It Continues

Me: So the meeting time we’ve settled on is 8 am pacific time
Her: Uh – what’s that in OUR time?
Me: ….
Her: ….
Me: That would be 11 am your time.
Her: Oh, OK.

Out of 7 people, the only person who asked me this question was the person in Ontario. The person in the maritimes? Did the math. The person in Manitoba? Likewise. It’s not that they’re stupid in Ontario. It’s that they’re used to having the meeting be in their time zone and everyone else can do the math. They’re used to being the Centre Of It All. It’s like the American tourists who would buy cheese from me with American dollars (I would do the exchange for them because they would say, “What’s the price in OUR money?”) and would get all indignant when I gave them their change in Canadian coins. “What am I supposed to do with this?” they would sniff. To my credit, I never once replied, “Try eating it and see what happens!”

Tropes & trisms, I know. But this week has been what the career counsellors call “challenging” and what I call “6 weeks to go if I make it that long!”

On Monday I renewed my driver’s license. And yesterday, I received the new license in the mail. That is possibly the fastest I have ever received anything in the mail. I guess they were so excited about my fabulous picture they couldn’t wait to send it. Or maybe they wanted to get it out of the office because it was crashing their computers.

Yesterday morning, on the bus, I saw two things that amused me.

First, I looked out the window and caught the eye of a medium-sized terrier in the passenger seat of a car. (please note: this does not count as car-pooling, even if your dog is wearing a seatbelt and fiddling with the radio.) The car’s seats were covered in leopard print and the dog was wearing a puffy camouflage jacket. He stared at me for a full minute, not barking, not agitating, just communicating “I am taken hostage by bad taste,” with his mortified brown eyes. And then they pulled away.

The bus I was on had an ad for a carpet cleaning process? solution? called Chemdry. The text of the ad read: “They laughed at us when we said we were starting our own carpet cleaning business. Who’s laughing now!”

The image in the ad was of a big, tropical ocean with a small boat off in one corner and in the other, a man and a woman, both wearing jeans and t-shirts, straddling a palm tree that hovered at a dangerous-looking 90 degrees over the water. Despite this seemingly desperate situation, they were both looking at the camera, smiling with an insane sort of glee.

I think, dear folks, that your friends are still laughing at you because you made your millions at carpet cleaning and then spent it all on your own tropical island but forgot to buy groceries or a manservant and your cell phones don’t work and your boat is way out there but these are shark-infested waters so you’re trying to get back to it using this victim of a tropical storm but it’s just not long enough. Meanwhile, you’re really sick of each other and each of you thought the other was bringing the “desert island disks” so you have no music.

Oh and I am laughing too. So, thank you.