Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler...*

Yahoo! recently asked its readers to submit their stories of being unemployed. For some reason, they were "surprised" at the number of responses they received -- hundreds of thousands -- and at the rawness of the responses.

There is no mistaking -- it's an employers' market out there and, if you have a job, hang on tight and don't give your employer any reason to even think about replacing you. This seems like common sense to me.

Then tell me, please, why, when I go into a department store, grocery or restaurant, I am waited on by some half-witted bachagaloop who acts like he's doing me a favor pausing his texting long enough to wait on me? Why am I reading current novels that have glaring grammatical, spelling and typo errors rampant throughout the book? Why was my order wrong in three out of three visits I made to a fast food place since the first of the year? Why did I read a piece about Lady Gaga being bashed for a routine where she dresses as a mermaid and rolls on stage in a wheelchair, yet there was no reference to the fact that this stunt was a staple in Bette Midler's show twenty years ago -- and no one was offended?

And, while I'm asking, how do I get a job where the bar is set so low?

Just so you know this is not just the ranting of a curmudgeonly 54-year-old, consider this: a friend of mine daily relates his frustration with his fellow workers who continually fail to show up for their shift, come in late for their shifts, are the recipients of not one, but several, customer complaints, show up for work high, leave in the middle of a shift and continually defy governmental regulations protecting the public health.

Then, there is the story of a friend's son who was "rewarded" for doing what he should have been doing anyway. But "just doing his job" was so rare to this particular supervisor, that he felt it warranted a reward. Before you heap accolades on the supervisor, though: the "reward" was a bag of pot.

You would think, with the job market such as it is, only the best workers would be employed. But, it seems, even management is lazy.

It did occur to me, though, these entitled-worker behaviors are the precise traits of the upper corporate management that caused this economic bust in the first place -- laziness, deceit, smug security of position, and an overall lack of integrity.

And that is the ranting of a curmudgeonly 54-year-old who, incidentally, knows the difference between "there," "their," and "they're" and that, in a sentence, the tense of the subject and predicate should agree, even if a there is a prepositional phrase after the subject.

*Office Space -- as if you didn't know.