By Steve Fey

I know what you’re thinking. What could be so bad about the life for a guy who has the extra energy to criticize other people’s spelling? Well, let me tell you, bub, things ain’t always as easy as they seem. Here are some true examples from my own recent past.

I was just down to my lunch (at 2AM, so it’s already pitiable) at the employee dining room, or, as the sign over the door says, the Staff Café at Wynn Las Vegas. A cynic would say that since I don’t pay anything to eat there I’m pretty petty to complain about anything. Here’s where I prove people wrong. People, that is, who think that I’m cynical, because I’m never going to agree with that assessment. You see, on today’s menu was barbequed pork ribs and barbeque beans. See? See how they are? No cole slaw? It’s a miracle I don’t just quit in disgust. They have never, to my knowledge, served caviar either.

As I may have written before, sometimes nothing much breaks on the Wynn network over night, and I’m forced to resort to surfing for tidbits on the Internet to fill the long dull hours. There is entertainment available, and it’s not all videos of people your mother warned you about showing what she was getting at. There are concert videos and webcams as well. Of course, the resolution just isn’t up to the standards one has come to expect of a video monitor. And the webcams are sometimes slow to refresh, and often more than a little bit fuzzy looking. Again, a horrible thing for anyone to have to put up with. (That is, it’s a horrible thing up which with anyone should have to put.)

And that’s another thing. Language! Do you realize that there are at least half a million words in English? Consider that I write stories among other things. Do you think it’s easy to pick out just the right word from all those tens of thousands of choices? Or is that options? Or . . . It just isn’t fair, is what it isn’t. How would you feel if you couldn’t tell whether to use a past particulator or a pluperfect conjunctivitis? Not good, I can tell you that.

And then there’s the place where I live. Sure, it says it’s the "entertainment capitol of the world" or some such thing. That’s great, if you can decide what you find entertaining. Celine Dion or just Dion? Blue Man Group or Penn & Teller? Rock, jazz, blues or classical? Dinner theater or maybe even a movie? Blackjack or Video Poker? Do you see what I mean here? With all those choices there’s no good way to decide what to do on any given evening, which explains why I watch so much bad TV. There’s no choice in the first place with bad TV, so it’s easy to decide.

Then there’s the problem with getting around. Vegas used to be a small town, and things were perfect, as they always are in small towns. Now, however, I find myself forced to slow all the way to the speed limit by the sheer volume of traffic on the local highways. I have no idea how anyone finds such a situation at all tolerable, but obviously lots of people do, because more keep moving in every day.

Well, there you go. My intolerable and awful life. Again, I realize that cynics will say I sound like a spoiled rich kid, but again I say that, as I am not a cynic, I refuse even to listen to such talk.

It’s disgraceful.