A Love Letter.

To the scum that floats on the ebb and tide of the universe:

I like my new job. I was so excited. A relay operator for the deaf telephone service? How fulfilling! How rewarding!

And then, after a few days, I found out about you guys. I upturned your rock and found you wriggling, pale and fat, underneath it.

You are the people who phone from Ghana (pretending to be reverends or pastors or Sunday school teachers) and purchase merchandise-- with stolen credit card numbers-- from tiny businesses that are struggling to succeed. You are the people who do not answer questions and who do not ever give out real addresses or names or numbers. You are the people who dupe business owners into thousands of dollars of problems.

You are the punks in eighth grade who think it’s funny to use the service to crank call their friends and the schools they attend. The punks in high school who use the service to call and tell their friends to lick their nuts or fuck their moms—and we are bound by law to say whatever you type. It’s degrading, embarrassing, and so unnecessary to the operators and to the Deaf community.

You are the people from hotornot.com and other dating services that can’t afford your own phone lines, and use our service instead of downloading a damned messaging client. It’s just the same for you as it would be to IM the person directly. Or because you’re actually a man. Or because you want to dupe a lonely older man into buying merchandise for you somehow.

I would like to say, right here and now, that you guys are unbelievable.

Do you know how large the Deaf community is? How much they rely on this telephone service to communicate with their family and their loved ones? To get dates and times for movies, to find out about sick relatives, to pay bills, to book trips, to coordinate schedules, to call Mom from college and say hello? There was a wedding proposal in the cubicle behind me yesterday. There was a breakup not ten minutes ago. There is important stuff going on here.

And yet my tax dollars pay for you sleazy, thoughtless scumbags to abuse this. I spend seventy-five percent of my day catering to you people. Three out of four phone calls. I’m not even remotely exaggerating. Seventy five percent. At least. When I could be spending my time helping people solve problems with their loans, resolve fights, joke about their enemies, celebrate about new babies, tell each other they love each other.

You people really, truly, genuinely make me sick. I walk away from my job at the end of the day knowing I helped some people, but it makes me sad that there are more I can’t help because you tie up our lines. Because of you, many businesses will not accept relay calls anymore because they’ve been scammed. Because of you, the Deaf community is having problems accomplishing the things that they wish to and that they have a right to.

We can only guard against so many of you. We have a list of you, but you get new screen names and other I.P. addresses and dupe new people every day.

I can’t express my disgust or my dismay or my anger. You are what’s wrong with this world, to take good, real thing that helps people into something horrible and deceiving.

I hope you all get what you deserve.


Sincerely.
Me.

Mr. Hair and the Personal Standards

Okay, I'm oversensitive. I admit it; I would openly declare this behind a podium at the front of some immense lecture hall.

I am oversensitive, but rarely am I angry. I get sad, or hurt, but angry? No, thanks. That's for the Neanderthals! How undisciplined! Anger wastes the hell out of my energy, makes me annoyed with myself, and doesn't do a whole lot of good for humanity in general (as I tend to fume until a room essentially fills with the smoke that pours from my ears).

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I was angry.

I do a lot of theater in the area-- in the most facetious way of putting it, I am an AC-TRESS! The majority of the time, in the current show that I'm performing, I am the only girl onstage. During rehearsals, I was often the only girl there. I made the gigantic mistake of letting the guys think they can walk all over me.

One guy in particular-- let's just call him Mr. Hair, as he seems to have forgone the natural progression of fashion and wears his hair something like Toby Maguire in Pleasantville-- tends to walk all over everyone. He is the LEAD, so that means he is automatically entitled to snark and snipe at every other cast member. Because he is the LEAD! And we are all just window-dressing; all our hard work is nothing. We bust our butts to play it straight so he looks even more outrageous, and he zings us for it. He often says things that are clever and amusing, but are too barbed to be jokes. They are veiled in humor, vaguely insulting and make you wish you could disappear in your chair, but not before you forcefully insert a fondue fork through his smug face.

ONCE UPON A TIME, I saved his skinny ass. He was stranded on the side of the road, out of gas. I turned around and went ten minutes out of my way, drove him to a gas station (not once, but twice) at midnight in the middle of November.

To note: I also have the mouth of a sailor-- one that's been on shore leave for a good long time. I say damn, hell, and ass on a regular basis, but I try not to let the others slip too much.

To continue. We perform three times on Saturdays-- two matinees and a typical evening performance. By the time the evening performance rolls around, we are all tired and achy. But the show must go on and all that other crap they stuff down your throat to make you feel like you have to have energy.

As I came offstage, the heel on my shoe turned, twisting my ankle viciously. Tired, fed up, sore, and in pain, I let out an emphatic "fuck!"

Mr. Hair, standing nearby, proceeded to look shocked and offer a few "hey now, hey now"s. I stormed off in high dudgeon (high dudgeon meaning with one shoe in my hand and one on my foot, stump-limping down the hallway). The minute I was alone, however, I felt like a horrible human being. I hadn't meant to be offensive; that was no good. No matter how I disdain him, I still didn't want him to think that I was a dislikable person who said "fuck" at a moment's notice (shut up, it doesn't matter if it's true, I make an effort not to, so that makes me a woman who is trying to better herself, okay?!).

Twenty minutes later, while we were both setting our props for the next scene, I drew him aside and apologized.

"I didn't mean to offend you-- did I really offend you? I really apologize, seriously."

"Oh," he said offhandedly. "Well." Smirk. "We all know you have a pottymouth, sailor."

I conceded. "Yeah, well, I guess I do on occasion. But for real, that wasn't cool of me-- I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, don't expect me to lower my standards to match yours," he replied in his best I'm-so-joking-but-did-you-miss-how-I-think-you're-lower-than-a-shellfish voice, and then whisked off.

Me: ...

I promptly locked myself in a bathroom and cried for a good minute... and then I moved into anger.

Who the hell is this guy anyway? Who does he think he is, that he can comment on my standards, of all things? And after I saved his skinny forty-pounds-soaking-wet ass in the middle of November from certain doom and death on the side of a highway right near a PRISON?

Let us put this situation into the universal scale. I said "fuck". He backbites, gossips, can't keep his mouth shut, never says a nice thing about anybody, and wears his hair like an ABSOLUTE IDIOT.

Jury?



(Special thanks to Josh for validating me at one-thirty in the morning while I cried. "He insulted you while you were apologizing? What a jackass!" He's kind of awesome.)