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The Talkin’ Milk & Cheese Vs. the TSA Blues (an Air-Travel Horribly True Tale)


Just got back from visiting my sister in Austin.

In addition to eating like an asshole, as is my Austin tradition, I also had the traditional visit to Austin Books & Comics, my favorite comic shop in the whole wide world. If you can think of a graphic novel or comic book trade paperback collection, chances are quite high that Austin Books & Comics will have multiple copies of it in stock. They also have a huge supply of statues, toys and figurines to keep your inner geek happy for decades.

While there I happened to spy a set of vinyl figurines cast in the shape of cartoonist Evan Dorkin’s most famous creation Milk & Cheese. For those unfamiliar with Milk & Cheese, they’re dairy products gone bad, known for their hatred of most things that aren’t alcohol, mindless violence or the late TV show A Current Affair. (They once engaged in a successful two man war on drugs because they were tired of the anti-drug commercials interrupting their viewing of A Current Affair.) I love the characters and own every one of their comics, most of which are #1 issues. I also have both the flat illustrated Milk & Cheese refrigerator magnet set, but also the now rare three dimensional porcelain magnet produced by Graffiti Designs in the late 1990s. (Oooooh, ahhhhh.) Until that moment, though, I’d only seen pictures of the Milk & Cheese figures, as they were produced several years ago and in limited supply. Another reason I’d never seen them in person is because they cost around $70 at the minimum when they were first released and I was still smarting over the cost of the porcelain fridge magnet. Because of this, I had no idea how huge the figures are. The photos I’d seen didn’t really give any sense of scale, so I’d assumed that Milk was probably smaller than the typical smallish carton of milk and Cheese a smallish wedge of cheddar. The figures were easily twice the size I had expected, though. They came packaged in a huge foot and a half long box decorated with Milk & Cheese comic strips. The display of the figs in the shop listed them for the usual $70, so I still wasn’t going to bite. However, on further exploration into the toy section of the store, I saw that they had a endcap display of them that had the sets listed for $30 each. I figured they must be a former display model, or something had to be wrong with them to be at that low a price. But when I asked a clerk he said that the figs were dairy products reduced for quick sale because the store had bought too many sets. So I bought a set for $30.

Cheese and Milk, of Milk & Cheese fameAnd they’re completely awesome!

Inside their box, Milk & Cheese are nestled securely inside a bagged, plastic vacuform insert along with their weapon accessories: a plastic broken gin bottle, a large plastic hammer, and a plastic stick with a plastic nail through it. I left everything in its place, didn’t even crack the seal on the plastic bag and put it all back in the box. For a bit I considered shipping the box to myself in WV, saving me the trouble of packing such an enormous item in my check luggage. I also considered collapsing the box and packing the figs loose within my clothing. Then I changed my mind and instead packed the full box into my carry on gym bag since it was light enough that it wouldn’t be a hassle.

On Saturday, we headed to the airport, checked our check bag and proceeded thorough the TSA security line. We did the whole remove all metal and run your carry on through the x-ray machine bit. I made it through the security screening before the bags and was able to look back at the x-ray display screens while I put on my shoes. On the screen was what looked like my satchel, at least from the snake nest of media cables I could see. I was sure this would take them a few moments to suss out. But it was actually the gym bag that they’d paused the conveyor belt to examine in depth. The tech stared at the x-ray. Then stared some more. Finally, he called one of the TSA officers over and said something to her before starting the belt again. My bags came rolling out.

“Whose bag is this?” the TSA lady asked pointing to the satchel.

“That’s mine,” I said.

“This is your bag?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sir, do you have any glass products packed in here?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

Then the TSA agent seemed to look at the satchel for a moment, perhaps listening to someone speaking to her in an earpiece, for she then said, “No, this isn’t the bag.” She slid the satchel to me in its plastic tray. Then she pulled the tray containing my gym bag close and said, “Whose bag is this?”

“That’s mine,” I said again.

“This is your bag?” she asked again.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sir, do you have any glass products packed in here?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said again. Did I, though? We had been to a Penzeys Spice store and had loaded up on little glass jars of curry powder and peppercorns and what not. But I’d definitely packed those in the check bag.

“You don’t have any glass products?” she asked again, now with suspicion.

Had I stuttered?

“Not that I’m aware of,” I repeated.

Another pause and perhaps another listen to a voice in an earpiece.

“Sir, do you have any figurines in here?”

Figurines? Ohhhhh!

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, there are two.”

“May I search the bag?”

“Go right ahead.”

The TSA lady unzipped my gym bag and there at the top was the long Milk & Cheese box. She removed it from the bag, nosed around in the clothing that had surrounded it, found nothing made of glass, figurine or otherwise, and then began the process of opening the Milk & Cheese box itself.

“Um, technically I guess there is kind of a bottle in there,” I said. “But it’s a fake plastic gin bottle,” I added. I didn’t mention that the fake plastic gin bottle was sculpted to appear broken, nor did I mention the fake plastic stick with the fake plastic nail through it, nor that their accessories were supposed to represent weapons. By then she had the box open and had pulled out the plastic bag-covered vacuform insert with Cheese and Milk (that’s the order they’re packed in) staring up at her baring expressions of malice on their little Dorkiny faces, their hands clinched in fists of dairy fury. The TSA lady blinked down at them for a few seconds as though what she was seeing didn’t compute. At least they’re not flipping her off like my Milk & Cheese magnet, I thought. Then she smiled and said, “Oh, it’s a game!”

“Actually it’s–   Uh, yes, it’s a game,” I said.

She took the insert over to the x-ray tech to show him “the game.”   He seemed to approve, or at least not deny. She then repackaged my toys and zipped up the bag, after which I gathered my possessions and made my way over to where my wife was standing, shaking her head.

“Apparently Milk & Cheese caused some problems with the TSA,” I said.

“Naturally,” the wife said.

 

Copyright © 2012 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Selling the House, Gates of Hell, Poo Tank Maintenance, Humiliations and General Grossness, Big Ol’ Grin of Satisfaction, Bad Dog Blues (a truly horrifying Horribly True Tale)

One of the most humiliating experiences I can imagine is to take a huge dump in the front yard and then invite someone over to have a look at it. It’s just not something that is ever done. Even more humiliating and nonsensical, though, would be to then ask them to dispose of it for you. As unbelievable a scenario as this is, it’s exactly what I did this week, only several thousand times worse. For this week, you see, was the week we had the septic tank emptied.  Yessir.

We’re about to move, you see, and, as part of our process of readying our house to hit the market, we’ve been going down the list of home improvement projects we’ve intended to accomplish for four years and getting to some of the ones left there. So we finally had the automatic garage door opener on my side of the garage replaced, redid the hall bathroom, regrouted part of the tub surround in the master bath tub, etc.  And, as we went down the list, some items were moved further down it in priority—such as actually replacing the tub in the hall bathroom, which we avoided by rationalizing that we didn’t know what kind of tub the new owners might want there, so why not let them do it?  Other items were added to the list out of the blue.

“We should call someone to come clean out the septic tank,” the wife said over breakfast. I’d already been thinking about that, oddly enough—not because of breakfast but because a cleaning of the poo tank was probably due. According to the paperwork we’d received with the house, the last time it had been emptied was a few months before we bought the place. So you figure once every 3-5 years being the norm for emptying a poo tank (though some argue against emptying it at all), it was about time. The thing is, I’ve never lived in a place with a septic system before and we were kind of mystified as to where the tank itself was located, and had no idea where its lid could be found.  We deduced it was in the front yard somewhere, because that was the direction our poo pipe ran from beneath our house, but we were not at all sure where the tank was buried. Our front yard has a lot of trees, so it seemed like it would have to be located in between some of them, but the trees were spaced fairly close together. If you were going to bury a 1000 gallon tank, it would have to be somewhere between the trees, we reasoned.

We’d had cause to speak with the health department, a few months previous, as we’d been trying to determine when our well had originally been dug.  While I had them on the line, I’d asked if they had records of the septic tank’s installation and, hopefully, location. They faxed over two diagrams, one for the proposed tank and drainage field location and one for the inspected tank and drainage field location.  They showed two different locations for the tank, but I figured the inspected one was the correct one.  It put the tank somewhere outside my office window, with the drainage field further down into the yard. I didn’t do any digging to check, but figured that would be where I’d have to direct any poo removal specialists when that day came.

And now it had.

The poo removal specialists arrived around midday and were soon awash in the oh-so-vicious snarls of my two dogs Sadie and Moose (collectively known as Sadiemoose). While the dogs barked and slavered from behind glass, I went out to meet the poo removal specialists carrying with me the aforementioned poo tank diagram.

“Has it been backing up on you at all?” Terrance the poo tank man asked.

“No, not at all,” I said. “We just want to get it cleared before we sell it.”

Terrance and his poo tank assistant, Matthew, then poked the ground with a pointy metal pole for a while, making their way from the center of the yard over to the area in front of my office window that I’d suggested was where they start.  The poking of the lawn continued, with occasional thunks as the pole struck either concrete or rock. Several minutes passed this way with no real consensus as to where digging should commence. Finally, Terrance took something plastic and orange from his pocket and handed it to me.

“Could you go inside and flush this twice?” he said. I looked at the plastic device.  It was about the size of a flattened golf ball, but had a slot along one side within which I could see a small metal disc, about the size of a thick watch battery.  It turned out to be a tracking device.  I figured he must have a whole box of them back in the truck and that they must be cheap if you could go flushing them willy nilly.  By “flush this twice” I knew he meant, flush the tracker down, then flush the toilet again to send it on through.  This I did and when I came back Terrance produced what looked like a metal detector handle minus the pole and detector disc. He aimed it at the ground until he found where it seemed to be the loudest, which was beside one of the four pine trees planted in front of our house, this one just outside my office window. They stabbed the pole down once more and struck something solid.

Digging began, hampered a bit by the limbs of the tree.

“That tree’s in a bad location,” Terrance said. His point was that with the tree was as close to the tank as it seemed to be, eventually there would be root problems. They might not make it through the concrete tank, but they could certainly bore into the septic pipe leading into the tank and gum up the works—that is, if they hadn’t already. He recommended the tree be taken out.

Within 20 minutes a foot and a half deep pit was dug out and the upper surface of a section of the concrete poo tank exposed. There was a rectangular concrete plug in the top of the tank with a rebar hook embedded in it. They looped some chain through that and lifted the whole thing off.  And there before us were exposed the gates of hell itself.

I will not go into detail as to what the gates of hell look like in this case, but I will say that the gates were quite FULL. To the brim even. I will also not describe the smell, which you already have a pretty good idea about I’m sure. What I will say is that having four years-worth of one’s leavings exposed to strangers is a very embarrassing experience even if it is the job of said strangers to see such leavings on a regular basis. I wanted to apologize and issue denials and run away all at the same time. But there was just no denying what we were all looking at and smelling, nor was there any denying exactly who had produced a goodly portion of it.

“Looks like we got here just in time,” Terrance said. Then he and his poo tank assistant went back to their poo truck and soon poo hoses were hooked up and stretched across the yard and into the gates of hell. The powerful poo pumps on the poo truck soon began to make quick work of their 1000 gallons worth of burden. And Terrance stood by with a giant poo rake to help the process along. He seemed pretty skilled with that rake, and was able to use it to retrieve his orange radio tracker, which he tossed to Matthew, who put it in a pocket.  And with that I suppressed a shudder at the realization of how many poo tanks that thing had probably seen in the past and how little cleaning it was likely to have had before being handed to me earlier.

“I been doin this a couple days,” Terrance later said with a grin. “Thirty five years, actually,” he added.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve pulled out of one of these?” I asked.

“A dead body,” he said. Then he grinned again and said “Not really.” But he did say that when he was first starting out, about the same age as Matthew, he was working on pumping out the septic tank of a man and wife whose septic system had become clogged. The man of the house asked him what had been causing the clog and young Terrance told him “Condoms.”

“What?” the man said.

“Condoms. You know, rubbers?”

The man of the house said that this was not possible. He and his wife didn’t use condoms.

“Well, maybe it’s from house guests,” young Terrance reportedly had offered.

No. This wasn’t likely either.

“Well, maybe it was the people who owned the place before you,” Terrance said.

And at this the man of the house said, “I built the house.”  The man then excused himself, went inside and there shortly followed a great deal of angry shouting between the happy couple.  Terrance’s boss came running up at the sound of the screaming argument from within the house and asked Terrance what he’d said to cause it. Terrance told him. “Boy, don’t you ever tell the customer what’s in the tank!” the boss said.

I laughed at this story, but within mere minutes we were to discover something of a different brand of disturbing within my own poo tank. As the level of substance decreased in the tank, a PVC pipe with a T joint on the end was exposed. This is the end of the pipe that ran from our plumbing beneath the house. Unfortunately, as the level finally reached the bottom of the tank, we could see a second section of T-capped pipe lying in the muck at an odd angle, its other end very much broken.

“Ohhhhh,” Terrance said when he saw it. “If that’s what I think it is then you’re in for a world of shit.”

“What?” I said.

Terrance asked for a flashlight, then got down on hands and knees and lowered his head into the gates of hell for a look around, specifically toward the easterly end of the tank which extended several feet beneath the ground. When he came back up he looked grim. It seems that the piece of broken pipe was supposed to reside in the other end of the tank, as it was a part of the system that connected to the drainage field. The way a septic tank works is that everything enters the tank where solids sink and paper and sludge float. The solids are digested by microbes from the monthly Rid-X treatments we send down. The liquids are able to bleed off into the drainage field, which are a series of pipes running down into the yard that allows for natural filtration of the water. According to Terrance, though, the broken pipe was preventing this system from working naturally and it had all just been building up in the tank itself.

I shook my head in annoyance at this, but was not entirely surprised. After all, it’s not like anything around here is ever going to be simple or go to plan. No, it’s going to take three times as long, cost three times as much and drive me nigh unto madness before the end of it. At least this time, though, I had two guys who were willing to return, venture into the gates of hell and fix our poo pipes. We’d be able to include their work in our packet of Cool Things We Did to Make the House a More Attractive Purchase folder for prospective buyers.

The poo tank assistant fished the broken pipe out of the poo tank with the poo rake and then dumped it in the yard. Terrance then picked it up and used it as a visual aid to explain the work that would need to be done, including replacing that thin chunk of pipe with much thicker modern PVC that wouldn’t break. The work would involve a lot of digging—including possibly digging up the offending and dangerous tree, if we liked—to expose the other lid to the poo tank where the bulk of the work would need to be done. Until the work was done, the septic system would be inoperative, or at the very least inefficient, and would just fill up to the gates of hell once again. It would take a while, but far sooner than if the drainage field was operational.

I agreed to it and soon the men were plugging the poo tank with its concrete lid again and winding their poo hoses back onto their poo truck, promising to return at the crack of dawn the following day.  They left.

I went back in the house and was greeted by our dogs, who were very interested in getting outside to potty and explore and see what smells these strangers had left behind. Oh, you’ll smell some smells, I thought. I opened the back door and out they ran.

After several minutes, I began to wonder why the dogs had not returned to the back door. They’re usually only good for a couple of squirts in the yard and then they’re back wanting to be let in. Oh, they’re probably around front checking out the smelly hole in the ground, I reasoned. So I stepped out onto the front porch where I could see them over by the hole. I clapped my hands to call them and they came running. Moose trotted up the steps first, happy to see his “pa” as always. Then Sadie rounded the edge of the porch, a huge smile on her doggy face, and I was afforded a horrifying sight nearly as bad as the gates of hell earlier. Sadie’s neck and shoulders were coated in something black. To the untrained eye, it might have appeared to be very black mud. But to my trained eye and nose, I knew it to be raw sewage.

Where did she… ? How did she…? What the f…?!

And even as I watched, she gave me my answer by dashing back to the poo tank pit where I witnessed her bend over and roll gleefully onto the sewage-coated piece of broken pipe that was still laying in the grass above the pit.

“LEAVE IT!!!!” I screamed. “YOU! LEAVE! IT!!!”

Sadie looked up through a haze of filth and flashed a big ol’ grin of satisfaction. This was by far the greatest and best stinky thing she’d ever found to roll in and she was in stank heaven.

Cursing, I threw open the front door and yelled at Moose to get in the house.  Then I snatched up my phone and texted “YOUR DAUGHTER JUST ROLLED IN SEWAGE!!!” to my wife. Then I then began preparations to give that damn dog the queen mother of all baths.

But which bathroom to use?  Normally we bath the dogs in the big tub in the master bathroom. But we’d not yet sealed the new grout we’d freshly put in the master bath tub surround. I could bath her in the hall bathtub, but did I really want to chance this dog shaking wet sewage all over the freshly painted walls? Onto the good towels? I finally opted for the bathroom with the most room and the most tile and went with the master.

Sadie, of course, knows that we don’t dress in normal clothes for bath time, and she never comes to a bath willingly.  So we’ve learned that if we want to bathe her without so much hassle, we have to dress as per normal, calmly walk up and lift her 80 pound butt, carry her to the tub and only then  strip down to skivvies.  However, picking her up now meant coming into contact with sewage and I didn’t really have any normal clothes I wanted to sacrifice.  So I put on my painting shorts and a t-shirt I didn’t care about.  This didn’t fool Sadie.  One look at me and she went into red-alert mode, dropping her front down to the deck and giving me a warning woof.  And any move I made toward her sent her skittering away.  I opened the back door and ordered her into the house, determined to get her into closed quarters where her running range was limited.  This was very dangerous, I knew, because there was carpet in the house and she was just as likely to decide to roll on it in her flight from me as anything.  But I was able to corner her on the parquet floor of the kitchen and eventually reason with her until she let her guard down enough for me to slip my arms under her chest and lift her.

I held my breath as I carried Sadie back toward our bedroom, but half way there I had to take a breath. Oh, it was awful. I felt my throat tighten, suppressing a gag. You never consider when you use the bathroom that you’ll ever see, let alone touch that waste again, but here I was carrying a dog coated in it.  And I was quite certain that if I dwelled on that fact long enough, I would indeed throw up.  Instead, I tried to put it all out of my mind and just concentrate on putting feet in front of the other all the way to the bathroom.

I lowered Sadie into the tub and set about spraying her off with the shower hose. I avoided her head, though, because that’s usually the trigger that makes her shake and the longer we could avoid that the better for the surrounding room. Pulling the shower curtain as far closed as I could, I then sprayed it off too then growled loudly at her when she did shake. Dots of dark water struck the shower surround and dripped down. Ewww.  Unfortunately, in my haste to get things ready I neglected to actually bring doggie shampoo into the bathroom. What I had brought was doggie conditioner. I couldn’t leave her there to go look for any shampoo, either, or she’d be out of the tub and dripping diluted sewage around the house for sure. So I grabbed the next best thing, a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and started pouring it on her. I gave the bath extra attention to detail and spent a lot of time scrubbing her face, neck and shoulders. Then I rinsed her off and, since I’d brought it in, poured on some conditioner. Finally, I took a sniff of her neck to see if the sewage was gone.  It took my nose a few seconds to process it, but it seemed like the smell was gone. I gave her some extra rinsing to make sure, then toweled her off with three different towels—all of which were popped into a hot washing machine before the dog could finish her triumphant post-shower victory prance around the house.

This accomplished, I cleaned up the bathroom, washed all the sewage drops away and then had a shower myself using the same H&S technique as with Sadie. After I too was dry, I grabbed one of our industrial strength contractor’s trash bags and went outside to deal with the poo pipe. I managed to get it into the bag without actually touching it, then sealed it inside the trash can.

It took a few hours before I risked letting Sadie out again and even then I watched her every move and called her back every time she tried to head around to the front of the house. I had dispatched the pipe, but who knew what sort of drippings she could sniff out and roll in. I only hoped the following day’s adventure would prove fruitful and far less disgusting.

I slept very poorly. I kept having mini panic attacks that once the septic guys dug up the other side of the tank they would find something even more horribly and expensively wrong. What if the reason the pipe had broken within the tank was because that whole end of the tank had collapsed? That would suck.

At the ass crack of dawn, I finally arose to await the arrival of Terrance and his assistant. They’d said they would roll in around 7:30. I made extra coffee in case they needed some and commenced to wait. While I did, it began to snow. We’d had nary a flake since mid-November, which I’ve attributed to the fact that I’d had my snow tires installed in mid-November. But down the flakes were coming now. I wondered if it would mean a halt to the project for the day.

Around 8:30, Terrance and his assistant arrived driving a different truck from the previous day. This one was a smaller and with a flat black metal bed in the back upon which was mounted a bright and shiny new portajohn pump. Hitched to the back of the truck, though, was a long trailer on which was secured a medium sized backhoe. Terrance unloaded it and soon its treads were rolling up my driveway and then across the yard to the septic dig site.

As they set up, I told Terrance the story of Sadie rolling on the pipe. They agreed it was an awful experience, but I know it was far from the worst septic-based thing that had happened to them, so I doubted if they felt any actual sympathy.

With a bit of digging from the backhoe’s scoop, a new hole was opened a few feet to the right from the previous one. Some fine tune digging with a hand shovel later and the tank’s other lid was exposed. This time they hooked the chain for it across the backhoe’s shovel and lifted it off. Inside was a deep dark and relatively empty space, save for some liquid in the bottom. Terrance borrowed my flashlight again and poked his head into the tank to have a look around. He explained that he needed to see which direction the pipe leading out to the drainage field was headed. The interior portion of that pipe was the broken one that Sadie had rolled on, which is why he had to look inside the tank to see where it had been connected before the break. It seemed to be at the southern end of the tank, so that’s where they next began to dig to expose the pipe leading into the yard. As expected, this pipe was also broken and partially collapsed. He said this was likely due to the whole tank settling at some point and sheering off the pipe on the outside, which led to the breaking of the interior part of the pipe as well. It probably still worked to some degree, but not at prime efficiency.

Within half an hour, Terrance and his assistant had dug out around the pipe, sawed through it below the break, installed a new section of thick PVC pipe that ran from within the tank, through the tank wall and connected to the drainage field pipe. We were now back in business.

“Wait about two weeks then pour a whole box of Rid-X down the toilet,” Terrance advised. Then he added, “You still want that tree pulled up?” I explained that the wife did not want the tree removed up at all, but had agreed to it on the grounds that within a couple of months this would no longer be our house and we would not have to be concerned with whether there was a tree imbalance in front of it. Terrance’s assistant hooked their chain around the middle of the tree, the other end to the backhoe and with a smooth application of reverse they pulled it right out of the ground, roots and all. Then it was just a matter of recovering both sides of the freshly repaired tank and smoothing the mud back down in a mostly level fashion. It doesn’t look too bad. Not nearly as bad as the wife expected. The tree itself I sawed all the limbs from and will shortly carve it up for firewood with my chainsaw. I’ll plant grass over the place where it had grown and hopefully by the time the place sells we’ll have something of a yard over there again.

And the next time anyone opens the gates of hell to see my leavings, I won’t have to be there to see it.

 

Copyright © 2012 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin Sweet Merciful Turd on a Shingle Blues

Another home improvement project horribly true tale has been thrust upon me.  However, I just don’t have the energy to follow this rabbit down the hole and attempt to chronicle it. The last such chase did not end nearly as dramatically as I imagine anyone would have wanted.  Instead, you guys can make up your own awful adventure based on the photo below.

Optionally, here are some elements you may choose to incorporate:

  1. There was an incident with a botched front door deadbolt installation for which I was in no way responsible–though I would have, in all likelihood, botched it just as badly had I been there to assist;

  2. the purchase of a replacement door was subsequently required;

  3. we’ve never done a door installation of this magnitude before;

  4. turns out you can’t just replace a steel front door without replacing the jamb and everything, so we’d have to buy a pre-hung door and remove the old one to put it in;

  5. also turns out no one in our area sells a pre-hung steel door set big enough to fit our doorway that doesn’t also look like sparkly wet crap;

  6. a two hour road trip to another town to fetch one that didn’t look like sparkly wet crap was then required;

  7. upon return with the door, it was discovered that the screws for attaching said new door were apparently made of Chinese pot-metal and were of SPECTACULARLY SHITTY QUALITY, for two of them sheered off during installation;

  8. the decorative window in the door was installed improperly at the factory and is, in fact, not precisely parallel to the paneling below it by around an 8th of an inch, a fact that we did not discover until the door was well and truly in place;

  9. said door was manufactured by the Masonite Corporation, who I invite, along with the National Fenestration Rating Council that certified the door, to eat a bag of dicks;

  10. the deadbolt, once installed, turned out to be equally shitty to the quality of the screws and its mechanism did not stand up to even the slightest of pressure in turning the deadbolt, which resulted in a bent and no doubt Chinese pot-metal shaft within it, as well as its subsequent removal and return to the local retailer;

  11. a new, more expensive deadbolt was purchased;

  12. said new deadbolt was returned due to the fact that its purchaser (me) managed to get one with the wrong finish to match the door handle;

  13. said new new deadbolt with the correct finish had to then be returned because its purchaser (me, again) managed to buy one with a keyhole on each side rather than one with a keyhole on the outside and a turning latch on the inside;

  14. the returns clerk at our local Lowes failed to disagree with me when I pointed out to her that clearly I was a moron;

  15. the molding that had previously surrounded the old door is now null and void because the new door jamb does not sit as far in as the old one did, so a gap revealing the drywall beneath is clearly visible on three sides of the door;

  16. as of this writing the door is still not fully reinstalled, though it is at least secured in place and has multiple locks present.

