The Pain of Knowledge

There was some cowboy sidekick guy that was always saying "You young whippersnappers". I am doing my doctoral dissertation on the origins and underlying meanings behind that phrase and its usage.

It was a chilly, drizzly, windy day in North Suburban Chicago, a place where everyone knows we have four nice days a year.  The doorbell rang.  An unusual occurrence causing  the dog to freak.  Spellcheck picked up three errors in that one sentence.

It was AT(&)T Uverse salesmen and we welcomed them into the foyer--a  lovely warm room.  They went on and on to my spouse.  I kept interjecting.  I finally introduced myself into the conversation, introduced in the sense of inserting, not in the sense of saying my name.  I stated that it was my decision since it was my portion of the allowance and my name on the account and I was ready to say yes, BUT. . .

By now one of the youngsters was sitting on the staircase, as was I, and a third lovely young lady had joined us.  She was carrying a Glock 27 with gold engraving  on the butt and shot the dog.  Just kidding.

I asked a few questions like would I still get STARZ (Are those peni on Spartacus prosthetic?  This has yet to be answered.) (No.  I didn't ask the salesman that.  Really, now. . .  Why would you even think that?)  and how long was the promotional period and it soon became time to initial documents which I was prepared to do since they had assured me they were not contracts, but simply payment agreements.  That's a new one, huh?  At one point the young man answered a question I posed and I said,  "Yeah.  But you might be playing me.  You kind of look like you are."  He was classically dumbfounded.  Or at least the expression on his face indicated that. Someone had to pick up the conversational ball that he dropped at that moment. 

There was quite a bit of banter about our incredible age and their incredible youth and local dialect and what it was like to live in Riyadh, even for short periods of time.  And I said, "Okay, but recently I was discussing things with a local resident and she mentioned that uVerse was supposed to be the best but we couldn't get it in our area."  The young man had earlier reassured my husband that they had surreptitiously inserted fiber optic cable under our driveway, at which time, while the theme from The Twilight Zone played softly in the background, I bit my tongue so as not to embarrass my spouse who actually worked repairing engines in Nuclear submarines and actually installed fiber optic cable under the Chicago River.  I was dismayed that he was buying that story, but I know men of his age frequently have minor neurological events that can impair their thinking processes.

As a sort of reply to my comment,  the young whippersnapper sitting near me in the stairwell shook a bundle of papers at me and said, "Would we be out in this weather if we didn't already have that information?" in what can only be described as a snippy tone.  And she showed me our address on one of her pieces of paper.  Now  my spouse was clearly biting his tongue--I knew this cuz blood was flowing down his chin--(just kidding again) because I frequently embarrass him with my outbursts of knowledge that he thinks I manufacture on the spot since he knows I wouldn't be married to him if I had a working brain cell. So off they went into the unpleasant weather, glowing and congratulating each other for another job well done, another sale they closed, another success story to last them the rest of their lives.

Three days later, my husband played back a few voice mails.  We do this once a year.  There was a message from AT(&)T stating that uVerse was not yet available in our area, but if we called them in a few months maybe they could help us. Once again, fuck me.

I have found that most bloggers end their blogs with a provocative question, probably to encourage commenting and continued social intercourse.

How do you slice an English Muffin?