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Admittedly, this post has been building for a long time. I had first discussed this issue some months back, when I had the distinct displeasure of shaking hands with a co-worker that I had talked to dozens of times, but had never met in person.

That particular individual wasn’t exactly my favourite person in the world to begin with (read: he was a complete asshat) but after having shaken his hand, I realized that my image of him had taken a nosedive into shit-on-shoe territory.

Why is it so difficult for some guys to shake a woman’s hand properly? I am not just talking out of my ass here. I have, in the course of my life, shaken hands with perhaps thousands of men, and very few of them ever really get it right. They look uncomfortable, they are awkward and their faces scream that they would rather shake hands with the public urinal cake than with a person of the boob-having gender.

Seriously, guys.
It’s not that difficult a task.

I’m going to put it right out there for you, easy-peasy:

If you wouldn’t do it to your dick, don’t to it to a woman’s hand.

It’s really that simple.
For example:

The Death-Grip.
Don’t do this. No woman likes to have her fingers broken and bruised by a brute in a suit. Or by an ogre in overalls, for that matter. You wouldn’t choke the life out of your precious, so please don’t do it to our fingers. While we aren’t nearly as delicate and breakable as some might think (see the next paragraph), we also aren’t expecting to have our fingers put through your hand wringing. If you think we’re impressed by your show of strength, think again. All we will be thinking is that you are a douchebag who has to prove his manliness and superiority by making us cringe. And that is not the first impression of a good guy.

The Wimpy-Wimpy-Wimpy.
In a lot of ways, even worse than the Death Grip. This barely-there meeting of hands will prove not that you are a caring person who would never hurt a fly. It will leave every woman thinking that you do not believe her to be worthy of a real handshake. Worse yet she will feel dismissed, which means that she, in turn, will dismiss you. As a douchebag. I can’t imagine that your manly monster likes it limp. Trust me, we don’t either.

See what I mean?
Like your dicks, dudes.

So what’s the right way? Take matters firmly in hand. Reach out with a smile, grasp firmly and warmly, smile and shake hands. Stop worrying so much and just shake our fucking hand. We will forgive a multitude of lesser sins – sweaty palms, hanging on just a bit too long – if you just take our hands and shake them with the kind of grip that you would grace your gremlin with.

Go forth and heed what you have learned.

Just one final note.

For fuck sake, don’t start stroking our hand.

Because ew.

Some of you might not like this post.
Some of you will deem it inappropriate and disrespectful.

I invite those of you who do, to please click here and entertain yourselves for a while, because “off” is the general direction in which I am going to tell you to fuck, should you leave a comment stating that you find this post disrespectful or inappropriate. I not only warned you, I gave you a perfectly acceptable link with which you could get your world-wide-wocks off.

I recently lost someone very close to me.  Someone that I had known my whole life (not an exaggeration) and someone that mentored me and taught me things that I could not have learned anywhere or from anyone else. A very great man, indeed (also not an exaggeration). He was a unique and special person, one with whom not everyone could relate.  A dry, sarcastic wit; a heart that belied his gruff and often frightening (to those that didn’t know him) demeanour.

In short, he was my Yoda.

And on May the Fourth – Star Wars Day, fittingly enough – I shall bury my Yoda.

Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you? ~ Yoda, Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

I did judge Arnold by his size.  Everyone did.  He was huge. His hand was almost alien in it’s size.  Fingers as big as any two of mine.  He was truly a mountain of a man.  He was also missing an arm. In place of his right arm, was a prosthetic. Complete with a hook for a hand.  Arnold had lost his limb long before I was born.  He had it torn off after getting caught in a conveyor at work. And while Arnold never seemed to see this as a problem, other people did.

I remember once a new operator got his machine stuck in mud. Not just stuck, but fucking stuck. Mud up over the tracks. He tried for an hour to get that thing out. All the while, Arnold watched through a window chuckling quietly to himself.  Eventually, the dude gave up and came in for a coffee.  Arnold went into his office, got into his coveralls, and trudged out to the Cat. The operator was very derisive in his comments as he watched Arnold walk out.

He remained derisive right up until the time that Arnold – one arm and all – got the machine out of the mud in a matter of a few minutes.

Do, or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

There were so many times that I recall hearing this sentiment over the years. It wasn’t spoken like that, and was generally either preceded or followed by a ‘what the fuck’, but it all amounts to the same thing.  It was this very thinking that allowed my co-worker and I to perpetrate somewhat of a miracle one day.

Arnold was upset because the bushes in front of the office were brown and dead.  He very clearly – after whatthefuck-ing us – expected us to DO something about that.  Seeing as how the man wouldn’t take any excuse for anything, we figured we’d better damn well figure something out.  And we did. My co-worker brought in some green spray paint the next morning and we painted those fucking bushes back to life. We painted the bushes. We painted the branches. We probably painted the dirt.

But god dammit, they looked vibrant.

And yes, Arnold noticed when he showed up.
Let’s just leave it at that.

