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March 19, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
I’m being harassed by my company. They’re not intending to harass me, mind you, I just happen to be a the unfortunate victim of my husband’s bright mind. (All good things come with a trade-off.)
Last night, I was having a rare, blissful night of deep sleep. Apparently, my snoring and dreaming was displeasing in the sight of the Sleep Gods. I was jolted out of a dream by a very loud ringing sound coming from the general area of the phone. When I looked at the clock, it was 3:24. I picked up the phone, not knowing what to expect, and managed to utter something not quite resembling a greeting but considerably friendlier than what I wanted to say. The voice on the other end was cheery, bright, and asked to speak to my husband, who seems to be the only intelligent employee who understands one of our systems. The third party support team who should understand it, and is paid to understand it, sure as hell doesn’t. So they call on Friday nights, and at 3:24 in the morning, and even again this evening for two hours.
The kicker is that the “problem” the “support team” needed help with is the very same one my husband troubleshooted with them a week ago, so should have known how to fix.
I’m not complaining that my husband doesn’t get overtime or any sort of extra compensation for the off-hours help. I would just prefer it if the “support team” scheduled their 3 am calls around my insomnial nights. Is that so much to ask?
As I wander off to bed, I wonder if I will again find myself answering the phone tonight at some unspeakable hour, involuntarily muttering, “I can’t believe it” as I pass the phone over to my husband.
What are the rules around restraining orders?
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January 25, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
I could complain about the bad week I’ve had, but what’s the point and who the hell would care anyway? It is what it is, even when it makes you disgusted.
The good news is that my husband took care of our moth situation. When I got home tonight, he was standing in the kitchen with a satisfied and victorious look in his eye. His proud body posture said everything about the empty kitchen cabinets above the refrigerator and the cereal boxes lining the kitchen counter. If I had come in the front door, I would have seen the moth-infested boxes lined up out there. That’s the reward for stocking up on half-priced cereal–a moth invasion.
Thank goodness I have this wonderful man in my life who is even-tempered and doesn’t take these setbacks too seriously. Before he came along, I used to have a strict policy that I could not own more possessions than could fill up a box. I liked that on a moment’s impulse, if things became desperate or awful enough, I could fill up the 240, and disappear in the middle of the night, leaving behind all my tedious troubles and annoyances to create brand new ones somewhere else. Probably because I allowed myself permission to fantasize about running away, I never needed to act on the urge. Lately though the imagery of my Nissan stacked with my few treasured belongings has been popping back into my consciousness. The difference now is that my husband is in the passenger’s seat. That means I’d have to leave behind quite a stack of sweaters, so I hope he appreciates what he means to me. There will still be indentations in the melted asphalt where my tires briefly passed over. That part of the fantasy remains the same.
Anyway, tomorrow will be a brand new day and the sun will continue to rise and set. When I look at these pictures, there’s not a trace of me or my miniscule problems in this huge cosmos, so why worry about them.
Until I can figure out something interesting to say, you should broaden your horizons and take a look at these new fashions from Paris. There’s one dress that my husband very much likes and hopes catches on. See if you can figure out which one it is.
It would sure help my disposition if the rat bastard Orioles would start selling opening day tickets as part of the “all regular single game tickets.” To quote Odd Todd, filthy, scum, liars.
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January 23, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
Just when you’re feeling down on your luck and yourself, and like you’re really God’s personal punching bag (except when you remember essentially the whole continent of Africa and then hate yourself even more for daring to feel sorry for yourself when you live such a sheltered life in this truly privileged nation), your dear college friend Ray reads your blog (bless his heart!) and is concerned enough to call you and ask how you’re doing. How I love my kind friends. Ray did complain about all my Orioles postings, but he’s from Severna Park, so we can’t hold it against him that he doesn’t know about loving the Os. I’ll work on educating him later this year.
Have you been watching American Idol? Did you see that girl from Albemarle? It’s right down the road from here. You know Kelly Pickler is from Albemarle. Did I ever tell you about the story about the date I went on with a doctor from Albemarle? I met him online. He was really nice, so, so nice. Really nice guy, but his arms weren’t proportional. I felt like the shallowest person alive because the connection wasn’t there. Albemarle too, I just couldn’t see living there, what with my great career here in Charlotte and all, and Albemarle being such a small town.
Have I stalled too much?