 

Copyright © 2011 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ I’ll have a Bloody Mary with a Twist of Skunk Blues (a Stanky Horribly True Tale)

This past weekend, I was enjoying some Saturday evening TV with the glow of a beer still about me when our dogs began barking oddly at the back door. Through the glass of the door, I could see one of our cats, D.J. Kitty, sitting on the deck railing.  Then the dogs paused in their barking to sniff at the bottom of the door. Immediately, they began whining loudly to get out. I had no clue what was going on, but I got up and opened the door and they nearly turned an ankle trying to get off the back deck and run into the night. Only after they were gone did I take a good breath and picked up the strong odor of skunk.

“Ohhhh shit!” I said.

I could just imagine those dogs, who love to chase after little critters like squirrels and cats, running headlong into a skunk and finding themselves with a face full of spray. It would be horrible and I would have to spend the rest of the knight scrubbing them. Moose is smaller, granted, but his fur is very thick. And Sadie, while thinner of fur has more of it, and fluffy.

The dogs had already run around the corner of the house and were presumably in the driveway. Frantically I began shouting for them to come back while also clapping my hands as loudly as I could. The clapping part is their signal that Pa Means Business and Shits Are Gonna Break Bad if They Don’t Head Back This Very Second. True to their training, they listened and came running back.

“Get in the house!”

Moose ran right in, but Sadie paused at the edge of the yard.

“GET IN THE HOUSE!!!” I shouted. She whined and cast a glance toward the back corner our home’s exterior, as though weighing how much trouble she would be willing to incur by running that way to check for skunks.

“GET! IN! THE! EFFING! HOUSE!!!!!” I screamed. Only I didn’t scream “Effing.” My neighbors must adore me. Reluctantly, Sadie went in the house and I slammed the door after us, crisis averted.

Standing at my firmly shut back door, it was astounding to me how strong the skunk funk already was inside the house. The door had been open for less than 30 seconds, but it smelled an awful lot like skunk. It was so strong, in fact, that I wondered just how close to the house the skunk had been for it to smell so powerful. I could at least count my blessings, though, that the skunk hadn’t managed to spray one of the dogs or the…

…cats.

oh shit.

I looked over at D.J. Kitty, who was munching food from his bowl atop a table in the kitchen. With fear and trepidation did I move over to the table. Double that and you’ll have my feelings about the prospect of leaning over to carefully sniff the cat.

Back when I worked for a public library, I once had to check in a book that had been steeped in what we believe was horse urine. And upon first sniffing that book, I realized to my horror that what I’d thought was merely mud was actually the bladder-based waste-product of a living creature. This is much the same gut reaction that hit me as I sniffed the cat. He didn’t smell exactly like skunk spray, but the cat was definitely covered in some sort of powerful, revolting, animal by-product concentrate. Again, it not exactly skunky, but in the ballpark. I couldn’t think of what else it could be and the skunk in the area was too much of a coincidence for it not to be skunk funk. My best guess was that the skunk odor we’re all familiar with is actually a combination of skunk-funk-concentrate and air.

D.J. hopped down from the table and our dogs took an immediate interest in sniffing him. I knew my nose wasn’t off. He was doused in something awful.

Somehow I had the presence of mind to go and shut the bedroom door. It would be hellish to have to sleep in a room that smelled of skunk and I knew my wife, with her acute sense of smell, would not be able to handle it. I then stripped off my shirt and went to catch the cat, who I hauled to the hall bathroom tub.

An episode of Mythbusters backed up the home remedy of a bath in tomato juice to cut skunk spray, but I didn’t have any at hand. So, instead, I soaked the cat in vet-shampoo and scrubbed him for ten minutes. After rinsing him off, I found he was definitely still stinky, but maybe a bit less so. He was also wet and cranky.

I texted the wife to warn her about the skunk. When she came home, she immediately wrinkled her nose upon walking into the house. I don’t think she was very happy about it, but it wasn’t as if I had let the cat in KNOWING he was coated in skunk spray, so she couldn’t really complain.

“He smells a little better now,” I offered.

The wife suggested we put the cat back outside regardless. He was way too rank to stay in the already stinky house.

“I know it’s probably a long shot,” she began, “but did you happen to close the bedroom door?”

“Yes, I did,” I said, proud of my forethought. She was equally delighted.

The bedroom had indeed remained blissfully free of skunk smell and we kept it closed off and the dogs locked inside of it throughout the night. Eventually, the dogs had to make stinky of their own and whined to go out at 5 in the morning. Upon entering the hallway with them, I was hit with the still potent smell of skunk. Waking up on my return to bed, the wife suggested we turn off the heat and open some windows in the rest of the house. Sure, it was a bit chilly outside, but we’d be pretty snug in the closed off bedroom. And by morning, the house nearly smelled normal. The cat, however, did not.

From the store, I purchased two of the biggest cans of tomato juice they had and took them home, prepared to give D.J. a proper tomato bath. One of the many troubles with giving a cat a tomato juice bath is that despite it being the standard suggestion for skunk spray remedy, no one ever tells you exactly how to accomplish it. Do I fill the bathtub with tomato juice? Do I pour it on his head? Do I need a wire bristle brush? Does he have to soak in it for half an hour? Should I heat it first? I didn’t know. I decided to go with a soak/pour combo to cover bases and I decided to do this in the kitchen sink. I’m not sure why I thought it would be easier than the bathtub, but it was a mistake all around.

Before seizing the cat, I mixed two different kinds of shampoo with half a giant can of tomato juice and stirred it up. (Mythbusters also said soap was good.) Then I put the stopper in the sink drain, put the cat in the sink, rinsed him with the sink’s spray hose and then held him with one hand while pouring the mixture over his back and head with the other. I began massaging it over him, trying to get the cat good and coated, but the soap mixed in was making him slippery. Thinking that he wasn’t coated enough, I then tried to pour the rest of the can of tomato juice over him, but I couldn’t get a good grip on the sides of the can with only one hand and had to awkwardly pull the can over by gripping its top edge, before tipping it over using my forearm and chest, and then pouring it onto the cat.

D.J. Kitty was not having a good time of it, but he didn’t squall too much and didn’t claw me. (Clawing me is what he saves for when I’m actively trying to feed him in the morning.) What he did do, though, was one of those patented Kitty-Full-Body-Shakes, sending blobs of soapy tomato goo flying in all directions. Quickly I realized my error of doing this in the kitchen. I also realized that the puny spray pressure of our sink hose would not be enough to cut the tomato mixture in any sort of ideal time period. Those thoughts, combined with the fact that D.J. suddenly decided he’d had enough and had begun clawing at the edges of the sink to escape, which became a two-hand job to prevent, made me certain that we needed to finish this bath in the bathtub.

I didn’t have a spare hand to grab for a towel, so I just pulled D.J. to my chest,  keeping his claws away from my body, and ran with him to the hall bathroom, blobs of tomato falling to the carpet in a trail behind us.

The bathroom rinsing seemed far less traumatic for him, if no less messy. By the time we were done, it looked like a cat had exploded in there, from the cat-slung smears of tomato-soaked cat hair sticking to the sides of the tub. And while the tomato juice bath had cut the stench quite a bit, it had not taken it all, particularly around his face. I could have done another soak on him, but it wasn’t so bad that he really needed it. Let him keep a stank head for a few days, I thought. Maybe that would teach him a valuable lesson about which woodland animals he’s supposed to be hassling.

 

Copyright © 2011 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ I Am Just An Ordinary Guy, Burnin’ Down The House, Blues Part II: Still Burnin’ After All These Years (a frighteningly familiar churnin’ burnin’ Horribly True Tale)

In a Horribly True Tale I penned nearly ten years ago, I mused that perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to be a home owner due to the occasional lapses in attention to detail I suffer from when it comes to major home appliances.  Said lapses have previously included: leaving for work with a turkey carcass on the stove in the cast iron Dutch oven with the burner beneath it set to medium; and, in a separate incident, turning the wrong burner of the same stove onto high so that all of its heat was applied to a plastic spatula rather than to the tea kettle for which I’d intended it.  However, all previous warning signs to the contrary, I am now a home owner and have been for well over two years without any major incidents.  Oh, sure, we’ve had to make it a family policy that all tea kettles in the house must come equipped with lids that not only howl and whistle, but which also automatically close and cannot be left ajar, preventing me from burning up any more of them due to inattention.  But that’s hardly anything to get excited about, right?  Right?

Today seemed an average day.  I woke, saw the wife off to work, made coffee, ate breakfast, walked our two dogs, annoyed our two cats, assembled a podcast, wrestled with the uploading of the podcast, discovered it was my treacherous firewall causing the FTP clog, fixed that, publicized the upload and then ate some lunch.  I noted while digging in the refrigerator at lunch that we had an awful lot of raw green beans left over from our recent venture into the realm of summer time home-delivery of organic veggies.  One bag of them had already gone bad, but we still had a giant plastic container that I’d spent the better part of an hour filling with beans I’d snapped myself which soon would go bad if they weren’t cooked.  Wouldn’t hurt to make them for supper, I reasoned.

Around 2:30 I decided to head to the gym and to the grocery store.  I was about to leave when my progress was interrupted by a 20 minute phone call from our insurance company.  After taking care of that, I left the dogs and cats in the house and drove across town to the gym.  There I had a semi-vigorous workout for 35 minutes or so, checked the bulletin board on the way out for any new cool happenings about town, ran into our friend Tarek in the parking lot and talked to him for a couple of minutes before leisurely driving over a few blocks to Kroger.  There I strolled into the building through the exterior set of automatic doors, chose a shopping cart and then went through the interior set of automatic doors and began shopping for more produce.  Something tickled in my mind at that thought, but I put it aside as I’d found some Asian pears that looked tasty, followed shortly by some avocados.  A minute later, I was swinging my cart back toward the vegetables proper when my eyes fixed upon a bin of green beans and the tickling in my mind transformed into a shudder of horror.

What I’ve neglected to mention until this point in the narrative is that earlier in the day—more precisely, between the time I had decided to go to the gym and the time the insurance company had phoned—I’d put all of the green beans from the plastic container into the largest of our butt-ass expensive Pampered Chef pots (the very ones my wife had hosted a Pampered Chef party in order to get a high enough discount on them to justify their expense) and put them on the stove where I planned for them to simmer to perfection while I was out on errands.  However, after giving them only a few minutes on the burner’s #2 setting, I’d gone back and turned the dial up to high so the beans would start to boil and get a head start on the cooking process.  My plan had been to turn them back down to simmer after they hit a boil.  And even as I’d turned the knob to high, I had thought to myself that I should be very careful to remember that I’d turned the beans to HIGH, because it would be a horrible tragedy if I were to run off to the gym with the beans on high and burned down the house as a result.  Then the phone had rung and 20 minutes of retirement talk and Simple IRA explanation ensued, after which I had practically bolted from the house leaving all the animals trapped inside behind me.  All of this flashed through my mind over the course of one second, there in the vegetable aisle of Kroger.

Abandoning my shopping cart where it stood, I hurled the peaches and avocadoes in the direction of their displays, already shifting my ass into proper hauling gear as I headed toward the automatic doors.  I then nearly slammed into said doors, which failed to automatically open for me and played a loud klaxon alarm as punishment for my attempt to egress through them.  Apparently once you got into Kroger, you could not get out via that door.

“OH, GODDAMMIT!” I screamed across the produce section.  I didn’t have time to argue with the doors, though.  I ran between the nearby service desk and the checkout lanes and then through the other set of automatic doors Kroger has deemed as their preferred exit.

In the parking lot, as I ran toward my car, I was already trying to determine the probability that my house and pets were now in flames.  I’d only been gone for around 45 minutes, so I thought it unlikely that the house had ignited yet.  Granted, many house fires start in mere seconds, but the one on the stove was at least contained within an expensive and high-quality stew pot, lid secured atop it, situated beneath a stainless steel oven hood.  There had probably been enough time for the broth and water to have cooked off, leaving only the moisture in the beans to prevent actual combustion.  If I could get home as quickly as possible, I might only have a smoky house and freaked out pets to deal with.

The problem with exiting the parking lot of Kroger in Princeton, WV, is that while there are three exits for the lot none of them are ideal for a quick departure.  The easternmost exit is probably the least used and therefore the quickest, but it isn’t so much an exit as a connection to the speed-bump strewn shopping center next door.  It also puts you at the furthest distance from the road leading to the highway I needed to take in order to get home, which was to the southwest.  The most direct route to the highway, the westernmost exit, was no good either, though, because it always has heavy traffic pouring by it from the north and south, but with really shitty sight lines, making it extremely difficult to turn left there.  I opted instead to take the northernmost exit, which has just as much traffic as the western exit, but with better sight lines and the notable advantage of having a chicken lane.  Unfortunately, it’s also the exit that every slow-of-ass human being tries to use and they always turn left.  Sure enough, as I arrived at that exit there were already two vehicles ahead of me, intent on turning left but unwilling to actually go when given clear opportunities to do so.

A momentary digression on the topic of going:  I’ve been a licensed driver for over 23 years now and in that time I have come to the conclusion that ours would be a far better world if all drivers of all vehicle-equipped nations could find it in their hearts to simply go.  This is not to say there is not a time and place for caution behind the wheel, but, for the vast majority of any driver’s time, going is the policy preferable to me, especially when I’m the guy behind the person who isn’t going or am otherwise in a circumstance where I am forced to rely upon them to go in order that I may also go.  I fully realize that there are plenty of allegedly valid reasons as to why people do not go as they should, such as red lights, or the desire not to violate posted speed limits, or two lanes of busy cross traffic at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.  These excuses matter not one whit to me when it comes to my desire for other drivers to go.  And regardless of whether or not the driver in question can go, I make my feelings known by screaming the word “GO!!!!” at full volume from the safety of the interior of my vehicle.  It is the single word that I have screamed the most during my lifetime and it is my behavior to do so on any given average day.  So imagine, if you will, the rending of vocal cords that occurred as I sat behind the two cars at this northernmost Kroger entrance/exit, with my house and pets going up in smoke in my imagination.

After nearly a minute of impotent screaming, the front car was able to escape from the parking lot, leaving behind the small, primer-colored pickup truck in front of me driven by a young woman whose aspect in her rear view mirror suggested her to be maybe 20 years old.  Her passenger in the truck cab looked to be another similarly aged girl.  In the bed of the truck was a teenaged boy wearing a ball-cap and looking mighty dissatisfied with his lot in life.  This driver also refused to go.  However, she not only refused to go in the long intervals of heavy traffic during which she could not go, but also during the two or three occasions when there were large enough gaps in the traffic in which she conceivably could have gone had she but the skill to do so.  At least three minutes passed during which my mental image of my pets aflame because of this girl blocking my path caused my blood pressure to spike.  I slammed my fists on the steering wheel and wailed “GOOOOOOO!!!!”  Then, around the start of the fourth minute, both lanes of traffic magically cleared and the girl had no remaining obstacles to her path forward for a nearly a quarter mile in each directionAnd yet there she sat, her head swiveling back and forth, regarding both of the clear lanes of non-traffic, her foot firmly on the brake.  Never mind that her situational luck would not hold for very long and soon traffic signals would turn green and hellish road congestion would again be unleashed upon the land, she remained stationary as though she fully expected Doc Brown and the DeLorean to slam through the space-time continuum and cut her off.  I laid on my horn, causing the kid in the back to jump, and again screamed “GOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”  The girl stomped the gas, then immediately stomped the brakes, causing the kid in the back to first fall forward and then suddenly backward, smacking his head into the back of the truck cab.  He looked pissed, but didn’t actively climb out to come beat me about the face and neck, nor did he even make eye contact with me.  He just rubbed his head while the driver moved forward not even an inch.  I don’t know if she was trying to punish me for daring to impugn her driving ability or if she just couldn’t get it into first gear, but by the time she was able to move again the traffic flow had resumed before us and it was another half minute before enough of a gap opened up for her to escape—though not long enough for me to.  A minute later, I caught a break and I floored it all the way to the westernmost traffic light where I managed to turn left in a narrow and perhaps unadvisable window of space.  I then sped toward the next traffic light that led onto highway 460, but was forced to stop a good 200 yards from it when I saw the enormous line of cars that were waiting to turn left onto the highway there.  I screamed and raged and pounded the steering wheel some more, all because I’ve found myself in similar lines at that light before and knew that it would be at least a ten minute wait to get out.  People in huge lines at that like traditionally do not go, and drag ass in moving at all, allowing the light to cycle back to red before anyone can move more than two car lengths forward.  The right-turn lane, however, was practically wide open and had a green arrow.  I roared past the slow asses, turned right and then tore down the highway in search of the first police median turnaround I could find.  There weren’t any, so it was a good two miles before I reached the next intersection where I was able to whip a U-turn and floor it back the way I’d come.  The light near Kroger was kind to me, this time, and I zoomed perpendicular to the line of non-going slow-asses there who I’m pretty sure hadn’t moved an inch since I’d passed them a minute earlier

Down the highway I roared, easily doing 70 in a 55.  My plan, if pulled over for speeding, was to inform the officer that he was welcome to give me as many tickets for speeding and reckless endangerment as he liked, but he was going to have to give them to me in the driveway of my potentially burning house because I wasn’t going to hang around.

The next four traffic lights were not kind.  In fact, the first of them contained a stalled vehicle that was blocking one of the lanes—MY LANE!!!—further gumming up traffic.  The color red, more commie slow-asses and Grampy Patrol members bedeviled me on my way through the next three lights, after which I finally arrived at the road leading to my neighborhood.  I traversed its mile-long, serpentine length at breakneck speed, the lack of smoke above the trees providing me some hope.

As I reached my driveway, the house appeared intact and I could see no smoke through the windows.  As I exited the car, however, I could definitely smell something odd in the air.  I bounded around the back of the house and threw open the back door.  Flames did not explode into my face, Backdraft style.  And while the interior of my house was definitely smoky, it was not exactly floor-to-ceiling smoky.

Our youngest dog, Moose, was running through the kitchen looking very concerned.  From the front dining room of the house I heard our other dog Sadie barking.  Then they both whipped past me and out into fresh air.

I turned off the burner of the stove, the stench of charred beans coming from the pot atop the burner.  The cooking surface around the pot was covered in a ring of brackish colored crust.  There were scorched-on spill stains along the sides of the Pampered Chef pot, made when the liquid contents had boiled over. Its clear glass lid was tinted brown and sounded as if it were on the verge of exploding from the heat coursing through its metal frame.  Through its now tinted surface I could see that the pot no longer contained any liquid and the formerly impressive pile of beans within were now basically a thin layer of charcoal around an inch in height from the bottom of the pot.

After I’d opened all the windows and doors in the house, it occurred to me that the one thing missing from all this was the blare of our smoke detector in the hallway immediately outside our bedroom.  There was smoke in our bedroom, which would have had to have wafted past the detector on the way into the room, so I didn’t know what the detector’s excuse was for remaining silent.  I poked its test button with a stick and it flared to life, spewing high pitched alarm beeps and then shouting “FIRE!  FIRE!” followed by “WARNING!  CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTED!”  Turns out, this is just what it always does when the test button is pressed.  Otherwise, this Kidde Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector appeared to be very late to the party.

The dogs watched as I hauled the pot of bean-char outside and set it on a patch of dirt.  They looked more than a little worried, so I told them they were good dogs, gave them dog hugs and apologized profusely for leaving them in the house with a burning pot of beans.  After giving the pot an hour to cool, I dumped the remains of the beans into the compost bin and washed out the pot.  The interior bottom of it had lost much of its nonstick surface and is likely ruined.  As pricey as the pot was, I’d rather buy a new one than a new house.

By the time the wife arrived home, several hours later, I’d put candles out in all the rooms and tried to make the place smell as good as it could under the circumstances.  She, to say the least, was not happy about the beans or her Pampered Chef pot.  Mostly, though, she was glad that the house and its residents were all okay.  We joked to the dogs for the rest of the evening about how their Pa had tried to kill them and, likely, would again in the future.

Even with all the windows open, it took two days for most of the smoke smell to dissipate and now, several days later, we still get a whiff of it when opening up closets and cabinets that had since remained closed.  The ghost of burned beans past.

 

 

Copyright © 2010 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ I Can’t Get into Things Without My Magic Keys of Satisfaction Blues (a horribly yet magically true tale)

I’ve had my Subaru Forester since February and have enjoyed it quite a bit—particularly its allowing-me-to-traverse-my-icy-hilly-blind-curve-filled-neighborhood-in-the-winter feature that my previous vehicle did not possess. It’s a nice roomy car that can haul lots of stuff, such as heavy, enormous dogs and is plenty comfy. It also came factory-equipped with an Oh Shit-handle above the driver’s side door, which is an innovation that gives me far more comfort than any unseen airbag ever could.  One of the only drawbacks to my ownership of it, though, is that until recently I have only had one key for it.

When we purchased this previously-driven vehicle in February, we were given two key fobs and one actual key. We were told at the time that the previous owners of the car had not returned both of the keys, but were assured by our salesman—let’s call him Stan—that he would be in touch with the previous owners soon and they would return the second key within a very short period of time. Having two keys for our vehicles is pretty important in my family, as I’m married to a kind and wonderful lady who has been known on more than one occasion to lock herself out of her own vehicle. The two key fobs would certainly help in unlocking the car in such a time of need, but the wife doesn’t even carry her own fob, let alone be willing to carry mine. Hell, I only started carrying mine after a series of embarrassing incidents involving the Subaru’s tendency to blast the horn in alarm whenever the door is unlocked using the actual key alone. There is a way to tell it to stop doing that, but you have to tell it every single time and I can never remember the steps, so I just carry the fob.

Jump ahead to late April. We happened to be driving by the dealership, which prompted the wife to inquire if her key had ever arrived. It had not, so we stopped and I went in to ask Stan about it. I had to reintroduce myself and explain the lack of a second key thing. At the time, though, he was in the middle of a sale and asked if I could call him back about it some other time. He said was sure he had it somewhere.

Jump ahead to June. I never heard from Stan, nor did I call him back as requested, mostly because I sensed that there was no way he actually had my other key and that getting a new one would be the equivalent in difficulty to going on a magical quest akin to the Lord of the Rings.  Eventually, though, the topic of the key came up again when I had to borrow the wife’s car to haul a larger amount of stuff than my car could handle and we again had to trade keys. I decided it was time to get this key quest straightened out.

I returned to the dealership one afternoon, found Stan, reintroduced myself and told him I was still in need of the second key. He wasn’t in the middle of a sale this time, but another salesperson had commandeered his office for a sale of their own, so he couldn’t get to his desk, where he assured me the key was located.  He asked if I could return later in the day.

“Well, either today or tomorrow,” I offered.

It was at this point that Stan should have piped up to alert me to the fact that the following day was his day off and that he would not be there. Stan, however, is a salesman and therefore sends off salesguy vibes.  They reminded me of the vibes I used to detect from a particularly weaselly ad sales guy I once used to work with in my radio days, whose nickname was, in fact, The Weasel. This is not to say that I think Stan is necessarily a weasel (NOD), but like many of his erminey ilk he defaults to behavior designed not to mess up a potential sale, such as never telling people things they might not want to hear like I’m going to be gone on my day off.  Clearly, he preferred to instead have me return two days later pissed off.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty weaselly behavior, so let’s put another checkmark on the Weasel Chart for Stan.

So, after returning on his day off to find Stan absent and his even more openly weasel-like fellow salesman unwilling to help me for fear of screwing up something Stan might conceivably have in the works, I returned again two days later. I was determined that while I would not be openly hostile, I would also do nothing to disguise my annoyance with everyone involved.

Through the window, I could see that Stan saw me coming and perhaps even noted my expression, for he immediately put down his slice of pizza and ran to riffle in his desk drawers before I could even open the door.  Spouting apologies for not having begun this search weeks before, he began pulling fistfuls of key fobs out of the desk in his search, looked in all the drawers, looked in his filing cabinet, and made more nervous small talk. Failing to find any Subaru keys, he apologized again and then disappeared into the depths of this particular building of the dealership complex for a full ten minutes, leaving me to watch his more weaselly-looking fellow sales guy slink around in an attempt to look busy.

