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August 17, 2005, early
CAN YOU FLY, BOBBY?
I saw Kurtwood Smith at the grocery store where I work tonight. Around midnight, I was up front dustmopping and he walked in, big as life and twice as… well, as Kurtwood Smithie, I guess. If you know who I’m talking about (the belligerent dad on That 70s Show, or, as I prefer to think of him, Clarence Boddicker, greatest cinematic villain of the 80s, from the first Robocop film) then you know how distinctive looking he is, but it was so strange for me to see someone from the other side of the screen in real life that I immediately assumed he simply had to be someone who looked exactly like Kurtwood Smith.
So I leaned over to the guy who was manning the only open register at the time and said “Look at that guy, he looks exactly like Kurtwood Smith.”
He replied, “Who?”
I, knowing damned well that while Robocop was a huge hit when it came out in the early 80s, and it remains simultaneously one of the best SF, action, and superhero movies ever made, it is by now all but forgotten by all but a few of us steadily aging ubergeeks, said “The pissed off dad from That 70s Show.”
He said, “Oh, yeah.”
Then he walked right up to him and said something to him. Kurtwood Smith, looking slightly annoyed, put his hand over the mouthpiece of the expensive looking cell phone he’d been speaking into and said something, nodding his head. Register Guy said something else to him. Kurtwood Smith replied, I think, a bit tersely, and Register Guy turned around and came back to me.
“It’s him,” he reported, apparently not much caring.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Well, I asked him if he was from That 70s Show and he said ‘yeah’,” Register Guy said, rather blandly. “Then I said, ‘so what are you doing in Louisville’ and he said ‘there aren’t any groceries in L.A’.”
I badly wanted to walk up to Kurtwood Smith and gush all over him about how much I loved his work in Robocop and I how I thought his portrayal of Clarence Boddicker was just the most brilliant portrayal of a complete sociopath ever put on celluloid and Anthony Hopkins could just kiss my ass if he didn’t think so. But he was still talking on his cell phone and I really didn’t want to be yet another intrusive idiot shoving myself into his private space and making what was probably a brief, unexpected layover in Louisville into an even worse ordeal than he probably already thought it was.
So I didn’t.
But I’ll probably always wistfully wish I had.
So Super-Girlfriend got a note from Scott McCloud (who will always be just Scott McLeod to me) in the mail today, saying he’d be happy to autograph my copy of DESTROY!. Apparently, when he didn’t respond to her email, she followed up with snailmail. In his note he said he had sent her an email response, and even included a copy of it, so Super-Girlfriend figures it must have gone straight into her spam folder and she just deleted the whole thing without noticing it.
So that’s cool.
Here’s something else: the editor at Moon of Alabama finally corrected my byline on the one piece of mine he’s put up so far. So that’s something. Unfortunately, the cached copy of the old page is still showing up on web searches, which could still lead Super-Girlfriend’s Asshole Ex, and/or any of his Legion of Internet Skanks, to this page. I don’t mind being trolled by the emotionally retarded and/or their witless, affection starved surrogates, but every time this cretin finds one of my blogs he makes Super-Girlfriend even more miserable than usual over it, so I’d just as soon spare her that.
Even more interestingly than that, though, I discovered when I searched on Super-Girlfriend’s first name, along with the name of the city we all live in now, that this current blog came up about 11th down the page, with a block of text that would make it clear to the Asshole Ex that this must be my new blog (since it discusses Super-Girlfriend’s 5 year old daughter, SuperAdorable-Toddler, and mentions her by name).
All of which is why the links to my archives don’t work any more. Someday, if I get the ambition to do it, I may go into my own file copies and globally replace all instances of proper names that the Asshole Ex might do a search on with various pseuds, and then I might re-post all of them, although, honestly, that seems like a whole lot of work to me.