Well, my boss did take me to lunch and my instincts were right. It wasn’t good news. My boss started our lunch with, “I want you to know I really like you.” Uh oh. The short version is it went downhill from there. He’s a kind and sincere man and the favorite boss I’ve ever had. He is a special person. He’s the front man on our customer account and takes a lot of abuse from the customer. I mean a lot of abuse. Today he told me about an incident last week when the customer called him in his hotel room, called him a variety of names and used a lot of expletives, the same ones I used when I watched Hoey pitch, and then hung up on him. I admire and respect my boss a ton, so I didn’t pull out the heat when he told me that he just gave me the only bad rating I’ve ever gotten in my life. Part of my goals were based on, for example, doing work, and since the customer didn’t buy anything, it made meeting that goal pretty difficult. The few projects I was on, the customer loved, but nevertheless, someone had to get a bad rating since we have a mandatory bell curve rating with hard numbers that 14% of people get set up to get the axe. I feel worthless and like a big loser and it’s very clear to me that I’ll be completely unemployable when I am fired, which will be any day now, though my boss promises me that he would save me if the big corporate machine made such efforts.
So, I’m still employed, but I suck and I wish I could be mad at my boss, but I’m really not, because I know he’s as much a victim of our corporate policies and our customer’s stubborn indecisiveness as I am, and it is what is anyway. I brought home my plant and took down the pictures in my cubicle anyway as an immature sign of protest.
I came home to our growing invasion of moths and a broken ice maker in the refrigerator. So I made a White Russian and waited for my husband to get home to fix things. That’s exactly what he did. He produced a mangled chip clip which somehow worked itself down into the ice maker from an unknown location on an unknown source. If it weren’t for him I’d have sucked on the tailpipe a long time ago, but he makes everything right. Thanks to him, tomorrow will just be another day.
Maybe February will finally be the start of something positive around here.
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January 21, 2008 by enchantingsunshine.
Meet me over at Google.
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October 30, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.
Saturday night after the birthday cruise for my mom, one of my aunts (who is on my list at the moment) suggested that we go to the VFW. The VFW. The VFW is a notoriously awful place for me and my husband. Since my mom loves to celebrate Halloween, and the VFW always has a party, that’s usually where we go. It’s not a bad place particularly, it’s just that there’s not much for a younger crowd. I mean no disrespect to our venerable veterans, but these are our primary complaints:
1) Because most of the people who frequent it are…um…of a mature age, the music is often deafeningly loud.
2) The regulars tend to be of the demographic who enjoy a good fag, in a one lit off the other sort of way. Since both my husband and I are allergic to smoke and I have asthma, this is a considerable drawback for us both.
3) This last one is strictly my husband’s complaint. Being British, he comes from a country where women don’t pass up any opportunity to share cleavage, so when my husband thinks of “party” he thinks of a view and the VFW is verily lacking in this.
I miss my family terribly and since I don’t get to see them much, of course we tagged along even though we were secretly dreading it. (Only a few hours in the bar and three days later I am still suffering the consequences.)
One thing I admire and envy about being of a certain age, is the freedom that comes with it. Once you pass a certain birthday, you’re given permission to freely say whatever comes to mind and do whatever you want because you long ago stopped caring what other people think. It must be so liberating. The downside is that sometimes there are victims, as we were on Saturday night.
The VFW owns a karaoke machine. I suppose the regulars thought, “Hey what the hell! I can’t hear what I sound like anyway.” On Saturday night, there was one couple in particular who sang together most of the evening, much to our chagrin. The husband wasn’t bad, but his wife made William Hung sound like Pavorati. My aunt knows the couple and told me that the husband doesn’t enjoy it, but sings anyway to make his wife happy. Here are some adjectives to describe her singing: atonal, flat, cracking, savage. Each time after they sang, even though we had to mop up the blood dripping from our ears, people (not me) applauded cheerily and generously. Bunch of dysfunctional enablers, if you ask me.
Even though I didn’t enjoy the cacophony (emphasis on caca), I admire them for getting up and enjoying life. Who the hell cares what anyone else thinks. That’s really the way to live, though it certainly would have been more polite if they showed up with free earplugs for the rest of us.
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October 18, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.
I love NPR. There are so many interesting programs and so much good information. Yesterday, one of my favorite programs, “Talk of the Nation” discussed the topic of profanity. The episode started with a story about a woman, bless her heart, who was cited for disorderly conduct for yelling profanities at her toilet. If she is convicted, she could spend 90 days in jail and pay a $300 fine. So the first question is, you can go to jail for that?! Oh my goodness! And the second is, can Orioles fans be granted a special exemption, kind of like how Congress exempts itself from the laws it passes?
