Recently, I saw a truck with a tailgate and a canopy that were coated with bumper stickers. Why people feel the need to treat their vehicles like a community bulletin board still baffles me. I can understand a sticker telling complete strangers how shitty their kid is in comparison to your honour roll student. I mean, if you can't be awesome, at least there is hope for your offspring. Even a few names of bands you are destroying your hearing with is acceptable; people need to know that you are having a hell of a time listening to Black Flag so they can feel shitty about listening to Josh Groban's Christmas album. There are two kinds of bumper stickers I hate, though, and they are: a) The ones with "funny" sayings like "If you don't like my driving STAY OFF THE SIDEWALK" and b) The ones relating to your specific stance on political issues, like "Alberta Separatists Unite!"
The worst offenders of the latter are Pro-Lifers. I often wonder if they really expect someone following them to change instantly their stance on abortion because of a bumper sticker. I imagine there is a long list of things that people want to think about on the way home from work, and controversial medical procedures is not on it. Dick move, Pro-Lifers.
Anyway, the truck was covered in the mass-produced and mass-purchased "witty" statements type. The back of the otherwise well kept truck regaled tailgaters with garish personal declarations involving the owner's kids and lack of money. Apparently, I wasn't supposed to laugh, it's paid for. One of the stickers completely confused me, though. It said, "My kids think I'm an ATM machine!"
I had no idea what this meant. Clearly, his kids didn't think they were an Automated Teller Machine machine, because that's redundant. If that were the case, it would just say that his kids think they are an ATM. That obviously wasn't the answer, so I searched for what ATM could stand for.
One of the first things I found out was that ATM, on the byways of the information superhighway (yeah, I'm bringing that phrase back, baby!), means "at the moment." So that doesn't work.
I also found out that it was an abbreviation for the Malaysian armed forces, "Angkatan Tentera Malaysia." I don't think there would be some sort of Malaysian military fighting machine working on bringing down the Canadian government living in Alberta. Unless the Malaysian government was planning on annexing Fort McMurray to make cocaine transport to their biggest market a little easier.
ATM is also used as a unit of measurement for atmospheric pressure. That just doesn't make sense, unless the owner's kids were brilliant meteorologists and it was some sort of inside joke or an insult. This just makes the owner kind of a dick for posting that on his truck.
None of these made any sense, so I was forced to conclude that the ATM he was referring to was "ass-to-mouth." This disturbed me to no end, and raised a metric shit-ton of questions. I mean, whose kids think they are an Ass-To-Mouth machine? Was the truck's owner a porn star, and forced the children to watch his work? Are his ass-to-mouth abilities an extreme source of pride in his household? Do his kids go to school and say things like, "My dad is the best ass-to-mouther in the world!" and "My dad could ass-to-mouth your dad!"? Does he have a shirt with the same saying across the front? When asked, does say he works as a Procto-oral Analysist?
The moral of the story, kids, is that when you're purchasing a bumper sticker, you may want to consider all of the possible interpretations of the statement. Stick with something safe, like "I'd rather be fishing/hunting/dropkicking leprechauns."
