Dead Man's Honda

Something is wrong with the computers and server at work so I am forced to sit here and wait in agitated expectation before I can finish my projects. Patience is a virtue, I keep telling myself, but I am certainly not learning it.

Last night was no exception.

My younger sister is incredibly efficient in all she does. Prior to our trip last night to look at wedding dresses, she went online, wrote down all the numbers of the dresses in which she was interested, and was ready to get them on and off to make the evening brief.

It was anything but brief.

First, the women at the shop seemed confused by the numbers.

“I thought this would help you locate the dresses more easily,” my sister said. They stared at her with blank faces.

“Uh, no cause, like, we have to go online and look up the dresses for you.”

“But I already did that for you.”

“Well, see, we don’t know about the numbers. We have to know what they look like and then look them up in the racks. Can you just look through this booklet and find which ones those numbers go to?”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “You organize the dresses on the racks based on what they look like in the catalogue? Not by identification numbers? How does that work?”

That sentence proved too confusing for them. One girl just stared straight ahead and absently shrugged her shoulders.

“We’re just going to have to look up that whole list of dresses,” the other one whined.

There were eight dresses.

Well yes, I thought, you are a dress shop. You have to get the dresses and let people try them on. That’s what you do.

The girls “helping” us sighed. The younger one leaned over and grabbed the list.

“Ok. I’ll do it for you. It is just going to take awhile. But I’m going to take my time, and you can go look at shoes.”

WHAT? You’re going to take your time? What just happened here?

The rest of the store experience was ridiculous but I’ll spare you.

We left laughing at the strange behavior of the women in the shop only to discover that my sister had locked her keys in her car.

Great.

She called her fiancée and he agreed to bring the keys to her. It would be about an hour which gave us plenty of time to eat dinner.

Where I had an entire meal spilled down my leg.

Then we ran over to Target because her fiancée wasn’t there yet, and we needed to grab a few items. I hate carrying things like purses, so I grabbed my ATM card and asked my sister to put it in her purse. She did.

But then she lost it.

So we went to the customer service line where we waited for someone to find the card and, (praise the Lord) they did. While we stood there, though, a young woman who looked like outerspace had invaded her brain stood whining at the cashier.

“I want to return this,” she said.

“Ok,” the cashier responded nicely.

“But I don’t have my card so can you call and get the number for me?”

“Uh, what?” the man said.

“You call. You have to call them and get the number.”

“Call who?” he said with a look of intense confusion on his face.

“Call the place where they keep the card records cause I didn’t bring my card.”

“We don’t have a place like that.”

“Yes you do, all stores have it. You just call them.”

“Even if there was a place to call and get your credit card information, they wouldn’t give it to me anyway---that’s private information,” he said, appealing to reason---for which I silently applauded him. Even if it really just sent her off in the wrong direction.

“See, you can call them because I have my social security number, and I’m here, and they’ll give you my card number so I can return this. You’re all the same corporation.”

Who is all the same corporation? I wondered? Looney Toons and Target? Where did this girl come from?

While that went on for about 45 minutes of insanity, another man came up behind us in line with a chair to return. He set it down to walk off and get something else. Another woman took it as a courtesy and sat down. Were we in a circus?

Finally we were told that the manager was going to get the card from the cash office.

30 minutes later the manager walked up. She asked for our information, and then left to get the card.

30 minutes later she came back. Chewing on the remnants of her dinner. She stopped and had dinner while we were waiting for my card. WHAT?!

“Yeah, how long ago did we call you?” she asked.

“You didn’t. We’ve been standing here for an hour.” I responded.

“Yeah, I didn’t see it. Do you know who was helping you?” The woman who had helped us an hour before was just finishing her break. She came back to the counter and explained to the younger manager about the card and then turned and looked at us. She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“Oh, you dropped it?” the manager said.

With nearly catatonic expressions my sister and I nodded. Yes. We dropped it. How would that make a difference as to where it is located now? Do they have a separate shelf for “Dropped it” and another one for “Set it down” and another one for “Not quite sure”?

After the young, confused manager walked off the older, more helpful woman said quietly:

“She’s new.” We smiled and nodded. She was either new or just extremely mindless. Possibly both.

When she returned with the card and handed it to us, (to our great relief) and we had signed everything I asked her if there was anything else we needed to do.

“Umm….not really…”

Not really? Or really?

As if my evening hadn’t been bizarre enough---how did I end it? My sister got in her car after her fiancée rescued us and I got in mine. I then drove in the direction of home.

But I missed my exit. By a long shot.

I detoured out into a region of Los Angeles I had never seen before.

I was too tired to cry. ;-)

Please see Lindsey's comment for the best part of the night. I forgot about it. Yes, it's completely and entirely true. Whoever named their child that was just plain cruel.

It isn't every day that you find yourself facing death by a file cabinet, or that you become entrenched in a toy so seductive your entire research team stalls their work to participate or that you realize maybe, just maybe, morality has nothing to do with morals.

