Somebody Else's Detour

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Order Status, Much Pondering (Or: How to Recycle Spam Subjects)

Order Status, Much Pondering

By Samuel Clements

Hi, moth bean,

Attention all small stock players! Sara examined Mark! Confirm, please--did a unit see Sara buy a replica Rolex at only a fraction of the price? Just out, every man wants it: Nurse tub; Flomax, propecia; software at low prices; loan request; refinance report; Corel Draw, OEM. All here! Just added and the results will impress your girl. Your invoice is ready. Added bonus offer: lick annoy or shame of sex? We can change it. Test the sweets of life yourself. Big boom on look!

Less is More (Huh?)

My thyroid has apparently decided, along with the rest of me, to take a nap. Now all the little drones inside me are squawking, "Hey, who turned out the lights?" No wonder the fats cells are gaining ground. Their natural enemies are either asleep or can't find them in the pitch black. And no wonder the water is being retained. Hey, it can't find its way out without the runway lights. The sleepiness… ah, but of course. When everything that matters thinks it's dark, we sleep. And the heart palpitations… yeah, it's obviously scared of the dark. The hot/cold disregulation.. .well, have you ever tried to adjust the thermostat in total darkness?

Can you imagine what the surgeon who, I'm sure someday will have to open me up for something, will find? Some little spleen-or-other hawking stockpiles of little T-shirts that state, "I survived the great TSH Blackout of Ought-Six!" I wonder if the surgeon and all the nurses will buy one for its obvious collector's value? I could become a rich woman!

Gosh, and just when you think your body is going to start letting you down!

The Real Stuffed Turkey: Who Knew? (November 2005)

In the same day's newspaper as the annual "how to stuff your turkey" recipes, I discovered another stuffed turkey--in the guise of a stuffed shirt. (What they won't do to avoid the ax this time of year!)

Allow me to quote directly from our newspaper's public (dis??) service column, The Vent, wherein, as the name implies, regular citizens can phone or email in their gripes for publication. This one made my eyes roll. And since my eyes continued to roll about this vent all day, I had to address it or bust.

"Is it me, or do you get annoyed when you are in a retail store and the sales associate tells you, "have a good one?" Have a good what? Their language tells me that they possess little or no command of the English language as taught in school. The person to blame is the management of these retail stores who allow their associates to speak like this. Once the management corrects the problem I would like to hear "thank you for your business," not the above statement nor "have a nice day." I guess some people need to be reminded where their livelihood comes from."

[Venter's name appears in The Vent but I have removed it here]

Uh, since we're being fussy, that would be the rather awkward sounding but grammatically perfect, "from where their livelihood comes", Sir Language Cop. Come on. I mean, like, you know (I just did that to further annoy the Language Cop), English is a fluid language that adapts to its environment and the times; it welcomes enrichment from people for whom English is a second language. It changes! It's interesting! That's the beauty of it!

And besides an appalling lack of appreciation of the English language, there's that little Grinchy (how dare Dr. Seuss introduce a new word; how absurd, that silly word!) attitude. A retail associate sent you on your way with a pleasant, if not professionally correct, farewell, in perfectly implied English (meaning, one is expected to understand that "have a good one" is the equivalent of the ubiquitous "have a good day"). For that courteous acknowledgement of your humanity, as opposed to those associates who barely acknowledge a customer's existence, you wish to stomp away and never grace the premises again (one can assume that you believe that you, as a metaphor for all customers, provide their livelihood, and since you are displeased with their service, you prefer not to provide that livelihood, which involves stepping into the store. Yes?).

Lucky them!

So my answer to you, Señor Grump (ooh, bad me, I threw in a non-English word) is, "Yes, it's you." I do not "get" (more properly stated as "become") annoyed. I smile, thank them for their courteous service, and tell them they should have a good "one", too.

So, Mr. Venter, go suck canal water. That suit ya better?

One Million Per Inch

So, snow is expensive these days. According to a report on KYW news radio, New Jersey spends about one million dollars per inch of snowfall to clear the roads. One million. Per inch. I heard this report as I drove over roads still white with our latest snowfall, about which we were all appropriately overreacting, glued to television sets in case the snow stopped falling and we, God forbid, wouldn't know!

As I drove I was thinking how peaceful and relaxing the world seems when the roads are still white, and the tires swoosh and crunch in a way peculiar to, well, tires on snow.

And then I heard that news report. And immediately visualized monster snowplows leaving jagged mountain ranges (whoops, left your car on the side of the road? See you in Spring...) of filthy, salt-encrusted snow that you wouldn't want your kid to play on much less eat (because, besides the traffic hazard, who knows where the yellow snow is under all that mess?) and windows sprayed with gray stuff everytime a vehicle drives by (then your windshield washer fluid runs out just as darkness falls and you're still twenty minutes from your destination)... UGH.

Would the world really stop turning if we simply let snow be snow?

One million per inch.

Did I just answer my own question?