These things are easier to put up with if the entertainment is good, but going to the Warped Tour in 2007 is like attending a Bee Gees concert in 1984. No matter what your reason is for attending, you shouldn’t tell your friends. I told mine I was spending the day jerking people off at a highway rest stop. This excuse was less humiliating than admitting I went to the Warped Tour.

My real excuse was the band Bad Religion, whom I’ve wanted to see since I was a teenager. They rarely play shows, so I thought braving the sea of bored 15-year-olds would be worthwhile. I was wrong. In order to see the band for 30 minutes, I had to waste an entire day watching 50 other bands that couldn’t fill a small club if they gave away tickets.

Of course, it’s not entirely the fault of the Warped Tour. This is just what happens when a festival is based on a genre of music that hasn’t been cool for over five years. As pop-punk music and extreme sports went from “hip and edgy” to “ways to sell Mountain Dew”, the Warped Tour became the vaginal yeast infection of modern rock.

Besides, the festival does have some benefits. If teachers want to educate kids about the dangers of unregulated capitalism, the Warped Tour would be a great field trip. Sandwiches cost $8, a Rolling Rock beer is $7, and a pizza the size of your palm is $6. In the heat of summer, few people could possibly go all day without spending at least $40.

It’s also a great lesson in hypocrisy. Want to sip a beer while listening to your favorite band? Think again. You must drink your beer in a fenced-off pen far away from the stages. Meanwhile, cigarettes – which pose a much larger and more addictive risk to underage teens – can be smoked or shared anywhere, without a wristband to verify the age of the smoker.

This poor treatment of drinkers was the last straw for me. If I’m paying $6-$7 for a beer, you’d better not stick me in a wire pen like a leper. They wouldn’t even let me stand near the fence of the drinking area. I was told to stay at least ten feet back, for fear that I’d infect someone who doesn’t drink. What was I going to do, pour beer through the fence? Not with a six dollar beer, jackass.

I had been willing to overlook the other horrors of this punk rock toilet camp, but the beer faux pas was too much. I will leave a concert disappointed if I must, but I will not leave humiliated. I’d love to have the Warped Tour’s owner hang out at my place sometime. I’ll charge him $35 admission, blast mediocre MySpace bands for nine hours, charge him $7 for a beer, and then make him drink it in the bathroom with the door closed.

Yet the respect and service are not there. All across the country, banks are getting rid of their change counting machines. If you bring a jar of change into a bank, they’ll either ask you to roll it yourself or give you a huge guilt trip for making them roll it. It’s your job, you filthy bastards! You’re getting paid to serve your bank members. You should feel lucky that I’m requesting a little house of nickels instead of a handjob in the parking lot.

Seriously, I’m not asking the bank tellers to get me coffee. I’m not asking them to open the door for me as I walk in or hand me a towel after I wash my hands in the bathroom. In fact, I’m not even asking them to have a public bathroom, which most don’t. I’m just asking them to do their job by taking my money.

Last week a teller told me to take my change to a Coinstar machine at the local supermarket. I’m not paying a machine nearly 10 percent of my change to turn it into bills. That’s what I joined the damn bank for. I became a member so I could unapologetically be one of those douchebags who brings in a gaint jar of pennies and then uses the resulting $8 to buy booze across the street.

I read online that you can hack the Coinstar machines by requesting an Amazon.com gift card – they don’t take out a fee for that option – and then unplugging the machine’s internet cord while it’s processing. When the machine can’t connect to the internet to add money to your gift card, it instead gives you cash without charging a fee. But that’s theft, reader. I’m not a thief, I’m a drunk and a scoundrel, which is entirely different. I’m not going to commit a felony just because my bank is full of Marxists who believe no one should have to roll change for anyone else.

Some banks are even using the Coinstar trend to screw their customers. These banks not only make you roll your own coins, but they then charge you if you have more than five or six rolls. So you’re doing all the work yourself and paying a fee for your trouble. The owners of these banks should be drug out into the street and raped like animals.

It’s a good thing I’m not sober enough to be elected president of this country, because If I was, the scam artists who come up with this tripe – executives, shareholders, and stock analysts – would be raped at an astonishing rate. Wall Street and its surrounding neighborhoods would become as feared as the darkest cells of Attica Prison.

But I don’t want that, reader. I just want bills for my change. If you hear some psychotic drunk Irishman screaming obscenities when you walk into your bank this week, that’s probably me. Don’t just backpedal slowly out the door, like most my readers do when they finally meet me in person. Stride up to the front and take a stand for your rights. We’re bank members, damn it, and we deserve to be treated like it.