Everyday Stupidities

The stupidity of the moment: over the weekend a new customer database (and thus a scad of calls from customers on that system) was added to the existing four systems we service – all through one easy interface, so it's not a huge mess to get into all the customer tools. The stupid parts are: #1 - being a database that is new to my group, we don't have logins for it yet. #2 - they also changed the call category selection drop-downs, so now we get to play hide-and-seek trying to find the right descriptions, and as always some of the ones we need aren't offered. #3 - we have this tool that will quickly generate an order which this little rearrangement has broken, something about now needing to get permission to remove the shipping charge when sending return-mailer boxes. It's bad enough, as I think I described earlier, that I can't make connection-fixing account tweaks on half of the existing customers without an overloaded-queue Customer Service agent pushing the buttons for me, but add these new ones as well as the sudden addition of several products that we had nil useful training on (and keep discovering new and exciting cryptic errors with)... At least my job isn't absolutely boring, when you add intregues like this to it. (I prefer unintreguing, for the record.)

I got home from school one day when I was in high school hornier than a two-dicked goat [thank you, Redd Foxx] and no one was around, so I closed my bedroom door, dropped my pants, flopped out on the orange beanbag chair in my room and threw the brown afgan over me for security. And inevitably my mother walked in without knocking because that's what she did. My family was horrible about knocking before entering other people's bedrooms, the bathrooms, or other places where a closed door implies someone's inside and would like a little privacy. All she saw was me in my beanbag with my pants around my ankles and a blanket over me, and she turns sideways and calls to my father, "come see what your son is doing." I don't recall if I said the words "I'm sure he's familiar with it!!" out loud but I know I thunk 'em as I slid my pants back on and stood up, demanding to know WHAT she had come barging in for in the first place. And I don't recall her ever saying. My mother was an only child, so this was the same person who thought if her teenage son walked into the dining room for breakfast with quite natural 'morning wood' prodding the front of his shorts/jammies/etc. that he had to have DONE something to get it there. This made for some interesting and truly unwanted conversation first thing in the morning, and I learned to either tuck things into the waistband and wear a long shirt or to make preparations (think about team sports, first visiting the bathroom to reduce the swelling by dunking it in cold water, wake up ten minutes earlier so that it would have time to relax) before marching to the table. I only got caught by my father once, late one night in the family room when I was looking at a deck of those playing cards with topless women on each (who looked old enough in the photos to be my mother and probably were old enough in real life to be my grandmother), and while he didn't see anything he knew what was going on – he was a guy – and I realized in that instant that my natural instinct to lie & deny wasn't going to be a good plan, not only because he was aware of what teenage boys do in the dark but because it would create discussion, and I really didn't want to talk about the matter at all. Some parents and children have good rapports about private matters, mostly on TV sitcoms or friends who frankly have sweet TMI moments with their folks, but this was never the case in my family. There was one time when I was in college that I visited the house and my sister, probably 16 at the time, pulled me aside and said, "Guess what?! Mom gave me the talk!" The talk? "The bird and the bees!" I was astounded and my first words were, "Well, what did they say??" About an hour later I walked into the kitchen and said, "You told Becky about the birds and the bees; how about me? I wanna hear it now." My mother's response was, "You don't need it, you already know this stuff." Hmm, at that moment, yes, by trial and error since I lacked any information whatsoever from my parents during the formative years... Speaking of spanking, heh, let's turn away from my folks toward a friend's best sweet TMI moment with his folks:

I was visiting Randy at his house one day and he leads me to his parents' bedroom. He rummages through a dresser drawer and pulls out several pictoral "adults only" magazines with The Joy Of Spanking boldly printed across their covers, and inside plenty of photos of grownups who either were bent over someone's knee with the other person holding a hairbrush aloft in black and white, or had smarting red welts all over their blanche backsides in glorious color close-ups. We had a few laughs. Randy turned 18 not long after that, and in celebration he bought a couple Hustler magazines, which he kept tucked away in his room not out of shame but because he had two younger brothers and uptight parents; the magazines were no secret. One day his father comes to him and says, "Randy, this is a Christian household and we'd like you to get rid of your girlie magazines." Randy didn't bat an eye, and said, "Okay, Pop, I'll throw out my Hustlers when you throw out your Joy Of Spanking magazines." His father was taken aback and asked how he knew about those, and Randy said, "Never mind that, you get rid of yours and I'll get rid of mine." And wouldja believe they both did?