Eventually Stan returned to announce that he’d spoken with someone with technical skills and they were even then printing instructions on how to program a “new one” for me.  These modern car keys sounded complicated.

Soon enough, another fellow came out, instructions in hand and he and Stan followed me out to my car. At the technician’s request, I handed him my keys and he had a seat behind my steering wheel. He was there for under a minute when he emerged, holding up my keys by the fob with one hand and a second fob in the other. The second fob was our extra fob that my wife had left in the car while driving it days before.

“Does this one work?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And yours works?” he asked, dangling my keys from their fob.

“Yeah.”

“Then why do you need another one?”

Inwardly I smiled.

“I don’t,” I said. “We already have two key fobs. What we don’t have are two actual keys.”

The technician looked confused for a moment. “You don’t have two keys?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “That’s why I’ve been coming in here for the past several days asking for a second key.”

Wow that was a massively satisfying thing to be able to say. In fact, it was worth all the hassle so far just to be able to say it in a perfectly pitched tone of calm, polite, righteous indignation.

The technician turned a cold eye in Stan’s direction then stalked off toward the building, wadding up his instruction pages and pitching them at the nearest trash can upon entry. Stan looked rather embarrassed, standing there in the illumination from my blazing self-satisfaction.

“I feel like a huge idiot,” he said.

I said not a word to dissuade him of this notion.

Stan leaped into action to right his wrong. He piled into a golf cart and asked me to follow him down to another of the buildings in the complex. I was then led on a merry chase from building to building, eventually just joining Stan in the golf cart to save time. At each stop, Stan was treated to having employee after employee explain that he was in the wrong department and would need to go talk to so and so over in such and such other department. Half an hour later I was still waiting for a key, but was at least standing in line in the correct department with the correct employee, who had only moments before sent Stan on yet another trek to locate a blank key for him to cut.

Again, the magical quest would have been easier.  Turned out, though, mine was not yet completed.

Upon Stan’s return with the blank, he announced that he was going to head back up to his own building, since I didn’t really need him there for the rest of the process. At first I was tempted to explain to him that I’d already invested far more of my afternoon—nay, my MONTH—in this little venture, all of which was due to his inability to follow up on assurances he’d made to us four months prior, and that until I had a working key in my hand he was just going to have to suck it up and waste some of his time, in addition to wasting mine. I almost said that. However, I’d long since decided that I didn’t really like Stan very much, nor did I care to listen to any more of his uncomfortable attempts at small talk, which I sensed would almost certainly soon turn to sports, a topic in which I’m not only uninterested but also illiterate.  I told him to begone and he vanished in a puff of weasel-tinged brimstone.

The guy with the key-cutter soon produced a replica key for me, but explained that it wouldn’t actually work with my car until they cast a few spells on the magic chip embedded in it.  The wizard for this was located in one of the previous departments we’d visited, back up the hill.  I climbed into my car and tested this new key in the ignition.  As was foretold, only my original key would start my vehicle.

I made the journey back up the hill to what I believed to be the wizard’s lair, only to be told that the wizard in question, who actually worked next door, had been sent on a side-quest and would be back in a sec. They advised me to go wait in the sun by the wizard’s mystical garage bay. So I waited. And I waited. After ten minutes and half a sunburn, I went back inside to inquire if the wizard had been alerted to my presence.

“He’ll be back in just a minute, sir,” the man there said.

I returned to the garage to find that the sorcerer’s apprentice had appeared and was working on another car. He asked who I was waiting for. I told him the wizard’s name.

“Jimmy,” I said.

The apprentice nodded, but said that the Wizard Jimmy’s quest had involved taking a vehicle to one of the dealership’s other branches. He would, the apprentice assured me, be back. I did the math in my head, though, and knew that the branch in question was a good ten miles away. What choice did I have, though? I waited.

Eventually, the Wizard Jimmy did appear.  The skin of his arms, baked dark by the blazing sun above, was marked with black and arcane symbols no doubt denoting his elevated status among his wizardy brethren.  He was also the least weaselly person I’d met the entire day. I found him instantly likable even beyond the fact that he held the power to set me free from my now hour plus trial.

The Wizard Jimmy asked what wish he could grant me. I gave him both my magic key and my somewhat less magic key.  He then asked me to search my heart to determine whether I truly only desired two keys, or if perhaps I might one day want more.  For once his arcane arts were applied to them, no more keys could ever be produced. I told him I was true of heart in my desire for only the two.  The Wizard Jimmy then produced a flat brown creature—his familiar, I’m sure—and inserted my keys into its orifices. It squeaked as he massaged the rows of scales upon its back. A few moments later, he removed my keys from it and passed them into my grateful hands with a hearty, “There you go, big guy.”

I climbed into my vehicle and found that both of the keys worked as promised. I waved to the wizard and then sped from the parking lot, not even bothering to return to the office of the wizard’s supervisor for fear he would present me with a bill for all their sorcery and this would be a situation in which I would be unable to restrain myself from calling down furious wrath upon one and all. So far, they haven’t called to tell me otherwise, though one of their minions did leave a message asking if my experience was satisfactory. I have yet to phone her back.

 

Copyright © 2010 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Fun With Chase Bank Blues

We love Chase Bank. Sure, they’re a multinational conglomerate that’s probably directly or indirectly responsible for much of the world’s misery and pain, but they’ve been fairly kind to us. More accurately, they’ve been fairly kind to us as compared with other such thieving, conniving, misery-spreading credit card organizations which shall remain nameless. (*COUGH*COUGH*SHITIBANK*COUGH*)

We’ve had a Chase Platinum Mastercard for a couple of years now. (“Ooooooh, ahhhhhh!”)  I’m sure Chase wanted us to see it as some kind of status symbol when they offered it, but I’m pretty sure anyone who hasn’t recently declared bankruptcy probably has one of these in their couch cushions somewhere. When we lived in Charlotte, back before we were poor college students and had a decent income, we used to pay all of our bills with the card, then pay it off, on time, every month just to cheese off Chase.  As revenge, they upped our credit limit in the hope we’d start spending more frivolously.

That all sounds pretty swell, but the thing we really like about Chase Bank is not that they gave us the Chase Platinum Mastercard but that they continue trying to give us more and more Chase Platinum Mastercards despite the fact that we already have one.  It’s now gotten to the point that nearly one out of five calls to our house is a Chase representative offering us a great deal on a Platinum Mastercard from them. I’ve heard Ashley repeatedly explain to Chase’s tele-minions that we don’t need their card because we have one already and how can they not already know this since they’re the company that gave it to us in the first place. They usually scratch their heads and resolve that we’re lying to them because they keep calling back.

Today it was my turn.

*RING*

ME:  Hello.

TELE-MINION:  Hello, my name is Barbara. May I please speak with Ashley Fritzuuii… Fruitziiuce… Frizzutiuezs…?

 ME:  Fritzius?

 TELE-MINION:  Yes.

 ME:  I’m sorry, Barbara, but she’s not here right now.

 TELE-MINION:  Very well, sir. I’ll call back another time.

ME:  May I ask what this is regarding?

 TELE-MINION:  I’m with Chase Bank.

 ME:  Ah. Would this be a credit card offer?

 TELE-MINION: (Cautiously)  Why, yes. It is.

 ME:  Ah. Would this be a credit card offer for a Chase Platinum Mastercard?

 TELE-MINION:  (Surprised)  Why, yes. It is.

 ME:  (Adopting best John Cleese circa Holy Grail French accent)  We already got one. Is ver’ nice’a!

After Barbara the tele-minion stopped laughing (which just goes to show even evil minions get Python references) she was able to look in the case history of our call-center telemarketing file and see that the last several calls to us were met with wild claims of our already having the card.  Didn’t seem to matter because, as Barbara explained, all previous tele-minions had checked the Attempt Later box on their call-center screens, passing our hot potato on to the next rube. Barbara promised to check the Already Got One box instead, so our hot potato should cease to be an issue.  (This is not the first time we’ve been told this, I might add.)

Being a devious soul, though, it seems to me that this series of calls demonstrates a flaw in the tele-minion/potential customer relationship.  That flaw is: They can’t really know if I’m lying.  Sure, I haven’t lied to them yet, but that hasn’t done me any good at all. They still call back despite my truthful proclamations that I cannot use what they’re offering because I already have it.

And in this we find a new fun way to play with the minds of the various other multinational, misery-spewing conglomerates of the world. I think it should become my personal policy that whenever a tele-minion of any sort phones I should just tell them I already have whatever it is they’re trying to sell and that I’m really steamed about all the calls I keep getting about it and now wish to cancel my order or service. Of course, they won’t be able to find an order to cancel or an account to close or a history of either, leaving me plenty of room to get royally angry about their incompetence. They’ll have to get their supervisor on the line who won’t be able to figure anything out any better.  He’ll call his superior in (who, as middle management, traditionally has even less idea what’s going on than the folks on the floor–I know, I used to work for Onstar.)  He’ll call the tech-department, who also won’t be able to figure out what’s going on and may be more likely to know that I’m lying, but no one believes the techies anyway so it won’t matter.  Eventually, they’ll have no choice but to offer me lots of money for my all my trouble. Then a few days later, they’ll be calling again to start the vicious circle once again.

I have way too much time on my hands, don’t I?

Copyright © 2009 Eric Fritzius

 

The Talkin’ Actual Fantasy Telephone Conversations Not Actually Heard in My House Blues (a Horribly Untrue Tale)

*RING*

ME— Hello?

(Silence)

ME— Hello?

(*SILENCE*)
(*CLICK*)

MICHAEL— Hello?

(*SILENCE*)

ME— Helloooo?

MICHAEL— Hello. Mr. Fritz…  Fritzi…. Frietz…. Fritsieus?

ME— Yes?

MICHAEL— Hi, my name is Michael and I work for the State Troopers’ Association. As you may know, our fall fund drive is approaching and it’s very import that we…

ME— (Rudely interrupting) Here’s where I have to stop you, Michael. See, I’ve already had this conversation with about four of you guys in the past four months and I can already tell you exactly how this is going to go down.

MICHAEL— Sir, I…

ME— No, no. Let me finish, Michael. Cause I’m pretty good at this. See, Michael, had I allowed this call to continue, uninterrupted, what would have happened is as follows: You would have continued speaking, going into a long-winded spiel about how the Troopers’ Association needs money and is in the process of gearing up for their annual fund drive and were hoping to find people willing to donate funds to that drive. However, Michael, you would have delivered this appeal in such a rapid-fire burst of speech that I would not have been able to get a word in edgewise without rudely interrupting you.  In order not to seem rude, I would then have allowed you blow on for nearly a minute until you came to the end of the massive paragraph printed on the card in front of you. At that point, you would have issued an inquiry such as, “Can we count on you for $50?” or “How much can we count on you for?”  You might even use a bold statement such as “I can put you down for $50.”  Whichever you used, the goal of your endgame, as we both know, would be to get me to part with as much money as possible, with continued negotiations downward should I not wish to give the full $50. At this point, Michael, you would have at last paused to allow me to speak, an opportunity I would then take in order to make the point I would have preferred to have made far earlier; which is this: beyond the repeated annoying phone calls, I have nothing against the Troopers’ Association, nor many of the other organizations who call seeking my money; I do, however, have a hard and fast rule in my household, which is that I accept absolutely no telephone solicitation of any kind. The only exception to this rule is if that solicitation is coming directly from representatives of my telephone company, my long-distance service or a competing long-distance service, and these are only entertained if those companies are actively looking to save me money over my present services. Even then, it’s really really dicey.  To date, not one of them has succeeded.

MICHAEL— Sir, I can assure you that I’m not soli…

ME— At that point in our hypothetical conversation, Michael, you would have rudely interrupted me to assure me that you were not actually soliciting money over the telephone at all, and what you had only intended to do was to offer to send me material in the mail which I might look over and then make a donation of an amount of my choosing, say $50. You would then have further assured me, as your brethren have many times before, that this was in no way telephone solicitation. I would then have been forced to read to you the definition of solicitation out of my handy American Heritage Dictionary; which is, Michael: 1) To seek to obtain by persuasion, entreaty, or formal application; or 2) To petition persistently. Both of these would have fit our particular conversation like chipped beef gravy on a biscuit.

MICHAEL— But, sir, I…

ME— And it is at that point in our conversation, Michael, that you would either have attempted a second dash against the defensive barriers of the definition of solicitation, or—more likely—hung up the phone without another word, or—even more likely—hung up the phone while uttering the word “asshole” slightly over your breath. (Pause) So, Michael… Why don’t we save ourselves some time, here, and you can just go ahead and pick one of those options now.

MICHAEL— (*CLICK*)

ME— Click indeed, Michael. Click, indeed.

Copyright © 2009 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Christmas Cracker Dog, Cheap New Oven, Erma Bombeck Blues

On our way out of town for Christmas with the in-laws, we stopped to buy a stove and nearly had to kill our dog.

Let me back up.

We’ve been in the market for a new stove since nearly the day we moved into the new house. It’s not that our existing stove is malfunctioning entirely, but it is very ugly and about 20 years old and has burners that are a bit cockeyed. The oven itself only about half works and pretty much ruined our wildly expensive-to-make holiday cheesecake. This, and a very cheap deal we found on a new GE stove at Sears, prompted us to finally commit to a new stove as a family Christmas gift to ourselves.

The particular stove we found was a floor model that had been marked down $300 for closeout before we arrived, but which a floor manager told us was actually $300 cheaper than the listed cheap price because it was overdue to be marked down yet again. We wanted to measure our existing space to make sure it would fit, so the manager gave us a markdown guarantee slip, said he wouldn’t make the markdown until Friday and told us they would open again at 7 a.m. on that day. The wife, who worked for years as a retail manager, asked if he would get a commission. He said he was salaried, but recommended we see one of his sales people called Pam, who he said would be there on Friday. Super.

On Friday morning at 7 a.m., we left the house with a car packed for our road trip to the in-laws, including Sadie dog, who snoozed on her pillow in the back of the Element. Our plan was to hit the mall, buy the stove, arrange for delivery the following week, hit Biscuit World and then hit the road.

We parked in the lot outside of Sears. Before I had even unfastened my seatbelt, the wife opened her door and had started to get out when I saw Sadie barrel between the front bucket seats from the back of the car and make a break for the semi-blocked door.

“Watchoutwatchoutwatchoutwatchout!” I screamed. The wife, not realizing which side of her Sadie was coming from, turned the wrong way and let the dog slip out behind her.  I lunged to grab for a dog leg, but my seatbelt caught me and Sadie was out the door and free. This was one of my worst nightmares as far as the dog was concerned. If she gets loose at the house, it’s no big deal. We’re out in the woods, what’s she really gonna hurt? In an open parking lot, with plenty of space to run away from us and other vehicles driving around, it’s another matter.

We tried to stay calm, in the hope we could get her back in the car with little fuss. Sadie knew better, though, and was off to the races in her usual game of keepaway from us.  She went full on cracker dog, dashing through the parking lot, gleefully grinning as we chased her to and fro.  This went on for some minutes. Making matters worse, the weather–which, back at the house, had been a little cool but nothing a hoody couldn’t handle–suddenly turned misty, rainy and very cold.

The wife then had the idea of busting out the Pupperonis in an effort to lure her back, since Sadie cannot resist their siren call.  This effort had very mixed results, though.  We tore off bits of Pupperoni and dropped them on the ground to lure Sadie into grabbing range, but she was far faster than we were and snatched them up and vanished before we could even lunge.

After a close call when we nearly were able to grab her tail, I said, “Toss one in between us,” hoping this would let at least one of us have a chance to get her. The coconut *KLONK* sound our heads made as they collided when we both lunged at the same time was no doubt comical. Even we had to laugh, through the pain.

All further attempts at Pupperoni luring were futile. Sadie didn’t care and, furthermore, decided to run very far away from us to head off temptation.

“Dammit, Sadie, you get back here!” I screamed.

“She’d not going to come to you screaming,” the wife hissed at me.

Other early morning shoppers arrived, some of whom saw us bonk heads. Sadie noticed them and rushed toward them, barking furiously.

“No, Sadie, NO! You stop that RIGHT NOW!” the wife screamed.

Mostly the arriving customers ignored her. One little old man, however, asked, “Is it going to bite me?” as Sadie followed him toward the mall, practically snarling.

“No, she’s harmless. Just loud,” we shouted, as she continued to chase him at slow speed.  Great, now we were menacing the elderly.

Sadie thwarted us at every turn, running close and then dashing away, loving every second of it.  What a great game! 

Determined to outsmart her, we decided to use the geography to our advantage, moving ourselves closer to the mall so that we at least had the exterior wall to serve as a corral.  For a second, we almost had her cornered in some shrubbery, but she zipped between us and was gone again. The shrubs were near one of Sears’ lesser entrances, however, and this gave the wife an idea.

As with most mall store exterior entrances, Sears had a glass box breezeway with two sets of double doors to go through.  The wife opened the outer set and gestured for Sadie to go in. The dog started to, then paused, thought about it, and was gone again. 

“Come on,” I said in what I hoped was a cheerful tone, stepping through the doors myself. The wife followed and we closed the outer doors behind us.  No doubt fearing she was about to be left, Sadie ran over and nosed at the door until we opened it for her.  In she went and was trapped.  I pulled the leash from my pocket, managed to keep from strangling the dog with it and we returned her to the car and went back in for our oven.

Our adventure of annoyance, however, was only just beginning.

Just as we were hoping, the oven we had been looking at was still on the floor and, true to the floor manager’s word, had not been marked down. After a few minutes of final discussion, we started to look around for a salesperson. After a short search, we found the lone salesperson for Appliances. At first glance, she appeared to be busy helping two other customers, so my wife stood by to wait her turn while I continued to browse around. However, from what I could soon hear of the saleslady’s conversation with the man and wife customers, she wasn’t so much helping them with any sales or product-related business as having a long chat with them. Her tone and manner suggested she was familiar with the couple, possibly even friends with them. And from what I gathered over the course of the five minutes that followed, the gentleman customer had recently taken a job driving a school bus, for the saleslady was telling him horror stories of a time when she had done so as well.

“They told me `you just have to feel for the road,'” she said, regarding driving in thick snow, up treacherous, narrow, one-lane mountain roads.

Her anecdote continued as minutes crawled by and I knew that as annoyed as I was starting to get listening to it from afar, my wife was probably about to snatch someone bald-headed from her position within eyesight of the storyteller. I went over to help feel her pain and add to our collective waiting presence. Didn’t help. While the saleslady did in fact glance in our direction and could see that we were waiting to be helped, she went right on with her story, perhaps as though we had heard a snip of what she was saying and were interested enough to come join the audience.

Now, I’m not saying her story wasn’t interesting and I understand the need for a salesperson to be personable with customers in a department full of large ticket items she would presumably earn a commission in the sale thereof. However, to spend the amount of time she was spending on a non-sales related conversation while other potential customers were standing impatiently nearby was inappropriate to say the least.

Seeing no end in sight, we left the aisle and went to look for another salesperson who might like our business. At 7:30 in the morning, even on After Christmas Black Friday, though, they seemed thin on the ground. So we took our little price slip to the Lawn & Garden dept and tried to seek help there. Lawn & Garden, who had what appeared to be four employees on hand, literally sitting in chairs, said they were forbidden from checking out materials from the appliance side. They suggested we return to Appliances and wait for the saleslady. This we did, resuming our place in line at storytelling central.

The saleslady looked up at us momentarily, but again didn’t pause her narrative concerning the kind of guard-railless roads she’d had to maneuver her child-loaded bus along. In what world does it make any sense for her to be spending this much time ignoring customers? I thought perhaps she was just passing the time waiting for some vital piece of information to be delivered regarding a pending sale with the couple at hand. Nope. Dude had a bag and a receipt already. Even if he hadn’t, though, she could have at least told us what the situation was.

My ire grew hotter. Adding to this, I was still pissed off about the dog and knew things wouldn’t be pretty if I got into it with the saleslady. But I also didn’t want to raise hell with someone who could potentially derail our $600 savings. (Plus, if anyone was going to show their ass, I knew it should be the wife, who is always cool and scalpel sharp when in such confrontations.) Passive-aggressive soul that I am, I returned to the Lawn & Garden desk.

“Excuse me, but is there anyone else in Appliances that can help us?” I asked.

“No, I’m sorry,” Lawn & Garden said. “Is there no one over there?”

“No, the saleslady’s over there, but is telling some other customers a very long story that doesn’t involve Sears.”

“Well, what did she say to you?”

“Nothing. She’s not paying us any attention and we’ve been standing right in front of her for ten minutes,” I said.

Lawn & Garden phoned a manager. The Appliances lady was still telling her story when the manager arrived, more minutes later. We didn’t mention the trouble to the manager, but directed her to the stove we wanted. We gave her our little price-drop slip and explained we were told to ask for Pam.

“Pam’s not here yet,” the manager said. Ah, good. At least Pam wasn’t the storyteller.

The manager efficiently led us to a register and began ringing up our sale. A little way into the process, there came a question about whether or not we needed a power cable for our new stove. We were pretty sure we did, but the manager said she needed to go over and ask “Erma Bombeck” to be sure. She walked across the aisle, interrupted the ongoing narrative and asked.

“Oh, yeah, they’ll need a cable,” we heard Erma say. “Tell them I’ll be right over to help them in just a second.”

I would like to note that this last sentence was uttered nearly a full eight minutes after the manager became involved, making this nearly half an hour into our quick in-out visit. At this point, we were determined that if anyone was going to get a commission on our sale, it would NOT be Erma. The manager seemed to feel the same, for she called back, “No, I’ve got it.”

After our delivery day was arranged and our transaction completed, Pam arrived.

“Oh, I wish you’d gotten here earlier,” the manager told her. She then explained to Pam that we’d been asking for her. Then, with a gleam in her eye, the manager told Pam to void out our completed sale and ring us up again, allowing Pam to get the commission. As determined to get out as we had been, we told them, yes, please, do ring us up under Pam’s name, cause we wanted there to be no change that Erma would get the commission by default, being the only salesperson on duty. Turns out the manager had rung up our sale under her own name. While she was explaining this to us, Erma stepped over. Everyone got silent for a second, which I guess must have made Erma suspicious, because she began looking over Pam’s shoulder as she went back through the process of ringing us up. The manager saw this and told Erma point blank that Pam was taking care of us. Erma continued to lurk, though, even after the manager left the area. While she was lurking, a male customer walked up to Erma and asked her if someone was supposed to be at the register in Sporting Goods, because he had something to check out and no one was there. I didn’t hear what Erma told him, but I suspect it was something along the lines of “I’ll be with you in a minute,” because she didn’t move an inch and he continued to stand there and wait while she continued to lurk.

“I’m taking care of them,” Pam told her firmly. Erma still didn’t move, so Pam added, “They asked for me.”

“Oh,” Erma said in a put-off tone. At last she turned to help her customer.

By the time we had received our receipt and were on our way out, Erma was back to chatting with someone else. I had to suppress the urge to give her the bird. 

Should have just sicced the dog on her. 

The Talkin’ Mystery Poo, Ghost Pirate Plastic Footsteps of Doom Blues (a Home Improvement Horribly True Tale)

At 3 a.m., Monday morning, I was awakened by a whimper from our dog Sadie. It was the usual whimper she gives off when she has to “go potty” and isn’t going to be able to go back to sleep until she does. I waited and tried to snooze, hoping I was wrong.

Moments later, my peace was disturbed again, this time by a cold dog nose thrust into my face from the side of the bed, followed by another plaintive whimper.

“Whadayuwant?” I said.

*whine*

“Youhavtagopotty?”

*WHINE!*

I got up, put on my robe and slippers and went out to water the dog. Our cat, Avie, heard us and got up to see what we were doing—cause damn if the dog gets to go outside and she doesn’t. Turned out she was hungry, so I fed her and gave Sadie a dog cookie to keep her quiet and then tried to get everyone back to bed before this hour-of-the-wolf trek turned into a fit of insomnia for me.

About half an hour later I was lying in bed still pretty much awake, but I could feel myself drifting toward slumber. Then I heard something that caused my eyes to pop open and my ears to perk up. Elsewhere in the house, I heard the distinctive sound of plastic sheeting being disturbed. In fact, it sounded exactly like two footsteps being taken across plastic sheeting. Now, the plastic sheeting part was explainable because we still had a couple of sheets of plastic drop-cloth on the floor of the living room, left over from our weekend painting project.  The real trouble with hearing two footsteps on plastic sheeting is that my wife was asleep in bed beside me, the cat was asleep on my chest and the dog was snoring away on her giant pillow by the bed. The only other pet in the house was a fish. This meant that I’d either dreamed I’d heard footsteps on the plastic or something or someone else had made them.

