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Don’t Solicit Me

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When I was younger and saw signs that said “no solicitors” I had to ask what the word “solicitor” meant.  And my mom explained it was people selling things.  As a kid, I could only think of how kids go door to door selling candy for fundraisers, or Girl Scouts selling cookies.  Who WOULDN’T want door-to-door candy service?  As an adult, I wish I got more of this.  More candies and more cookies right at my doorstep.

As an adult and an office manager, “solicitor” has taken on a whole new hellish annoyance to me.  NEWSFLASH:  no one ever comes around selling candy.  Ever.
Sometimes on the subway there are “youths” (which are generally waaaaaay too old to even be in school probably, and I am smart enough to know they are not raising funds for their rec center.  They went to Costco and are trying to turn a profit) selling candy for a ridiculous price and this is not helpful nor useful.  Yes, I want candy.  No, I am not paying $5 for a fucking fun-size Snickers.

I will announce right here and now a little tidbit into my working-life.  I use Staples.  I love it.  You will not ever sway me from Staples.  I have their card, their online ordering is great, their customer service is awesome and no, this isn’t a sponsored post.

So many people come into my office and try to get me to switch to their business or service.  Verizon, get out of here.  WB Mason, hit the road.  The most recent company to try their luck with me… I don’t even KNOW who they are, but they ain’t getting far.  I see right through them.

Two guys came in last Thursday trying to get me to switch to their office supplies.  Told me they’re a subsidiary of Staples, offer lower prices, really tried to get me on board.  I open with “Thank you for your time but I am with another company and do not plan on switching.”  That is my hello and goodbye, don’t waste my time, I got work to do.  I shut these two guys down pretty fast and then they’re all heeeey I like your shirt.  What?  Thanks…….?  Go away.

Monday afternoon, another sales rep from this same company comes in but is harder to shut down.  Not because she is a tenacious sales leader, but I really think she was slow and was not understanding what I was telling her.  The following convo actually happened…..

“Hey, nice shirt!  What a lovely pink color” Heeeeey the two guys last week said the same thing to me.  Do they train you to say that?!
“But we have lower prices.” I don’t care.  I like Staples.
“No obligation, let me set you up with a user ID for ordering”  No, I don’t want to do that at all.
“Let me show you our price comparison sheet and-” I don’t have time for this, I have work to do.  I’m not switching.
“Ordering is easy, you just call and talk to me and I do everything for you” I don’t want to talk to anyone, I like Staples because I can do everything online and not speak to a single person.

After a few more blank stares, back and forth, and me pointing at my computer and grunting “ME WORK BUSY, MUCH BUSY.”  She got the hint and left.

The next day I saw her stalking the hallways in this building again… this time she had someone with her that I overheard giving her a pep talk before entering another company’s office.
“You got this on lock, you can do this, you are a WINNER.”

I feel bad for her.  I know sales is a hard job, and it’s hard to purposely have to interrupt and annoy people in the middle of their day, but I try to say no as nice as possible at first.  After that, you gotta get a clue.

Shit I Do to Annoy People

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On Sunday, I actually got called out on my shit that I’ve been sprinkling into conversation to just see if someone will call me out on being a lameass.

“If you say ‘hella’ again I am breaking up with you right here right now,” said my boyfriend to me in the garden department of Home Depot.
In emails with Jaclyn or conversation with others, I’ll drop in the word “hella” just to see if anyone will point out to me that I shouldn’t say that word ever.  No one has, until now.  After saying something was “hella expensive” Mike promptly stopped the cart, stopped walking and gave me the business right there in Home Depot that I was being a fucking weirdo and I better quit it.
Relationships can go through a lot of things.  There are rough times when two people go through hard things and stick together.  Some people even overcome things like trust issues and infidelity.  But make no mistake of it, Mike is handing me my walking papers if I say the h-word in his presence ever again.
Time for me to find a new word to annoy people with.

