Dentists hate you. But I suppose its okay to have an attitude if your entire profession revolved around pain, radiation, tooth decay, gingivitis, bad breath, blood and drool.

You dread the visit to the dentist all day long. You park your car and walk into the dentists office 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment time in order to sit in their waiting room for an hour and a half. They teach the receptionist how to arrange such a schedule in Dental Receptionist College. In Dental Receptionist College all students are required to minor in How to Create Major Inconveniences for your Patients. They know that we might complain about the wait, but we are trapped there and have no choice. Our complaints are taped by secret microphones and played back during office parties.

Once you are there you get to sit down in the well-heated and stuffy waiting room. You can even watch TV, but you are not allowed to touch it. You have to watch whatever the dental receptionist wants to watch; game shows, soap operas and Oprah. This is the beginning of their sensory deprivation process that makes it easier for them to perform alien experiments on your body. If you don't feel like watching TV they have a selection of 2-3 year old magazines for you. They know that old news will help calm you. If you still have any wherewithal left after thumbing through the magazines, your eyes will be hypnotized by the apathetic fish in the aquarium. Listen to the bubbling aquarium filter. Feeling sleepy? Listen to the alien music playing on the intercom. It is Celine Dion. She is the only alien to ever crack the top forty pop music market.

In the back of your now dulled state of mind you hear a voice calling. It is the hygienist. All of a sudden, after waiting 90 minutes, your appointment has a sense of urgency to it. They want to finish you up and go home. Now lie down in the comfortable chair. That chair has special alien gravity powers that hold you down without straps. Have you ever tried to get up quickly from the dental chair?

Let the blood pool in your head as you stare into the bright light. The more blood in your head, the more calm you are and the more blood they can take from you and use for evil. Notice the sterile room you are in. Doesn't it resemble the spaceship operating room that is often described by hypnotized alien abductees? Now put on the safety goggles so that bone chips and broken drill bits do not fly out of your mouth and lodge in your eyeball. Look at the hygienist. She has a mask and goggles. Is it the same person who led you into the room? Maybe she is a victim of alien body snatching. Now gargle with the mystery fluid. It kills the germs in your mouth that may infect the alien population.

Dental professionals prefer to talk to you when they have tools and fingers in your mouth. The odd sounds that you make is actually the aliens native language. You don't realize that you are speaking alien and you soon get frustrated at the apparent lack of communication. Then you resort to just nodding at whatever they are saying. This is okay too because they have alien mind reading powers.

The hygienist now goes to work on you. They do not let you see the tools that they are sticking in your mouth. They take magician and gambling courses in dental school and are deft at the sleight-of-hand. There's a reason they don't want you to see the tools. You would expect alien tools to be space-aged equipment. But they aren't. The aliens are sadistic and want to inflict pain on you. They have been using the same dental surgery tools since the Civil War. If you attempt to fight their gravity chair and peek at the tool table, they will shock your exposed nerves with a blast of cold water or cold air.

How sadistic are dental professionals? Did you know that the US Army Reserve unit that got into trouble for abusing prisoners at Abu Graib was a dental unit? There was a snafu at the assignment office and this reserve dental unit from West Virginia was mistakenly sent to relieve a departing military police company at the prison. These dental professionals were just doing what they were taught to do. Torturing and humiliating people.

Once the hygienist is done scraping every exposed nerve in your jaw she calls for the dentist. He likes the drill. The drill hurts but there are worse things. He was drilling on one of my teeth one day and we fell into a routine together. He would drill a little. Stop. Tears would well up in my eyes. Drill, stop, tears. Drill, stop, tears. This cycle repeated itself about 4 more times when he finally asked, "Why do you wince and tear-up when I stop drilling?" I said, "Doc, it's that music! Every time you stop I can hear Celine Dion playing! Please keep drilling!"

The dentist is good at using euphemisms. "You are going to feel a little pressure," means, "It is going to feel like a yellow jacket stung you on your tonsil." "You are going to feel a pinch" means, "It will feel like this needle pierced the roof of your mouth and penetrated your eyeball."

They speak in a secret code to the hygienist too. "Suction," means, "Get rid of that quart of blood that is pooling in the back of his throat." They even assign a secret numbering system to the dental tools. "Give me a # 3, or a # 4, or a # 8," is shorthand for "the gum eviscerator, "the raw dangling nerve pincer," and "the bone pulverizer."

Now it is time for an x-ray. There is nothing more unearthly than radiation. Do you really think that a human invented the x-ray machine in the 1890s? That was quite a leap in medical science going from barber-surgeons and bloodletting to x-ray machines. Whoever invented the x-ray machine had some alien help. I really can't explain what this machine does to you. They jam something into your mouth (a GPS?), immobilize you with a lead blanket, and then shoot strange rays at you.

Before you leave they tell you to floss. They want you to take a nylon wire and rub it in between your teeth until your gums bleed. This is the same principle as taking a linoleum knife and running it back and forth in between your toes. The last thing they tell you before you leave is not to eat or drink anything for the next 96 hours.

As you exit the building and walk out to your car in the parking lot you sense a weird feeling. Though you spent the entire afternoon at the dentist office it has only felt like five minutes since you first arrived and got out of your car. This is called "lost time" or "missing time" and it is the same phenomenon that alien abductees experience. Coincidence?