In the meantime, though, eventually, the blank pages that those links now lead to will replace the cached pages with all those foolishly treacherous potential search items on them, at which point I’ll stop worrying about it. As for now, I don’t think the Asshole Ex has found this blog yet, because he has absolutely no impulse control nor ability to keep his temper (he shows a lot of signs of Van Vogt’s classic Right Man pathology, honestly). Super-Girlfriend and I both agree that if he’d already found this page, we’d know it, because he’d be screaming at her over stuff he otherwise couldn’t be aware of. (It’s not that he’s not smart enough to realize he’d be blowing his cover if he did that; he’s a pretty intelligent man. It’s just that he really has no capacity for managing his anger, and if he was reading this page, he’d just have to go off about it.) Plus, one if not several of his Internet Skank Squad (the guy is simultaneously dating something like four different women he met on the Internet after the divorce, all of whom he has told he just wants to be ‘friends’ with and will drop them like a hot rock if they try to ‘get serious’ with him… he’s a real class act, all right) would be posting irate comments about my use of abusive language and my lack of consistency in dating a woman with kids (something I once said on a previous blog I’d never do), and he himself would most likely be posting pseudonymous comments accusing me of breaking up his marriage and putting all the blame for things on Super-Girlfriend.
So, anyway, from here on in, Super-Girlfriend shall be known by her superhero identity only in these pages.
Going back to Moon of Alabama, I’ve submitted two other pieces of past poli-blogging to the editor (Bernhard) since he invited me and put up the first one, and he hasn’t responded to those submissions, nor posted them. I’m not going to claim any more enlightenment than I have by trying to scam you into thinking that rejection doesn’t annoy me, because it does. But I can be a grown up about that (although if he’s not printing my stuff while he is printing his own really badly written crap about French goddam priests and how the Democrats will ‘loose’ in 2006, I am going to be rather aggravated). Still, what I will voice a more legitimate grievance with is the way he just completely ignores my stuff, after inviting me to submit to him. If he doesn’t want to print it, he could at least write me back and tell me that.
And having vented about that, and thus guaranteed he will never print anything of mine again if he ever checks this blog page, let’s move on to:
The phone company shut my phone off earlier today (well, yesterday, Tuesday the 17th, but I haven’t slept yet as I worked last night, so it’s still ‘today’ to me) . I only found out about it after Super-Girlfriend dropped me off here on her way to work, so I could use a few graphics programs on my computer that she doesn’t have on hers to do some work on some digital photos she took of the kids over the weekend. In fact, I found out when I tried to log on and email her the finished product, as she’d asked me to.
Now, we’ve had some thunderstorms here over the past few days, so at first I thought maybe the service had just been knocked out. However, a quick knock on my upstairs neighbor’s door revealed that her phone was still working, and she confirmed she used BellSouth, too, so, obviously, they’d just shut me off. I’ve only been half paying my bill for the past two months (I don’t make much money, okay?) so once I realized that, it didn’t surprise me, but as always when corporations which are vastly overcharging me anyway turn my service off for non payment, I was really rather pissed.
So I took a bus back over to Super-Girlfriend’s apartment, and for the whole trip (some of which was a lengthy walk, since the bus will only get me to within a mile or so of her apartment) I was fuming and spitting and guh-nashing my teeth and mentally rehearsing how I was going to demand that these fuckers turn my phone back on immediately or I’d switch phone providers (there is a list of like 50 alternative phone service providers in the BellSouth directory; Super-Girlfriend even uses one of them, so I knew she could hook me up). I was going to go up one side of them and down the other; I was going to tear whichever hapless, luckless customer service rep took my call a new asshole, I was to chew him or her down to a nub of gristle and then set that nub on fire, I was just gonna tear ‘em up. When you’ve done customer service at a phone company you know all sorts of cool technical terminology and have a good basic sense of how both call centers and general corporate policy works, and I was just going to hammer the bejesus out of whichever miserable sad sack took my call, oh yes.
