The moment one learns English, complications set in. — Felipe AlfauSomehow, certainly not by careful design, much of my worklife has been spent communicating with others by telephone. In my younger days, I was an employee of the good old Bell System, back when people could choose between telephones with buttons or dials. When I began working there, no one had a cell phone & nearly every household had landline service. Subscribers in rural areas could still get party lines.
When it was time for the Christmas holidays (Remember those? We were able to say "Merry Christmas" back then without offending anyone), I would volunteer to work the skeleton crew so that most of my co-workers could leave early on Christmas Eve. We didn't get many calls on that day anyway, and I'd get to leave early on New Year's Eve as a trade-off. I recall one Christmas Eve when I got a call late in the afternoon from an elderly woman.
She was in a nursing home and was being moved to another room. She needed to get her phone service moved as quickly as possible, because they were moving her that very day. When I told her we could not move her phone until the following week, she immediately started wailing. She sounded so frail.
"Oh, Lord! You got to move it today, else I won't be able to talk to my family on Christmas!"
I felt quite bad for her, but the technicians were booked solid, and only emergency orders had a hope of being worked the following week. I was already expediting her order because of the circumstances.
She continued to whine and moan, and I did feel sorry for her. I had questions, though, and said "I'm so sorry the nursing home is moving you to a different room with no warning. That's very unusual."
"Mmmm, well, yes. I suppose so."
"Why are they doing that?"
"It's this lady I'm in this room with. It's all her fault! She keep worrying me & worrying me. And when I hit her, they move ME!"
There's always more than meets the eye. Here she was acting pitiful, and she'd just been caught beating up her roommate. I told her her service would be moved at the end of the following week, and wished her a Merry Christmas.
The photographs on this post are of Wilton, a plantation house owned by the prominent Randolph family. Yes, Morris & I were out exploring again. It was a chilly day with drizzling rain, so the pictures look a little gloomy. I decided to be adventurous and play around with some button called picnik. Usually, I limit photo manipulation to cropping and adjusting the contrast, but I experimented with some of the more mundane picnik features this time. I didn't want my pictures to look too freaky.
It took a lot of money and many slaves to support the lavish lifestyle of the landed gentry in Old Virginia. By the time a few generations had passed, the economic climate had changed. The last of the Randolph family to live there was Robert, who died in 1859. Here's what a northern visitor in 1833 had to say about the house:
"...spacious wainscoted rooms, high ceilings, broad staircases and fine hall give you a very magnificent idea of the grandeur of the former proprietor who so long ago had an establishment that wants for nothing but a fitting up, to vie with modern elegance. But such ruin! - Broken down fences, a falling piazza, defaced paint, banisters tied up with ropes etc. etc. - the general aspect of the house is that of forlorn ruin."
The illicit photo of the interior was snapped when our guide, Tom, dashed off to the bathroom before we began our tour. Honestly, what is it with us Americans? You can go to Europe and practically lick the walls of 12th Century structures, but over here we act like something 100 years old will turn to dust if it's looked at cross-eyed. Photography, with or without flash, was not allowed inside the house.
One of the most striking qualities of Wilton is that the entire interior is elegantly paneled - even the closets. The early Randolphs were very wealthy indeed, and the house reflects their importance in colonial society. But consider this: hot, humid summers + no window screens + mosquitos. Sure, the place looks great now that it's renovated, but in its heyday on a summer night it would have been filled with a bunch of hot itchy sweaty malarial rich people. I'll happily accept reduced circumstances with window screens & air-conditioning.
Zooming back to current times, I once again find myself in a job that requires a good amount of telephone conversation. The wonderful thing about answering the AA hotline is that you never know what to expect. It is quite common for callers to pay no attention to what we say when we answer the phone, and we do get a lot of wrong numbers since ours is one digit different than a local television station's phone number. I fielded calls all day when the nation's TV stations went digital two summers ago. I finally started telling callers that unless their television was causing them to get drunk, I could not help them.
The previous office manager told me a story that still makes me grin. It goes something like this. She answered the phone one day with the usual "Alcoholics Anonymous, how can I help you?"
"Uh, yeah, my wife handed me this number and told me to call it. Who did you say this is?"
"Alcoholics Anonymous."
"F%CKING BITCH!!!" (shouted to someone in background as the call was disconnected)
Richmond's first AA meeting was held here in June, 1943
A few weeks ago I got a call from a blurry-sounding woman asking a question. After a bit of confusion, I understood that she was asking about a brand of liquor, Burnett's, and whether we stocked it. I told her I couldn't help her.
"This isn't the ABC store??? Who is this?"
"This is Alcoholics Anonymous."
"Huh? Who?"
"This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We're who you call if you want to stop drinking."
"OH MY GOD!!!" she screamed, and slammed the phone down.
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