Er.

I slid out of the covers and retrieved my brainin’ stick from beside the bed. At no point did it strike me as wise to wake my wife, even though I was potentially about to do battle with another human being. I went to the bedroom door and debated the merits of turning on the hall light. On the one hand, it might expose a prowler prowling in the hall; on the other, it would also blind me. Instead, I crept into the hall, through the dark and made it to the foyer. There, I reached around the corner into the living room, where the sheeting was located. Keeping the wall between me and the hanging lamp, I flipped on the light switch. There was no movement to be heard so I peeked around the corner. No one was there.

Great, so if there was a prowler, they A) were elsewhere in the house, and B) now knew I was looking for them and exactly where I was. The fortunate part of this, though, was that because of the painting project we had enough furniture scattered in obvious walkways that if they tried to escape or run to attack me they would be unable to keep from running into it, alerting me to their location. I heard nothing.

I moved through the living room and into the kitchen. No one was there.

I checked the garage door. Still locked.

I circled back into the den where I checked the back door, also locked, and returned to the foyer, where prowlers still weren’t visibly prowling and where the front door was similarly locked. Then, after searching all the other obvious places for a couple of minutes, I decided to file the whole thing away as misheard leaf noise from a deer outside, otherwise I’d never be able to return to sleep.

Around 7, I woke to find the wife up and about, readying for work.

“I heard an odd noise at 3:30,” I said.  I then told her about the plastic footsteps.

“Huh,” she said in a tone that suggested I’d provided a clue to a mystery she was working on. “Well, there is an odd poo in the hallway. Maybe we have a mouse.”

A mouse, I thought. Yeah, that made sense. It was getting close to winter, the time for all good mice to try and get indoors. Only when I finally got a look at the odd poo in question, I saw that it was far too large a poo to have come from the ass of an average mouse. No, this was a poo of a different creature and the wife and I both began to audibly hope we didn’t have a rat on our hands. The wife didn’t think there was any way for a rat to get into the house, but I pointed out it would have been easy enough for it to get into the garage on one of the many days we’d left the door open, and from there it was only a matter of sneaking in the interior door when we weren’t looking. She didn’t like this theory. We didn’t need any more troublesome furry creatures in our lives. We already had two.

“All right, kitty,” I told Avie, who was already engaged in her daily ritual of knocking important things off the table for the dog to chew up. “Time to step up to the plate.”

A little after breakfast, the cat and dog tired of their games and thankfully both went to sleep. So I crept out of the den and toward the office to check email.

As I entered our freshly-painted hallway, I spied, seated in the middle of the hallway, the creator of the aforementioned poo and knew that it had also definitely been the source of the noise on the plastic sheeting.

It was not a rat.

It was not a mouse.

It was, instead, a frog.

When I saw it, I laughed out loud, then caught myself, lest I wake the animals and cause a frog-stomping stampede. I scooped him into a coffee cup and then deposited him in the flower bed out back, near a gap where he could hide under the deck and bed down for the winter.

Yep, a frog hopping through the living room could conceivably have made two leaps across the plastic at about the rate footsteps would take. Still not sure how a frog got into the house.

Maybe the rats let him in.

 

Copyright © 2008 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Quests for Rings that Would Give Tolkien the Willies Blues (a Funny Dog Poop Story)

While talking to my sister on the phone, one night, I happened to look down and see my dog Sadie chewing on something silver. On closer inspection, it was one part of the wife’s wedding set: the engagement ring part, i.e. the diamond-encrusted valuable part. I snatched it off the floor before Sadie could devour it. I then saw that the other part of the set was perched on the edge of the coffee table, right at Sadie-mouth-level.

Aw, crap, I thought. Here we go.

Now that Sadie has grown larger, we’re finding we have to police new territory to keep her from eating things we would rather her not eat. She’s mostly given up on chewing up our shoes, which is good, but still finds socks, fabric softener sheets, snotty tissue paper and the contents of cat boxes to be tasty treats. My fear was that if she had decided metal rings were great to eat, we’d be in trouble, because the wife is forever taking her rings off.

I brought the wedding set to the wife and told her what had nearly happened. We laughed and joked about how it would have been unfortunate to have to wait around for Sadie to crap them out and the wife put them on her hand and said she’d be more careful in the future.

The following morning, a Saturday, shortly after breakfast, the wife announced she couldn’t find her wedding set. She swore she’d put them on that morning, having taken them off before bed the night before because they didn’t fit well and she suspected the msg-laden Chinese food we’d eaten the night before might be the culprit behind her swelling finger. But now the rings were definitely not on said finger, so a searchin’ we did go.

The logical place for them to be was in the kitchen, where the wife had cleaned the fish’s bowl earlier that morning. Not there.

We tried the messy breakfast nook table, piled high with papers in need of sorting. Nada.

We tried the coffee table, which was equally piled with papers and mail, but it wasn’t there either.

Bedside table–nope.

My office desk–nah.

Bathrooms–noperino.

The kitchen again–still not there.

The tables again–nerrrrrr.

After nearly half an hour of searching, we both stopped and stared at the dog. She looked innocent enough, but who could really tell?

“You don’t think…” the wife began.

“Maybe,” I said. I then proposed a scenario. During the previous night, we had been awakened by the sound of the wife’s alarm clock falling to the floor, having been pulled off of the bedside table by Sadie who had become tangled in its cord as she slept. My thought was that the wife’s rings had also been on the table and could have been pulled off by the clock and potentially gobbled up later at Sadie’s leisure. This theory spat in the face of the wife’s claim that she remembered putting them on again in the morning, but it wasn’t beyond reason that she was mistaken in this memory. We dashed to the bedroom to check again, but found no rings on the floor nor under the bed.

With no other obvious location for the rings, we began to monitor Sadie’s “big potty” sessions and poke through them with sticks to check for rings. We knew it was probably too soon for them to have made it through her system, but we had to check to be sure. It turned out to be a lot of work, too, cause that dog is a dogpoop manufacturing plant running at peak efficiency. The following day we were starting to run out of sticks and I began to regret having recently hurled all the ones from the yard into the woods.

Monday evening, at dinner time, the wife and I sat down to have a meal and took our places on the sofa as usual. (Hey, we can’t exactly eat at the breakfast nook table with it being glutted with papers, and all.) As I was reaching out to shuffle some mail out of the way so I’d have a place to set my drink, I heard a metallic clink and from between two pieces of mail slid the wife’s rings. I gasped, snatched them up and passed them over to her.

“Where were they?” she asked.

“Right there,” I said, pointing to the exact place where Sadie had nearly devoured them two nights before. Neither of us can figure out how we missed them in our multiple searches, unless we each just assumed that they wouldn’t have been left there in that spot in the first place because the wife said she would never leave them there again.

We asked the dog’s forgiveness for suspecting her. After a Pupperoni or two, she granted it.

 

Copyright © 2008 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Mole Hole, Dish Network Herpatologist, Ringing a Neck Blues (a Snakey Horribly True Tale)

Shortly after we moved into our new house, near Princeton, W.Va., the Dish Network guy came by to install his product.  While he was running wires from the inconveniently placed dish behind our house, to the house, he suggested that our flower beds might have something of a snake infestation due to the number of holes he’d noticed in them.

“I prefer to think of them as mole holes,” I replied.

“Yeah, probably mole holes,” he corrected.

I thought about this for a moment. “Incidentally,” I began, “if there were to be snakes about, what sort of snakes might they be in this area?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Green snakes, copperheads, rattlesnakes…”

“Ah,” I said.

“The rattlesnakes will let you know where they are,” Dish guy said. “It’s the copperheads you have to worry about. They’ll bite you just to laugh at you.”

“Ah,” I said. “And what do they look like?”

“Well, they’re copper colored. Real similar in color to all these leaves,” and then he pointed to the great heap of leaves our home’s previous owners did not see fit to rake from the flower beds back when it was cold enough that you wouldn’t have to worry about deadly poisonous serpents lurking in them. Then he added, “Which is where they like to hide.”

“Ah,” I said.

And where do you think our dog Sadie likes to poop the most? Yes, sir, the flower beds. Even more horrifying, the flower beds pretty much surround the entire back deck portion of the house.

Have I mentioned that my wife Ashley is deathly afraid of snakes? Oh, she’s deathly afraid all right.  Sure, under controlled conditions, such as a snake in a cage or a known non-venomous pet snake held by someone else, several feet away, she’s okay with them; it’s the unidentified snakes in the wild she’s none too thrilled with. This is understandable, really, as she grew up in Alaska where they don’t have any snakes. She therefore has no idea of the usual snake etiquette the rest of us take for granted (or, at least, the rest of us who grew up in snake-infested south Mississippi) and would actually prefer fighting a bear.

Back in the fall, having just finished planting some new perennials in the flowerbed by the garage, Ashley called me over to see her work. Just as I arrived, she stooped down to move the garden hose and then yelped and jumped back.

“There’s a snake!”

Sure enough, slithering along the seam where the flowerbed meets the house was a small grayish snake with a white band around his neck. I didn’t know what kind it was, but it was not a copperhead and not a rattlesnake and was kind of cute, so I reached down to see if I could grab the tip of its tail.

“Don’t pick it up!” Ashley screamed.

Huh, I thought. That hadn’t occurred to me. Probably a good idea. I pulled my hand back and a moment later, the snake slithered around the corner of the house and then down behind the drain pipe and out of sight beneath the low boardwalk leading to the back deck.

“Oh, no!” Ashley said. “He canNOT live under there!”

“I don’t see that we have a choice in the matter,” I said. “We can’t exactly get him out.” Well, we could, but it would require destroying the boardwalk to do so. “I tried to catch him, but you said not to,” I added.

“I didn’t tell you not to catch him. I said `don’t pick it up.’ “

“And I didn’t,” I said.  “Besides, he’s harmless. He’s probably just some sort of little garden snake.”

The wife was less than thrilled by this assumption. “I should have sprayed him in the face with the hose and when he was distracted I could have killed him,” she said.

“And then we’ll look him up online and it will say: Little gray snake with a ring around his neck—harmless, friend to all human beings, will give you five dollars, very bad luck to kill.’

“I’ll show him bad luck.”

We left the matter there, but I could tell our little snaky friend did not leave Ashley’s thoughts. In fact, I took no small pleasure in playing snaky pranks on her throughout the rest of the day.

While loading up the last twigs from what had been an enormous pile of sticks I’ve been assembling over the past few months, composed entirely of ones I pulled from the yard, I spotted a large earthworm wiggling on the pavement.

“Oh, look, a snake,” I said calmly. Ashley looked, yelped again and clutched at her heart, Fred Sanford-style. Then she hit me really hard in the shoulder. I had to admit, I deserved it, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to play with fate.

Later, after she had wondered aloud whether or not the snake could get into our garage, I pointed out that it would actually have little difficulty getting into the house, what with the back screen door being cracked open like it was, and all. I was out of reach for that one, but I know she wanted to belt me again. I assured her that snakes don’t like people and avoid them at all costs, so they’d not be real likely to want to get into the house.

Just to further ease her mind, I went and looked up our snaky friend by his description. I’m pretty sure it was a ring-necked snake. If so, the snake we saw was not far from being an adult, at less than a foot in length.

“And he’s not poisonous,” I said.

“Venomous,” she corrected. “Venomous.”

 

Copyright © 1997-2008 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ No Distant Networks, Phoning up India, Won’t be a Problem, Fighting with The Man, DIRECTV SUCKS ASS, Pooping an Angry Monkey Blues (a cautionary Horribly True Tale)

Back in early December, I was flipping through TV channels one night, decided to see what was on NBC and discovered that NBC was no longer there. Neither were FOX or CBS, though, oddly, ABC was still present. We have, or rather had, or rather will have again (though I’m getting ahead of myself) DISH NETWORK.

“Oh, you didn’t know about the lawsuit?” my wife Ashley said.

“What Lawsuit?” I said.

She explained that there had been a lawsuit against DISH NETWORK by television stations that were fed up with them giving away distant networks (i.e. network satellite feeds from stations in New York, Chicago or the West Coast in place of local network affiliates). DISH NETWORK was, according to the plaintiffs, just giving those distant networks away to anybody who asked for them regardless of whether or not those people were capable of receiving local affiliate broadcast signals. DISH lost the case, so they had to take all the Distant Networks away from their customers, (except for ABC, apparently, which I was still receiving just fine).

Now, I understand and even sympathize with the affiliates’ case. They were being deprived of potential advertising dollars by viewers in their coverage area watching satellite feeds of stations from New York City instead of theirs. (In DISH NETWORK’s defense, many of these same affiliate stations, including the ones in my area, still haven’t bothered to comply with the Federal mandates from 2001 stating that they have to be capable of providing their signals to such satellite television services as DISH NETWORK or DIRECTV, thus ending that problem.) And I would be happy to watch their signals but for the fact that I cannot receive them on my TV despite my house being on one of the highest points in our immediate area. Not a one.

Naturally I was pissed. I don’t watch much network TV anyway, save Fox on Sunday nights and Lost on ABC, (which, again, might not have been a problem since I still had ABC), but when I want to watch some networks I don’t want to have any problems.

I went online to research the matter. I found many news articles explaining the situation. These articles almost always ended by saying that while DISH NETWORK was in the doghouse with the Feds, DIRECTV was not liable in the lawsuit, as they had always played nice with their distant network gifting. The articles, to a one, went on to say that DIRECTV was now offering those distant networks to new customers with wild abandon in an attempt to steal customers from DISH. DISH too had its own publicity campaign, suggesting we sign up with American Distant Networks, a service that could provide the networks through our existing dish, for a dollar more per channel than DISH was charging. I began to weigh my options.

Let me just say up front, until that point I had been 97 percent happy with DISH NETWORK. We had a little problem with them near the beginning, which, not coincidentally, also involved issues with our distant networks being removed after three months of service. However, after our local installation representatives phoned them up and threatened to set us up with a DIRECTV system, DISH gave back all but ABC. Since then, we’d had very few problems. We even were able to get ABC back—with a vengeance apparently—after requesting it from them multiple times. We liked the service, we liked the remote, we liked it all. The only thing that could have improved it for me was a DVR, but DISH NETWORK was only giving those away free to new subscribers and would make me pay out the nose for one should I wish to upgrade. Even without the distant networks (ABC excepted), I didn’t really want to switch to anyone else. That is, until a coworker passed me an offer from DIRECTV that seemed too good to pass up.

The offer was for a free installation of a DIRECTV system, plus a free DVR upgrade plus a free portable DVD player, a $50 sign on rebate spread across our first few bills (which my coworker would receive as well for referring us) and a $100 rebate to cover the cost of the DVR. Seemed like a good deal, particularly since DIRECTV’s website made it clear that they were handing out distant networks like party favors. So I phoned them up to get some information and make sure I could get the distant networks. The rep I spoke with assured me that there would be no problem getting the networks. According to her computer, they weren’t available in my area at all so this was a non-issue. She even offered to throw in three months of Showtime if I signed up right then. So I did. Before signing up, though, I stressed to her that I was only interested in joining DIRECT if I could definitely have the distant networks. I didn’t want to have everything installed and then be told it wasn’t a done deal. Nope, I could have them, she said. It wouldn’t be a problem. I told them to come install everything in late December.

I phoned DISH NETWORK up to tell them when to cut us off. Their phone-rep, sensing an emergency, quickly transferred me off to Crisis Customer Control, where a bright and cheery representative tried to talk me down from the ledge. She assured me that DIRECTV could, in no way, make any promises concerning distant networks as it was out of their hands in the first place. She looked up my area in her computer and said that the only distant network I was actually eligible for was Fox. (I then pointed out to her that I was technically still receiving ABC despite the court order saying I should not be, but she agreed to keep quiet about that.) I explained that I’d already signed up for DIRECTV, so it was too late. The rep asked me to wait on disconnecting from DISH until I’d had time to test out DIRECTV, and, hopefully, change my mind. She even gave me a free month of DISH service to accommodate this.

Over Christmas, I went to my sister-in-law’s house where she had a DISH NETWORK DVR. It was a thing of beauty, very smooth and quick and handy in form and function. Seeing it made me feel a little guilty for leaving DISH, but I tried to put such thoughts from my head.

Late December came and DIRECTV sent out a rep to install the system. He showed me how to use it and it was pretty impressive stuff. This system had two coax cables running to it, allowing its DVR to record one channel while we watched another. Or, to record two channels while we watched something else already stored in the DVR. You could also set it to record shows up to two weeks prior to broadcast, record an entire season’s worth of shows or search by Title, Keyword, Subject, etc.  It was supposed to be a multi-tasking entertainment wonder.

While the guy was there, I asked him about the distant networks and he put me on the phone with a DIRECTV rep who told me that they would have to put in a waiver request for me, which might take 45 days.

“Um, but my trial period with you guys only lasts seven days,” I said. “After that I’m locked into a contract.” The phone-rep assured me it would not be a problem because the networks weren’t available in my area. He was completely certain the request would go right through. Happened all the time.

After the installation guy left, I began playing with my new toy. It worked pretty good.

Mostly pretty good.

Mostly.

In function, the DIRECTV DVR worked much the same as a DISH NETWORK DVR, only inconveniently slower. Between the time I pressed a button on the remote to activate one of the DVR’s higher functions, such as the guide menu or the programs recorded listing, five seconds might pass before it actually did anything on screen. And unlike the DISH remote, which you could pretty much aim anywhere in the room and still use, the DIRECTV remote had to be aimed directly at the center of the DVR’s all-seeing blue eye or nothing would happen. Of course, you wouldn’t necessarily know something wasn’t happening until you waited five seconds. Also, unlike with DISH, the DIRECTV system wouldn’t allow us to alter the channel guide to show us only the channels we were able to receive. Their guide book said we could, and we followed the instructions to make it do this, but it didn’t work. Only after we called DIRECTV and asked them about it did they mention that they had a bug in their software that wouldn’t allow this and if we only wanted to show the channels we were subscribed to we would have to set up a favorites list in which we deleted all but the channels we wanted to show. Thanks a heap, guys.

In early January, I received a postcard from DIRECTV listing the responses to my waiver requests. I was rather surprised it came so quickly. However, of the five networks listed, only FOX and PBS granted my request. I phoned up DIRECTV and told them I was unhappy. After explaining the situation and my ire, the phone-rep (who I’m pretty sure was in Jaipur) transferred me to DIRECTV’s version of the Crisis Customer Control department, where I waited 10 minutes on hold before getting to explain the situation and ire to a new phone-rep.

The new rep looked over her screen, made appropriate “Hmms” and “huhs” and then said, “This says you were denied for the HD channels. But you don’t have an HDTV, right?”

Only then did I notice the large “HD” in the phrase “HD Broadcast Network Waiver Request Results From DIRECTV.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Why would they ask for HD waivers?” she said. “We don’t even offer HD service with a DVR.”

Mystery thick in the air, she agreed to go ahead and put in an analog signal waiver request and assured me that the reason the channels were denied at all was due to their being HD channels and my lacking an HDTV. Once my channels were granted, they would immediately appear and I’d probably receive a card about it a day or two later.

Before hanging up, just for their records, I once again explained the whole reason for moving to DIRECTV and about the monkey-defecating fury which would erupt from deep within my twisted, blackened, Simpsons-deprived bowels should I be denied my channels. Again, the phone-rep assured me there wouldn’t be a problem. I had, her tone suggested, a far better chance of being devoured by zombie guinea pigs than of not receiving the distant networks. She added that if for some reason—worst-case-scenario only, mind you—I wasn’t able to get the distant networks, I could then speak with one of their customer care reps and all would be made right. What exactly this entailed wasn’t spelled out.

A day or so later—January 10, 2007, to be precise—I received another bit of mail from DIRECTV. This time is was my coupon good for the free portable DVD player I was to receive as a signing bonus. All I had to do was fill out the form, include a copy of my first bill with it and mail it in. At the very bottom of the form, in fine print, it stated that my filled-out form and first bill must be received with a post-mark no later than December 31, 2006. Since it was now January 10, 2007, it seemed unlikely that DIRECTV had even mailed the coupon before December 31. Within my bowels, the monkey began to stir.

I phoned DIRECTV, explained the situation three times to the first Indian man I talked to and he still didn’t seem to grasp the problem. So he transferred me to Crisis Customer Control again, where I waited on hold for 15 minutes before being told by the Crisis Rep to ignore the date and send it in anyway. “They’re just using an old form,” she said. Sick of dealing with them, I hung up and did not reiterate my concerns about the distant networks. I did, however notice that it was nearly time to pay my first bill. I went online to DIRECTV’s site, set up automatic payments, activated it and went ahead and told it to pay my first bill with a one time debit card payment. And since I’d paid my bill with DIRECTV, I figured it was finally time to shed myself of DISH NETWORK.

I phoned DISH up, spoke to another Indian man who listened to my request to sever service and then transferred me again to Crisis Customer Control. The CCC rep tried gamely to talk me down from the ledge; that is, until I told her, “The dish is lying in the yard. It is no longer attached to my house. The equipment is in a box.” This dashed all of her hopes and she agreed to stop service and told me that I owed them nothing.

Days passed and the February 7 resumption date for this season of Lost was swiftly approaching. The bowel-monkey began to pace and I began to frequently check the network channels for signs of activity. Only PBS contained a signal, but I already knew that as I’d begun checking all the network channels after we’d received the HD waiver card.

On February 2, mere seconds before I needed to leave the house to go to work, the mail came with a new postcard from DIRECTV announcing the waiver request results. This time they weren’t for HD networks. However, once again I was denied everything except FOX and PBS. Oddly, the monkey hardly moved at all. I just went to work and was even in a good mood for the whole day, the delicious thought of getting to tear into DIRECTV when I got home keeping me warm and toasty despite the bitter winter cold.

When I got home, I showed Ashley the card. She gleefully offered to call them for me, as she also likes nothing better than releasing some good, old-fashioned righteous indignation upon those who deserve it. She’s far better at it than me, but I declined her offer all the same, for the bowel-monkey was again becoming agitated. He became even moreso when I went to my TV and discovered that despite the postcard’s claim that I was now able to receive FOX, both distant FOX channels listed in the onscreen guide were still unavailable.

After dinner, I phoned up DIRECTV. I knew I was now far past the end of my so-called trial period and that they would raise a stink about this and try to charge me massive fees for allegedly breaking my contract with them. Frankly, though, I was of the opinion that they had broken their contract with me. Not only that, but they had wasted my time and money and I wasn’t going to stand for it. Regardless, I was determined to remain calm and collected, with the bowel-monkey held at bay until such a time as I needed him. What I heard upon being connected to DIRECTV’s phone system, though, sent the monkey bouncing off the walls of my colon in an apoplectic fit of rage. The phone system, upon determining who I was, told me that I owed them $89 for service thus far. Apparently the automatic payments I’d set up and the first debited payment I had made had not taken. Sonofa…

I told the Indian man I first spoke to that I was interested in being transferred to the Very Unhappy Customer Department, (i.e. Crisis Customer Control).

“Oh, ha, ha, hah,” the man said. “I’m very sorry you are unhappy, sir. How may I be of assistance?”

“No, really,” I said. “This is going to need to go to your customer care folks.”

“Ha, ha, hah,” the man said again. “Very sorry. How may I be of assistance, sir?”

Fine. Waste some more of my time. That’ll help you.

So I very politely and calmly explained the situation to the Indian man, the multiple times his company had assured me of the miniscule chances of my not getting distant networks, the card I had just received denying them, and my wish that they come and take their dish off of my house, haul away the DVR and depart my life. I wanted a refund of all monies paid for the equipment, save for our monthly service fees, which I thought was only fair to pay them, despite the fact that they apparently didn’t want my money as the payments I’d already attempted to make hadn’t taken. I wanted to hear nothing more from them ever again.

The Indian man asked if I minded being put on hold while he transferred me to Crisis Customer Control. Not at all.

The phone-minion in Crisis Customer Control was also very nice. She listened to my tale of woe, which I gave in far greater detail than to the Indian man, including the bit about how I was unhappy with the glacier-like slowness of the DVR and the bit about the previous and inexplicable HD network denial.

“You don’t even offer HD service with a DVR,” I said, parroting what a previous DIRECTV minion had told me.

“Oh, no, sir. We do offer HD service with DVRs. In fact, if you would like to upgrade to an HD DVR we can accommodate–”

“I don’t own an HD television, so there is no need to even discuss anything having to do with high definition at this point.”

