This story happened in September 2022. I was woken up by something that sounded like an explosion. I looked at the clock; it was four o’clock in the morning. I was pondering about it for a while, then fell asleep again (I am definitely not a morning person).

Later, when I was at work, I asked my colleague, who lives nearby, about that strange night sound. He did not hear anything, but he is a sound sleeper. We talked about it, and our best guess was that some vandals put a petard into a recycle bin again, as they did some months ago.

We continued to talk about other things, and he finished with a story that happened to his wife yesterday. She was about to park when an “a**hole in a [Company] car” took her place so aggressively that she almost bumped his car. After venting this story, we continued to work.

In the afternoon, this colleague came to me with his phone in hand. He told me that he was browsing the web during lunch and found out what the strange sound last night was. He showed me an article from the local news, showing a picture of a firefighter truck and a burned car, in a place near his home. He knows this place well, because he or his wife routinely parks there.

I looked it up on my computer myself. Apparently, last night, a parked car caught fire, and a gas stove LPG cylinder exploded. Fortunately, the explosion was contained mostly within the van, so the outside damage was relatively small; only two cars parked next to the van were damaged.

There were photographs: the van aflame, firefighters putting out the fire, smoking remains of the burned van, and two soot-covered cars, with cracked windows and melted mirrors. One of them had a [Company] logo on its side…

This will be the final entry of the saga of the crazy grandmother from the Stab Caesar series. This is because my parents finally got her on Medicaid, and she is now in a home full-time. But it was not without drama.

In October, her doctors approved her for a pacemaker set to be put in at the end of December. However, in early November, she came downstairs one Thursday, claiming she didn’t have a pulse. My dad barely managed to find it, and the decision was made to take her to the ER. The doctors at our local hospital determined her pacemaker surgery had to be moved up. This meant they needed to transfer her to a different (and much better) hospital in the next county.

Now, non-emergency transport is, in a word, slow. They took so long to get to her that my dad ended up leaving before the ambulance arrived. The slow service was completely unacceptable to her, and no one could give her an exact time of when her transport would arrive. It was nine or ten o’clock at night when it finally arrived, based on when she stopped calling the house to complain about the wait, the nurses, and whatever else she fancied.

Friday, the next day, she had the surgery. My dad, uncle, and cousin went to visit her around lunchtime. She was not happy. “The doctors are horrible! The nurses are horrible! I’ve never been treated so horribly in my life!” This is arguably the best hospital in the entire state, and you don’t hear many stories about patient neglect here, so my uncle did some digging.

The problem: the doctors and nurses insisted on doing their jobs, which involved seeing their other patients. My grandmother seriously expected them to wait around on her hand and foot like they were servants. My uncle went to the nurses’ station to warn them that she was in a mood, but she had already been labeled as “difficult” in their system. She had been in this hospital for a little over twelve hours at this point.

The next day, my dad went to get her, since we had been told since October that the pacemaker surgery was supposed to be an outpatient procedure. But two different doctors agreed that since she is ninety-five, she needed to go straight to a rehab place for a few days so she can be under observation and someone can answer any questions she has about the pacemaker. She was pissed when she found out she wasn’t going home, but the staff eventually convinced her that this was for the best.

The staff at the hospital told my dad they would arrange the transportation, but since it was a weekend, she may not get transferred that day. Dad stayed with her most of the day, but he did eventually have to leave since Mom didn’t want him driving an hour and a half in the dark. (He had a mini-stroke last summer, and he’s mostly fine, but every once in a while, he does something weird, like taking three lefts to turn right.) Crazy called the house several times to complain about the lack of transportation. My dad tried to reason with her. “It’s Saturday night, they’re probably busy and have minimal staff.” This wasn’t good enough.

Sometime on Sunday, she was transferred to the rehab/nursing home. My dad visited her on Monday. She was not happy. After a few days, some of the staff talked to my parents about getting her homed there permanently. Now, my parents had tried to get her on Medicaid a few times before, but she was always denied since she made too much money from Social Security. She drew off my grandfather’s Social Security, even though 1) they divorced when Dad was in high school, 2) he’s been dead for almost twenty-six years now, and 3) she’s been married and divorced a couple of times since she divorced my grandfather.

We can’t figure out how she was allowed to do this.) The staff at the rehab were great and helped walk my parents through the process in a way that would significantly raise her chances of getting accepted, and in the meantime, Medicare would pay for, I think, a hundred days of care for her.

Grandma went back and forth on her view of the place during this hundred-day trial period. She liked the social aspect of it and often played bingo with the other residents. (We had tried to sign her up for elderly social things before and rejected it.) But, she wasn’t allowed to have any outside medicine, and the staff still weren’t treating her like the queen she thinks she is.

We did try to clean her room while she was gone since it was a complete disaster area. The amount of medicine we found in her room was astonishing. Twenty bottles of unopened OmegaXL. Twelve unopened bottles and three opened bottles of Balance of Nature vitamins. Two opened things of Colace. One unopened bottle of calcium chews. Four bottles of Shaklee vitamins. And a whole medium-sized box full of various prescription medications. Some of the medicines and supplements my parents bought for her with her money, but the rest she conned my cousin into getting for her.

Then there was the food.

There was a peanut butter jar that wasn’t closed, three big cans of coffee, too many protein shakes to count, a moldy orange juice bottle, a large jug of powdered Balance of Nature, three boxes of her special tea bags (she refused to drink tea that wasn’t a certain brand), and two cans of long-expired chicken were in her closet. There were also countless pills scattered on her floor, and we are lucky the cats never tried to eat them. The power strip had stains from where she spilled coffee, juice, and who knows what else on it over the years. We’re lucky she didn’t burn our house down. And the smell of urine, baby powder, and Chanel No. 5 was baked into that room. Leaving the window open for a full day did nothing to get rid of that smell. Our best guess is that she lost her sense of smell long before she moved in with us.

