google this information for him.  I should mention that he only has an old school phone from 1996.  He starts to give zip codes that Mandy types into Yelp, which come up to areas in California.  He insists that these zip codes are located in Downtown Dallas and she must be typing them in wrong.  “I’m an engineer!” he exclaims, as if we’re somehow idiots because he’s giving us the wrong zip codes.  “Um, don’t argue with me”, Mandy says at one point.  We’re trying to do this guy a favor and he’s not only being an ass about it, but he’s not grateful at all.  At this point, a normal person would have said something along the lines of, “Hey thanks for trying, but I’ll figure it out.” And that would have been the end of it.  But Nope.

Mandy gets up to go to the bathroom.  He gets on his shitty old phone and dials what I assume is information because he starts to say into the phone things like, “Dallas midnight masses.” But that doesn’t work because he’s soon saying over and over again, “AGENT.  AGENT. AGENT. AGENT.” He thinks he’s going to get an operator on the phone on Christmas Eve to give him directions to a church he doesn’t know exists. And then..  “Hey dude, could you just google this church for me?”  He gives me a very specific name of a church, but I’ve had enough.  I look at him and say, “No.”

I realize I’m not doing a good enough job describing how creepy this guy is.  He had moved from across the bar, and made one of the bartenders move his drink for him, when he could have done that himself without much trouble.  The girls behind the bar are giving this guy a very serious WTF look.

He doesn’t appreciate my negative response.  “Come on dude, just look this church up for me.” Mandy returns from the bathroom at this point and hears me say to him very loudly at this point…”No.  Just because you’re asking me to look something up for you doesn’t mean that I’m under some sort of obligation to do it for you.”  Mandy’s hand brushes my back to let me know that I need to calm down.

He seems to understand at this point that we’re done being his personal google assistants and pulls out of his duffel bag sheets of paper that I can only describe as something out of A Beautiful Mind.  He begins scribbling on his coasters underneath his beer and these sheets look like they’re covered in rambling notes and numbers.  Um…

A guy who pulled up on a bike sits down next to this nut and we can’t get his attention to AVERT!  CRISIS!  AVOID!  DO NOT SIT THERE SIR!

It’s too late.  Crazy guy strikes up a conversation with this guy and another guy next to him about his bike, among other things.  We can’t make out the details of the conversation but we’re glad he’s done talking to us.

He finally gets up to leave and the guys who were sitting next to him started making the universal sign for ‘crazy’ by circling their ears.  We’re relieved that we weren’t the only assholes for thinking this guy is off.

Everyone….the bartenders, the people sitting next to him, we all said the same thing at about the same time…”Did he have any guns in that bag!?” We spent the next 20 minutes trading stories about this guy and I sincerely started to feel sorry for him.  I hope he gets some help.  And I hope he finds a church just as long as he doesn’t bring that duffel bag into it.

Merry Christmas!