It is the morning of Memorial Day. I have to spend 33 of the next 59 hours at work. It is going to be 95 degrees today and the air conditioners in the part of the store I’ll be working in haven’t been working lately.
Enjoy your cookouts.
Tag: death
Adventures in customer service
So last weekend sometime I sold a sectional. I am absolutely religious about checking ETA dates whenever I order furniture, as you are probably aware if you’ve ever read any of my posts about my job before. I absolutely despise dealing with pissed-off people, which makes me the most honest salesperson on the planet, because I’ll lose a sale in a second before I’ll misrepresent when something is gonna come into the store. Because you’re gonna notice, and I’m not gonna want to deal with you when you do.
So. A bit of background: our company has two main warehouses. Our upholstered product is all supposed to come to us from one of them, but if that warehouse is out of a particular piece and the other warehouse has it, we can send an email and switch which warehouse it comes from and it still shows up on the same timeline. I do this a lot, as you can probably imagine. However, the person who responds to those emails works banker’s hours. So I was rather dismayed on Monday to discover that a particular piece had sold out from the secondary warehouse over the weekend and that I now couldn’t get it until– wait for it– June, when I told my customers to expect it in the store in 7 to 10 days.
June is farther away than 7 to 10 days.
No problem! I found one at our Lafayette store, and decided that rather than wait for a truck to come through from their store to ours and hope that they remembered to put the piece on that truck, I’d just go get it myself today. It’s like a two hour drive. I have a former student who I’m still in touch with and quite fond of who is a sophomore at Purdue, so I’ve got somebody to grab lunch with, too! I’ll go get the piece and have lunch and come back and drop it off at the store and nobody’s the wiser and I’ll lose a chunk of my commission on gas money but whatever. I like the occasional car trip.
Go ahead, check the weather report for today for northern Indiana. Because holy Christ, why did I do that stupid thing I did. I have never seen fog in my life like the Lovecraftean, Ravenloft-esque insanity that I had to drive through today. We’re talking maybe three seconds of visibility in front of the car, less on the heavy spots, for the first two thirds of the trip. I thought about turning back repeatedly, consistently falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy and reasoning that surely I was damn near out of the fog by now and that it would be, would have to be, gone by the time I was on my way home.
Also, once I got to campus, my GPS utterly shit the bed, trying at one point to send me the wrong way down a one-way street, then redirecting me to another street that it could have just left me on the entire time rather than taking me out of its way to nearly die, and then directing me into an alley between two buildings that abruptly turned into a bike path that just-as-abruptly turned into nothing, at which point I called my former student and described where I was as best I could, informing her that I wasn’t moving my car again and she needed to come find me.
(Also: I’m not a complete idiot. The other problem with Purdue’s campus is that there are damn near no signs anywhere. Signs that say things like “No Exit,” which one might put before a point-of-no-return road of some sort.)
Also, Logansport, Indiana is the worst place in the world and I don’t want to hear any different from any of you. I got directed through “town” for some reason and half of the place was utterly deserted and everyone in the rest of it had the Innsmouth look. I deliberately took a different route back to avoid the town.
We lingered over lunch, at any rate. I was the oldest person in the restaurant by at least 18 years and we were both vastly entertained by the literal hush that fell over the room when we walked in, as everyone tried to figure out if I was a sugar daddy or not. When the hell did college students get so Goddamned young?
I was planning on being home by 2:00 and didn’t bother leaving West Lafayette until after 1:00, figuring that the fog would have to have burned off by then.
Nope. Just as bad on the way home as on the way down there, except without the opportunity to turn back. Also, west central Indiana smells terrible. That sounds like I’m just being mean because of IU vs. Purdue regionalisms and I swear I’m not. It smells awful.
Point is, I think I deserve a tip for this one.
You feed a cold, right?
