Nana: Read any good books lately?
Me: Actually, yes. I read this one about a boy who becomes a vampire and-
Nana: Don’t you ever read anything cheerful?
Me: Honestly, the most cheerful book I own is probably one about a woman going into debt or the one where a girl catches her best friend’s boyfriend cheating.
Nana: That’s not very cheerful.
(Every Halloween, our school takes the seniors on an ice skating trip and to a park for lunch afterwards. At the end, there’s a best costume contest. I am dressed up as ketchup. This takes place after my friend has won the contest and our friend group is leaving the park.)
Me (to Friend #1): You may have the best costume officially, but I have the best condiment costume, hands down.
Friend #1: For a second, I thought you said condom.
Me: Nope, condiment. That’s how you pronounce it, right?
Friend #1: Yep.
(Friend #2 has just finished a conversation with Friends #3, #4, and #5 and has just turned his attention to us.)
Friend #2: Condoms?
Me: No! Condiment.
Friend #3: Condoms?
Me and Friend #1: Condiment.
Friend #4: Condoms?
Me and Friend #1: Condiment!! [Friend # 5], you’d better not say condom.
Friend #5: Huh? Condoms?
Me: *internal facepalm*
(We laughed about the misunderstanding all the way to the bus. And my friend got a gift card for winning the contest!)
In 1992 when I was 20 years old, I traveled in the south of England for a month with my best friend. We lived in youth hostels and ended up taking some detours because we had accidentally booked them alphabetically and couldn’t change it because our parents would like to know where in the country we were.
We are in Dover and are visiting the Roman Painted House. They had wanted to build a parking lot but when they started digging they found a huge Roman house with mosaics and remnants of floor heating. My friend and I are huge nerds who love history and this place is amazing. As we stood, fascinated, looking onto a huge mosaic floor, an older gentleman approached us and started to tell us about the building. We asked him a lot of questions and he seemed to know the answer to everything. After spending a pleasant half an hour with the nice man, who was called Philip, we drifted into another part of the museum where they had a lot of photographs of the original excavations. Philip was on several of the photographs, as he was one of the archeologists who excavated the building. We wanted to find him again to get his autograph, but he was gone.
After a visit to the ER, I’m encouraged to make an appointment with my primary doctor to discuss changing my current medications. Since we’re in the middle of a health crisis, most doctors are doing online “tele-health” visits, and I’ve done them with this doctor before, but only on my laptop. When making this particular appointment, the receptionist says she’ll send me a text so I can use their app to complete my visit on my phone. I tell her that I’ve never accessed their practice on my phone before, since my phone is kind of wonky and automatically denies calls from “unknown” or “private” numbers, which is how most of my past attempted tele-health visits have called from. The receptionist is confused, saying they’ve never sent emails for tele-health visits before, only texts, so she directs me to the practice’s website to show me how to access my visit from there. I make the appointment, thank her, and hang up.
Minutes later, I get an email from the practice, confirming my appointment and giving directions on how to access my tele-health visit on my laptop.
Little bit of a happy one here!
So, after 2 years in a very busy and stressful job, I finally found something else. (Out of context, it got so bad that I’ve taken a 4k paycut to a nicer company just to get out of this place.)
My email signature to all my customers has been notifying them of my leaving now.
I just got the following response from one customer…
“Oh no.
We were just saying how good and helpful you are.
My colleague says you cannot leave.
So you cant leave.”
Made me smile, little bit of a laugh before I’m rid of this place.