We greatly enjoyed our holidays without her. The stress levels in the house plummeted. My parents started to fantasize about going away for long weekends without having to arrange care for her. Finally, at the end of January, we got the acceptance letter in the mail! She is approved and will now stay in the home!

Related:
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad), Part 2
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad)

CONTENT WARNING: Mention of injury and possible death.

I’m relaxing at home. There’s a parade going on in my small town, and vehicle traffic naturally is delayed as a result. Immediately outside my picture window, I see a large SUV – the kind you can fit six kids and their different hobbies in – drive up to the road immediately outside my house and approach an intersection at roughly the same time as the parade goes past.

The window gets rolled down, the driver leans her head out the window to yell, and there is much honking and revving of the engine that suggests she is literally expecting the parade to halt and split up so that she can continue on her way.

And then I see flames.

Parts of her car are catching on fire. I immediately sprint outside in my bathrobe and start yelling to get the driver’s attention. The driver panics, all the doors open, and four teenagers leap out of the car. They all sprint away towards the nearest house (mine), and I open my garage to get them inside in case the car explodes (I don’t even know for sure if that can happen, but I’m not gonna risk it) while I call 911.

I realize the driver isn’t with them.

She throws a large purse and a tote bag on my lawn and RUNS BACK TOWARD THE BURNING CAR. There is smoke at this point. The parade has stopped as people realize what’s happening. Several others and I yell at her to get away from the car as she opens the hatch and pulls out two giant bags of sports equipment. She’s coughing as she comes back to my lawn, throws the bags down, and runs back to the car again to grab two more.

I have to stop one of the kids from joining her because he sees his mom working and wants to help. Someone else comes up while she’s dropping off those two and physically holds her back from going back to the car a third time. She is hacking and coughing like a mess, and the car is starting to be visibly consumed by the flames, but she’s still trying to go back for her stuff.

By the time emergency responders arrive, the driver has passed out. She gets loaded up onto a stretcher. The kids’ parents are called, including the driver’s husband, and they arrive on an adjacent street to get the kids safely home. I soon realize that they didn’t even bother to take the kids’ bags with them; from their size and quality, I estimate about $75 worth of sporting goods in each. Assuming the owners will want their things back, I keep the bags in my garage and send word to the parents asking if they want to pick them up.

Three of them ask if they smell like smoke. When I answer in the affirmative, they refuse, insisting that it’s never going to come out.

The fourth – that being the driver’s husband – says no outright. His wife is in the hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation and not expected to recover, and the kid doesn’t even want to play the sport anymore.

I dispose of the bags and sit down to realize that I might have seen someone die trying to save things that aren’t even usable anymore.

Prior to my retirement, I worked a retail job with a quasi-state agency that controls retail stores in my state. In our old store, we had a buzzer at each register that rang in the warehouse in case we needed help, or a customer needed a case of something.

Then the powers that be decided to move us to a new, bigger store. Of course, this being a state operation, while the store is much bigger, the staff is exactly the same. We now have four times the warehouse, four times the retail space, and the same number of people and hours.

Everything is always ‘you need to do more with less’. I got sick of this, and I’m a vindictive SOB by nature. I’ve been called the ‘Iceman’ because I can ignore anything. So, if I were on the register, I would stay at the register until I was told to do something else.

The managers were not happy. Then they started playing a game, one of the two managers on the shift would go back into the warehouse, to ‘check things’ aka vape (vaping is not allowed in the stores). In short order, the other manager would join the first, and then the other two clerks would head to the Warehouse, leaving me alone in the store.

Now, at this new store, the powers that be had the buzzer to call the warehouse placed in the office instead of at the registers. Managers put out a memo stating that employees are not allowed in the office without a manager present.

I keep ringing up customers, and other customers come to me asking for products that are in locked display cases. I inform them that they need to stick their heads in the door at the rear of the store and call for a manager. A manager comes out, talks to the customer, and goes to the office to look for the keys, then has to go back to the warehouse to get the keys from the other manager.

Customers are not happy, and I proceed to tell the customers to complain to the state complaint office.

The managers go ballistic, demanding to know why I didn’t ring the buzzer, and I simply point out that their memo says I’m not allowed in the office without a manager present.

Bottom line, there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.

A guy comes in with a VCR, a rather unusual unit as it’s for European rather than US TV standards, and proceeds to detail to me how he thinks it’s going to go, in detail, and with a very domineering manner.

His clothing tells me that he’s military, and his mannerisms tell me that he thinks that he’s dealing with a subordinate. He also informed me how much he had paid for the thing, purchased in Italy (prices on that sort of thing came way down as time passed).

When he finally finishes, I then tell him how it actually works in my business, that I would do an initial diagnostic and that there would be a charge for that, and then we’d take it from there. And that was because it was a unit working with a European TV standard; I would be limited in terms of how much I could test the functionality.

Some time passes, and I have gone as far as plugging the thing in and finding out that there were some issues with the power supply that would need to be addressed before I could go any further with it, and I gave him an estimate of what that would cost.

He threw a fit, saying that the whole thing was taking way too long, and that he’d be in to pick it up. At that point, I informed him that there would be a diagnostic fee charged before he could take it, and he got even more p***ed off, but I stood firm.

Next thing I get is a letter from a lawyer that he’s engaged to deal with this matter. Fine, I handed the whole mess off to my lawyer and forgot about it for a while. Some correspondence went back and forth, and that was the extent of that. I never heard from the guy again, and still had that unit sitting around.

At some point, way later, I considered it “abandoned” and scrapped the silly thing.