Last night, at approximately 4:30 in the morning, I was bludgeoned out of a sound sleep by the sudden and overwhelming need to vomit. Like, threw the covers damn near off the bed, kicked the cat, scared the shit out of the dog, damn near fell over clawing for the bathroom before I projectile vomited all over my entire fucking bedroom. And then… nothing. I got into the bathroom and absolutely nogoddamnthing happened. When my alarm woke me up this morning, I spent a moment reflecting on the fact that I was able to breathe normally and thought oh, hey, maybe I’m better! and then got out of bed and was damn near forced to my knees by the virulence of the ensuing coughing fit. How the hell I made it to work this morning is a mystery, and instead of the usual caffeine product that I make sure to bring with me every day (a bottle of tea, most of the time) I brought Robitussin. I literally do not know how I got through the day, but I managed it, and with enough sales to make the effort more or less worth it.
On the way home, I drove past another fucking wild turkey. I live less than a mile from what is effectively open prairie and woodland (yes, both, in different directions) so the occasional deer and the much-less-occasional herd of deer in the neighborhood isn’t unheard of, along with the other usual urban wildlife, but I swear I never saw a wild turkey before this year and now I’m seeing them all the time. Wild turkeys are fucking weird, guys, and I have the same reaction every time I see one, which is to briefly wonder why the fuck a dinosaur is that close to my car. This particular wild turkey was even weirder, because I watched it in my rear-view mirror as I was driving past and the damn thing was hopping, not walking, across the street. So maybe it’s a one-legged wild turkey? I dunno. I’ve never been one for hunting but I kind of do want to see if these things make for good eating or not.
A minute or so later, I had another massive coughing fit and came very close to swerving into oncoming traffic. Frighteningly close, actually. Probably should have pulled over.
And then I got home and made the sumptuous feast you see in the photo above for dinner– yes, that’s turkey– and for dessert I plan to have codeine. I will try to post something more generally useful and less hallucinatory tomorrow; for now I’m just happy to be alive.
The end.
RIP, Sonya Craig
Friendship online is such an odd thing. I have a couple of friends in my Clark Kent identity who I’ve known for damn near fifteen years and who I’ve met once and never, respectively, and I don’t have the slightest idea when those numbers might go up again. We met through the previous incarnation of this blog, over at Xanga, and at the moment I can honestly say that the only reason I’m still on Facebook is so that I can keep track of the two of them. I have a handful of other friends who I lost track of after college and reconnected with– again, on Facebook– and for at least one of them I think we actually have a closer relationship now than we did back then. But I never see any of them.
And making friends as Luther is even weirder, right? Because the vast majority of you don’t even know my real name. I’ve got this network of people, mostly bloggers or independent authors, who I interact with a lot on Twitter and a bit less on Facebook and on the blog. I consider a lot of them friends, but the thing is people have Real Lives outside of their online personas (well, I don’t. I’m told people do, though.) and sometimes they just get busy or change jobs or move and their priorities change and suddenly someone you interacted with on a daily or near-daily basis has just gone poof and you don’t know why, and sometimes you don’t even notice for a few weeks, in a way that would never ever happen with people you know in the real world.
And sometimes you log into Facebook and you find out through the grapevine that someone’s depression finally caught them after a lifetime of struggle, and that person is gone, and you don’t really know how to react to it. 
“Follows @nfinitefreetime,” it says there. Were I not connected to her on Facebook, too, I’d never have known she was gone. It’s not like Twitter is going to notice and unfollow me on her behalf, right? There was an outpouring of grief among our little sci-fi indie community last night on Facebook and Twitter; I retweeted a bunch of them on my account, or you could just check the #thankyousonya hashtag if you like. There were tons of posts, and the amazing thing, to me, was just how many of the people participating were also people I “knew” and considered friends the same way I did Sonya. She was at the center of a big group of people online, and we were all reacting the only way we could.
I don’t really know her, is the thing. I don’t know her family, or her RL friends, or what she liked to do with her time other than write and hang out with yahoos on the internet. I know she had a cat, named Fang, who was frequently the subject of tweets and Instagram postings. I don’t know where Fang is right now. I hope he’s okay. I know that she was the type of person who created random meme pictures for people she’d never met on their birthdays, which is where that picture up at the top came from. (My Twitter bio at the time referred to me as a friend to muskrats.)
And yet.