Let me explain.

First, I did nearly die by the hand of a file cabinet...or, I should say, the woman who moved it. In a building not far from where I work the file cabinets are held together on tracks that enable them to roll back and forth and fit together until they lock snugly into a solid mass and a hallway is revealed on the opposite side. Since she didn't hear me (or did she?) as I sifted through files at the farthest end of the contrived hallway, she began moving the large, industrial-sized file cabinets to lock into place. Without noticing it, I found myself feeling vaguely as if I had fallen into a trash compactor. I tried pushing against the imposing wall of files but my weight did nothing. I finally remembered to yelp. The poor woman was frightened out of her wits.

"I nearly smashed you to death! You're so small they wouldn't have even noticed!" I wasn't sure if that was an observation or an accusation, or who, exactly “they” were (the clean up crew?) but either way I was too stunned to say anything. I suddenly felt tragically insignificant.

I could have been smashed to death in between these large cabinets and no one would have noticed. Interesting. I thought.

Upon returning to my office, I found that my two fellow researchers had tried to perfect their skills on a computer toy called "Line Rider". This is probably the most impressive thing I've ever seen on the internet. For those of you who can't get it to load, you basically use a draw tool to make a line and then press play. It takes great skill and perseverance to make an adequate, ride-able, and still impressive little roller coaster for Line Rider. This skill takes time. This time diminishes your productivity. This lack of productivity....well....it could lead to the land of unemployment. But for the moment, we simply use it as a tension-reliever.

And what do I mean that morality may have little to do with morals? I'm not quite sure, but allow me to explore for a moment.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington are commenting on the depth and veracity of the negative ad campaigns launched to precipitate the upcoming Congressional elections. Both sides are mercilessly attacking the other with dirt on their candidates they managed to drudge up from before the candidates had even finished puberty.

Both sides justify it by saying that voters ought to know who the candidates really are, and what those candidates are likely to do once they reach Washington.

The premise for both sides is that voters want honest, moral, upstanding individuals running their Congress. Certainly this is the case--we do want our representatives to be trustworthy individuals. But what about the issues themselves? Are we not also concerned with those? And why are they not the primary subjects of the ad campaigns? Don’t we want individuals who will represent our perspective on a given spectrum of issues? Or do we really care if they paid all of their parking tickets all of the time?

Recent ad campaigns against California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger say nothing of what the Governor plans to do or has done. It simply associates him with George W. Bush. The reasoning goes that if California voters dislike Bush, they won't vote for Schwarzenegger. The end. No discussion about the issues or the differences between what Bush believes to be of importance and what Schwarzenegger says is important, or worse, even what voters believe to be important.

John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, has had to spend days explaining editorials he wrote for student newspapers. Student newspapers. What does that have to do with current issues? So he wrote about legalizing marijuana when he was a student---does anyone honestly think he’s going to get that passed in Congress or that he even thinks the same way so many years later?

From the outset, it looks as though our elected representatives will only be individuals who say the right cues, have name recognition, or who somehow manage immunity to idiot-proof smear campaigns. They campaigns scream:

"If you don't know to whom you are loyal (and we're certain that you don't) --let us decide for you based on what we drudged up from the depths.” Then, in huge bold letters, “if you vote for this person, you will vote for a lying cheating, no-good, forflushin' (thank you National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) mindless, stinkin' , stupid...etc.etc'"

These slander campaigns have resulted in the issues becoming bumper stickers or simplified moral-language-laden quips. Congressional elections are no longer about what is the most responsible and feasible approach to taxes, or what are the causes and consequences of real poverty, or what is a realistic, rational as well as diplomatic approach to foreign policy. It isn't even a discussion of the power plays in Washington.

They seem to becoming more and more about duping voters into being angry at someone and then voting for the other side. And then, when this is all said and done, we howl that the decisions we should have made via our representatives in Congress are being made, instead, in the Judiciary or in the Executive branch.

And why do file cabinets and Line Rider and morals not being moral have anything to do with one another let alone Congressional elections?

Because I didn’t make any noise the file cabinets slid silently close to nearly smashing the life out of me. Because we like little mindless games that keep us preoccupied with tiny, insignificant details, we get sidetracked from more important issues.

Because we listen to ad campaigns, the individuals attempting to serve the country become pawns in a big game of tar and feathers that completely sidesteps really important issues. Because we don't speak up about it, or get involved, until after the fact when we can post a snide bumper sticker on our car to exempt us from being responsible for the state of national calamity and because we don’t really have time to learn about those issues, care about them, and think outside of ideological boxes that force us for or against individuals, we make the concept of “morals” nothing more than a slogan. We subscribe to television networks, not ideas. We subscribe to the perspective of narrow-minded ideological pundits, not values. We allow slander to describe for us what are and what should be, in the national conscience, "moral". Politics in the U.S is being smashed between two silent filing cabinets while the rest of us are hypnotized by tiny, mindless details.