And then (I had no illusions) I was going to be without a phone for a week or so until I could get new service hooked up, and it would end up costing me as much or more as I owed BellSouth. I knew that. I knew there was nothing I could say to get them to turn my phone back on before I paid them what they thought I owed them. I’ve fought with utility companies before, and worked for Sprint, and I know the drill. Under no circumstances do you ever restore a bum customer’s service before they pay. It just doesn’t happen. Not ever. They pay or they skate. That’s how it is.
But, you know, sometimes you just have to cut off your nose to spite your face, and anyway, Super-Girlfriend had a phone and she paid her bills, so it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to check my email, not that I get much these days, anyway.
So I got to Super-Girlfriend’s apartment and called her to tell her where I was, and called my agency and got a lead on a customer service job, and then I called BellSouth, and strangely enough, despite all my intentions, I found myself almost reflexively exercising the hard won soft skills I’ve picked up over the last decade or so of secretarial, clerical, and customer service jobs, and the first very nice woman I talked to offered (I didn’t ask) to transfer me to billing to see if they would reconnect my phone service until Thursday (when I had apologetically told her I would be getting paid again) and the even nicer woman in billing listened to my foul and despicable lies about sending off a check for the unpaid half of the previous bill’s balance in the previous week and how I was sorry it hadn’t gotten there and all I wanted to know was, when I made an electronic payment this Thursday, would my service be automatically reinstated or should I call them back to tell them I’d done it, and then said “you know, I really shouldn’t do this because we never do this for new customers, but since your payment just hasn’t gotten here yet, I’m going to note that you’ve sent it in and the bill will be paid on Thursday at the latest and I’ll unsuspend your account. But next week if it’s still not paid your service will be disconnected again.”
Then she apologetically told me that there would be a $35 reconnection fee on my next bill, and I said that would be okay, and it will be, because I’m not going to pay it, but I didn’t tell her that.
And, you know, I have phone service again right this very instant, which, frankly, astounds me.
So let this be a life lesson to you: when you want something from a customer service rep on the other end of a phone line from you, speak very very nicely to them and don’t even do much more than hint at what you’d really like them to do for you. In my experience, there is always something that a customer service rep can do for you if they really want to. However, they generally aren’t supposed to do it, and they certainly won’t if you piss them off by screaming at them. Taking the approach I had originally planned (“Turn me back on RIGHT NOW or I’m taking my business elsewhere”) means nothing to a customer service rep; they don’t work on commission and the lousy $50 you pay to their Giant Corporate Employer every month wouldn’t mean anything to them if they did, anyway. As far as they are concerned, if you switch your business to Light Year or Insight, that’s one less asshole calling them up every month and screaming at them.
But, if you’re really really nice to them, sometimes they will be nice to you back.
Anyway, I was astonished to find myself doing it, and even more astonished that it worked. But it did.
Somewhere in the last ten years or so, I seem to have grown up at least a little.
Super-Girlfriend gave me a Vampire Batman click yesterday, too.
Today was the first day of school in Louisville. It was SuperAdorable-Toddler’s first day in kindergarten, and SuperSensible 14 Year Old’s first day in high school, and SuperDrama Teen’s first day as a junior, so it was a big day for everyone, especially since, with the Super Kids having two different residences, the bus routes to and from school are necessarily complex, and we weren’t at all sure that SuperAdorable-Toddler would be able to master the bus trip home, which required her to get off at a stop several blocks from the Asshole Ex’s house and walk over there. (All the Super Kids will be going to the Asshole Ex’s house for several hours each afternoon, as his house is much closer to their schools than Super Girlfriend’s apartment is.) We were worried about it, but SuperDrama Teen met SuperAdorable-Toddler at the bus stop and walked her back to the Fortress of Assholiness, and all was well when Super-Girlfriend spun by there after work to pick the Super Kids up.
It’s all really complicated right now, and has necessitated sending SuperAdorable-Toddler back to daycare in the mornings so someone can take care of her for the couple of hours between when Super Girlfriend and/or the Asshole Ex leave for work and kindergarten starts. We’re hoping this will get simplified in the near future, although if it does, it will still be complicated when the Super Kids are over at the Asshole Ex’s house… and I really wish they didn’t have to go through this nonsense.
