(The 'Eek!Cards' explan.)

My new-as-of-January job is in an office building in Cambridge, just a quick jog over the bridge from Boston.

(Or a short swim under it, I guess, if you're the backstroking type.

Me, I'd stay out of the Charles River. That thing used to be like the Futurama sewers. And I don't need any grossly mutated fish wriggling their way into my trunks, thanks. When there's a chance of "shrinkage", fourteen eyes are way worse than none.)

Also close by the office is a shopping mall and underground garage, where the company has graciously provided me a pass for parking.

The only way out of this garage is through the mall, which is an interesting experience for me. I've spent most of my adult life avoiding shopping malls like the plague. When I absolutely, positively have to go to a mall -- on Christmas Eve, say, or an hour before an anniversary dinner reservation with the missus -- I do my own rendition of the Hokey Shoppy Pokey:

You get the hell in.
You get the hell out.
You buy a card or some gadget,
And you don't mess the hell about.

There's nothing about malls I enjoy. They're crowded. They're loud. There's Muzak and children and kiosks full of schlocky crap I don't really want to know existed, much less want to buy.

"I'm willing to 'window shop' in exactly two places: the Harvey Vinyl Double-Glass Home Emporium, and the Red Light District in Amsterdam."

(Seriously? "Kiss Me, I'm Albanian" in silver glitter on a halter top? Since when are Eastern European prostitutes moving to New Jersey and shopping in Massachusetts?)

What's more, I don't especially like buying things. And I absolutely don't like "shopping" for things -- which, according to my wife, involves a lot of looking and walking around and trying things on and fondling various bits of merchandise without necessarily making any purchases. That does zero for me. I'm willing to "window shop" in exactly two places: the Harvey Vinyl Double-Glass Home Emporium, and the Red Light District in Amsterdam. Other than that, sayonara, shoppers.

So this parking-in-a-mall thing is a little slice of weekdaily hell for me. It's not so unbearable in the morning -- I'm generally there before the mall opens, so the only buzzing throng of goofballs is packed into the Starbucks. The suits descend on the joint and screech at each other like it was some kind of Armani birdfeeder. But it's just one shop. I try to distract myself with sexy mannequins until I'm safely by.

(Which doesn't always work. The problem with sexy mannequins before opening hours is that they're often being rearranged, stripped down, disassembled or otherwise uncombobulated. There are clothes and parts and torsos all over.

I can stretch a little in my inner fantasy world. But Victoria's Secret: SVU is going too far. Stupid malls.)

The evenings are the real gauntlets, of course. I usually leave the office between six and eight pm -- prime shoppah time for the suburbanite crowd. And their kids. And the teens. And the old folks. And, apparently, the glitter-loving Albanian barely-legal tramp stamp crowd. Who knew they existed? The mall knew; that's who.

I assumed that navigating the hordes of zombie-eyed consumers would be the low point of getting back to my car. But no. There's also the crippling social rejection. That's a nice little end-of-the-day bonus. Like a mint on a hotel pillow. Or a nighty-night kick in the nuts.

The ostracism comes courtesy of a particular dead-eyed overmade girl who works one of the kiosks on the main floor. I pass her every day as she scans the throngs of passersby for victims. She wields some sort of skin care cream or paste or gravy -- I've never gotten a good look at it, but I'll sometimes see her slathering it onto some man's or woman's cheek as she coos in a soft accent about hydrolyzing moisturizers and essential oils.

Once, I got close enough to glimpse the tag on her collar. Her name was 'Matilda'.

Or maybe it was 'Magda'. 'Margalena'? 'Muffelata'? I don't know. Something vaguely exotic and fitting her over-glammed persona.

(Come to think of it, maybe she's the one buying those glitter tops. Frankly, it would explain an awful lot.)

And the reason I've never seen or heard myself about the product she hawks? Because fancy Matilda won't even look at me.

Actually, that's not technically true. She's never looked me in the eye. But she's seen some part of me. Her customer-dar seems to pick prospective slatherees up by their shoes, or maybe their knees. Some people, she'll look them the rest of the way up, unleash her blinding teeth, and offer sweetly to cream their face.

(The first face creaming is always on the house, of course. That's how they get you.)

With me, she never reaches the face. I'll watch her start to look me up, and then she stops. Maybe she doesn't like the look of my belt, or the angle of my knees, or my shirt's not tucked in enough to be "cream-worthy". Whatever it is, she'll blink, turn her head, and scout out the next walker down the line.

And let's be clear. I'm not interested in being glopped with Matilda's anti-aging cheek gravy, or whatever the hell it is. I'm quite content to wrinkle and pucker at a steadily accelerating pace, until I resemble the prunypussed Mister Magoo befitting my advanced age.

