Don't Eavesdrop On My Lunch Pod, Part 13

Guy 2: Where was the European office going to go?

Guy 3: One possibility was Amsterdam.

Me: Hookers, baby.

Guy 2: Fuck the hookers!

Me: (in a small voice) Well, that's usually how things go.

Guy 2: FUCK THE HOOKERS! WEED IS LEGAL!

Dumb Rednecks

A few weeks ago, the mate and I went to his nephew's high school graduation. Three whole rows were occupied by this extended family tree, and a whole branch wasn't even there.

You know that rowdy group of people at every graduation, wedding, bar mitzvah, and cocktail bar you've ever attended? The ones yelling inappropriately, with the small child running up and down behind a row making truck noises, and whispering with all the subtlety of an ocean wave crashing ashore?

Yeah, that was our family.

At one point, the father of the graduate leaned over and told me that the young man onstage, the salutatorian, was "a giant pain in the butt." Apparently, the kid was our nephew's mortal enemy. This sounds like my brother in law was just filling in some colorful details for me, but what I have not yet mentioned is that the salutatorian's parents were sitting six inches in front of us.

This was a church school, so the ceremony was being held in the church. (That's how much we love our nephew - we risked lightening strikes to attend.) My mate and I were dressed in church clothes, a suit for him and a raspberry colored pantsuit for me. We blended in with the blessed ones, actually. It was the true believers we were sitting with that didn't blend. The graduate's maternal grandfather was wearing his finest T-shirt, advertising a specific sort of seafood dining establishment. Another uncle had pulled out the formal denims, with paint on the hems.

Since the student body was so tiny, they gave out awards for everything up to and including consistent breathing. There were certificates for the highest grade point average in each subject, as well as overall. One young lassie, most certainly saving herself for Jesus because, well, because of the usual reason, was trotting up to the stage every two seconds, and the salutatorian every three. Both were reasonably popular kids, and there was plenty of applause.

Then the nephew got the "top grades in photojournalism" award.

Pandemonium broke out. The entire family was whooping, screaming, clapping, yelling his name. His sisters tried to start the wave. Mind you, he'd TOLD us that the class was purely an excuse to nap in the middle of the day for most people, so he'd basically just received a prize for having a pulse.

Finally, the actual graduating started. Being at the ass end of the alphabet, our boy was second from last in the diploma line. That meant we'd had plenty of time to rest up for more shrieking, cheering, and hopping up and down. The kid had a million friends, too, so the place was really jumping.

Through it all, people had been staring, turning, pointing, tsking, shushing, and glaring. At the reception, for some reason, the other attendees were nervous about standing too close to our family table, lest they be mistaken for members. Clearly, we were of the lowest possible caste in this Christian brotherhood of equals in the eyes of God.

Thing is, when you're in a group of more than twenty people and you're all hugging and yelling and picking up stray kids to cuddle and taking pictures, it's difficult to notice that you're being shunned.

The conclusion is simply thus, and I never would have believed it - it is far more fun to be in a pack of dumb rednecks than to sniff at them.

Lasers!

Long ago, in the time before I had dental insurance, I went to some hack in Alexandria. He found a cavity, and did the crappiest filling in the world - I could feel the seams, for heaven's sake.

Today I found out how crappy it was. My dentist of the last four years poked a hole in the filling to the cavity beneath. "Cavity?" you ask. "When you have a cavity, the dentist drills out all the decayed tooth and fills it. There is no "cavity" left under a filling."

You're right! Unless the dentist sucks and doesn't drill out all of the decayed part, in which case the tooth continues to rot under the filling! And unless it rots down to the root of the tooth, you won't know until it's either too late or a good dentist follows a hunch.

My dentist is good. My dentist did have to tell me that I'd need it redrilled and filled. I sighed and asked him if we could do it today, and he said sure. I told him to hang on, I'd tell my mate to wait for me. (Men do not willingly care for their own health. They marry mates who will make appointments and then force them to keep said appointments. Thus it was that my mate was settling in for his cleaning after mine was finished.) The dentist said, "Why? You'll be done before he is."

What? It was going to take twenty five minutes for the nasty needle of Novocaine to numb my jaw enough to work. I said so.