However, the kids, despite obviously preferring the two week periods they spend with Super Girlfriend (Super Mom to them) and, well, Happy Little Me, to the apposite two week periods they spend at the Fortress of Assholiness with the Asshole Ex, are all vociferous in their resistance to Super Mom trying to make any adjustments to the custody arrangements. Why? Because they are great kids, and despite the fact that their idiot father is serial dating a buncha borderline psychotic Internet hos, and he won’t spend a single penny on the Super Kids more than he absolutely has to (I guess he has to save money for his many paramours, and Super Girlfriend and I both suspect he hasn’t kicked his previous heavy dope habit as completely as he claims, but we have no proof), and he also refuses to get any counseling or anger management therapy so he flies off the handle at everything and screams at them (especially at SuperAdorable Toddler, who is, admittedly, rather a spoiled brat a lot of the time) like a hyperthyroidal banshee whenever he loses his temper (which is, reportedly, often)… despite all that, the two older kids both say that “Dad is lonely and sad since the divorce” and they don’t want to abandon him to his lonely sadness.
Super Kids indeed. But it’s very hard for Super Girlfriend/Mom and I to send them back into that environment every two weeks.
About a week and a half ago (the weekend before last) SuperAdorable-Toddler called Super Girlfriend/Mom up (she calls whichever parent she isn’t with at the time every night to say goodnight) and during the course of the call, begged Super Girlfriend/Mom to please come visit her the next day. It was piteous. She said “I’ll give you a dollar, mommy”. Honestly, Super Girlfriend’s heart was just breaking and so was mine. And SuperAdorable-Toddler has never, not ONCE, begged her Asshole Daddy to come visit her in the middle of her time with us. She loves him, of course, and she seems to like going to stay with him (at least, she tells him she’s looking forward to it when her two weeks with us are drawing to a close) but she has never begged him to come visit her while she’s been with us.
It’s hard, sending those kids back. They’re great kids, and their father is, unfortunately, a whirling sonofabitch, and we just hate knowing they’re spending time in that environment.
The Super Kids, loyal as they are, are still aware that their dad is an asshole in a lot of ways. He doesn’t seem to realize just how psychotic he looks to them, when he comes over to give them souvenirs he picked up for them in Baltimore (on a weekend date with one of his Internet Skanks) and he refuses to come to Super Girlfriend’s front door, because he thinks I might be there. He won’t do it. He has vowed to Super Girlfriend that he will never come to her door or set foot in her apartment if there is a chance I might be inside. Anyway, it was like 98 degrees that day with a heat index ten degrees higher, and he made those kids, including SuperAdorable Toddler, meet him in the parking lot, to make sure he wouldn’t run into me.
They know I’m perfectly willing to deal with him. I’ve suggested sitting down and talking to him about stuff, to clear the air. I’ve even offered to apologize to him for… whatever it is he wants an apology for. He’s demanded that I apologize to him before he’ll even consider dealing with me, but Super-Girlfriend feels strongly that nothing I say to him will be adequate, and she’s given in to him on unreasonable demands before and it never does any good. She gets no credit for it; he just pushes for more.
But he really just doesn’t seem to get how bad this behavior is for his kids (who love me, but SuperAdorable-Toddler is confused and a little upset because her daddy and I don’t get along), and how bad it makes him look in their eyes.
That's them, at the top of the page. I took that pic, a few days ago with a digital camera Super Girlfriend borrowed from work. Nice, isn't it? SuperAdorable Toddler saw that pic on Super Girlfriend’s computer, where I set it up as the Windows background, and when I asked her if she knew who that was, she chirped, “It’s all of us!” Then added, “’cept you.” And, after a second, kind of sadly, “and daddy.”
She just doesn’t understand why her daddy and I can’t get along.
How do you tell a 5 year old that her daddy is a prick, an asshole, and most likely borderline psychotic?
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4/13/05
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