Last night I had a Lois encounter of the third kind.
Lois is this older, crazy woman who lives next door to me. I don’t really know how to sum her up, but she and her son Johnny live next door, are old and crazy. Literally. She comes over and asks if she can have slugs (she calls them “shelless snails”) from my yard and I don’t know or want to know what she uses them for. Johnny is also crazy, hears voices, and has epileptic seizures.
So last night at about 8pm my doorbell starts ringing and ringing. We know it’s Lois because she doesn’t know how to use a doorbell, she just pushes it constantly until someone answers. I go answer it while my wife throws Beebo, our dog, in the bedroom (he HATES Lois).
Turns out her phone is broken and she needs to call the phone company to repair it. This takes her FOR-EVER, partly because she talks really slow and keeps saying the same things over and over and partly because you can tell they’re giving her typical MCI phone company run-around bullshit: “are you sure it’s the phone, are you sure the dog didn’t chew it, are you sure it’s something that would require us to do nothing whatsoever and not fix but maybe charge you for?”
She must have told them what was going on about four times because either they were handing her off to other people or just giving her bullshit answers. I wanted to just grab the phone and say, “Look, asshole, can you not tell that this woman has fucking PROBLEMS? Now get a goddamn repairman here fucking pronto. Even if the phone just needs to be plugged in right, SHE IS CRAZY AND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK SHE IS DOING SO BE A GODDAMN HUMAN BEING AND HELP HER FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”
Well she finally proved to them that she really did have a problem with the phone (cause anyone who’s ever called the phone company with this sort of complaint knows that they all suspect you of lying about having a problem) and their excuse as to why they don’t know when someone can come repair it is because of the September 11th events. Which, to my knowledge, were not aimed at phone service in fucking Illinois.
This part I heard with my own ears, as I was talking to the guy myself at that point. I had explined to him that she was an older lady, her son has serious health problems, she needs this done right away, and so forth and he patiently explains to me that the September 11th events have put them on a tight schedule. In Illinois.
So anyway, supposedly there’s a guy coming today or maybe Monday or Tuesday but they really don’t know when (their words). Lois wanted to borrow my phone as though that would work somehow, and now my kitchen smells like it’s been used as an ashtray for years because she and Johnny chainsmoke constantly and don’t bathe much.