Teach me how to Science

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This conversation actually happened.  I told Jaclyn that “these mini cupcakes are as tiny as a molecule,” and that is what spawned my thoughtful pursuit in the name of science to try to learn more about physics…. so I asked my boyfriend some questions, he’s smart…. right?

me: mike
 Michael: nadine
me: is an atom the same thing as a molecule?
 Michael: no
  a molecule is made of atoms
 me: ok.
  thanks.
atoms are in a molecule. so what’s a molecule then.
  is that an element?
 Michael: no
  a molecule is a collection of atoms
  for example, hydrogen and oxygen are atoms
 me: then what’s hydrogen.
  wait i think you’re wrong.
  like …
 Michael: h2o is a molecule made of 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom
 me: hydrogen is an element
  and it’s made of atoms
 Michael: no
 me: god i’m so fucked.
  ok so yeah h20 is a colemule.
and an element is defined by how many electrons or whatever the atoms are right
 Michael: A chemical element is a pure chemical substance consisting of one type of atom distinguished by its atomic number, the number of protons in its nucleus.
  do you have a science test next period?
 me: you fuckin copied and pasted that.
 no i’m talking about cupcakes with jaclyn and it got me thinking about life and what we are all made of.
  and i’m gonna go make some meth.


Traumatizing your kid, one car trip at a time.

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A prime example of being good with babies.  This photo is a lie.

I was clicking around on pinterest and saw this article about “How to Travel with a Baby.”  I was like, fucking duh, you pack up their shit, put it in the car, then also put them in the car and go to the place you want to go.  This article had a lot more involved, far more than “buckle up and go.”  It involved first aid kits, baby CPR and the reminder to not drink and drive.  Who really needs to be told that?  Of course a baby is going to need first aid and CPR if you let them drink and drive.

Reading this reminded me about the first time I brought Jaclyn’s infant daughter Caitlyn anywhere.  She was 3 months old and had stayed the night at my house and we were going to a BBQ at a friend’s house where Jaclyn would meet us later after she got out of work.

The following story I did not tell Jaclyn for 2 years out of fear that I’d like traumatized her daughter for life. Or that once she knew, she’d definitely not want to be my friend or ever trust me with her kid ever again.

Gather round, kids. Time to get weird.

I was actually really stressed out about going somewhere with this kid.  She’s an easy baby, but I had to drive a whole car with only me and a tiny baby in it.  So much could go wrong.  I also  had the added responsibility of bringing potato salad.  I had a lot to juggle, literally.  I had to get myself, a baby, a car seat, a stroller, a diaper bag, my own bag and the best damn potato salad ever all into the car in the garage by myself in one trip.  I didn’t know the rules of “do not leave baby unattended” for even 2 minutes.  I even brought her in the bathroom with me when I had her over by putting her in a bouncy seat and facing her away from me as I peed.  I didn’t know the nudity rules about babies either.

Clearly a good babysitting decision

Anyways, I didn’t want to make two trips and irritate the baby so I had an idea.  I called the front desk (we lived in a swank luxury apartment building) and asked them to bring by a luggage trolley (the kind you get at a hotel with a bellhop) to my door.  Why didn’t I just ask one of them to help me is beyond me… they were all nice and knew me.  But somehow I had it in my head that I was on a mission of solitude and had something to prove.  So I loaded everything up on the luggage trolley and took the elevator to the garage and felt really smug at my bright idea.

The blanket when it was new.  It looks far more disgusting now.
If you forget a pack-n-play you can toss them in a laundry basket.
Babies don’t even care.

As soon as I was about to start the car, it hit me what I’d forgotten:  the baby blanket.  You gotta have it.  Especially this baby, she is engaged to that blanket to this day.  Mike had bought it for her the previous day when after Jaclyn dropped her off, she’d forgotten a blanket, and we didn’t have any.  I was just going to use a towel as a baby blanket, but Mike is a good uncle and went to Target and bought her the prettiest and softest and pinkest blanket he could find.  So there was only one option, I had to go back and get the blanket.