He cackled, and said, "You haven't seen my new toy!"

He had a LASER. A great big laser, that explodes droplets of water into atoms along with a bit of tooth. Sounds awful, right?

12:10, he finds the hole. 12:20, I'm in the chair. 12:30, he's instructing the assistant to hold the heat set instrument over my dental bondo.

1:10, I'm eating crunchy things.

No pain, so swelling, no numbness, no needles, no ANYTHING but a tooth that no longer has a crappy filling.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

Please Remain On the Line; Your Call Is Important To Us

Except no, it's not. It's not important to you at ALL.

If it was, you would have hired more than two gum snapping inbred swamp dwellers to answer your phones.

If it was, you'd have outsourced to India, where at least the staff has been trained to call me "ma'am" and sincerely wish me a pleasant day. Or evening. Once, the nice Indian lady I was chatting with admitted that she had a little plastic clock on her desk that told her what time it was in the different parts of the USA. And that when she looked up customer records, she'd figure out what time it was for the customer, JUST so she could correctly say "have a good morning" or "have a pleasant evening."

If it was, you wouldn't interrupt the music meant to soothe me every fifteen seconds to tell me how important my call was.

If it was, you'd give me a guess as to how much longer I'll be in line, or at least where in the line I happen to be.

If it was, I'd have been able to call an 800 number, instead of calling Florida about your inexplicably broken piece of shit product, no doubt assembled by the gum cracking mongoloid's brother.

If it was, I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ON HOLD, LONG DISTANCE HOLD, FOR ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN FUCKING MINUTES BEFORE BEING INFORMED THE CALL CENTER WAS CLOSED FOR THE DAY.

Don't Eavesdrop On My Lunch Pod, Part 12

Guy 3: You should come play poker with me.

Guy 2: Yeah, you're a real high roller. Ol' "Change For a Dollar" Lastname.

Guy 3 (ignoring Guy 2) : It doesn't matter how much you're up as long as you're up, and I'm up eighty cents at the moment.

Me: Hey, that's two strippers for you.

Guy 1: I think strippers must be different here.

Guy 2: No, they're not. It's just him.

(Attention, aghast middle aged lady at the mid-range chain restaurant: Stripping is a perfectly fine artistic endeavor. You can look down your nose at strippers IF you can hang by your thigh muscles with your torso perpendicular to a vertical pole about five feet from the ground while you convince men to give you money even though they aren't allowed to touch you AND NOT ONE SECOND BEFORE.)

Teased!

I ordered an iPod and some accessories on Wednesday. If I must replace my beloved player, it might as well be with the industry standard that comes with all the good toys, right?

A box arrived TODAY. Two days! How awesome! I tore into it with glee... only to find the accessories. The actual iPod is still in transit.

MAN. It feels like sex did in college.

Sigh.

You know, just when I thought everyone had gotten the memo that "states' rights" was shorthand for "the right to do something really icky," or at best "the right to deny some sort of natural right to American citizens who are not straight white Christian people in Kansas," I hear it on CNN.

I Hate You Too, Technology

On Monday, the office building lost power. Do you know how DARK a women's bathroom, with no windows and no emergency light, can be? Do you know how fucking Satan's nutsack whore in church SWEATY people on the top floor of a glass office building can get, when you can't open the windows or circulate air?

On Tuesday, my home machine's hard drive failed and I got the message "insert system disk and press any key." It's SAD when you pine for the blue screen of death. Previously, I have been able to repair this problem by popping the case and scientifically wiggling the power harness. Wiggling no longer does the trick, on this TWO THOUSAND DOLLAR GAMING RIG THAT IS NOT YET A YEAR OLD.

Today, a water pipe burst in the office building and flooded the data room. This destroyed the T1 lines, the phone switch boxes, and more! It is hard to be an internet relations manager when you cannot access the INTERNET. I sent my much-adored minion home to work. Calling her to dictate posts got old fast.

But since I could not read message boards or even send email, I worked on other long put off projects. And I used the other computer, now lying fallow, to add music to my MP3 collection.

