Playing Store

Posted: December 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

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Today was my filming day for the Food Bank.  First I had to appear on live TV for about 30 seconds.  I did not know what I was going to be asked, but lucky for me I only had to think a moment about the answer.  My second filming was for a video for the Food Bank and it was shot at the Durham Branch.  It was much harder because I did not have a script but I had to talk much longer about how people can help the Food Bank.  It took about 15 takes to get right.

 

While setting of the video shot by putting cans of food on store shelves I had a major flashback to my childhood.  We lived in a fairly isolated house with no girls living nearby so my sisters and I would play together even though there was nine years difference in our ages.  One of the games we loved to play was “Store.”  I had a bedroom with lots of shelves and we would price everything already on the shelves, like little glass animals and piggy banks and then go and take canned food from the kitchen that already had price stickers on it and add that to the shelves.

 

We would spend hours making fake money some of which went into a box made into a cash register and the rest divided between the shoppers.  I was usually the storekeeper because first it was my room, therefore my store, and second I could add the purchases faster than Margaret and certainly than Janet who was probably only 3 years old.  The only problem with store is that the setting up was fun, but neither of my sisters ever wanted to put anything away when they got bored with shopping.

 

Another favorite pastime was playing restaurant.  In my same bedroom I had a board that spanned one side of my room, which we used as a counter.  I had a bunch of flatware that my Godmother had been giving me for birthdays and Christmases so restaurant seemed like the only game a kid could play with forks and spoons.  Just like playing store the set-up was the majority of the game.  We would spend hours writing menus and then we would have to find costumes to wear as the waitress or the patrons.

 

Store and Restaurant were the games I would choose, but Margaret liked to play beauty parlor.  This was my least favorite game to play because she always got to be the beautician and she also had a short attention span.  That meant that she would set a chair up at our bathroom sink and I would have to put my head backwards into the bowl and she would pour a handful for shampoo in my hair and run the water on cold for a minute and lather me up, get bored and walk away leaving me fully clothed with a big wet head full of bubbles and no way to get up without soaking myself.  Sometimes it was even worse than that because she also had my hands soaking in a whole cereal bowl full of Palmolive dish soap.  We had no idea what a manicure was, but we knew that Madge the manicurist told her customers “they were soaking in it” so that’s what we did.  No wonder years later when Margaret was in boarding school with 5 other Margaret’s in her class she took on the nick name Madge.   Was life simpler then?

Being At Other People’s Mercy

Posted: September 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

I hate being at other people’s mercy. I like to be the driver, the planner, the get-it-done-myselfer and in the words of someone I never quote, the decider. It is not necessarily an attractive quality and one that I try and mask to the outside world very unsuccessfully.

This week all my masking skills failed me when in the space of two days I was tested over and over again.

The first situation came at 10:00 the night before a surprise birthday party I was throwing with some friends. I was in charge of the restaurant and menu. Coconut cake was featured in the invitation and was expected. I had gone to the restaurant weeks in advance and reserved the space and the cake.

The manager told me to email him the exact menu a week ahead, which of course I did. I called him the next day to confirm his receipt of my detailed instructions. He was not in so I requested he call me back. The next day no call back. I phoned him, not in, no call back. And again. Then I went away for the weekend.

Upon my return home I had to cook for the clothing show at my house, reconnect with my 13 year old daughter who almost did not realize that her father and I had been away for three days and do all the laundry from our hot weekend where we changed our clothes four times a day.

As I fell into bed dead tired after the clothing show and started thinking about the next day’s party it dawned on me that I had never heard from the restaurant manager. In a panic I picked up the phone and called them and asked for him by name. I felt as if I was going to throw up when I was told that he was not in and would not be in until Friday, two days after my party.

The poor man who answered the phone. I went into full on bitch and asked who was in charge at that very moment. Another manager came to the phone and I begged him to tell me that he knew all about the party, the email for the menu and more importantly the coconut cake. NO. He knew nothing about it. We worked out the menu, and he thought he might have enough staff, but the cake was going to be a problem. He only had half as much as I needed!

It eventually worked out, but not until I completely micromanaged the staff, bussed plates, poured drinks and cut the cake slices myself, serving the skinniest of servings. In the end the birthday girl was completely surprised, celebrated and happy.

My second pain-in-the-ass event this week was my call with a national phone company I won’t out here. We have way too many phone lines for a family of three. Three months ago I gave up long distance service on one of the six lines, I told you it was too many. Somehow I inadvertently kept paying on the account of the line I gave up and not on one of the lines I still had.

I was receiving automated calls from this rotten phone company saying that I needed to call them about my phone line. Since I had been sending them more than enough money I assumed they wanted me to call them so they could sell me something, so I never called them back.

It was not until I received a letter saying they were going to cut off my long distance that I realized there was a problem. It took 15 phone calls to figure out that they had my money in one department, but would not transfer it to the correct department until I sent them a FAX, and even then it would take two weeks.

What century is this company in, a FAX! When I asked the poor customer service rep why in the world they had not alerted me that I was sending them money for an account which had been closed months ago he was silent for a whole minute. When I said, “Well?” His response was, honest to god, “I’m trying to think of a good excuse.”

Even after that admittance of guilt he could not transfer my credit, nor could he refund me without a fax. When I asked if I could send an email, the answer was no. “We can’t take your word over the phone that you are who you say you are and we need a paper trail.”

I could just as easily impersonate myself by fax as by phone and since when was email not a paper trail? I just imagine that fax I sent falling on the floor and rolling under the fax table because it is still printed on slick continuous fax paper of 1988.

I write this as I sit at the airport at the mercy of an airline, no surprise there. My 11:45 flight is not taking off until 1:15 now it is yet to be seen if I will make my connection on a tiny 12 seat prop plane. I would love to know what my normally low blood pressure is now.

The good news is that I did not turn to eating as the way to deal with my frustrations, instead I turn to ranting via blog. Blogging now an official diet tool for me. So thank you to all you unknown readers I imagine I am complaining to. I know I am still at the mercy of others, but at least I hope you have gotten a chuckle out of my frustrations and you have a stress free weekend.