I rarely feel compelled to write about my work because I like to keep the many spheres of my life separate. Wait, I am lying; there are only two spheres in my life, and one of them is more of a hemisphere than anything that could actually roll down a hill. But they are separate, goshdarnit. Although sometimes, something happens at work that is just too delicious not to describe for you, my little peanut butter sandwiches.
On Tuesday, I received a phone call from a Crazy Sounding Person asking if I had received some literature he had mailed to me. Now, I get two kinds of mail: “literature” and bills. The bills go into my accountant’s inbox, and the literature, if it was not sent by Shakespeare or Saki, goes unopened into the recycling bin. So I said no.
The Crazy Sounding Person lamented what a great tragedy this was and asked if he could come by and drop some more off. “Will you be there tomorrow at three-thirty?” I was all, like, whatev. I never promise anyone I will be at work at any specific time, which makes it easier to hide in the alley when they show up.
I immediately got another phone call from a different Crazy Sounding Person, this one also sounding somewhat Stern. “Did you just make an appointment with [first Crazy Sounding Person] for tomorrow at three-thirty?” the second Crazy (and Stern) Sounding Person demanded.
“Well, I wouldn’t call it an appointment. He said he was going to drop something off.” The second crazy sounding person asked if he could confirm my address. I hung up and forgot all about it.
On Thursday at noon, I was told that the first Crazy Sounding Person had arrived to see me. It was an older guy in a suit with the most shocking amount of hair coming out of his ears. Really, you have never seen such a thing, like curly black earmuffs. Why would you even bother to put on a suit when you’re wandering around with curly black earmuffs? There are no answers. The Crazy Sounding Person introduced himself as the one I had spoken with on the phone and apologized for not having shown up the day before at the specified time. “I have no idea how that appointment got made. I was sick yesterday and didn’t know anything about it until this morning.”
Since both of the people I had spoken to on the phone had mentioned this fabled appointment, I just stared at him blankly. He took this as his cue to launch into a spiel about the services he could offer to businesses. Apparently, the crazy sounding person was a representative of a huge corporation that makes millions of dollars offering services to small corporations. It was very difficult to pin down exactly what those services are. When I asked him, he told me about how he used to own a greenhouse that got run out of business by Wal-Mart and the Home Depot and was so depressed after that that he moved to a desolate area of Virginia to become a crab fisherman who sold his catch on the Internet. This was before being diagnosed with ADHD and mistakenly put on a medication for bipolar disease, which ended up giving him a mini-stroke that caused him not to remember anything anymore. “Next week, I won’t even remember I talked to you today,” he said. Like Sofia on “Golden Girls,” his mini-stroke seemed to eradicate his ability to censor what he said, because there was a great deal more to this story, involving his mother crashing a car into a telephone pole and the changing technology of web sites.
He then went on and on about how his nonspecific services helped dozens of thousands of businesses every year. Helped them how, he could not precisely say, but the point is, they were very helpful, and they would be more than happy to help me, too.
I told him I would think about it. (Translation: no.) He told me that when I decided to say yes, to call him directly. “You’ll get a call in a few days from some other guy checking up on me and offering to send in one of our consultants. You just tell him, no way! I’m working directly with [crazy sounding person]. Those guys call around and check up on my every move. They mean well, but they aren’t going to help you like I am.”
No. No, they aren’t.
I forgot to tell you that at one point I had to interrupt our “appointment” to go out and put money in the parking meter. The Crazy Sounding Person’s response was: “Oh, you’re supposed to put money in those?”
I have the utmost faith in his business services.