The phone-minion apologized. She then apologized for my not having received the networks as I’d wished and offered to put in another waiver for them. This new waiver, she said, would take up to 60 days for completion.

“I’m sorry, but I no longer have any confidence in DIRECTV’s ability to secure distant networks for me. What I wish is to cancel my account.”

The phone-minion offered, instead, to put my account on pause, no monthly fees required, while they made their 60 day attempt to get my distant networks. No, I calmly said, this was also not something I was interested in. I wasn’t going to wait 60 days to learn anything more. I was, in fact, going to sign up again with their competition, DISH NETWORK, despite the fact that I know they can’t give me distant networks at all. What I wanted was to end my DIRECTV service entirely. I wanted their dish removed from my back deck, the DVR boxed up and carried away, I wanted the $99 I’d spent on the DVR refunded, and I wished to do business with them never again.

I expected to have a fight on my hands, but Phone-Minion said that if this was really what I wanted she could cancel our account. She explained that they didn’t send people out to collect the equipment, but she could send out a postage paid Recovery Kit. Fine. She also said they couldn’t refund my $99 directly, but that I was still eligible for the rebate I was already supposed to receive for it and would only have to fill out paperwork and send it in. Fine, again. We even agreed upon a date when our service would stop, thus giving me time to sign back up with DISH NETWORK.

This all seemed too easy, though. I had been expecting a fight, but the phone-minion was being remarkably helpful. Then she put me on hold to check something about the rebate and when she returned she said that everything was in order and that they would soon send out my final bill which would additionally contain a $250 early contract termination charge. With that, my previous calmness vanished and a large angry bowel-monkey ripped its way out of my ass and began tearing through the house shrieking at the top of its lungs. I, in turn, began shrieking at the phone-minion.

“Uh, no!” I said. “A $250 fee is entirely unacceptable and I want that removed from our bill right now!!!”

The phone-minion disagreed, saying that we were the ones violating the contract and would thus have to pay the fee. I loudly countered that I believed, in fact, it was DIRECTV who were violating the contract, as they had been the ones who assured me we could receive the distant networks, a condition I had told them was contingent before I’d signed up with them in the first place, and they had repeatedly continued such assurances since. The phone minion remained admirably calm, much as someone who is accustomed to being screamed at regularly might be.

“Well, sir, you’re going to have to file a written dispute if you wish to contest the fee.”

The monkey crashed into our china cabinet. Fortunately, we don’t own any china, so only our curios and knicknacks were jostled. The monkey followed up with a fistful of poop aimed at the DVR. I, however, wasn’t so sure how to handle the situation. I’d spelled out my argument to them in triplicate already, but knew they weren’t prepared to back down from their fees. It seemed to me that I could either keep yelling and disputing things and telling the story again and again, but was that really going to accomplish anything? So I told the phone-minion to hold on and turned to my goodly wife for advice.

“They say we have to dispute this in writing.”

“Let me talk to them,” Ashley said.

Brilliant!

I very nearly told the phone-minion, “Aw, shit! Now you’ve done it! HAH! You only THOUGHT you were talking to the bad cop!”

I passed my wife the phone, tagged out of the ring and then the bowel-monkey and I sat down to watch the show.

Having worked as a retail manager in the past, Ashley knows the one cardinal rule of retail customer service: no matter who you’re talking to, they always have a superior officer. (A fact I should have thought of, as I used to work in a call center, myself.) So Ashley let the phone-minion rattle on again about how we would have to dispute our claim in writing, and how many weeks it would take for DIRECTV to respond. When the girl was finished, Ashley calmly said, “No, I don’t think so. I’d like to speak to your manager.”

The minion was taken aback. “Well, he’s just going to tell you the same thing I did,” she said.

“That’s okay. I’d like to speak to your manager.”

The minion put Ashley on hold to go fetch a manager. Over the next few minutes, the minion came back on the line two or three times to let Ashley know she was still fetching the manager. Eventually, a manager came on the line.

“What was your name again?” Ashley asked him. He gave it to her. She wrote it down. And then Ashley calmly and methodically began to take him apart verbally.

I could only hear Ashley’s side of the conversation—though if I’d had any sense at all I would have snatched up the other phone in the room and listened in. All dialogue that follows, therefore, is taken from Ash’s first hand report and from what I could deduce from her half of the conversation. The thing you have to know about Ashley is that the madder she gets about something the calmer and more logical she becomes until she’s just this precision laser, slicing smoothly through any argument presented to her that she deems is wrong. As a guy who’s been on the other end of it many times, I can tell you it’s infuriating.

As seen from my and the bowel-monkey’s vantage point, Ashley launched into the story, emphasizing to the manager the various times when DIRECTV had expressed to us that we were in no danger of not receiving our distant networks. She even invited him to take a look at the call records within our account and count the number of times I had expressed concern that a situation exactly like the one we now found ourselves in would occur. The manager’s counter argument, from what I could tell, consisted of repeatedly saying that we were violating our contract with them. Ash pointed out again that it was our contention that DIRECTV was in violation of our original agreement, to which the manager then responded that, no, we were the ones in violation. After a couple rounds of this, during which I began to sense Ash’s own monkey straining to break free, the manager varied things up a bit by adding that DIRECTV had never made any promises in writing to us regarding the distant networks. They had no control over whether they were granted, or not, so there should have been no expectation on our part that we would receive them.

“Okay, so we may not have received such a guarantee spelled out on a stone tablet,” Ashley snapped, “but that doesn’t mean we weren’t repeatedly assured that we’d be able to get the channels!” At this point, I felt I ought to warn the poor man that it’s bad enough when you get her in cold, calculating, steely anger mode, but if you’ve managed to drive her through into hot, calculating, firey rage, you’re pretty much in trouble.

The manager tried to ignore what she said and returned to his contract violation argument, but Ashley wasn’t letting him get away with it. She told him in no uncertain terms that it was our belief that DIRECTV had intentionally told us what we wanted to hear on the subject of distant networks in order to get us to sign up for their service, knowing full well that by the time we heard anything definite we would be under the terms of that service. This, in her estimation, constituted extremely poor business practices, perhaps even criminally so.

“Well, you are getting FOX,” the man countered, as though this somehow made up for losing the big three.

“Uh, no, we’re not,” Ashley said.

“Yeah, you are,” the manager said.

“NO. WE. ARE. NOT,” Ashley said. While that exchange was going on, the bowel-monkey tossed me the remote and I changed the channel to one of the two listed FOX stations. I scrolled back and forth between the two of them, showcasing the “Channel Not Purchased” message displayed on both. Ashley read the displayed message for the manager’s benefit. He seemed at a loss for words about this.

“You can tell him we are getting PBS,” I said, “but we’ve been getting that for weeks.”

Ashley told him. The manager then became wildly preoccupied offering to connect our FOX for us right then and there.

“No,” Ashley said. “We don’t want you to connect FOX for us. FOX is beside the point. What we want you to do is to disconnect us entirely and waive the $250 fee. And if you’re not prepared to do that, then I need to speak to your manager.”

The manager whimpered something and put her on hold to go fetch his boss. Ashley waited on hold for several minutes, the former manager occasionally popping back on to let her know he was still waiting on his boss. Eventually, he returned to say that his boss was tied up at the moment, but, given our circumstances, had given him authorization to waive the fees. He explained that the $250 charge was automatically going to be placed on our final bill by their computer system and there was no way they could change that. However, his boss had authorized him to give us a confirmation code that, which we can phone up DIRECTV and give to them once we receive our final bill. Allegedly they will then credit us the $250 and be shed of them forever. Or so he said. Ashley wrote everything down, made sure to note the man’s name again for his benefit, thanked him for his effort and hung up.

The monkey and I applauded.

Since last Friday, the wife and I, as well as our various smelly lower primates, have been riding pretty high on our victory over The Man. Unfortunately, my deep-seated paranoia has led me to investigate the matter further and what I’ve dug up causes me concern that our ordeal may not be over.

One doesn’t have to Google very far to find a plethora of consumer complaint sites which seem to indicate that our “victory” is rather unprecedented in the grand scheming of all things DIRECTV. There are people out there with horror stories that make ours pale in comparison; people who have allegedly had their credit bludgeoned, some of whom claim to have never been a customer of DIRECTV in the first place, or people who claim that after complaining bitterly to manager after manager concerning the wrongs against them, they were eventually told “DIRECTV is not responsible for the lies told by our employees. Basically, a lot of people in need of bowel-gorillas. We’ll see.

In the meantime, we’ve signed back up for DISH NETWORK. I meekly called them up to register as a new customer, but since I’d only cancelled my account a week before they said they could just reactivate it for me with no strings attached. Mighty nice of `em. I then asked to upgrade to their version of the DVR, which I decided to lease rather than buy. This meant an 18 month commitment, which considering we’ve been with them since 2001 and also considering we’ve got 18 months left in Ash’s residency, didn’t seem like such a bad deal. Plus there were some sign on rebates and such that helped bring our monthly bill to a reasonable level. We’re still paying more for them than we have would for DIRECTV, but let me assure you, to me it would be well worth it only for the DVR.

On Tuesday, they sent a guy out to install it and we found immediately that the DISH NETWORK DVR is a sleek creature of beauty and speed. I’m still learning the ins and outs of it, but it’s already won over my wife, who hated the DIRECTV DVR with what became an abiding passion. The DISH system has the added advantage of a remote that’s set up much like our old DISH remote—not to mention it does what you tell it to do when you tell it to do it and without any lip and does so no matter where in the room you point it. (There are actually some features of the DIRECTV DVR that I think could stand to be incorporated into the DISH one, such as the four colorful modular-function buttons, but frankly I’ll take speed over elegance in this case.)

We’re even going to try and pick up some distant networks through an outfit called All American Direct, which has already said we’re eligible for FOX. My guess is that they too won’t be able to get us the other distant networks either, but I’ve already put in my waiver request. The guy who installed the system said the local stations are now supposed to be available on DISH by 2008. In the meantime, he said he had no problem getting all of his own networks through American Direct. Of course, we’ve heard that before, but the bottom line is, this time we’re not putting any stock in it. If it happens, great. If not, we’ll somehow survive with online Lost webisodes.

So, is the moral of this story DISH NETWORK good, DIRECTV bad? Well, DIRECTV is certainly bad, but I somehow doubt I’d have to look very hard to find similar horror stories about DISH. They’re very similar companies, after all and it stands to reason that they’ve engaged in similar business practices to try and stay ahead of the other guy. At this point, though, I prefer not to do such research. I prefer to hold onto the potential illusion that they’re a swell bunch of folks who always have my back. That’s how they’ve successfully portrayed themselves to us over the course of our five plus years of service with them. If they’re not good, they’re doing a darn good job of disguising it for us. Your mileage may vary.

EPILOGUE 1

If you recall from the DirecTV saga in February, we told DirecTV off, assuring them that we had no intentions of remaining with their service, nor of paying their $258 cancellation fee, due to the fact that they mislead us on numerous occasions by, essentially, promising us that we could have distant networks when it turned out we couldn’t. At that point, after nearly 40 minutes of holding and waiting and speaking to managers and then the manager of the managers and then requesting to speak to the manager of the manager of the managers, the 2nd manager of managers we were talking to finally relented and said he’d been authorized to give us a confirmation number that would allow us to get out of paying the cancellation fee. The trick, he explained, was that we had to wait for our final bill to arrive with the $258 fee on it, then phone them up with the number and they would credit us the $258.

Three weeks back, we received said bill, phoned DirecTV up and completely expected them to tell us the guy we’d spoken with before had been talking out of his ass. (There are lots of examples of this very sort of thing floating about the net.) They did not, however. Instead, after nearly 20 minutes of waiting on hold between their phone rep in India and the Crisis Customer Counselor he’d rolled our particular ball of dung to, the CCCounselor came on the line and told us our account had been sent to their credit-claims department and it should no longer be a problem for us. We’d heard that before too, so our skepticism remained strong.

We’ve now received a notice from DirecTV saying that they had credited our account $275 and we owed them nothing. In fact, because they’d only billed us $258.68 for the cancellation fee in the first place, we have a $16.32 credit with them, which means they now owe us money. They owe us an apology too, but I think we’ll get the $16.32 sooner.

EPILOGUE 2

I received another piece of mail from the evil and ass-sucking DirecTV; this, after having been assured by a previous piece of mail that I was finally finished with them for good.

This new bit of mail contained a note that read:

Dear Mr. Fritzius,

We regret that you recently cancelled your DIRECTV service. We hope you enjoyed the diverse programming DIRECTV offers and that you consider DIRECTV in the future for your home entertaining needs.

Our records indicate that we have sent you a final bill for $258.68, but have not yet received payment. It is important that we receive payment in full in order to clear your account. Please be aware that you may be billed additional charges if the commitment term was not completed. If there is an unresolved issue you would like to discuss, or to make an immediate payment, please contact our customer service department and a customer service representative will be happy to help you.

The note went on to list the many convenient ways I could send money to them and ended with a sentence reading, “If you have already made the payment, please disregard this letter,” and was signed by a manager in their collections department.

I immediately phoned DirecTV up and asked them what, if anything, their computers claimed I still owed them. The operator I spoke with (who did not sound as though she were located in Delhi, though she did sound very guarded, as if ready for a fight—indicating that my account has likely been flagged as “problem customer”), said that her computer showed that I owed them nothing and that I actually had $16.32 in credit.

Now, I hope that this note from the collections department was something automatically generated and sent out, perhaps around the same time that the previous note was sent. My suspicion, however, is that I’m looking at the opening volleys in a war between DirecTV’s collections department and their credit claims department. If so, I’m the poor asshole caught in the crossfire.

While I had Miss Phone Rep on the line, I did inquire as to whether or not DirecTV would actually be paying me the $16.32 they say they owe me, or if I should just forget it? She said that as I am no longer technically a customer, and therefore cannot receive credit on my next bill, they would be issuing me a check within the next 4 to 6 weeks.

We’ll see.

EPILOGUE 3

It’s been over two months since my last bit of dealing with the vile and ass-sucking entity known as DirecTV. It’s been blissful. In fact, I continue to have nothing but high praise for Dish Network, despite the fact that I am still without distant networks, except for Fox. If I must be without distant networks, I’d much rather be without them with Dish Network than with the sphincter remora that is DirecTV. But I digress…

Last I heard from them, they still owed me $16.32, the difference between the amount they originally said we owed them for our early disconnection and the amount they eventually wound up crediting us in order to cover the original claim against us.

In the intervening days, we’ve faithfully received a bill each month displaying that credit of $16.32.

Today, we finally received a check in the mail for the amount of $16.32. I will, of course, be cashing it and hoping against hope that it is the final piece of mail, junk or otherwise, I ever receive from that company.

I’m an optimistic soul, no?

 

Copyright © 2006 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Mount Childless Wonder, Mama’s Little baby Loves Ziggurats, Emergency Baby-Sitting the Borg Blues

After a particularly harsh day at my “liberry” workplace, I began complaining to my wife Ashley about the limited parenting skills of some of our patrons and how many were perfectly willing to allow their children to run wild and destructive throughout public places.  It’s not a new complaint from me, I’m afraid, and I must admit that it was made from my safe and comfy perch atop Mount Childless Wonder.  Evidently, the gods of irony were paying attention, however and decided to give me a little taste of how parenthood might play out.

The following Friday, I wasn’t scheduled to go in to work at all, so I was tidying up a few things around Chez Fritzius when the phone rang. It was our friend Beth from med-school. Beth said that her husband Will’s father had been rushed to a regional hospital with chest pains and it looked as if he was having more heart issues. The man’s been in and out of the hospital for such heart issues throughout the past year, but it was looking pretty serious this time. Beth and Will were going to head over. Could we babysit?

Now when I heard this, I immediately said “Sure,” cause it’s Beth doing the asking, plus Ash and I really love her baby, Ashley Nicole, (here on to be referred to as The Baby, so as not to get too confusing with namesake issues). I also figured that she’d be bringing The Baby over sometime that evening when my Ashley was around to know what to do with her.

“Thanks. I’ll be over with her in an hour or so,” Beth said. There was a bit more to it than that, of course, involving calls made to my Ashley to let her know what was on the way, but that’s the gist. Ashley alerted me to the fact that she wasn’t getting off from work til close to 5, so this meant it would be me and the baby all by ourselves for most of the day. Actually, she eased me into this revelation by first scaring the hell out of me.

ASHLEY: So you think you’ll be okay with her for the afternoon?

ME: Sure.

ASHLEY: What about when I’m on call tonight?

ME: Do what? You’re on call tonight?

ASHLEY: Yeah.

ME: You’re shitting me.

ASHLEY: Nope.

ME: I knew you were on call on Sunday night, but not tonight.

ASHLEY: I had to trade.

ME: You’re shitting me.

ASHLEY: Nope.

(Long pause.)

ME: You’re shitting me?

ASHLEY: Yeah.

Suddenly four and a half hours with the kid didn’t seem so bad.

To make matters worse, this was Beth’s first time to be apart from her kid for more than a couple of hours since they left the hospital nine months ago. Now, here she was leaving her kid in the care of a terrified sweathog in a stuffy, vaguely cat-hair infested house. But as they brought The Baby in, she gave me a huge grin and laughed and I somehow felt a little better about what I’d gotten myself into.

Beth and Will hauled in a foldable crib that transformed into a changing table, an activity saucer, a car seat, a stroller and bags and bags of toys, diapers, food, water, bottles, etc. Then Beth began rattling off instructions at me as to feeding times, proper Enfamil mixing ratios, how often the baby could have fruit-juice, nap schedules, Orajel application times, mood swings and a host of other informational tidbits that I failed to write down in their entirety. It was all just a blur. And within minutes, they’d departed, leaving me standing in my kitchen holding this 19 pound human, with whom I was not entirely sure what to do.

So, The Baby and I sat around on the couch for a bit, her smiling and laughing at me while I said things to her like, “Who’s a pretty girl?” and “I’m gonna get your piggies!” and “I have no clue what to do with you at all,” in soothing babytalk. After a while, this got old for me, so I looked around for something else to do. I spied her Baby Einstein baby-seat activity saucer–a big two-tiered, doughnut-shaped contraption the upper surface of which is lined with toys and various noise and light-making devices to entertain the baby as she sits in the middle of the doughnut and can rotate 360 degrees to reach all the stuff. So I stuck her in that. It seemed to work okay, as she happily began banging the crap out of all the toys in front of her, laughing away.

Baby happy, I tried to go to the kitchen for something to drink. The Baby immediately freaked out and began screaming at the top of her lungs. I dashed back and she got quiet and happy again. I took a step toward the kitchen and more screaming began. Step back and happy smiles. I then saw that so as long as I was within both eyesight and close proximity to The Baby, she remained happy. And I remained thirsty. This, of course, only lasted a few minutes, before she decided she’d had enough of the saucer and no amount of proximity or happy baby talk would calm her down. So I had to lift her out of it and sit on the couch while holding her to keep her quiet.

I then tried to find something on television that would be age appropriate. Instead of something good, though, I found the Doodlebops, perhaps the gayest kids’ show ever. (And when I say “gayest” I don’t mean it in a “Right Wing, All Homosexuals are Evil and Therefore so is this Show” kind of way. Cause, that’s not my perspective. I meant “gayest” in more of a “Violent Prison Rape in a Cell Block Designed by Rejects from the Set & Costuming Department of Cirque Du Soleil, with a 1960’s-Yellow-Submarine-Fab-Clown Fetish, and Cojo gets to watch,” kind of way. Go look at their website and tell me I’m wrong.)

After 10 minutes of that unwatchable crap, which The Baby wisely paid no attention to whatsoever, I was forced to change the channel to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was in the middle of Best of Both Worlds Part I. Sweet! Now that’s some Borg action for your ass!

The Baby only let me watch a few minutes of this, though, before she began getting restless and started warming up her voice for another good bout of screaming. So I jumped up and walked around the house with her. I walked into the kitchen with her. I walked back into the living room with her. I walked her to the window to look out at the lack of hillbillies working on the house. I walked her back to the kitchen and got myself something to drink, which is what I remembered I’d wanted a while ago. Eventually, she began to get heavy, so I walked her back to the couch and bounced her on my knee singing “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread,” only I don’t know any lyrics beyond the chorus so I began making some up involving Mama’s Little Baby’s Love of Ziggurats. (I have no idea where this came from, but apparently mama’s little baby really enjoyed Babylonian terraced pyramids.)

This singing and bouncing only worked for a few minutes before the baby decided she wasn’t having any more of it and began to kick and cry again. That’s when I realized what I was dealing with, here: this Baby was a Borg. Sure, I could get through her defenses for a bit, but soon she would adapt and her shields would return to full strength and she’d once again begin carving me up with her vicious sonic beams. I would have to continuously come up with new and more creative material if I was to stay ahead of the destruciton.

Then it hit me: a bottle! Beth had said something about the baby perhaps needing a bottle this afternoon. So I stuck her back in the saucer and ran to the kitchen to prepare one. Beth had already thoughtfull filled empty bottles with distilled water, so all I had to do was scoop in some carefully measured Enfamil while the baby raged. One dash back to the living room, one baby scooped out of the saucer and onto the couch, one bottle crammed in baby’s mouth and I had silence once more. For ten whole minutes. Then she finished the bottle and it was time for more squalling.

Pretty soon, the phone rang. It was Ashley calling to see how I was doing.

“When will you be home?” I whined.

“Not til 4:30 or 5. Why? Is everything okay?”

I told her about my Borg theory. She didn’t buy it.

“Just put her down on a blanket on the floor with her toys. I’ve seen her do it at Beth’s all the time. She’ll play there for hours.”

More screaming as I ran for a blanket, more as I spread it on our floor and dumped her bag of toys on it. She shut up for all of five seconds as I put her on the blanket, then opened up with more. So I began picking up her toys and giving them voices, entertaining her with a clumsy puppet show. It worked pretty well. She even seemed to like it when I made Eeyore scream in pain as she bit into his head. By the time this wore off, Data and Worf had rescued Captain Picard from the Borg vessel and I was wishing someone would rescue me.

Then a miraculous thing happened. When the Baby began screaming again, I didn’t know what else to do other than pick her up and rock her gently back and forth. After only a couple minutes, her screams turned to cries and then groans and then burbles and finally to little snores as she dropped off to sleep. I continued rocking until I was sure she was out, then I carefully put her on a big pillow and retreated to the kitchen where I quietly—oh, so quietly—lurked.

After 5, Ashley came home to relieve me of baby duty, though not of baby doody, as we soon came to discover. Fortunately, I’d gone through Beth’s Diaper Changing Boot Camp with this kid months ago, so even a spectacularly poopy diaper was nothing to fear.

Our weekend with The Baby, however, proceeded much as it had during the first four hours. We’d entertain the Baby, she’d get fed up with whatever we were doing and start to scream. Then we’d come up with new tricks or retry old tricks, they’d work for a bit, then fail. Or we’d discover that she was really crying because she was hungry/tired/teething/poopy/etc., we would apply fixes to said issues, they’d work for a bit, then fail again. Eventually The Baby would cry herself to sleep and we’d get an hour or so of peace during which we’d walk very very slowly and make no noise at all, terrified of waking The Baby.

I was worried about having to be up all night with this routine, for as I knew well in advance I’d be the guy to have to get up and deal with it all because my wife wants me to see just how much brutal, tiring work having a baby actually is—all so I’ll think twice next time I go cavalierly trying to impregnate her. Fortunately, though, The Baby slept through the first and second nights with only minor incidents of a midnight feeding or diaper switchout to speak of. She even slept right through a massive thunderstorm Saturday night, which was more than I could say for myself.

Bravely, we decided to take her out to lunch with us on Saturday. This involved putting her in her car-seat for the trip, which first involved figuring out how to install said car seat into my wife’s Element. Installing Baby into the seat was only slightly less difficult and involved me accidentally pinching her leg while trying to buckle the straps across her. I didn’t realize I’d done it until the Baby unleashed a scream of pain that rattled my very soul. We unbuckled her quickly and saw a small bruise already forming on her thigh.

“Aw, hell, Beth’s going to kill me,” I said. “Maybe she won’t notice.”

“She’ll notice.”

