We have no phone.
Apparently, during one of the countless storms we’ve had in the past few days, some water must’ve gotten into the phone box that’s glued to the side of the house because we have no phone. The line is open, but there’s no dial tone, none of the phones are off the hook and we unplugged the cordless. Yet, line one is still lit up.
More interestingly, when this happens, did you know that your phone can actually make calls without your help? Or knowledge? Or presence?
Wanna know how we found that out?
I was sitting here yesterday, actually writing my last blog entry when I noticed line one on my desk phone kept lighting up as though someone were using it. Only Randy and I were home, so I assumed it was him although I couldn’t imagine why he’d use the house line when he has his cell. Free weekend minutes! Then it would go out and light up again. In spite of the distraction, I shrugged: it’s Randy’s phone, too, after all.
Then it rang, just once. (Aside: whenever the phone rings and we’re not all in the same room, nobody answers it. We all just stare at it, hoping someone else will pick it up and that it won’t be for us.) So I stared at it, saw the line light up and assumed that Randy got it.
“Who was it?” I hollered when the line light went out. Because, you know, getting up and actually walking upstairs would have denoted too much interest.
“I thought you got it!” Randy hollered back.
Then it rang again. This time, I was intensely curious so I answered it. I said hello, and got the most amazing reply: “This is the 911 operator, we just received a call from your number. Is everything okay there?”
“Uh…yeah…..everything is fine. I mean, we’re fine. WE called you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, calmly.
“But-”
“We tried to call back once and got a lot of static. If you hadn’t answered this time, we were going to dispatch.”
“Oh, god, don’t do that. It’s the phone!” I cried. “The phone is wigging out, it keeps lighting up and getting all static-y.”
“Okay,” he replied, and hung up.
I sat for a minute, watching line one lighting up and flickering off. My phone was making prank calls to 911! They don’t like it when you do that. They charge you when you do that! And with the line being open and closed at random, the odds of them calling back and getting through to us were very slim, which would mean………..
Firetrucks and police cars and ambulances would arrive at our house, lights and sirens cutting a wide swath through the Saturday quiet. Our neighbors would all peer through tightly curtained windows at our house. While inside, we would be frantically trying to convince the First Responders that our phone was crank calling 911. Yeah. Not a good image.
So I called the phone company. Who, after over 30 minutes of being on hold, set up a repair appointment - which has come and gone with no sign of a repair person - and told me that it’s not at all uncommon for phones to dial 911 when they’re having problems. Especially cordless phones. Who knew that? Who started that? Who programmed that little bug into the system, thinking it could ever, ever, possibly be a good idea?
Anyway, I called 911 back to explain and apologize. They agreed to ignore calls from this number and only consider the cell number as real for now. Which has passed, and now they’ll start paying attention to the house line again. And I need to go get on hold for another hour or so to find out where my phone-line-fixer-upper is.
That’s me; cranky. That’s because it is that time of year when I seriously consider the value of becoming nocturnal.
The last two nights in a ROW, we were told confidently by the meteorologist, who has “THE MOST ACCURATE FORECAST IN CENTRAL IOWA FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW!” that it would be a quiet night.
Guess what. Not quiet.
3:30 AM on Friday morning, I was awakened by the lovely sound of thunder. So, figuring that it was an aberration, I decided to turn on the bedroom tv (poor Randy) and check the Weather Channel’s radar to see how fast it would pass by. After waiting a full 8 minutes for them to get around to showing it, I discovered that the storm that woke me was a teensy-weensy little thing, barely showing up on the radar. And about an hour behind it was this unbelievable line of serious storms of almost Biblical proportions. I’ve seen storms with tornadoes that were less scary.
So I cussed a lot, threw the covers off violently, cussed some more, got dressed violently, cussed some more and stomped downstairs to the kitchen, trailing four-letter invective behind me like clues to a treasure-hunt. I violently made myself a cup of coffee (yes, at 3 AM. I was half asleep. Shut up.) then stomped down into the batcave where I turned on my computer and cussed while it was booting up. Fortunately, Randy is a really heavy sleeper.
Checking the radar, I discovered that the storm that got me out of bed at that ungody hour was actually worse than I’d thought. The only thing this thing didn’t have to offer was an active tornado and given the fact that it shouldn’t have held together at all - meteorologically speaking - much less be that powerful, I thought tornadoes were a strong possibility. So I stomped around the batcave some more, cussed some more and went upstairs.