If someone had reported me for my oral misconduct this summer, I could have spent a couple of years in jail. Okay, okay, that’s not entirely true. All tolled, it would have been a life sentence.
Neal Conan started the show with the question, “Are there moments when no other words will do?” I immediately sent an email saying, “Yes. Let’s put it this way. I’m an Orioles fan.” At just the moment I tried to send the email, my Internet connection went down and I discovered that in addition to watching the Orioles, there’s another situation for me that consistently evokes profanity, when dealing with any electronic device. According to Steven Pinker, who has researched the subject, this would be classified as cathartic swearing.
While it’s true that it’s meant to be cathartic, I have to admit that by the time I get to the point that the stream of obscenities pours forth involuntarily and uncontrollably, I’ve been holding it inside so long, trying to keep it together and behave like an adult, that I’m so frustrated that there’s about nothing that can soothe me. Even acting on my fantasy to get a hammer and break the computer and its hateful breathren into bits wouldn’t be satisfying enough. I could never inflict as much pain on them as they do on me, and any punishment I would deliver would only punish me more. And, I know they (computers and their evil breathren) know this, which is why they get their giggles from continuing to engage in their hateful little games that torture me.
Anyway. In the brilliant words of Steven Pinker, here’s more about swearing. There are five kinds. Here’s a description of the two of them:
1) Cathartic–This is where, when some misfortune befalls you, your talk suddenly falls to excretion, or theology or reproduction.
2) Imprecations–You invite someone to engage in some indignified activity, or accuse them of being the sort of person who engages in some undignified activity, usually a sexual one.
When I interact with technology my utterances fall into both of those categories. When you think about it, swear words are really quite arbitrary and it’s a bit odd that we can be so easily offended by the expression of a single word. It’s just a word, after all. This point becomes really obvious when you attempt to translate swear words from one language into another. The result is almost always comic. Several years ago, a German friend of mine and I found a website that translated German swear words. Reading the translations in English had us doubled over, crying with laughter. Consider that our worst swear word in English invites someone to go make love. How cruel are we! What a thing to say to someone!
So in actuality, for the last two months every time my Internet has gone down for no discernible, logical reason, I’ve suggested that my computer and the Internet go make love to themselves and each other. Quite magnanimous of me, don’t you agree?
(In the interest of full disclosure, I may also have called them both a few variations of excrement.)
To me, it’s not the swear words that I find offensive so much as the unexpected insult that informs you that something you thought was an attribute is really a character flaw. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
Have you ever noticed that foreigners with an accent get away with a lot? Europeans have a way of being direct and honest, and having an exotic accent seems to give them permission to say whatever comes to mind without the same consequences as a native speaker might face.
For example, let me tell the story about a stylist I’ll call Margella. Margella is Romanian, or as one of her friends calls her, Ro-mean-ian. Apparently Margella speaks with a certain honesty that her colleagues both envy and find appalling. I was in the hair salon last night and had the privilege to witness Margella in action. She had just given a trim to a certain high maintenance customer (I was filled in on the history by the two other stylists, the one doing my hair and the other, the token gay stylist that is, by-law, a requirement at every salon, particularly in the Queen City, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Apparently this customer will not leave Margella alone. She’s told him directly not to come to see her anymore, but still he comes back. Last night she told him three times that I counted, “Tuesday. Come back on Tuesday. That’s my day off!” She didn’t laugh at the end to say, “I’m just kidding.” She was completely serious, but her accent made her words sweet and gentle, like she was saying, “now honey, I love to cut your hair, come back and see me anytime.”
I had to agree that this particular male customer did like a lot of attention, as the gay stylist repeatedly informed me, with a roll of his eyes. The customer was in the salon for at least an hour and had a lengthy conversation about the merits and how-tos of spiking the bit of hair on the top of his head. Then he asked, actually begged, to have another trim to have more taken from the top. Margella sat in the chair with her arms crossed, as we say in the South, completely through with this customer, and refused to cut anymore. “No, I’m not doing anymore” she said in her sweet Romanian accent, swiveling her chair to turn away from him and not budging despite the customer’s repeated pleas. Finally after arguing with him for twenty minutes she rewashed and recut his hair. She was so fed up with him that, had she been American, her words would have been delivered Clint Eastwood style, something to the effect of “I said get out, Punk!” But being Romanian, she somehow managed to tell the customer to go to hell, and instead of feeling insulted and wanting to see the manager, he had such a boyish grin and giggle that I seriously thought he was suppressing the urge to confess his love to her. Foreigners have it made.