At the Mexican restaurant, The Baby feasted mightily on Mexican rice and demanded more after every spoon. But she remained well behaved so long as we were shoveling in the food. Afterward, we bravely took her with us to Wal-Mart where we had one of the most pleasant Saturday Wally World experiences ever. See usually when we’re dumb enough to head to Wal-Mart on a Saturday, we have an awful time of it because on Saturday THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD comes to Wal-Mart and it is glutted with people slowly—ever so slowly—shopping for whatever’s cheapest and least healthy, usually with 8 kids in tow. After struggling our way out of said glut, we swear and swear and swear we’ll never set foot in Wal-Mart on a Saturday again. Then a couple weeks go by and we’re back there like fools. This time, though, Wally World was only about a third as full as it usually is and we had our ambassador to The World seated in the child seat of our shopping cart. Ashley had attached a small stuffed toy on a cord to The Baby’s wrist and, as we strolled down the aisles, the Baby would flap it back and forth happily, beaming smiles at any and all who met her gaze. Our journey was accompanied by calls of “What a cute baby!” and “Oh, look at that baby!” and “Beautiful baby.” And we too beamed, like proud unofficial aunt and uncle.

At one point, we ran into some people we know from church. They did double and triple takes as they saw what we had in our cart, tried to do the math in their head as to when or if one of us had been pregnant at any point in the last 9 months, then cautiously said, “Is that…. um… your…?”

“Nope, she’s a friend’s.”

They looked relieved.

As blessedly well-behaved as The Baby was in Wal-Mart, she turned on the screaming again as soon as we got home. By Sunday afternoon, that act had worn very very thin and we were ready for Beth to take her away from us. When Beth phoned to let us know she was on her way, we asked about the whole screaming bit.

“Oh, just set her on the blanket with some toys and she’ll get over it after a few minutes.”

“That’s just it,” we said. “She doesn’t. She’ll scream at the top of her lungs for five minutes, stop and play for one and then return to screaming for five.”

“Just let her go,” Beth said. “She’s got to learn.”

So we did. We let her go.  And go she did. For a solid hour that kid screamed and raged and shook her little fists at us. And the longer we let her go the more furious she became. She was so angry that it became comical and we soon found ourselves stiffling laughter. Still, we were afraid that she was becoming so upset that she’d throw up.  Logic imposed itself on us and we decided that Beth shouldn’t have to see a distraught kid when she arrived, so we picked the Baby up and tried to give her a bottle. She remained viciously pissed off at us for twenty minutes, despite our efforts. I tell ya, that kid’s going to be a force to be reckoned with.

When Beth arrived, she’d no sooner walked through the door than she said, “All right, who hurt my baby?”

“You told her?!” I said to my wife in as an accusing a tone as I could come up with.

“No.  I told you she’d know.”

Beth attended to The Baby’s bruised leg, gave it a smooch and admitted that she’d done as much herself by accident.

After The Baby and Beth had gathered up the mountain of baby supplies and departed, we sat in our house and enjoyed the silence. Eventually, we had to leave the house again, but when we returned home the place seemed a bit more empty than we remembered it.

How do I feel about my first taste of parenthood? It’s an acquired taste. Kinda salty and bitter in places, but with some good nougaty parts in there too. I think I could learn to like it.

 

 

Copyright © 2006 Eric Fritzius

The Talkin’ Grad-u-mation, Hide the Presents, No Hints, Floral Prints, Stupid Cat Blues (a Non-Horrible, Horribly True Tale)

As you may know by now, I have a bit of difficulty in keeping surprises a surprise when it comes to my wife.

Oh, I try. I really do. But she almost always knows I’m planning something for her major celebratory days (birthday, anniversary, Christmas, etc.) and starts pestering me for hints weeks in advance. And like a moron, I always think, “This time I’m really gonna pull it off. She’ll never guess this hint.” Then, as though she’s plucked it from my very mind, out she comes with the answer, pissing me off and causing me to vow never again to give her any hints. Then the next birthday comes along and there I go lobbing hints like softballs at the Near-Sighted-Middle-School-Girl’s Little League Playoffs.

After my defeat last October—in which I entirely failed to keep secret the fact that her birthday present was me finally hauling away our old washing machine, freeing up valuable space in the dining room—I became determined that I was finally gonna get one past the batter.

My three opportunities to do so, barring any unforeseen emergency holidays, were Christmas, our anniversary and Ashley’s med-school graduation present. Christmas was right out, because by the time I thought of a really good and perfect present December had already passed. That left our 5th anniversary in early February and graduation in late May. I aimed for Feb.

And as to the perfect present… Oh, it was just too good.

A couple of years ago, while browsing in a nearby gallery of community art, Ashley fell in love with a painting by local artist Jeanne Brenneman.  It was a floral watercolor entitled Flower Tower.  Beyond the beauty of the flowers depicted, though, the construction of the painting and frame was nearly as intriguing.  Mrs. Brenneman had taken an eight-inch-square piece of rough hand-made watercolor paper, the kind with craggy crinkly edges, and glued it to a larger piece of watercolor paper, also with cool craggy edges. Atop these layers, she painted the watercolor floral scene, and a most beautiful one at that. Then she mounted the whole thing on a thin piece of foam core which she in turn mounted to a matte board, framed by another matte board but with enough space that the viewer could see this painting floating above the back-most board, and then the whole thing was sealed in a wooden outer frame.  It was beautiful work. Ashley thought it was fantastic. She immediately declared her undying love for the painting and threatened to buy it right there. Then she saw the price tag and we realized we could neither justify nor afford dropping several hundred dollars for it, no matter how much we loved the painting. And while the artist herself was known to do prints of her existing work, a print of this picture, no matter how well-rendered, could never match the original three-dimensional work.

Deciding not to buy this painting was a harder thing to do than we thought, though. We went back to the hall more than once just to look at the painting. And then, several months later, Ashley tracked down Mrs. Brenneman’s website, discovered the painting was again on display in another town and we drove nearly an hour to go see it. Once again, though, we could not justify its purchase. Not with two cars in need of repair and rent in need of being paid. We’d have to save such extravagances for the future, like maybe in 2039, after we’ve paid off the school loans.

As distant a purchase as that seemed, the idea of the painting and the memory of how much Ashley loved it stuck in my head and then resurfaced in January when I was brainstorming presents for our 5th anniversary. I decided to look into it.  And while I still couldn’t really justify buying the painting as a whim purchase, I was—with a careful application of rationalization—able to justify purchasing it for a major event.

So I sent Mrs. Brenneman an e-mail explaining who I was, which painting I was interested in, and that I was interested in purchasing it as a surprise present for either our then upcoming 5th anniversary or for Ash’s graduation. Was it still on the market?  Mrs. Brenneman soon wrote me back and said that it was indeed still on the market, but had been submitted for inclusion in an upcoming painting competition and would possibly be unavailable until late April. This was fine with me, as it helped me decide when I was going to give it to Ashley. What I liked even better was that her asking price for the painting was at least a full $100 less than I remembered it cost before. Win win.

After this, I just had to start saving cash. I stashed away bits and pieces from paycheck to paycheck as well as my entire payment for some freelance web design work I had done. My nest egg grew, safely hidden away. (I knew it was safe cause Ashley knows I never have any money, so she doesn’t go looking for it.)

Meanwhile, I knew I had to come up with some way to keep hint-beggar Ashley off my back. May was quickly approaching and the closer we got to it the more likely she would start asking what my plans were. To the rescue came my mother-in-law. She e-mailed me to ask if I would like to go in on a family graduation present of some black pearl jewelry that she hoped to persuade Ash’s grandmother and sisters to join in for. I said it sounded like a fine gift, but I opted out citing my own plans.

“Don’t give her any hints!” Ma warned.  Evidently Ma didn’t tell that to everyone else in her little cabal.  Within a week, Ashley came to me and told me that she knew there were some sort of group plans afoot. Apparently, her grandmother had spilled that much, though she hadn’t spoiled any surprises.

“Oh, really?” I said, trying to act innocent, which I knew Ashley would interpret as guilt.

“You know about it, don’t you?!”

“Mayyyyybe.”

“Gimme a hint!”

“Nope. I can’t say a word about it,” I told her. “This is something other people are working on, so I can’t give any hints.”

“Aw, c’mon! Just one hint.”

“No!” I shouted. I then further distanced myself from any hint-giving by speaking exclusively to the cat for the next 20 minutes.

The spoilage of Ma and Company’s surprise was a blessing in disguise, though. So long as I continued to deny everything and not give any hints, Ashley seemed satisfied that I was in cahoots with them and left me alone about any solo plans I might have.  And so the days passed.

Since January, I’d kept in contact with Mrs. Brenneman and had continued to let her know I was still planning to make the purchase of her painting. We set a date, to meet at my library workplace to make the exchange, and soon our agreed upon date of May 26 had arrived.  My co-workers were all in on the surprise by then and were sworn to secrecy.

Mrs. Brenneman arrived at exactly the time she said she would, painting case in hand. We chatted a little about the painting, the awards that it had won and her general creative process for it. Then, I filled out a bill of sale form she had brought, made a copy of it for her and made the purchase. The painting was now mine and soon it would be my wife’s. I just had to find a good place to hide it.

I left work in the early afternoon on Thursday and headed home. Ashley’s parents had already arrived, but had taken her out for lunch, leaving me the run of the house.  My plan was to hide it somewhere inconspicuous-yet-accessible so I could sneak out late Friday night and hang it up somewhere in the house.  After abandoning a few bad ideas, I opted to hide the painting behind the door to my office. The door is always open and would be difficult to close even if I wanted to due to the runner carpet wadded up in front of it. Seemed perfect. I even gave the room a few walk-by passes from the hall to make sure it didn’t attract my eye. Seemed good to me.

That night, Ashley, Ma, Pa and I went to the big awards banquet at Ashley’s school. This is the traditional ceremony where all the students and their families come and feast from a banquet buffet while the school’s faculty congratulates them for surviving all the way to graduation. A number of students are recognized with scholarship awards and the sashes and cords for the top 10 percent grade achievers are passed out. (Ash wasn’t among the top 10 percent, but she’s not far from it. Frankly, passing medical school at all is the major achievement. And like the old joke goes: Question– What do you call a student who graduates from medical school with a GPA of 70? Answer– Doctor.)

Ashley had brought along a manila folder, which I thought was a little odd, especially after she became real secretive about it when I asked what it contained.

About mid-way through the awards ceremony, the dean of students stood and announced she was about to award the American Osteopathic Foundation’s Donna Jones Moritsugu Award, an award given to an non-student individual who has demonstrated “immeasurable support” of a student enrolled in the medical school and to the Osteopathic profession at large. The candidate for the award is chosen from several such candidates and voted upon by the faculty of the school itself. In addition to a beautiful framed plaque, the award came with a check for $240. And when the dean announced the winner of the award, she called my name.

I was stunned. I never knew such an award existed in the first place, nor would I have expected to win it if I had. I suppose, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been a candidate, after all I was the co-president of the school’s spouse/significant other support organization for a year and helped out at the school in other ways. But primarily, the award was granted for helping support my wife as she went through the four years of schooling. In other words, I was given the award for being a good husband. How many men get to say they were given an award (one that came with cash) for being a good husband? Not many, I’d wager.

After the ceremony, on our way to the car, Ashley revealed what she had in the manila envelope. She had intended to open it and distribute its contents during the ceremony, but no such opportunity was officially offered. What it contained were were two printed citations, one for Ma and Pa and one for me. They had the official school seal and signature of the president of the school, and stated that they were given as a token of her sincerest gratitude for supporting and encouraging her efforts during school. The award was given as thanks for patience and love and being an integral part of her success.  This single paper meant more to me than the framed one I’d just received inside. And it was at that moment that I decided I would give Ashley her present earlier than I’d intended.

My original plan had been to keep her painting a surprise all the way until Saturday morning. I was planning to sneak out and hang it up on an existing nail during the night and let her discover it when she got up Saturday. There on Thursday night, though, I felt such gratitude for the award she’d just given me that I wanted to rush home and give the painting right then. This was an urge I was able to fight off, though. I’d worked far too hard to keep this thing under wraps to give in quite that easily. However, I didn’t think it would hurt to give it to her a day early.

That night, just after we had retired for the evening, I got up to go fill my bedside water bottle and grabbed the painting from its hiding place on the way down the hall. I took down an existing frame on one wall of our living room, hung the new painting up, filled my bottle and then stashed the old frame behind the office door on my way back to bed. We went to sleep.

Early in the morning, our cat began driving us crazy. Usually we let her out in the evening, when she can run around in the dark and feel relatively safe from the entire lack of big bad animals that don’t stalk and kill her during the day. However, she didn’t get to go out in the evening because she was too scared that Ma and Pa might stalk and kill her if she came out from hiding. So at 5 in the morning, she began making a pest of herself, jumping on and off the bed and running up and down the halls at full speed, making as much noise as possible, in an effort to anger us to the point that we hurl her from the house.

“I better go let the cat out,” Ashley said, groggily.

“I can do it,” I said, fearing that she would see her surprise on the way through the living room.

“No, I got it,” she said, rising and snatching up the cat. I prayed silently that she wouldn’t notice her gift hanging on the living room wall, only a few feet from the back door, but figured that it wouldn’t be so bad if she did. She didn’t see it, though, and came right back to bed.

When we finally got up for good, around 7, I followed her into the kitchen. I had wondered how long it would take for her to notice it. I’d even envisioned the possibility that she wouldn’t notice it and would leave for her school-related functions that morning. Nope. Within 30 seconds of entering the kitchen, she turned, caught sight of it, turned away then did a double-take as her brain registered what she had seen. Her mouth dropped open and she said, “Ohhhhh.” Then she stared across the room at the painting for a long time, her eyes welling up with tears, then turned and smiled at me. The reaction was so satisfying. It was worth every bit of sneaking and plotting and secret-keeping on my part.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asked.

“Months,” I said.

“And he kept it a secret all this time!” Ma crowed triumphantly on my behalf. “He finally got one on you!”

“He did,” Ash said, giving me a big kiss. “He finally did.”

Copyright © 2005 Eric Fritzius

DATELINE: Saturday, April 2, 2005

So there we were, sleeping away, safe in the knowledge we didn’t have to get up `til breakfast time, that we’d have a leisurely morning of light sightseeing, and that our flight didn’t leave until 1:45 that afternoon.

At 5:45 a.m. our hotel phone rang. It was Butch. He and Andrew had gotten up to see Flo off for her early flight and while they were up Butch had rechecked everyone’s flight information. It turned out that only Butch’s flight was scheduled to leave at 1:45 p.m. Everyone else’s flight was scheduled for 8:45 a.m., same as Flo’s. He said we had 15 minutes to pack all our stuff and be downstairs ready to go before Sylvana arrived with the van. He said he would call Tito and Jo Ann so they could bring us our empty luggage.

“Who was that?” Ashley asked as I put the phone down. I told her it was Butch and informed her of our predicament and deadline.

“You’re kidding me, right?” she said.

“Nope.”

To say that we were panicked by this news is putting it lightly. Neither of us had done any packing whatsoever the previous night and all our stuff was scattered. So there we were, neither of us even technically awake, running around the room grabbing clothing and possessions at random and hurling it all into bags unfolded. I’d been optimistic that we could get it all done in 15 minutes, but the whole still being mostly asleep part and the still being very fatigued from our week really put the crimp on that. It was like we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be doing next. And in addition to clothing, we had to pack up our fragile items too. Ash had four pieces of pottery and I had all the little clay sun-faces and several bags of plantain chips to worry about. We decided to put it all in our carry-on luggage, which we could at least be sure we would have on our persons and could be responsible for not breaking. We certainly didn’t trust the airlines to extend to us the same courtesy.

Through the haze of morning, it occurred to me that something else might be going on.  What if this was all an elaborate practical joke on the part of Butch? I didn’t know how revenge-minded he was, but a prank of this magnitude would sufficiently get us back for all that stuff we did to him while he was sleeping last week. I could just see us breaking our butts packing and rushing downstairs only to find Butch there waiting with his camera to take our picture, laughing away at us. Ooh, that would be mean. We totally deserved it, but it would be mean. At that point, though, I figured having it be a prank was preferable to having to do a mad rush to the airport with Sylvana driving. She drove crazy enough when we weren’t under the gun, so I was not looking forward to the ride when we were.

After 10 minutes had passed, Butch called us back to tell us we could have until 6:15 to be downstairs. This was actually very good news, because we were nowhere near finished with packing. Unfortunately, it also meant that this was not likely a prank. And it wasn’t.

Perhaps ironically, the last time Ashley had been in Central America, she’d had to flee the country as fast as she could and here it looked like we were about to have to do the same all over again.

We got downstairs at 6:10. Jo Ann, Tito and Sylvana were there, ready to go, our luggage all packed in the back of Tito’s truck. We loaded up and hit the road.  Fortunately, traffic in San Salvador isn’t very hectic at 6:15 on a Saturday morning. We were able to zip right along at a nice clip and made the 40 minute journey to the airport in seemingly record time.

San Salvador’s airport a very nice, but also very small for the number of travelers it sees. Even at 7a, it was extraordinarily crowded, and that was just outside. Once again, my airport fears set in and I became very paranoid about our luggage. I didn’t know if it was justified or not, but we’d not had any time for a San Sal airport expectations briefing. I’d have to just be paranoid and wing it.

We unloaded all the luggage from the truck outside the airport. Though most of it was empty, it was still an awful lot of luggage to be lugging around. Butch gave us money for the $32 exit fee we would have to pay and then Jo Ann and Sylvana helped us get everything inside while Tito stood guard at the car. The inside was even more crowded than the outside, with thick queues of people as far as the eye could see. We said our goodbyes to everyone and said we’d hope to see each other in a year. Then Dr. Allen, Mary Ann, Andrew, Flo, Ashley and I headed on in to our place in line.

Oddly, the huge lines didn’t seem to really hamper us much as far as getting through customs went. I paid the exit fee and was given receipts for all of us that we’d have to show at further gates. We then checked our luggage and proceeded to the next set of lines we’d have to stand in. With all the bustling of the crowd, we managed to get separated, which wasn’t a problem until it came time to show the receipts for our exit fees at the next set of doors. After that it was just a brief stop at the metal detectors, a quick x-ray of shoes and carryon luggage and we then found ourselves in the far less crowded airport terminal area. This was a very long hallway that lead to the boarding stations for all flights. Ours was pretty far down the hall, but we had a half hour to kill, so we weren’t in any great hurry.

We said our goodbyes to Flo, who was headed out on a separate flight to Honduras, and then ate breakfast at a small airport café where they served pastries and coffee.

Even with the big journey ahead of us, I was feeling surprisingly calm about it all. It’s like I knew that the worries of the world and the hustle and bustle didn’t really amount to anything and it would all work out okay. Why get stressed about it? I mentioned this to my traveling companions and they felt the same way.

Once aboard the plane, I put on my seatbelt as instructed. It was the first time a safety belt had graced my lap in all two weeks.

We could definitely tell we were back in the United States when we landed in Houston. It seemed like everyone we encountered was determined to be rude to us and the customs process suddenly became far more complex than it had been in Central America. Our passports and customs forms were checked repeatedly at every step and there was a lot more walking to do and many more long lines to stand in. Most of the customs people were cranky too, yet we remained strangely calm.

We went through the X-Ray machines and Dr. Allen’s otoscope turned up in the shot and he was pulled out of line so that all of his luggage could be inspected by hand. Never mind that four members of our five member party all had otoscopes in their bags too, his was the one to get flagged.

Once we arrived at our departure gate, everything was fine. Then the little sign that said “Charlotte” disappeared and one that said “Philadelphia” appeared in its place. Our gate had been moved. Most people would have been annoyed at this, but we just looked around and found the new one across the way and moved. No biggie.

While we waited at our new gate, a stewardess for Continental Airlines came by and gave us each claim tickets for our carry-on luggage. This was going to be another smaller plane, like the one we’d flown to Houston in from Charlotte, so there wouldn’t be space in the cabin for everyone’s carry-on bags. We took the forms, left our bags on the jet-way and didn’t think much about it.

We boarded at 1:20 for our 1:35 flight. Dr. Allen and Mary Ann had seats together as did Ashley and I. And Andrew was just across the aisle from us with a good view of the baggage handlers as they loaded everyone’s carryon luggage into the plane’s hold.

“Hey, that guy’s dropping bags!” Andrew said. We couldn’t see what was going on, but Andrew could and said the handler was just yanking bags off the jetway and letting them fall six feet to the ground. He held onto them as they fell to give them a guiding hand, but fall they did and seemed to be landing pretty hard. This was probably the first time we began to get really riled up for most of the trip. The whole point of putting fragile items in the carryons was so THIS wouldn’t happen and here it was anyway.

We called the plane’s steward over and told him what was going on. He said he’d file a report about it and that shut us up for the moment. Our nerves calmed again and we settled in. Soon they plane taxied out onto the runway to await clearance to take off.

And we waited.

And we waited.

And we waited.

At 1:40, the captain came on the speaker and told us that Charlotte was closed due to weather concerns and we’re going to have to wait 50 minutes before they would know if we’d be able to take off.  At this point, the passengers around us began freaking out. People began grumbling, loudly and seemed to be of a mindset that asking us to wait for 50 whole minutes might just be the death of us, when it probably only meant the death of their connecting flights. Our party remained calm.

Somewhere near the front of the plane, a baby began screaming. Not crying, mind you, but screaming full-out, lungs ablaze, hardly stopping to take a breath. The air in the cabin, which had been warm from all the people aboard, now felt hot. Our party remained calm.

Two seats behind us, a man with a gruff British accent began loudly using his cell phone to call someone in Charlotte named Bonnie to tell her he would be coming in late. We know her name was Bonnie because he said her name, I’m gonna guess, at least 400 times during his brief call.  “Bonnie?  Bonnie?  Can you hear me, Bonnie?  Bonnie?”  His connection was apparently not very good, so he just kept repeating her name, getting no response, hanging up and dialing again and repeating the previous process.  Finally, after minutes of just going, “Bonnie?! Bonnie?! Bonnie?! Bonnie?!” he managed to get a good connection with her.  “Bonnie?! … Bonnie, I can’t hear you…. I said, I CAN’T HEAR YOU!! … I hear loud voices in the background.  …  Bonnie?! Where are you at, Bonnie? Are you having trouble answering your phone, Bonnie?! I hear loud voices there, Bonnie  … I said, I HEAR LOUD VOICES THERE, BONNIE!!!!  … Can you go to some place where it isn’t so loud, Bonnie?!!”

This is what we all were hoping for by that point.

Evidently Bonnie relocated and he began asking her what the weather was like there, to which he didn’t seem to get a satisfactory response because he then began chastising her for not paying attention to the weather reports. If he had shut up for five seconds, he might have heard the three other people around us phone home to Charlotte to learn that the weather was very windy there.

Regardless of Bonnie’s bellowing British husband, we the mission party were still very calm about it all. Even Andrew, who had the most to lose since Charlotte was not his final destination and he had to make a connecting flight from there to D.C., didn’t seem at all put out by the delay.

We waited on the runway for 50 minutes, with the screaming baby and the screaming Mr. Bonnie going full blast.

At 2:30, the flight crew came on the speakers and announced that we still didn’t know our take off time, but were going to head back to the terminal anyway because a passenger needed to get off the plane. I assumed the guy was maybe just connecting in Charlotte too and wanted to get off and try and catch a more direct flight to his destination. So they fired up the engine and we taxied back within walking distance of one of the airport terminals, but they didn’t let us off. Instead, we just sat there waiting, as the flight crew explained, for a bus to come and drive us to the terminal.

After at least 10 minutes, the steward came back on the speaker and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we were taxiing to a gate to allow a passenger off who was sick. But now the passenger doesn’t want off, so I’m not sure what we’re doing here.”

We all laughed at that. I had to hand it to the flight crew for having personality. Shortly after this, they came back on and announced that we had received word from Charlotte and would be taking off at 22 past the hour. Since it was now around 2:50, both we and the captain had assumed Charlotte meant 3:22. Uh, no. It turns out they meant 4:22, a fact that we didn’t learn until we’d waited ten more minutes. The captain had to come on and break the news to us that it would be another hour and 20 minutes before we could leave.

“If you want to deplane, we’ll call some more buses and they’ll probably take another hour,” he then said.

The passengers voted to deplane. This time the buses came fairly fast and we were whisked the 100 grueling yards to the terminal. Once there, we were told we would only have 15 minutes in the terminal before we had to bus up and head back to the plane, so we needed to be sure to stay near the announcement system speakers so we would know when to get back on the busses.

So we sat around in the terminal for 15 minutes. Far from being annoyed, I think most of our party found the whole thing pretty funny by this point. We found it even more funny when we bused back to the plane and it was discovered that Mr. Bonnie had missed the bus ride and was not aboard.  The steward walked to the man’s seat and asked if anyone knew who the man was and where he was. This inquiry was answered by a chorus of other passengers saying, “Bonnie? Bonnie?  Bonnie?”

The captain gives Mr. Bonnie two minutes to appear, then shut the door to the plane. Ten minutes later, Mr. Bonnie came running across the tarmac and, astroundingly, they let him in. He returned to his seat, quite shame faced.