I wish I could have been there for her, when she was suffering, to point out all these people whose lives she’d touched and would miss her when she was gone. But I never did. Part of the reason why? I know people online who are struggling with anxiety and depression and the insane thing is I wouldn’t have listed her as one of them.
I dunno, guys. I don’t know how to end this because I don’t know how I feel right now. I don’t want anyone to ever feel like suicide is their best option. And I want to say something like “If you feel that way, know that you can reach out, even to a relative stranger online,” but the fucked-up part of depression is that that information doesn’t matter and it’s not that simple. She’d probably had people she knew in the real world tell her that, people who she’d actually recognize if they walked past her at the grocery store, not rando authors behind an @ on Twitter. And she took her own life anyway, because that’s how depression fucks with you, because it’s a disease, not a goddamn personal failure, and you can’t help it.
God damn it.
You will be missed, Sonya. I can only hope that you’ve found some peace.
So um okay
My mother-in-law passed away in January. She died of… well, everything. That’s both less disrespectful and closer to the truth than you might believe; my father-in-law is fond of saying she had everything but cancer, and the way he describes it never fails to bring this to mind:
My wife’s family, for reasons that have never been clear to me, does not seem to be overly fond of winter funerals. This is, I think, the third family member of hers who has passed since we were married, all of them in the dead of winter, and each and every one had a spring funeral. There has thus far been no service of any kind, and the first formal acknowledgment of her death is going to be May 20th when her ashes are interred. In, uh, this:
She went to see her dad today, and he showed her this; her ashes are inside of it (presumably inside some sort of urn and not, like, poured out all over the bottom of the thing) at this very moment and in fact were there when the picture was taken, but he’d decided he wanted to inter a few other things with her– among which were a crucifix, which my son took one look at and excitedly declared to be a “trophy.” He, being the eminently practical and utterly unsentimental person that he is, looked around the house and decided that this plastic goddamned cooler was the most size-appropriate object he had for the items he wanted to bury with her. And the decision was made; this was to be her eternal resting place, tradition and propriety be damned.
My wife enquired as to whether the gravediggers knew that they were providing a hole for a cooler and not a (presumably) much smaller urn. He, of course, had already made all of the appropriate arrangements. I guarantee he measured the damn thing and sent them precise metric dimensions. Guarantee it. He’s going to do some work in the next few days to get it glued shut and waterproofed (and judging from the way the man wraps Christmas presents, life on Earth will be extinct before water gets inside this thing) and that’s going to be it.
The great part of all this, of course, is that absolutely no one can argue with me when I insist on burying her father’s ashes inside an empty bottle of Beefeater gin when he dies. He’ll appreciate it.
Uggggghhhhh
I know it’s been like three days since I’ve had a decent post but today was a noxious little smegmapimple of a day and I simply cannot. any. longer.
Have a seasonally appropriate music video. I’ve probably shared this more than once but it’s still the right song for the moment.
In which I need my knees broken
So I just found out this is going to be my schedule in the latter part of March:
Saturday, March 18: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 19: Work from 12-6
Monday, March 20: Board plane to Denver– which, to make sure we’re clear, is not where my wife or my son live. Upon leaving plane, attend sales meetings.
Tuesday, March 21-Thursday, March 23: Lots and lots of sales meetings. Probably involving some sort of roleplaying, with my days and evenings full of the sort of alpha males who might attend these sorts of things. I don’t drink and will have nothing in common with any of these people and will probably be having to share a hotel room with someone.
Friday, March 24: Attend morning sales meetings and then fly back home.
Saturday, March 25: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 26: Work from 12-6. I have been informed that I will receive my “average daily pay” for the days I’m in Denver, and that if I manage to exceed my average sales for an entire week over the 25th and 26th I will receive a bonus of… wait for it… fifty dollars!
Monday, March 27: Work from 9-8
Tuesday, March 28: Work from 9-8
Wednesday, March 29: Work from 9-2:30.
And then come home and die.
I’m going to need someone to badly injure me on the 19th. Anybody wanna get in on that? Is there a line already?
And I would walk 500 more
Just added it up, and I’ve walked 46 miles at work since last Wednesday. Good night.