Twilight is upon me, and soon, night must fall. That is the way of things. The way of the Force. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode VI, Return of the Jedi

Much the way that Luke told Yoda that he couldn’t die… well, I was always of the mind that Arnold couldn’t die, either.  He was too big.  Too strong.  Too… pig-headed to actually die.  And yet, while strong he was, with the Force, he was not that strong. And I was left repeating Luke’s own words:

But I need your help.

And oddly, or maybe not so oddly, I hear Arnold’s voice in my head.

“No more training do you require.”

Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. ~Yoda, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Ah… but I will mourn, and I will miss.

But the Force is strong with me.But I need your help.

Cuz I am a Jedi.

Arnold helped make sure.

In very, very loving memory of a great man, I have pulled up something that I wrote almost ten years ago. Because what I said then is true.

And because I am incapable of writing at the moment…

There is a man that I have known all of my life named Arnold. I knew him long before he ever became my boss, and I remember him fondly even back to the days of my childhood when I would go to work with Dad and Arnold would prop me up on a piece of equipment (loaders, packers, graders, etc) and let me go for a ride.

At first, I was afraid of him. He is a huge mountain of a man. Well over six feet tall, very broad in the chest, and just the kind of guy that looks like he could tear a building apart with his bare hands. That wasn’t the reason that I feared him when I first met him though. Arnold only has one arm, you see, and in place of his right arm, he has a prosthetic with a steel hook where the hand would be. Can you see why I might have, as a kid, been a wee bit frightened? After all, what scary story you hear as a tyke doesn’t end with some guy ripping your face off with a hook?

I giggle now about the fact that I was ever afraid of him, because I know the man as well as I know my own father.

When I started working for him at seventeen, I was his boss’s daughter. Hell, I was everyone’s boss’s daughter. No one would say shit in front of me at first because they thought I would rush right home and tell my daddy what had been said. They obviously didn’t know me very well. Dad and I always had better things to do than to talk about work.

Anyhow, Arnold never treated me like the boss’s kid. He treated me the same way as he would have treated anyone else, and in fact I knew that if I wasn’t doing my job, I was in just as much danger of being fired as anyone else. This was part of the reason the my respect for him was so deep.

There were other reasons. A lot of other reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he respected me, not as Jack’s Daughter, but as a person and a coworker. It was hard for me to go from calling him Mr. W****r to calling him Arnold, but it represented a shift in our relationship; I was no longer a child, and he was no longer just one of my Dad’s friends and co-workers. We had become peers, and friends.

That was just the beginning, though. He never treated me like a second class employee, just because I was a girl (yes, that still happens in this industry). He answered my questions and took me on many a tour to show me what he was telling me.

I remember clearly the rainy days, when he would sit in my office for hours at a time telling me about the old days, and about old jobs, and regaling me with funny stories from the past. I learned much about him in those days, and much about my father as well. More often though, I learned just how important it is to have people like Arnold in your life.

I learned a hell of a lot from him.

When he retired, I cried at the retirement party. I had worked for him for close to my entire adult life, and had not only come to respect him, but to love him as well. I couldn’t imagine life at work without him, particularly since I had just been promoted not too long before. I couldn’t fathom being able to continue without his nurturing and protective blanket atop my sometimes naïve and outspoken head. I told him so too. He told me that if he didn’t think I could have handled it, he would have never given me the job. I felt better after that, and better still when he made several visits to my office in the next few years to have coffee and visit with me.

I haven’t seen Arnold this year, although we are always in contact by phone. I had heard through the grapevine that he was busy with other projects, and although I missed him greatly, I knew that if he could have he would have been up to see me.

Well, through the same grapevine late last week, I received the news that Arnold is not well at all. He is having great trouble speaking due to a growth with may very well be cancer in his throat.

And now, I am left with the sinking feeling in my stomach that I will never be able to tell him just what he means to me, and how much richer he has made my life. I would call, but I know he can’t speak. I know in my heart that he cares about me just as much as I care about him, and that I was always more to him than an employee, or the daughter of his friend.

I’m just not sure how to go about telling him all of the things that I want to tell him, but whatever I do, I have to do it before it’s too late. I would never forgive myself if I didn’t tell him how much of a difference he made in my life.

I just don’t know how.

It turns out that Arnold did not have cancer, and I got the honour of having him in my life for another decade. But did tell him all of the things that I had wanted to tell him. I opened up my heart and told him everything that I had been thinking about back then.

I will always be grateful that I did.

He was a teacher, a mentor, a friend, an adviser, a protector and a great man.

Arnold was, in a sense, my last living parent.

He is gone now.

I had a hard time once believing that I could go on without him.
I didn’t know how.

I do now.

Rest well, Arnold.
I will always hold you in my heart, where you have always been.

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge – myth is more potent than history – dreams are more powerful than facts – hope always triumphs over experience – laughter is the cure for grief – love is stronger than death” 

~Robert Fulgham