Right as I was unbuckling Caitlyn from her car seat, I kind of hit her in the head by accident and she started screaming.  I felt so awful.  So, so, so, so, so awful.  Fuck.  I hit the baby.  That is totally on the list of things to not do to a baby.  I still had to get her blanket and make it quick, so I carried the wailing baby to and from the car as fast as I could.  I buckled her back in, didn’t smack her in the head by accident this time, and tucked her in with a blanket and pacifier as I started to drive away.  She would always fall asleep in the car so I was hoping she’d do that soon.  She was still crying and I just snapped and I yelled at her, a baby “OMG shut up stop crying jesus christ you’re fine, I didn’t even leave a mark.”  I hadn’t even made it out of the garage yet, so someone getting into their car nearby heard me yelling at a baby and looked at me like I was the worst person in the whole world.  The look of disgust from a witness really sealed the deal that I was a piece of shit, worst babysitter ever.

Maybe you didn’t know this, but yelling at a crying infant?  Doesn’t work.  She calmed down naturally in a minute or two after the rhythm of the road put her to sleep.  But for 2 years I was so afraid that somewhere ingrained in her subconscious was Aunt Dee smacking her in the forehead and then screaming at her for crying about it, and she actually hated me, or it would just come pouring out in therapy one day.

When I confessed this to Jaclyn a couple months ago, she assured me that no, I didn’t damage Caitlyn’s psyche, and that as a mother, she’d even done some stupid accidental stuff to her own kid and I shouldn’t beat myself up for it.  I’ll probably feel bad forever for it, but at least now, Caitlyn can’t black mail me with her repressed memory when it resurfaces like “I know what you did… you think infants have no memory?  I’m telling my mother.”  To which I will counter “tough shit, I told her years ago and you ain’t got dick on me.”  Because of course she’s gonna try to black male me someday…. or black mail?

The moral of this story, is if you hit & yell at a baby by accident… come clean… in a couple years.

Crossing the Streams

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“We know all about your blog,” my boss said, as all the color drained from my face….

For some people, that line could have been followed by “…and you’re fired.”  or “and you are a sick son of a bitch.” or “we’d like you to have a talk with a counselor.”  But that didn’t happen to me.

I don’t really blog about work because I like keeping my job, I don’t want you people (if anyone even reads this shit) to know where I work, and it’s just not very profesh to dish about work details.  Also it’s boring.

If I told you about my day, you’d fall asleep or cut yourself, but make no mistake of it, I really do like my job.  I love it.  There’s never a day that I dread coming into work.  I mean sure, we all have those days where we are tired and would like to legally marry our Tempurpedic and shut out the whole world, but there is nothing about my job that makes me not want to come here.

Right at the beginning of the new year, we had a change here at work.  We replaced the person who did Accounts Payable and hired another new person as well.  In a small office, it’s kind of a big deal when you hire 50% more people.  On the whole, I liked both new women that started here.  That kinda fizzled for the younger of the two, and she no longer works here.

My boss is a really nice guy.  He had the good idea for all of us to go out to dinner one night after work as sort of a “get to know you” with the new employees.  At the last minute, the younger of the two new chicks did the dip and bailed out on us.  While having dinner and drinks, I mentioned something about writing, and that was when he said it ….

“We know all about your blog.”

It was like that moment when your whole life flashes before your eyes, but instead of my life and all the good & bad times, it was instead my mind playing back all my blog posts and trying to scan it for any post worthy of being like “don’t come back to work anymore you sick fuck.”  Immediately I thought of the post about the dildo party.  Fuck.  And just anything.  Everything.  My god… this is how it ends….

Except that’s now how it ended.  Both my boss and one of my co-workers were like “we don’t even care, we don’t even read it.”  And then I’m still just dead in my seat, and think “…and my twitter?  and that?”  And basically I was told “we don’t care about your blog, even when you blog at work, you still get all your work done.”

No one fucking cares!  This is an exercise in vanity at its fullest.  For me to believe for a split second that this is interesting enough for them to read, let alone scandalous enough to terminate me for, is just so narcissistic. It’s a blog that I occasionally bullshit around in, don’t speak ill of my job or co-workers (not even the bitches that got fired!).

So, the moral of this story is, no one is probably reading this and I’m going to the motherfuckin’ Olive Garden with the “new” (been here for like 2 months now) girl at work that I like.  And she reads my blog.