My husband isn’t so lucky though. Even though he has a sexy British accent, he doesn’t get away with much. A couple of nights ago, I made a silly joke, not thinking that I was hilariously funny, just trying to be playful and fun. In reply, I got the following stinging insult, and I promise this is a direct quote, “Your jokes are stupid. They’re like kids jokes.” Those words pierced my heart. First of all, my joke had “ergo” in it and I defy you to show me a kid who knows what “ergo” means. Secondly, oh no he didn’t. I don’t care how sexy your accent is, there’s no way to deliver a statement like that without consequences. And that after I had spent half an hour in the drugstore looking for a romantic card to give him. You can undo a whole weeks worth of troubleshooting the Internet with a comment like that.
A male friend recently informed that the law of man speak is “if something can be taken two ways and one of them hurts your feelings, we meant it the other way.” Apparently, my husband didn’t say it to be mean, so he claims. Two days have passed, but I still can’t figure out a nice interpretation unless it was one of those things you tell someone “for their own good,” like saying, “that color doesn’t look good on you.” I mean, if he said to me, “look, I don’t know how to say this, but, some people aren’t meant to be in public in a bathing suit, and…well…you’re one of them” that, I could understand. But to cut on my humor? When I’m using the word, “ergo?” That’s funny stuff.
Fine. So I won’t make anymore jokes. We’ll just live in a serious little overcast world, shall we? Let’s say however he meant it, it didn’t go over well and, in short, I think he’s learned his lesson.
I share that story not to rat out my husband, but more because I found the whole thing so incredible. What is it about our brains that even after so many years of life experience, living in a culture and knowing what is appropriate and what is not, that we can still manage to stick both feet so deeply in our mouth? One expects these things from recent immigrants and those with autism or frontal lobe damage, but what excuse do the rest of us have?
Unfortunately, I can’t point the finger for too long as I am far too often a victim of my own misstatements. They account for way too many sleepless nights. In fact, I doubt the recipient of any of my words has suffered more than I have at uttering and replaying them in my head. Here’s one example from twenty years ago that my brain has randomly decided to remind me of recently.
We had just received a few inches of snow in Baltimore and I was still a relatively inexperienced driver. I found it really irritating that even though there are miles of sidewalk in Baltimore, people still walk in the street when it snows. All you have to do is ride in a car in the snow one time to realize that when a car hits an ice patch, you can’t always control where it goes. This isn’t rocket science, right? As a driver, generally one doesn’t like to hit pedestrians as this has all sorts of implications for car insurance, but when they walk in the street they’re kind of asking for it.
So, this poor, dumb woman who didn’t have enough sense (I stand by that) to use the sidewalk, was hit by a driver. As she lay semi-conscious on the ground while we waited for the paramedics, I may have made a comment to my friend about “this is why you don’t walk in the street” or something to that effect. At that moment, I realized from the look on the victim’s face that she was still somewhat coherent. There she lay injured waiting for help and jerk that I am, all I can do is comment on how foolish it is to get yourself injured by a car. Only then did it occur to me that maybe, albeit true, it wasn’t a very nice thing to say. Sometimes I shudder to think that she tells her children the story of the time she was hit by a car and some nasty lady commented on how stupid she was and how she deserved it. I blush at the thought of it.
Don’t you agree that if police are going to go around issuing citations for inappropriate verbal emissions, it would be more reasonable for comments like that or for “your jokes are stupid” than for profanity? Wouldn’t that be a much more intelligent use of our court systems, saving friendships and marriages? Eliminating all the garbage that comes out of politicians and their election strategists?? Too many insults and you spend a couple of days in jail until you can learn to say some nice things. It seems so obvious to me that if anyone needs arresting for foul oral behavior, it’s the political pundits. Imagine ninety days with all of them in jail, how peaceful our nation would be!
So, now that I’ve solved that problem, I have to get back to figuring out what’s wrong with my Palm &*#$! Pilot, the $#&(%$^@ Internet and the doorbell, which just rung itself.
Disclaimer: I make no promises expressed or implied about the merit of any of the jokes found in this or any post. I apologize for any injury incurred from an expectation of reading higher caliber jokes. If you want funny, go read David Sedaris.
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