I’d had about three sips of coffee which was just enough to start burning a hole through my stomach so I took a Pepcid, then proceeded to wake my sleeping menfolk. Who were, needless to say, not happy about this development. I’m not sure if the hour or my technique was to blame. I can’t say that I blame them; the best way to wake a sleeping person is gently, delicately and, if the person is like me, you want to do it from a safe distance. It is not considered polite or considerate to wake a sleeping person by stomping into the room, turning on the light, snatching the pillow out from under the innocently sleeping head and shouting, “Hey! Get up and get down to the batcave! There’s a god-damned storm coming! Let’s GO!” I heavily censored that, BTW.
By this time, it was 4 AM; Randy usually gets up at 5:30 or so. He was just as cranky as I was, so there were a few words of the impolite variety exchanged between us, sprinkled with shouts directed at DaBoy to make sure he was up and hauling his bedding down into the basement. I think about the most friendly comment the love of my life said was, “I really don’t like you.” To which I replied, “Yeah, well, I hate you, so get your ass up and downstairs so you don’t blow away with the house or something. And shut up.” DaBoy, who is a lot like me but whose survival instincts are better developed, just got his stuff, dropped it in the batcave, then looked at me with a perfectly straight face and announced that he was hungry.
I was staring at the radar, trying to calculate how long we had before the really bad storms hit, and transferred my horrified glare to my son. “You’re what?” I demanded.
“Hungry. I’m going to get something to eat,” he said placidly.
I gaped at him. “You…..seriously?”
“Mom, I’m hungry,” he repeated patiently. Then he turned away from the sight of my tonsils and went to get something to eat. I shook my head - didn’t these idiots realize this storm would probably blow the whole state off the map? - and went to have a cigarette. DaBoy was happily munching a bowl of Lucky Charms when I arrived in the kitchen. “Couldn’t you have just grabbed a bagel??” I demanded.
Randy, getting his own cup of coffee, interceded. “It won’t take more than a few minutes,” he said calmly. “Want some coffee?”
“No,” I said indignantly, resolutely ignoring my own coffee rapidly cooling on my desk, ”it’s four in the morning. You want me to be up for the rest of the night and then bitchy all day?”
Both of my males shrugged. “We’re leaving,” DaBoy pointed out.
“You can nap later,” Randy added.
Finally, after the hurdles of Lucky Charms, Marlboro, Folgers and more cussing were leaped, we all trooped down into the batcave. DaBoy and I curled up on the floor on makeshift beds while Randy, still muttering about his lost sleep and that there wasn’t any point in trying sat down at his desk and began pounding on his keyboard. I protested, he snapped that he was typing as quietly as possible and DaBoy mildly announced that it wasn’t bothering him and then proved it by falling asleep.
So, yesterday I made a point of watching the news. The forecaster announced that we were going to have a quiet night last night. The meteorologist (yes, the same one) confidently told us that it would be a quiet night, and even suggested we sleep in to make up for lost sleep the night before.
Guess what. Not quiet.
3:30 AM - I swear - I was awakened by thunder. Again. Feeling strongly that I must be dreaming, I turned on the tv. Again. Waited a full 8 minutes for the local radar. Again. Sure enough, the storm that woke me was a little, tiny thing - followed by a line of really powerful storms. Again. The only difference was that it wasn’t quite as wide or followed by yet a third set of storms unlike the night before.
I couldn’t believe it; it had to be a dream. The next crash of thunder convinced me otherwise, and without waking my malefolks or stopping for coffee, I just went straight to the batcave, booted up my system and fell asleep on my sleeping bag and pillow that I’m debating on just leaving there until FALL, since it appears I’m going to need it every night, regardless of what the damned forecasts say.
Nocturnal living. Hmm…..sounds quieter, anyway. It’s not like sleeping at NIGHT like the rest of the homo-sapien population does is going to be an option for a while.
I got a letter today. Apparently, there is a class-action lawsuit against AOL. The lawsuit states that anyone who was a volunteer Community Leader has the right to sue AOL for wages. Since AOL was/is a for-profit corporation at the time, those of us who were CLs couldn’t legally be called “volunteers” according to the legal definition of the word.
The first thing that blows my mind is that I cancelled my AOL account one last name, one state, two addresses and over 10 years ago - yet the lawyers for the plaintiffs still found me. Which creeps me right the hell out.