At 4:22, we took off.

Our flight home was beautiful with an amazing view of the sun as it set in the west.

Our arrival in Charlotte was indeed accompanied by some bumpy weather, though. It was pretty windy then, so if it had been windier earlier I’m glad they kept us on the ground for as long as they did. I don’t take too well to having my plane tossed around in the air. The pilots got us down just fine, though.

We went through our carry-on bags once they were returned to us at the jet-way. Nothing seemed to be broken at first glance, but when we went back through them the following day we did find that part of Ash’s clay cooking set had been broken and a couple of the clay sun-faces I had were chipped. We also learned from the Continental Airlines website that their basic policy on this is that even if it IS their fault it’s not their fault, they take no responsibility and they won’t be reimbursing anyone for any items that they damaged. Thanks Continental.

By the time of our late arrival, Andrew had indeed missed his flight. But he was able to make arrangements to pick up a flight the following morning and could come stay with us at Ma & Pa’s back in Hildebran and drive over in the morning.

In a reverse of our first day at the airport, we shuttle bused with our luggage back to Dr. Allen’s truck. I was even wearing the same clothes, and pulled my hoodie/pillow out of my bag to keep me warm against the North Carolina chill. I had hoped the bus driver who’d marveled at all the bags we had two weeks ago would be our driver, but it wasn’t him.

We were all quite hungry, by then, so we stopped off at a Ryans buffet in Gastonia on the way home, where I had a great deal of difficulty not saying “gracias” to our waitress whenever she refilled my tea. It was fantastic food, but I ate far too much of it—stuffed myself stupid, really—and then was embarrassed that I’d eaten so much when I’d just returned from a place where people often have so little. I was miserable in mind and body for the rest of the evening.

Arriving home at Ma & Pa’s house was bittersweet. On the one hand, I was glad it still was Ma AND Pa’s house because Pa had lived through his fall from the roof of the cabin he’s building nearby. On the other hand, it was tough for Ashley to see her father sitting there encased in neck and wrist braces. Seeing him like that reminded her that we’d nearly lost him. She put on a good show when in his presence, but that night was a fairly sleepless one for her.

Pa was doing well. He was still on some pretty serious pain medication, but his wrist was already doing better than expected. He knew then that his recovery was going to be a long one, but his determination to get back up and running and his perseverance at physical therapy have gone a long way toward making that recovery faster. We didn’t know it then, but Pa would remain in the neck brace until mid-June, but his wrist has made a far better recovery than his doctors ever thought. It may never be 100 percent again, but it won’t be because Pa didn’t try to get it there.

We sat in the living room that night, with Dr. Allen, Mary Ann and Andrew, telling Ma & Pa some of the highlights of our trip. It was very hard to do, because at that point everything we’d experienced felt far too big to even know where to begin. You can’t encapsulate an experience like that in an evening (or even in a blog over the course of several months—believe me, I tried and it just hasn’t worked to my liking).

As we were to learn over the coming days, most of the time you don’t even have an evening’s worth of time to spare to tell folks about your journey; instead you have to give people who ask about it a quick snapshot in just a few minutes. Ashley’s method was to simply explain that we saw over 2600 patients in two countries and over 850 of them were lead to Christ. That seems to work pretty well.

 

THE END (FOR NOW)

DATELINE: Friday, April 1, 2005

Our final clinic day wasn’t originally supposed to occur on Friday at all. Our original schedule called for us to have Friday off so we could go out and see the sights in San Salvador. However, since we didn’t arrive in the country until Monday, which nixed the planned Monday clinic, and since we still had plenty of meds in the pharmacy, we decided to go ahead and do a clinic on Friday. Tito and Jo Ann suggested we do a half-day clinic so that we could still have time for some sight-seeing, so we agreed to do that.

On the way to the clinic, Butch asked Flo if she would be comfortable giving her testimony to the crowd of patients that morning. Flo didn’t seem sure if she wanted to do this at first, and I could feel Butch’s eyes scanning the rest of us for any takers already. The trouble was, I could have given my testimony, but it’s not exactly an awe-inspiring one. It’s pretty run of the mill, in fact.

I first became a Christian a fairly early age. Though I grew up Southern Baptist, my father was something of a religious free-spirit (well, a religious free-spirit with pretty firmly held views as to how things work from a religious standpoint) who wasn’t afraid to try out the services of different denominations or even altogether different faiths. I’ve been to Greek Orthodox services, Synagogues, Catholic Mass, Mennonite services, Holy Rollin’ Speakin’ in Tongues Pentecostal services, plus just about any variation on Protestant services you’d care to name. I mostly hated it as a kid. There we’d be, driving across country when suddenly dad would get it in his head that we had to go hang out with the Quakers for the evening, and off my sister and I would be whisked to some strange little back-road church where they didn’t do things like we were used to. As an adult, I’m really glad to have had all those experiences and have thanked my dad for taking me to so many different churches. Still hated it at the time.

Even with that background, it wasn’t until the age of 8 that things first started to congeal in my head as to where I fit into religion and spirituality. It was while attending a three day church camp based at a local community college near the Mississippi town in which I grew up that things started to make sense. This was my first time being away from home by myself, so it was kind of a big step for me. But my best friend Scott Long was there, so that’s where I wanted to be.

In addition to all the usual fun camp-activities, (including a talent show at which I came in 2nd and Scott came in 1st), we were also given Bible lessons throughout the day as well as hearing youth-tailored sermons from our camp minister. We also memorized Bible verses. The first of the two main ones I remember was, of course, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” This is perhaps the greatest verse in the whole Bible, for it contains the key to salvation. It’s got the whole Wages of Sin is Death thing built in, but it shows you the way out at the same time. But the real Rosetta Stone for John 3:16, for me, was the other verse I memorized, Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The camp minister explained that this meant that human beings are born sinners and there’s not a one of us who can live up to the commandments and laws God laid down in the Old Testament. (You know, all those rules and regs that the Jews of the day spent much of their time sacrificing things to gain forgiveness for breaking.) This was why Jesus sacrifice on the cross was so necessary. He, an innocent man, died a horrible death, the death of a criminal/sinner, so that we would not have to make blood sacrifices in order to atone for our sinful nature.

Hearing that verse and having its meaning explained to me was a profound moment for me. I can still see the inside of that meeting hall on that community college campus like a snapshot in my head of the moment the meaning hit me. The verse means, we’re all sinners, humanity as a whole with me included. No one is exempt, cause that’s the definition of ALL. Suddenly this nebulous concept of all these nameless sinners getting sent to hell for sinning, that everyone had been talking about, hit close to home. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that I too was a sinner. Sure, I wasn’t sinning big time or anything—I mean, I hadn’t knocked over a liquor store or killed anybody—but I couldn’t say I was even living up to the rest of the 10 Commandments to the best of my ability, let alone the myriad of other things a person could chose to do (or not do) that constituted sin. (Sin, after all, is defined best as disobedience to God.)

Ah, but then my little mind headed back to John 3:16 territory, particularly the bit about “whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Hey, there ya go! I believed in God, I believed in Jesus, so therefore in my mind, I was saved. It was an amazing thing. I felt all tingly inside at the thought of it and figured that’s what happened to a person when they got saved—they felt all tingly.

I came home from camp and announced to my dad that I was saved.

“You are?” he asked, a bit hesitantly. So I told him about Romans 3:23 and my realization over its meaning and its correlation to John 3:16. I didn’t use words like realization and correlation, but you get the gist. Dad listened and then told me that my revelations on those verses were good, but he didn’t think I’d quite hit the mark. I wasn’t saved yet.

Dad let me stew on that one for a while and stew I did.

Within a day or two, though, it began to really bother me. How could I not be saved? I’d felt all tingly and everything, like something had changed within me. Then, in true Michael Binkley style, (that’s a Bloom County reference, folks—pay attention), I woke my dad up in the middle of the night and asked him how I could become a Christian. Dad groggily realized I was serious and he woke up enough to explain a few basics to me.

Dad told me that the way to become a Christian is that first you must admit to God that you are a sinner. It’s not enough just to realize that you’re a sinner, you must actually admit it to God. You must also ask him to forgive you of those sins. Next you must acknowledge that you believe Jesus was God’s son and that he died on the cross in our place as the ultimate sacrifice so that we didn’t have to endure the punishment of hell. And finally you must ask Jesus to grant you the grace of his Salvation and accept you into his eternal kingdom. With Dad’s help, I prayed that prayer.

This is not to say it’s been all smooth sailing since. Not by a stretch. And it wasn’t the last time I would pray that prayer. See, as a child I was always a worrier. I used to spend a lot of time fretting that somehow I’d said the salvation prayer wrong the first time and wasn’t really a Christian. No one wants to go to hell on a technicality, so I prayed it again and again over the years. My father finally pointed out to me that most people who aren’t Christians don’t worry over their salvation or lack thereof so much and it’s usually the people who are already Christians that spend so much time worrying about their sinfulness and seeking redemption. Made sense.

I also have to admit to falling by the wayside with my faith quite a bit over my life. I felt pretty strong in it when I was a kid all the way up through high school. I had my ups and downs, but I felt like I was on the path. During college, my downs became more frequent, but I had good friends who were Christians who helped keep me on the path most of the time. After college, though, I spent several years away from church altogether–not out of any philosophical differences, per se, but mostly because I was unwilling to upset my comfortable life of not going to church by actually getting off my duff and going there only to be reminded of how much I was disobeying God in the first place.

These days, thanks in large part to my wife’s influence, I’m a regular church-goer. Not that that in and of itself means anything, because I’m probably just as big a sinner as I was before in many regards. But I have a good church and good friends in it who go a long way toward helping me stick to the path and grow in my relationship with God. And that is the ultimate goal that many people miss.

There’s a common misconception that Christianity is all about Do’s and Don’ts. And many Christians get wound up in the whole “don’ts” part, as though actions are somehow what saves in the first place. They don’t. At its core Christianity is supposed to be about an ongoing relationship between you and Jesus, one where you allow him to steer your life where He would have it go and you’re along for the ride, putting your faith in him that He will bring you through the experience. I’m thankful to say that I’ve had quite a few Step out on Faith moments in my life, this trip being a big one of them. God has always brought me through. Do I allow him to steer my life at all times. Unfortunately, no. And that’s part of the ongoing relationship–learning to relinquish.

So my testimony is pretty normal. Not that it would have been a bad one to give, being as how the vast majority of people who become Christians probably have fairly normal testimonies to give. As it stood, though, I didn’t have to give mine during our clinic that day. Flo went ahead and gave hers that morning and I was left wondering what I might have said.

Only 65 patient numbers were given out Friday morning, but we let some more in after we saw that there were some people truly in need who arrived too late to get numbers. One lady who arrived late complained to us that she had not heard our clinic was even in the area until that very morning. We wound up seeing her anyway.

I know this number system for seeing patients seems cold and clinical, but it’s almost the only way to run things. Dr. Allen remarked through both weeks of this mission that he had never seen such smooth and seemingly practiced organization outside of mission work. Such things certainly don’t happen so spontaneously back in the states. We knew, though, that this was not practiced because this was indeed the Word of Life El Salvador Team’s fist such medical mission.

Because we had so many meds left, much of it in vitamin form, all prescriptions Friday got vitamins whether they wanted them or not and usually a two month supply. We also discovered that we still had loads and loads of candy, so I began bagging up fistfuls of it into our ziplock prescription bags and kept it in a box by the pharmacy window to dispense to any children who happened by with their parents.

In the morning, I spied a little girl out front who didn’t seem to be having such a great time, so I went out with a bottle of bubble stuff and blew bubbles for her to demonstrate how it was done, then gave her the bottle. She smiled and began blowing bubbles and soon had friends gathered round. A few minutes later, I looked out again to see one of her older friends running around with the girl’s bubble stuff. At first I was mad that this older girl might have taken the bubble stuff away from the younger one. Then I figured out that they were all just sharing. I grabbed a couple more bottles and went out to give to the girl and some of the other kids out there. Soon bubbles were floating freely throughout the clinic.

Not too long later, I had a little more time off and went out to juggle for the kids. I’d been saving my juggling balls for most of the trip and had brought quite a few. Most of them were from my personal juggling materials collection, many of them just rubber balls and raquet balls, the very ones I’d used when I first learned to juggle. I don’t use them anymore, preferring to use juggling bags when I juggle at all, so I figured relocating these to Central America would be a good thing. After I’d juggled two balls with one hand and three balls with two hands for a bit, I threw the balls to the three nearest kids and nodded that they should keep them. (You can communicate so much with a nod, at least in my mind.) They dashed off to play with their new toys. Soon after I returned to work, I began to notice children gathered at the pharmacy door. Word had spread I was giving out toys and the kids were looking awfully hopeful. After letting them stare in at me for a while, I did another juggling routine and then passed the balls out to the gathered kids. They disappeared and were replaced with new kids. So then I gave out the remaining balls I had and more kids arrived. Then I gave away all the rest of the bubble stuff and more kids arrived. Finally, I handed out some of our prescription bags full of candy to the remaining kids and that seemed to do the trick. They grinned and dashed away.

In addition to giving out extra meds for diagnosed problems, the docs on Friday also began prescribing some placebo meds as well.

Placebos, for those who don’t know, are medicines or harmless substitutes for medicines given to patients in place of real medicines. These days, they’re mostly used for control groups in pharmaceutical testing labs, but in the old days doctors prescribed placebos all the time when they suspected a patient’s ailment was mostly in their head.

In our clinic, we weren’t exactly using them in either manner, but instead used them in cases where we could not medically treat the symptoms described. I’ve said it before here, but it stands repeating: Doctors can attest that medicine is often more art than science. If a patient can be sold on the idea that something is going to make them better or will cause a condition to stop, they will very often get better or the condition will stop.

Dr. Allen said that this sort of practice used to happen all the time in doctor’s offices across the U.S. And pharmacists, back in the day, were used to seeing prescriptions for a veritable wonder drug called Obecalp, (that’s placebo spelled backwards), that was used to treat a huge variety of conditions. However, in the intervening years, medicine has become a whole lot more regulated, so these days doctors in the states pretty much have to put up with their hypochondriac patients.

The placebo meds we gave out were genuine meds, like Benadryl and Chlortrimeton, but they were prescribed for conditions those drugs were not intended to treat. Throughout the morning, we in the pharmacy would get prescriptions for Benadryl and beside the drug-name on the prescription would be a little note from Dr. Allen explaining what condition this drug was being prescribed for, so if a patient asked if it was for his nerves or for his insomnia we could say, “Yes, that’s what it’s being prescribed for.”

While dispensing meds Friday morning, one of our patients surprised me. Though I had Claudia there as a translator, I gave the lady instructions in Spanish since the instructions were simple.

“Tres diarias. En la manana, en la tarde, en la noche.”

“So, it’s one pill three times per day?” the lady replied in perfect English. I was dumbstruck at first, then grinned at the patient.

“You speak English,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

So I explained the rest of her prescriptions in English and finished up with “God be with you” instead of my usual “Dios te bendiga.”

Claudia asked me about my Spanish skills. I had to admit that to call them skills was really pushing the definition of the word. Sure, I’d taken over six semesters of it in college, but technically what I’d really done is take 6 semesters of a 4 semester course. I took Spanish I, enjoyed it, did fairly well in it, and then promptly sat out of it for an entire year before taking Spanish II. Naturally, I had forgotten so much of my knowledge from Spanish I that I began failing II miserably and had to drop it. So I came back for round 2 the next semester, having not so much as cracked my Spanish I book for a brush up, and proceeded to fail the class yet again and was forced to drop it. After this, I decided to audit Spanish I and really do the refresher course right. That helped tremendously and I proceeded through Spanish II, III and IV. I can’t say I got through them with no troubles, but I got through them.

I found, however, that throughout my two weeks in Central America, much of my Spanish skills had returned to me, far more than I had expected. Verb forms that I’d forgotten were reconnecting in my head and little bits of things would filter out every now and then.

“Hey, I remember Tener!” I said, just after a patient asked me if I was the guy who had the patient numbers. I didn’t know what to tell her so I directed her to someone else. Then I realized, I could have just said, “No tengo numeros” or “I have no numbers” and answered her question.

Toward the end of our clinic day, some kids from the neighborhood came up and asked if we were seeing any more patients. The missionary staff member whose job it had been to give out numbers explained that we weren’t and that we were sorry. The kids left. On their way down the street, they happened to pass by Butch, who was coming back from the store with more goodies. He noticed that one of the kids was barefooted and limping and was bleeding from his toe. Butch got the kid’s attention and helped him back to the clinic where he was put right into the system. Turned out his injured toe was in pretty bad shape and in danger of going septic on him. It was providence that Butch happened by at that moment and noticed it. Kid would have been bad off otherwise.

At 1:30 p we saw our last patient, filled our last prescription and then went next door to our final clinic lunch. I savored the home made potato chips one last time. We all feasted and had extra sandwiches afterwards and enjoyed the company.

After lunch, we packed up the clinic. Even giving out as much extra meds as we had earlier, the pharmacy still had quite a lot of medication left over. We packed as much of it into the plastic tubs as we could and the rest into the remaining suitcases. We would be leaving it in the care of Tito and Jo Ann for use with future missions or to distribute to those in need as they saw fit.

When the clinic was packed away, Butch wanted to get a group photo with everyone. Unfortunately, he chose to take this photo beneath the cicada tree. He asked Dr. Allen and I to take up positions as the end markers for the photo and then once we were positioned he asked everyone else to file in between us. There we stood, beneath the cicada tree while Butch got us into position, the cicada urine literally raining down upon our heads. It was so very very foul. Fortunately, I remembered that Ashley had made me pack a disposable plastic rain poncho, so I pulled it out of my backpack and put it on. After much jostling, we were finally in place and Butch snapped several photos before we revolted and dashed out from under the tree.

I will not miss those bugs.

We drove back to the hotel to freshen up and rest a bit before heading out to see the sights of San Salvador. The plan was to souvenir shop for a while, then go out to dinner with much of the mission staff around 7.

We headed first to an Indian Market to shop for souvenirs. There were enough translators to go around, but mostly the shopkeepers were used to dealing with Americans so it wasn’t always a necessity. I found some really nice gifts to take back home. Once again the American dollar goes a long way, and where it didn’t there was always the opportunity to haggle. Ashley found some really nice pottery, including a colorful chip dish with salsa bowl and a clay ware set that included a large urn in which you could put a Sterno to cook through a smaller pot that rested on top. It was sort of like a fondue pot, without the long forks.

After shopping there, we still had a bit of time before our reservations at the restaurant, so Jo Ann and Sylvana took us to a very swanky supermarket. I had mentioned to Jo Ann that I wanted to visit a supermarket at some point because I was looking to buy some instant soup for my boss. My boss’s sister-in-law is Guatemalan and she introduced my boss to a Knor-brand instant soup from Guatemala that was terribly delicious. My boss wanted me to score some if I could. I never got the chance to grocery shop in Guatemala, though, but figured El Salvador would probably have the same sorts of things. Meanwhile, Ashley wanted to shop for some fried plantains and Fresca. So we all followed Jo Ann to a grocery store located in a high-end strip-mall full of expensive shops. Our translators told us as we arrived that this was where the wealthy people of San Salvador came to shop. True enough, the place was surrounded by a very Yuppie-like crowd, out for their Friday evening.

Once inside, we located the soup aisle, but while they had plenty of Knor soups, they didn’t have the particular flavor I was looking for. I loaded up on them all the same since they were only a quarter each. We also found some individual bags of fried plantains to take back with us to give as souvenirs as well as some El Salvadorian coffee and Fresca.

While we were still browsing the chip aisle, one of the missionaries, Nestor, looked down into our basket and said, “You are buying whiskey?”

“No, no,” Ashley said, thinking he was joking around. “We’re only buying soup and chips.”

Nestor pointed into our basket again, where there indeed was a bottle of tequila in the bottom.

“I’ve been framed!” I said, looking around to see if the culprit was near. Not that I eschew alcohol by any means. I’m a beer-drinkin’ Baptist, after all, and do not hold with the oft-held belief that drinking alcohol is a sin. (I believe Jesus drank enough wine during his time on earth to prove my point.) However, even with that in mind, we weren’t really looking to buy any alcohol then. It took some time and guesswork to figure out who stashed the tequila. Naturally, Butch was our number one suspect, but it was Flo who figured out that it was really Sylvana who had stashed the booze in our basket. When confronted, Sylvana laughed and laughed.

We were to get another shock when we went to pay for our purchases. After the cashier rang up everything, the total price according to the register screen, was like 170.50. Fortunately, Nestor was there to aid us in translation and explained that the 170.50 was in the old El Salvadorian currency, back before the economy switched to American dollars, so we really owed around $15.

Next we climbed back into Sylvana’s van and rode to the restaurant of our dinner reservation at the Hunan Chinese Restaurant. (I know, I know, we came all the way to El Salvador to eat Chinese food. Shut up.) Sylvana, of course, was driving like a mad woman and that extended itself to parking. The restaurant was in a multi-story office building that we later saw consisted mostly of doctors offices and the like. However, we approached the building from the far two lanes of a very busy four lane road and in order to park we would have to cut across the two lanes of oncoming traffic. Sylvana waited and waited until we had just enough time to squeeze through a gap in the traffic and then she started to gun it before coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the lanes.

What we didn’t realize until then was that the road itself, through paving and repaving, was now quite a bit higher than the parking area in front of the building. In order to park, the van would have to drive down the rolling dip of the edge of the asphalt and then onto the rise of the concrete sloped parking space. With all eight of us in the van, however, this was an impossibility without gouging out the bottom of the van in the process.

“Uh oh,” Sylvana said.

“We have to get out?” Flo asked.

“Yes.”

So there we were, pouring out of the van like a Chinese fire-drill (ironically enough), two lanes of honking cars beaming their headlights at us as we scrambled to get out of the road. Our weight no longer a factor, Sylvana gingerly pulled into the parking space and we were set.

Dinner was fantastic and the restaurant quite nice. In fact, I hadn’t realized it was going to be that nice when I’d dressed for the evening.

“I’m glad I wore my best dirty T-shirt and flip flops,” I told Ashley. I didn’t have much of a choice, though. If it wasn’t a T-shirt and shorts it would have been the world’s wrinkliest dress-shirt and pair of corduroys, since my dressier clothes had spent the past two weeks wadded in my luggage.

Inside, we met up with many other members of the mission staff and were seated around an enormous round table that seated 16 people. Soon we had hot tea and shark fin soup to sample while our choice of dishes was prepared. When the food arrived, they came on big platters that were placed on the giant Lazy Susan in the middle of the table, and we took turns spinning it and sampling from a variety of great food.

After dinner, Jo Ann told us that Tito wanted to say a few words to us.

Though Tito is the leader of the Word of Life mission in El Salvador, we’d heard very little from him all week long. We’d been told in advance that he was a quiet man, but a very good soul and he had proved to be that throughout the week. I think we all assumed when Jo Ann said Tito would like to say a few words to us, that he would say a few words in Spanish and that she would translate them into English for us. However, what happened next surprised us all. Tito began speaking English—very good English. And he spoke in very good English for ten minutes straight. When he was finished, all we could do was grin and congratulate him on having fooled us all week. He’d never said he couldn’t speak English, but we’d all assumed as much from his quiet demeanor.

After dinner, we said our goodbyes to most of the mission staff and headed back to Tito and Jo Ann’s house to deal with the luggage. All of our clinic supplies had been brought back to their home following our day and it was time to divide it up and see how we were getting things back to the states. The meds and remaining toys and candy we left behind for future missions or as Tito and Jo Ann saw fit to distribute. There were a few other sundry supplies and items of donated clothing that we left as well. This left a lot of empty luggage, which we treated like Russian nesting dolls, putting bags within bags within bags to consolidate space. We also made plans for breakfast the following morning. Jo Ann knew of a place that sold an El Salvadoran dish called a pupusa which was supposed to be a great breakfast food. The place also sold genuine fried plantains, which is what I wanted. The only member of our team who wouldn’t be able to go was Flo and this was because she had an early flight out at 8:45 the next morning to go to Honduras, where she would be staying with some friends she had from previous mission trips. She’d have to leave the hotel around 6 a.m.

We left all the empty luggage with Jo Ann and Tito and headed back to the hotel in the van. Ash and I got to sleep around 11:30, savoring the knowledge that we’d get to sleep in a bit in the morning, go have a fabulous breakfast, pack up our stuff and be ready to go by our 1:45 p.m. flight back home.