Today, my beloved MP3 player froze. This has happened before. I pulled out the handy reset button tool (a paper clip) and poked it into the player. It started to reset, but instead of the "rebuilding" window, I got the "rescue" screen. Only, none of the options appeared to do anything. After an hour on hold, a nice boy in Creative's tech support broke it to me - full reformat required. I winced, and bid fare thee well to ten gigs of music ripped from my own CD collection and two gigs of, uh, yeah. Stuff. Stuff that someone no doubt owned before they uploaded it to Kazaa.

But that's okay! I turned a new leaf a few months ago (amazingly, about the same time I started writing for future publication again) and stopped stealing! I was willing to replace that music! By handing over actual money! So I hit reformat, and started chatting with the nice techie boy.

Five minutes later he asked what the player was displaying. I said "It says formatting dot dot dot." He said, "That's a thirty second process. You should have been done by now."

It's hosed. And it was a discontinued model. And it would cost as much to repair as it would to buy a 40 gig player.

I am writing this on borrowed technology to get the killing rage out of my system, and after I hit post, I am going to STOP TOUCHING THINGS THAT REQUIRE HARD DRIVES.

The Credit Union With No Name

I have a savings account at a credit union. (This is like a bank with better candy in the waiting room dishes.) There are credit unions for police officers, teachers, and military men. These unions are all named things that go with the supported population. Apple for teachers, Navy Federal for sailors.

And then there's the credit union with no name, for government employees. I'm not kidding. The statements come on plain paper with "Account Statement" written on the top instead of a bank logo. The statement envelopes have a post office box as a return address, with no logo, and the box is at the post office nearest to *your* home.

My dad works for the government, along with a million other people. When I asked him what he did for a living (with an eye to getting him to come speak at my elementary school on Career Day), he told me he read newspapers. This matched with my experiences, where he brought home heaps of newspapers and ripped out occasional articles for a folder in his backpack. So I went back to school and told them all that he read newspapers. Being as I was in a class with the scions of U.S. Senators, sports legends, and people who owned things like newspapers (the public schools are really GOOD around here), no one was impressed by my dad. "My dad has a stupid job," I used to sigh.

What my dad really has is a twisted sense of humor. The bastard reads newspapers in eight different languages and does translation and analysis. At about the time I was bemoaning his lack of star power at Career Day, he was getting his picture taken at a fancy dinner with the Reagans and some kind of king. Where he was the interpreter. Jeez. I could have moved up at least two notches in monkey bar society if only I had known.

But aside from my social climbing aspirations, Dad was trying to do right by me. He set up an account at his credit union in my name with the minimum deposit of five dollars. This was so I could continue to get access to the services and the interest rates even after I turned eighteen and flew the coop.

I was not aware of this at first. But after I'd been at college (in another state) for about a month, I started getting these mysterious account statements. They were addressed to me, the return address was a P.O. box in that city, and they informed me I had five dollars and change. The amount went up by a penny every statement. I stared at these in confusion and then forgot about them.

I traveled around doing theater, and for a few summers I didn't have a fixed address to speak of. My parents were transferred overseas, so I didn't even have my parents' home as a default. But I finally landed at a fraternity house in Blacksburg, Virginia... and the statements started coming to me again. I shacked up with the asshat who turned out to be a deadbeat... and the statements followed me to his house. I moved upstate, and so did the Account Statements.

This was starting to creep me out.

The deliciousness of being stalked by a bank ended when I asked my dad about it, and he told me about the credit union. What he didn't tell me was the bank's address, and so my penny dividends continued for another six years as I grew annoyed with the deadbeat, moved to my own apartment, moved to my current address, married someone good and sweet and strong.

Finally, I asked for the secret address. My account held seven dollars and seventy four cents, and I had finally gotten bored watching the glacial growth. For more than twenty years, this account had existed. It was time to get better acquainted.

The credit union was located just down the street. Go figure.

Since the most of my money is in a budget and accounted for, I figure this "extra" account should only keep the "extra" money, so I took over all my change. I had been keeping a stockpile in the closet, with neat little rolls of coins made from the contents of the piggy bank in the laundry room. I deposited 335 dollars. More than half of that was pennies. It seemed fitting.

Go Read This Instead

I'm kinda busy, but this site has lots of good stuff: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/