I'm just saying -- it would be nice to be asked. Just once. Then I can go back to bring the ugly-kneed ghetto-belt untucked heathen clearly not worth slathering beauty product onto. But every once in a while, even a guy like me would like to feel creamworthy.

Is that so much to ask, glittery Matilda? Slink that tube of goop over my way, lady. I promise not to take it. Let's just go through the motions, at least once. We need something. Otherwise, we're just hanging in a mall. Seriously, a mall. Jeez.

(The 'Eek!Cards' explan.)

(The 'Eek!Cards' explan.)

(Two things first -- number one, if you're one of those people into the Facepage craze -- or cars, or peanut butter, or squeaky-clean laundry -- then you might enjoy my latest ZuG.com romp: Prank Reviews: Zolton's in Yer Facebook.

And number two. If you're in the Boston area a few Saturdays from now -- June 16th, to be precise -- some chums and I will be carrying on in a sketchy way, if you know what I'm sayin', at ImprovBoston's Sketch CageMatch.

That's right. We're Deli Juices. And it's all downhill from there, I promise. Come see.)

Meanwhile, I have to admit watching an awful lot of TBS lately. I like The Big Bang Theory. The Teddy Flagship station picked it up a while back to syndicate fourteen episodes a night. And I only watch what Lord Master TiVo tells me to, so TBS is on the TV a lot. This is not, in and of itself, a problem.

But this is: TBS, after a long and rich history of regurgitating ancient cobwebby reruns of other networks' moderately successful sitcom franchises -- Beverly Hillbillies, Sanford and Son, the Andy Griffith Topless Aunt Bea Hot Tub Sexatorium or whatever it was called -- has finally seen fit to gurgitate up a comedy of their own.

It's called Men at Work, apparently. And I'm not going to link to it, because frankly it doesn't look like my cup of tea.

That's no crime. I've tried writing a couple of sitcom scripts myself, and maybe they'e nobody else's cup of tea. That's not actually the point. There are awful shows all over television, and most of them -- yeah, I'm looking at you, everything Rob Schneider has ever touched -- know the score. You can be mostly bad, but a little entertaining, and nobody's going to give you any shit.

Seriously. Ask David Schwimmer. It's fine. No biggie.

"The dialogue, the characters, are all extremely right now -- and I don't think there's anything else like that on TV."

But here's the thing. TBS is turdstorming ad after ad for this show. That's their prerogative. But one of these commercials is a 'behind-the-scenes' deal, where the actors talk about the show. And one of those actors, Adam Busch, has the following to say:

"The dialogue, the characters, are all extremely right now -- and I don't think there's anything else like that on TV."

And you know, maybe that's true. Maybe this show, this TBS original joint, is breaking new ground left and right and keeping it real before it ever knew it was real in the first place. I've never seen it, obviously -- it debuts this week, from what I understand -- so I can't refute the guy for certain.

But here's the evidence I have. In that same commercial, just before that heaving hunk of heartfelt hyperbole, TBS shows us two jokes from the show, as glistening examples of the hilarity to come.

The first joke involves pointing out an orange spray-tanned girl and referencing an Oompa Loompa. Now, maybe I'm off in my personal thinking about what constitutes "extremely right now". I'm wrong about things on an hourly basis, at least. But these are the facts:

The first movie with Oompa Loompas came out in 1971.

The remake of the Oompa Loompa movie -- the remake, now, mind you -- came out in 2005. Thirty-four years after the original. Remember that.

Orange spray-tanned people have been around since... well, since whenever New Jersey was founded, most likely, What am I, a history book? Two hundred years, let's say, for the sake of argument.

Now, is an Oompa Loompa joke made seven years after a frightening sequel and anything more than ten minutes after The Jersey Shore first aired "extremely right now"? No. No, I believe it is not.

The second joke involves a guy complaining about his friend grousing about his recent breakup. But... but, says Grousy Gus, it's only been an hour. Then a beat. And Complaining Cal, sarcastically:

"And yet, we're still talking about it."

Is that fresh? Is it unique? Is it breaking new comic ground, when there's nothing else like that on TV?

I can only say this. Google "And yet, we're still talking about it."

"About 285,000 results"

Ouch. For "extremely right now", these punchlines -- the lonely two chosen from a long half-hour pilot -- seem to have been pretty well covered, recovered, hashed, rehashed and indexed online. I'm not saying the show's going to be bad -- or that I'm ever going to watch to find out -- but I'm not buying the hyperactive hyperbole.

Maybe I'm just "extremely last week". Meh. I can live with that. At least it comes free of Willy Wonka cracks.