NEXT

DATELINE: Thursday, March 31, 2005

Since we didn’t leave the clinic until after 9 and didn’t eat supper until after 10 and didn’t get back to our hotel rooms until nearly 11, we didn’t get much sleep until nearly midnight.  When the alarm went off at nearly 7, Ashley and I were in no mood to actually get up. We’d both been worked to a frazzle the day before and had very little sleep in between, so we just could barely face getting up at all. I don’t know how we managed not to growl any more at one another than we did, but we arose and got showered and dressed with very little griping.

None of the rest of Team Gringo were especially bright or chipper, but I don’t think any of us dreaded the day itself. We just wished we had more energy to give to it. As for me, though, I needed not only more energy but also a better attitude. I was a right cranky man, for no real reason, and it seemed like everything was irritating me. That attitude, unfortunately followed me all the way to the clinic site.

In the pharmacy, we had a little down time before patients began showing up so we bagged more and more medicine. We could hardly keep up with the demand for vitamins the day before, so that was a primary goal for pre-bagging. For much of the day, whenever any of us had a spare moment, we bagged vitamins. Unfortunately, it was difficult for any of us to do this without taking up valuable counter space and generally getting in the way. And you could only bag meds for so long before the swell of patients with prescriptions called you away to help with the filling, leaving a mess behind from the stuff you were bagging before, clogging the counters and other spaces. I began to get growly—never a good sign.

We also bagged a bunch of other meds, trying to stick to the doc’s new favorite dispensing amount of 30 pills, instead of 20, only this time to have prescription after prescription arrive in amounts of 20!!!

“Porque? Porque? Porque?!!!!”

I also began to become further irritated with my fellow pharmacy staffers, particularly Mary Ann, who kept insisting on doing everything the correct way instead of the semi-half-assed method I preferred.  (I fully admit to being wrong here.)  I can’t even recall the exact details of what I was irritated about, except to say that it was over a medicine, probably Amoxil, that we had to instruct the patients how to pre-mix, but the way I wanted to do it required them to put 2 ml less water into the powered Amoxil than the dose actually called for. I think this was because we’d run out of the syringes that were easy to mark, or maybe we’d run out of our 250 mg Amoxil and were having to recalculate doses from the 400 mg Amoxil we had plenty of. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that Mary Ann insisted, as well she should have, on getting the dose exactly right, instead of having a dose with slightly less water in it, as I was trying to do. This was probably the pinnacle of my ire for the day, but even as I was fuming inwardly and sometimes outwardly about it, I realized that Mary Ann was only trying to do the right thing for the patient, and that no matter how little the differences in out methods might actually matter, I should defer to her experience in these things, especially considering that I’M NOT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL and SHE IS.

After that realization, my attitude became quite a bit better. It often takes embarrassing myself with my own bad-behavior for me to recognize how badly I’m behaving and make the necessary adjustments to stop it.

One of the major patient pharmaceutical requests was insect repellant. In a country with the kind of large and aggressive bugs that this one seemed to have, it stood to reason. However, the pharmacy did not stock bug dope of any kind. In some cases, however, there were children patients who had enough bug bites on them that it seemed like some sort of repellent would be good to prescribe. This is when Ashley had the idea of concocting a 1 percent solution of Deet in water. Deet is one of the most powerful insect repellents on the planet. Unfortunately, it is also quite dangerous when it comes to killing off brain cells in children and is not recommended for use with children. Her idea was to create a very weak solution of it to use on the child’s skin to ward off bity bugs. I let her mix it, so as not to screw it up and put too much in it myself. But I didn’t feel good about it. Most of the meds we had in house wouldn’t kill a person if they took too much. And even though the Deet solution was given out in a child-proof bottle that I’d drawn a skull and crossbones on, I didn’t feel safe that the kid we’d prescribe it for wouldn’t find a way to open it and drink the stuff. Later in the day, Ash prescribed another bottle of it, which I mixed up and labeled, but then went to her and let her know that I didn’t feel good about giving such poison out.  We wound up nixing it from the prescription.

We did do some far safer mixing when it came to creative prescriptions. Because we were seeing so many skin rashes, the docs had been prescribing lots of hydro-cortisone cream. So much that we ran out of it pretty early in the day. Dr. Allen suggested that we make our own cream solution by mixing 1 part Triamcinilone Cream (a far more powerful skin ointment than Hydro-cortisone) with 4 parts hand lotion. We mixed it up in tiny little baggies, labeled it as to what was in it and in what ratio and then gave it out as prescribed. I wound up mixing quite a few of these throughout the day.

Dr. Grace was back with us for most of the day on Thursday, so we kept a pretty steady patient rate.

On Thursday, Ashley had to leave for her first house-call. A woman had come to the clinic and explained that her son had suffered a severe burn to his leg and was unable to walk to the clinic for treatment. So Ashley, Butch and a translator took some supplies and some meds from the pharmacy that would be good for treating burns and headed out by vehicle with the mother to visit her home. Ash told me later that she didn’t know what to expect. For all she knew, the boy had just burned himself horribly that morning and she didn’t have the know how to do much, other than tell his parents they needed to get him to a hospital. Or if the burn had happened some time ago, she would likely have to deal with improper bandaging and infection. She prayed that God would give her insight.

They drove for a couple of miles until they were in a wooded area where they came upon a house. The boy himself was seated on the front porch of the house waiting. The boy was wearing long trousers and didn’t seem to be in any obvious pain. Ashley, through the translator, asked if she could see his burn and he lifted up one of the legs of his trousers, which had been split along the side for easy access. The leg had what looked like a fairly fresh dressing on it. The boy removed the bandages for her to let her see the burn itself. Upon seeing it, Ashley was confused, because she couldn’t figure out why the burn had a crosshatched pattern. It was also not in nearly as bad condition as she was expecting. Then she realized why it had the crosshatched pattern. The boy had received skin grafts on the burn already. This burn had been treated by physicians who had shaved skin from elsewhere on his body and applied it to the burned leg, to help grow new tissue there. The reason for the crosshatched pattern is that skin heals far better from lots of smaller wounds rather than one large wound. So before the shaved skin is applied it is first cut into a latticework-like pattern that facilitates faster healing. Not all of the skin graft had taken, so there were burn patches showing through, but Ashley said the whole thing seemed to be healing fairly well. Since she was there, Ashley applied a burn bandage infused with silver which would help in the healing process.

In the afternoon, we were brought more nifty snacks purchased at a local neighborhood store. Butch returned from the store bearing a large roll of snack bags, the kind chips usually come in. I say they were in a roll and what I mean by this is that instead of individual bags of chips, these bags were still attached to one another, as though they’d missed a key process at the packaging plant in which they were to have been cut apart. At a mere 5 cents American per bag, though, these rolls of chips were actually a pretty neat idea. After all, it’s much easier to transport a long coil of chips than 20 mini bags. Butch had also bought three different varieties so we could each get a good sample of the kind of snack junk-food El Salvador had to offer.

One of the varieties was basically Cheetos. They weren’t called Cheetos, but that’s what they were. And unlike my experience with El Salvadorian Oreos, these Cheetos actually tasted like real Cheetos. In fact, they were almost better than real Cheetos. Almost.

The next variety were a kind of bacon flavored puffed snack that had a similar texture to Funyuns. They were quite tasty. We don’t really have an equivalent in this country, so next time you’re in Central America you should pick up a bag of them. Sorry, I don’t recall the brand name.

The last variety was my favorite, though. They were salted and deep fried plantain chips. Yesiree, these were the best of the bunch. They were sweet and salty and crunchy all at the same time. Just Mwah! Goodness! I ate two bags of them without breaking a sweat.

“You know, fried plantains are a breakfast food here,” Jo Ann said. She didn’t mean the fried plantain chips, but actual plantains deep fried and coated with powdered sugar. I suddenly found I had a hankering for just such a creature and was looking forward to ordering them as soon as possible. Jo Ann even told us that she knew of a good place that did fried plantains and that if we wanted to we could go eat there on Saturday. Sounded like a plan to me.

The thing about the chips that continued to amaze me, though, were their price. Five cents American. I just marveled at it. Sure, it’s not like we were getting a Big Grab, or anything, but these bags represented the size you usually find with a child’s lunch. Not a bad size for a quick snack. And you couldn’t beat 5 cents. Jo Ann asked how much one would cost in America.

“Oh, fifty cents, easy,” I said.

They were appalled.

Unlike Guatemala, where the currency is Quetzales, El Salvador now runs on the American dollar. However, as you can see with the example of the chips, the dollar goes a lot further in El Salvador than it does back home.

Thursday afternoon we were joined in the pharmacy by two new translators, whose names were Rosio and Claudia. They were very sweet young ladies who were very good at their job of translating. Some might say too good. So far Jo Ann had pretty much stuck to our standard prescription instructions of telling each patient how often to take their medicine and for how many days and circling this frequency on our graphic-based instruction slips, or, if the instructions were more complicated, she would write them out, but for the most part she kept it as simple as possible. Rosio and Claudia, however, felt it necessary to not only explain all instructions in graphic detail but to write them all down in graphic detail as well. This might not have even been an issue, except that we still had Dr. Grace with us and she continued whipping through patients at an astounding rate. Soon the pharmacy had a line of patients fifteen feet deep and it stayed that way. Mary Ann and I were filling prescriptions as fast as we could, but then these filled prescriptions had to get in an ever-lengthening line to have their instructions notated, which–as the “pharmacists” on hand–we also had to be present for to make sure they were done right. It was gumming up the works and was beginning to put me into another foul mood.

I tried to explain to them that this was not a productive or efficient way to run a pharmacy. Sure, it was very nice that they wanted each patient to have exact instructions on when and how often to take their meds, to the nearest hour, but this wasn’t rocket science and our former method of telling patients “Uno por dia” and “Dos diarias” worked just fine for telling patients to take pills once or twice a day. Now, granted, if a prescription was more complicated than taking a pill a specified number of times per day, we did then have a medical obligation to explain it and write out the instructions accordingly.  However, for the vast majority of prescriptions we could just circle the little pictures on the instruction slips.

Rosio did not agree with this at all. I don’t know if she didn’t think the people were smart enough to follow the graphs or if she thought they would forget what we told them, but she did not like it that I wanted her to stop writing out all the instructions. I tried to explain that we’d been using the graphs and simple instructions quite successfully for not only this week, but a four clinics in Guatemala before this and had no known problems.  Taking the amount of time we were with each med was slowing everything down to a crawl and causing the patients who had been waiting to be seen for most of the day to have to wait even longer before they could leave. All we needed to do, as I saw it, was fill the prescriptions, circle the correct pictures on the instruction slips, explain each slip in regards to each medicine to the patients and then put those slips into the individual med baggies or otherwise attach it to the med bottle itself so that they wouldn’t be confused with other meds.

Rosio didn’t like it, but she and Claudia agreed to do it my way. Of course, the first patient Rosio tried my method on was a kid in his late teens who gave us the blankest of looks when Rosio told him the instructions for his pills. He looked at her like she was speaking English, or something. She told him the instructions again, very simple instructions that he was to take one pill three times per day until they ran out, but again his expression spoke volumes about just how much he didn’t get it.

“Uh, maybe you’re right after all,” I said. After that we kind of met in a middle ground of our two methods, altering it on a case by case basis.

At the end of the day, one of the last patients to be seen was an elderly woman. She explained to Dr. Allen that though she had been waiting for much of the afternoon, there wasn’t actually anything wrong with her. She said she lived nearby and had several children and grandchildren living with her. Due to circumstances, the grandchildren were largely unable to work, so she was the primary bread-winner for the household in her job as a housecleaner. Her family was understandably very poor and had little money to spend on anything fun for the kids. She had been told that our clinic had been giving out toys and candy and she had walked here and signed up to be seen on the off chance that we had some toys and candy we could give to her to take home. Dr. Allen was very touched by her story and loaded her up with toys and candy and vitamins for her whole family.

Our clinics ended around 7 that evening and we were able to head on back to WOL headquarters for a much earlier supper than the night before. Some of the translators from our week would not be returning for our Friday half-clinic, so we had something of a tearful farewell with them Thursday night.

EL SALVADOR CLINIC DAY 3 STATS
Patients Seen: 218
Prescriptions Filled: 586
Salvations/Rededications: 67

NEXT

DATELINE: Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Breakfast worked better this day. We got toast and jelly and it didn’t even take all that long.

Ash took my list of meds we’d run out of or were otherwise low on and headed to a local pharmacy with Jo Ann and Butch. The rest of us piled into Sylvana’s van and headed back to our pre-school clinic site.

We had nearly reached our clinic and were passing near the new neighborhood clinic site—the one with no staff and no medicine—and were a bit surprised to see a great deal of activity around it. The gates were open and there were many people standing around outside with decorations. In fact, the road past it had been blocked off due to all the new vehicles so we had to take a different route to our clinic. Later, Jo Ann explained to us that this day was the grand opening for the neighborhood clinic and there would be much celebrating going on there throughout the day.

“But they’re not really about to open, right?” I asked.

“No,” Jo Ann said. They still had no staff and no meds and no money for either, so the actual opening day was still months and/or years in the future.

“Huh.”

Despite that, the grand-opening celebration did continue throughout the day. We knew this because we could hear loud music coming from the direction of the other clinic which was broken up only by incredibly loud fireworks that sounded exactly like mortar shells going off. Tremendously loud. I thought for a moment they were indeed firing rounds into the air, because it was that loud. It made for a very trying day, because it seemed like every time I had to measure something into exact amounts in a delicate fashion, BOOOOM! and I’d nearly spill everything. Fortunately, there was not a lot of blood to be drawn in our clinic, or I could see horrible ramifications of the explosions. This went on throughout the morning and into the afternoon, making us all extremely nervous as we tried to go about our business in what sounded like a war zone. I began to suspect they were doing it on purpose to try and get back at us for inadvertently showing them up at their own job. I mean, how dare we open up a free clinic and treat patients when there was a perfectly good pay-clinic, with balloons, food and fireworks, albeit utterly devoid of doctors and medicine, just down the road?

Meanwhile, we had far more patients to see than the day before. Apparently word had spread of what we were doing. Fortunately, Dr. Grace was still with us, so we passed out extra number tickets that morning so we could see more patients. This would turn out to be a decision with ramifications.

One observation I and other folks on our mission staff made was that the people in this part of El Salvador did not seem to be suffering from the same sort of ailments as those we saw in Guatemala. In Guatemala, there was lots of dehydration, parasite problems and the occasional mother whose baby suffered from a heat rash so she bundled him up in three layers of cloth and was terrified to open the bundle even a crack for fear the infant might catch a chill. In San Salvador, we had no cases of scabies come through and not as many internal parasite cases. I know this because we prescribed no scabies treatment and very few doses of Flagyl. What we did see were a lot more diabetes cases, gastritis, fungal infections and high blood pressure. And we wound up having vitamins prescribed to nearly every patient, child or otherwise.

Once again, the local people are huge believers in the power of vitamins, so Dr. Allen and all the other docs prescribed away, continuing the valid philosophy that if the patient believes they’re getting better they’ll likely get better. We still had plenty of children’s vitamins, but had run out of adult vitamins on the first day in San Salvador. To make up for the loss, we—with doctors orders, mind you—began giving out prenatal vitamins to the adults. According to Dr. Allen, it’s basically the exact same stuff as regular adult vitamins, only these came in horse-pill form rather than the tiny little red pill form our regular adult vitamins took. We were thankful that there was a language barrier in this instance, but still tended to mark out the Pre-Natal labeling on the bags.

Though we were all terribly busy, I once again began looking to find things to give out to the children we were seeing. Since I’d exhausted my supply of little flashlights in Guatemala, I returned to giving out balloons. I kept a wad of them in my pockets and when traveling between clinic stations to ask questions, I would often blow one up and give it to a child. However, once again, if I gave a balloon to one single child out on their own, I soon had a cluster of them around the pharmacy door looking up at me with hope in their eyes. This was cool with me, though. Between prescriptions, I blew up balloon after balloon, passing them out to the kids at the door. I had given balloons to a brother and sister, who sat in the doorway across the hall from the pharmacy to play with them. Before long, we heard, POW! as the brother’s balloon popped. Thanks to the fireworks, my spine automatically seized up at the sound and I was sure most of the spines of the people in the clinic room these kids were sitting near probably had too. However, the brother looked very sad at the loss of his balloon, so I blew up another one for him. A few minutes later, though, there was another POW! After that, I decided he’d had his quota of balloons, because my nerves certainly had theirs of small explosions.

There were quite a number of stray dogs in the area. We even began giving them nicknames that seemed to match their appearances. My favorite was Fluffy Dog, who was a pretty little fluffy dog, albeit a bit scraggly from life on the street. None of the dogs seemed mean or dangerous in any way, but just hung around the clinic and the people looking for any stray bits of food that might fall. And food didn’t have to be human food either. I saw hungry dogs gobbling up the cicadas that had been unfortunate enough to fall out of their tree. And at night, the place was a veritable cicada buffet for the dogs.

I also noted that most of the dogs wouldn’t respond to me when called. I tried everything I know that usually works on dogs, such as whistling through pursed lips or barking or whining or just calling “Hey dog!” but they ignored me steadfastly. Even when Fluffy Dog wandered into the pharmacy, I could not coax any kind of reaction out of it, even to try and shew it away. Butch pointed out that this was an El Salvadorian dog, so it didn’t speak English. He was joking, but there actually seemed to be some truth to this.

Throughout the week, we noticed that when anyone local wanted to get the dogs’ attention, they used a sharp “Tsst-Tsst” sound, blowing air between their teeth. This form of non-verbal communication was not limited to human/animal interaction, either. We saw mothers use it to get their kids’ attention and we saw plenty of kids use it to try and get our attention, particularly when they wanted a balloon or something similar.

Our rate of patient turnover in the morning had been a steady one, thanks in large part to Dr. Grace. After lunch, we gave out quite a few more number tickets to see even more patients. Seventy-five of them, in fact. Unfortunately, we didn’t check first to make sure we had all our docs present and accounted for. It turns out that Dr. Grace had a job interview to go to that afternoon and was therefore not going to be with us. She had alerted someone on the mission staff about this before departing, but the message didn’t get relayed to all fronts until after the 75 new patient tickets had been distributed. So essentially, the slowest docs in the place (i.e. the Gringos) were left with the remaining patients who hadn’t been seen before lunch plus 75 new ones. We realized very quickly that this was not going to be an early evening for anyone.

This realization, in addition to the continuing fireworks barrage was enough to make any fake-Shemp pharmacist a bit cranky. However, I was finding new reasons to get irritable on my own, starting with the docs, who were prescribing pills in amounts other than what we had already pre-bagged the week before. Typically, we gave each patients 20 pills of most meds, with the exceptions of such things as Mebendazole, which usually gets taken three times a day for a week, so 21 pills. Almost all the docs began prescribing drugs in amounts of 30 pills, forcing us in the pharmacy to have to take time out to count out 10 extra pills from one bag to put in another and then to keep track of the bag with 10 less. Our Sharpie markers were kept flying, revising each pill amount as the docs kept sending new ones.

Now, I understand how this happens. Let’s say you’re a doctor or a student playing a doctor and you’re now charged with seeing nearly 90 patients between 1 p and sometime well after dark. Your job is now to care for the patients as best you can and get as many of them through as quickly as possible. So if someone’s complaining of a headache, you’re prescribing Ibuprofen or Tylenol and you’re writing it down quick. Moving so quickly, you’re likely to forget that all such painkilling pills have been pre-bagged in doses of 20 pills per bag and you prescribe 30 to give them a month’s supply. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, it sticks in your head and you keep prescribing that amount for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, Mary Ann and I are in the pharmacy pulling out our hair with each new prescription because it’s slowing down our already bogged process to have to stop and redo everything that comes in. We didn’t just go back and tell the docs to cut it out because for all we knew these patients truly needed the 30 pills and not 20, so we just kept following orders and losing more and more hair. Our mantra became a very Nancy Kerigan-esque “WHY? WHY? WHYYYYYY?!!!!” Soon, though, we translated this into “Porque? Porque? Porqueeeeh?!!!” for the benefit of the local staff, who would laugh at us.

Before long, we had the patients laughing at us as well, because we would utter this cry whenever anything went bad for us—such as when we got butterfingers and dropped our meds on the floor, or ran into one another in the cramped room, or had to fend off a cicada attack. I imagine that our antics sometimes resembled a Marx Brothers movie and we tended to get that kind of reaction from the locals. Instead of making me more irritable, though, having the locals laugh at me kind of brought me back to reality and let me remember what we were really doing there. It wasn’t easy work, but we were supposed to try and make the best of it and get the job done. Plus, getting to put a comedic spin on things was a good way of diffusing irritation, because I certainly didn’t want the locals to think I was unhappy to be there.

Wednesday afternoon, Tito went down the street to a store and came back with treats for everyone. He gave me two little 4-packs of Oreos, one of my all-time favorite cookies. I was so happy to have these little slices of home that I had a picture taken with one of them to commemorate the moment. I broke into the package and began devouring the cookies with glee. Then my glee turned to confusion. These Oreos did not taste like proper Oreos. They weren’t stale or past their expiration or anything. They just didn’t taste like Oreos are supposed to taste. It’s like they were cheap Oreo knock-offs that looked exactly like Oreos, down to the lettering on the wafers, but they did not replicate the Oreo taste AT ALL. It’s not that they even tasted bad. As far as cookies go, they were okay. But they were definitely not Oreos. I gave my other pack to Ashley, who had a bite of one cookie and then gave them all back to me.

This is just one example of how some products sold both in Central and North America may have the same brand name but taste radically different. Another prime example is Fresca Cola. In America, Fresca is now a diet drink. It has kind of a citrusy grape-fruity thing going, but is nothing to write home about. In Central America, Fresca is a full-sugar soda that’s bursting with citrus flavor. Ashley spoke highly of it when she came back in 2003 and was itching to get hold of some while she was in Central America for this trip. Fortunately, Fresca practically flowed like rivers wherever we went and the mission teams of both Guatemala and El Salvador had plenty on hand. The strange thing is, Coca Cola, the manufacturer of Fresca in both regions, used to sell regular Fresca in the states as well as a diet version of the same. Over the past couple of decades, however, the regular drink vanished and the diet drink took its name in some kind of unholy cola coup. These are the kind of odd little things I tend to remember.

Mid-way through the afternoon, Butch set his gecko free. He let it go in the hallway of the preschool and it scampered over near the wall and just sat there. I was afraid the poor little guy might get squished or gobbled up by a dog, as this was a very high human and dog traffic area. He didn’t want to move on his own, though. I finally had to walk very close to him, practically nudging him with my toes at every step, until he finally ran out the front door and climbed up the tree. Godspeed, Mr. Gecko.

As evening approached, we still had loads and loads of patients. Usually, the queue of folks who are still waiting to come inside to wait ends by 5 p, but we still had plenty of patients-to-be out front at 7:30. By 8 I had become concerned that patients who hadn’t been seen might be turned away or told to come back first thing in the morning, or something. That seemed like a possibility, though it was fortunately not one every brought up. I was against sending anyone away. We’d given out these patient tickets and as late as it was putting us, I still believed we had a responsibility to see every last patient we’d invited in. They’d all been very (no pun intended) patient with us and were waiting just as long to be seen as we were to see them. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been at all concerned that we wouldn’t see everyone, because there seemed to be no other options on the table anyway. Everyone else at the clinic was just as determined that every last patient we’d promised to see would be seen. And they were.

Creepy cicada boy returned that night. I had thought him to be the child of a patient, or a patient himself, the day before, but it turned out he was the son of the school’s administrator. Once again he picked up a good-sized fistful of cicadas and walked around with them making everyone nervous.

As the night descended, I took note of all the members of the mission team who no longer had assigned duties to perform. Much of the translation and missionary staff were finished with their part of the day, yet they still stayed til the bitter end in case we needed help. Butch helped keep them entertained with more funny little video clips from his laptop.

We didn’t wrap things up until after 9p that evening, but all patients were seen.

We had a late dinner back at the Word of Life offices. It felt so good to be able to sit down and relax a bit. The whole team, mission, translation, medical and staff, all sat and watched more of Butch’s slide show. This time we had pictures from the first day at the clinic. I loved seeing the faces of the patients as they were being treated. I got to see most of the faces when they came by the pharmacy window, but we were so often in a hurry to fill prescriptions that it’s difficult to pay attention all the time.

During dinner, Dr. Allen asked us how things were going in the pharmacy. Mary Ann told him I spent most of the day saying “Porque, porque, porque?!” because all the doses kept coming in for 30 pills when we’d so neatly pre-counted them into amounts of 20.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Dr. Allen said. “Just give them the 20 count. We screwed that up on our end.”

Aye yi yi!

EL SALVADOR CLINIC DAY 2 STATS
Patients Seen: 224
Prescriptions Filled: 565
Salvations/Rededications: 76

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