The second thing is that - and here is why I created a Debate topic - IMO, there is no basis for a lawsuit. I mean, come on. We all knew we weren’t going to get paid going into it. We all knew that all we were getting for our time was free AOL. And we also all knew that the only reason for that is because nobody in their right mind would pay for the privilege of upholding TOS. We all walked into that with our eyes open and we agreed to the terms. Period.
Even if there were any forum leaders who lied to their staff, the AOL staff made sure we understood it at TOS class. Any compensation any of us received came out of our forum leaders’ pockets and we all knew it.
So why the lawsuit? Why go back and demand wages for which we all agreed we weren’t entitled? Because of that word “volunteer”, evidently. Technically, a for-profit company can’t have volunteers. Well, that may be true. But, again, we all agreed to it. We all got what we were promised in return for our snazzy “uniforms” and free service.
I actually emailed the lawyer about this and surprisingly, got a response. A scathing response. A response wherein he actually called me unpatriotic…….wait, let me repeat that with the appropriate emphasis……unpatriotic for not going along with this. It’s about the economy, dontcha know. They’re fighting poverty. They’re standing up for the little guy, who apparently can’t think for himself. It’s about making sure people are paid for their services according to the labor laws. “That’s the American way.”
Is it? Is it really? Are we so greedy and filled with avarice that it has become our way to demand more than we agreed to and that we know we don’t have right to? Is it really the American way to sue a corporation for doing exactly what they said they were going to do, right or wrong? We walked into that CL position with our eyes open. What makes it okay to change our minds now that someone has come along and said, “Hey, they were supposed to pay you. They can’t call you a volunteer! Sue!”
Don’t there have to be damages? Was anyone damaged by agreeing to and upholding a position for which the only compensation was free AOL?
Personally, I don’t think so. I think this is just a way for people to make money out of a major corporation. YMMV, but that’s my opinion.
This thread is for debate. Should you choose to respond, it uses the same format as any of my other topics: click “Comment” and leave your message. Please remember to check back; I try to answer all comments left on my site. Plus, I miss having debates.
So we have this new bed. Fortunately, we also finally got the legs for it; you have to order them specially and they have to be shipped. There are two sizes of legs: on-the-floor or nosebleed. We got the nosebleed size. So we’ve gone from sleeping on the floor - basically - to feeling like I need a stepladder to get safely out of bed.
We also have mulberry satin sheets. I’ve mentioned those before, but for those who didn’t read my blogs on My Space, I’ll reiterate. Satin sheets are slippery. You’d think that would be self-evident, but I’m a little slow at times. I still had the waterbed when we got them; I woke up the next morning in a comma-shape halfway down the bed, turned with my feet toward the headboard because that’s how far I’d had to chase my pillow in the night. It slid all over the bed and I kept having to hunt for it, apparently. I also discovered that when one has satin sheets, a satin nightshirt is not a good idea.
One evening, I was in the middle of watching a show, when, at a critical moment, the picture went black. Assuming it was the media center freaking out, I ran upstairs to the bedroom, threw myself on the bed at full speed, grabbing for the tv remote on the headboard. But I’d forgotten something important: satin sheets + satin pillowcase = luge. Luckily, I didn’t crash headlong into the wall, but unluckily, the problem with the tv that had caused me to run up there in a panic wasn’t the media center, but the station’s feed.
Okay, so back to current times. As soon as we got the bed, I insisted that we put the infamous sheets on it. I love those damned sheets. They’re gorgeous and they go with the comforter. Plus, since the walls here are uniform white in every room, they add some desperately-needed color. This was when we discovered yet another set of problems.
1.) They’re cold. Satin is a cold fabric, who knew? I sure didn’t, but then why would I; they were always on a heated bed before. So even getting the legs installed on the bed didn’t make much of a difference in the temperature of the actual bed. So our shrieks of pain and surprise when we went to bed didn’t change; worse, unlike cotton sheets, the satins cool off unless they’re actually against skin. Which means that the whole “warm spot, don’t move” thing is even worse.
2.) Did I mention that we don’t have a headboard or footboard on the bed? And that the sheets are slippery? And the pillowcases are also satin, so the pillows keep falling down between the wall and the head of the bed. Plus, the covers do the same thing. So we spend the whole night hauling all of the covers back up off the floor where they’ve slid down either to the foot or the sides. Mostly the sides. Mostly my side.
I have Restless Legs Syndrome, which means that even with the meds, I spend most of my sleeping hours moving my legs around. Randy calls it taking walks in my sleep. I flop around, toss and turn, and as a result, I tend to pull the covers around. I also have very long hair, so, apparently when I turn over (according to Randy), I don’t just roll over. I leap up into the air, spin around and flop back down. Taking the covers with me. Anyway, when we wake up in the morning, I have ALL of the covers and Randy is curled up into a little, shivering ball. He started sleeping in his sweats in self-defense and out of deference to him, I keep the bedroom windows closed.
Finally, the other morning, when I got up, Randy greeted me with a cheerful smile that should have warned me.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked, showing a whole lot of teeth.
“Oh, fine! You know, I think this bed is going to work out,” I said, taking a sip of coffee.
“Really?” He asked. He sat down next to me, gripping his coffee cup in shaking hands. He peered out at me from between his puffy eyelids and the bags under his eyes and asked, “were you warm enough?”
“Yes,” I said blithely, not noticing the signs that said “SHARK INFESTED WATERS”. “I think once I get my sleep number setting right, we’ll both be happy.”
“Really,” the love of my life said dryly.
“Mm-hmm. Thanks for the coffee, this is really nice.”
“Well, you’re welcome. By the way, I had the Night From Hell,” he informed me brightly.
I choked on a mouthful of coffee and really looked at him for the first time. He looked awful. “Good gods, what happened to you?” I demanded.
“Well. Since you ask, I’ll tell you. I spent the whole night with no covers. And the ceiling fan blowing on me. I woke up every 20 minutes by the clock to yank the damned covers away from you and back onto me.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, it was a very long night,” he said coldly. “But I’m glad you were comfy.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, feeling horrible. “I didn’t mean to steal the covers, I swear. They’re just-”
“Slippery. I know. And since you take walks in your sleep all night, unlike me, who just lays there not moving and minding my own business, you get all the slippery on YOUR side.”
“Randy-”
“We are changing those sheets tonight,” he announced. “Putting the cotton ones on. At least with those, my pillow stays in one place, and I have a fighting chance at staying covered up.” He glared at me challengingly.
“Okay,” I said meekly. “The cotton sheets are nice.”
This is like the I-hate-my-spouse-because-they-snore syndrome. You know it’s not their fault they snore. You know they’re not doing it on purpose and that they feel terrible about it. Which does not stop you from wanting to smother them with their own pillow at 3 AM. It stops you from doing it, but not from wanting to do it. Randy knows I don’t try to steal the covers, I don’t hang on to them, I don’t wrap myself up in them, I just move a lot.
I also do bizarre things without thinking about what the neighbors will think. This is a holdover from living in an area that, no matter what you do, someone else is doing something worse. The other day, I decided I wanted DaBoy to come outside and help with something. Instead of going in and hollering him downstairs or calling him on the phone, I decided to throw pieces of ornamental bark at his window, which is on the front of the house, facing the street. Randy was in the garage watching me toss piece after piece of bark at DaBoy’s window. They all hit, but they’re too soft to be heard over a deafeningly loud computer war game.
“Do you want to use my phone?” Randy called.
“No, I’m having fun,” I said. “If you hold the bark just right, and let it roll off your fingers instead of just hucking it, you have more control.”
“Uh-huh. You realize that people can see you, right?” He asked in that deceptively mild tone. He moved to a chair in the very back of the garage, where he couldn’t be seen from the street.
“Wool, yes. I mean, we’re outside. Of course they can see me. So what?” I tossed another piece of bark at the window, hitting the frame.
“Are you sure you don’t want to borrow my cell phone and just call?” Randy asked again.
“I’m sure. Besides, I’m getting better. Except the bark keeps staying on the roof, see, so I keep having to find new pieces. And you have to be careful to get one that isn’t too light or too dense,” I explained. Randy was sitting where we couldn’t see each other so I informed him when I’d found the perfect bark-missile. It not only bounced off the window without hurting it, it came back down so I could throw it again.
Suddenly, the front door flew open and my son marched out. “You have TERRIBLE aim,” he informed me.
“I most certainly do not!” I exclaimed indignantly. “It worked didn’t it?”
“I called him,” Randy confessed.
“You did what?”
“Called him on his cell and told him to come out.”
“You did not……..did you?”
“Well, yes. Everyone was staring at you like you were crazy. So I told him that and asked him to come down.”
“But I was hitting the window….”
“I didn’t hear anything,” my son announced. “Randy told me that people thought you were nuts and that I needed to come out here and get you to stop.”
“I do not have bad aim,” I mumbled. And just for that, I made Randy go get us Chinese food for dinner. Hee.