MY LIFE - DECEMBER

Social Experiment #295 - December 7, 2002

People must be doubling up on their stupid pills lately. The last two days at work have been exercises in completely stupid questions from people who obviously don't have much sense.

Example number one comes from last night, Friday night. We had a woman call up who started to ask Jim some questions. It became pretty obvious that this woman wasn't very intelligent as Jim's expressions kept getting better and better.

She was sick. She had a fever. She had taken Tylenol earlier in the day and it had brought her fever down. She took her temperature after about 6 hours had passed and couldn't believe that her fever had come back.

In a word: duh.

Let's see, Tylenol lasts about six hours or so, so it would make pretty reasonable sense that her fever would return after that much time had gone by, but she was completely aghast over this scenario. She couldn't have this. This was not acceptable.

She told Jim that she was taking her temperature every 15 minutes and each time, it was different.

Double-duh.

After about 25 minutes or so of not understanding a thing that Jim was telling her, she finally got the message. Either that, or Jim just hung up on her. I don't know. Either way, it was something else to hear him describe the things that she was saying and asking.

Now, I would assume that most of you would have enough of an understanding to realize that things like Tylenol do wear off, that a fever can come back, and that your temperature does not stay the same, that it's always flucuating. These are things that most people should realize.

It's amazing to me when someone doesn't get it.

I used to hate people years ago. It had nothing to do with working in a pharmacy though. Then, I just was antisocial. It wasn't the people around me, it was me being fucking anal about everything that was going on. It was me not realizing that I was complicating my problems by being the way I was.

Now, I just find a lot of people to be stupid. It's amazing to me how many parents don't know their childrens' date of birth. It's amazing how many people don't know what medicines they're taking. It's amazing how many people don't know shit about the insurance they're paying for.

There are a lot of people who just aren't intelligent enough to be dealing with all these medicines. Most people just don't get it and they don't want to get it. It's the old "if you don't know it, it can't hurt you" mantra.

I don't hate people anymore though. It's a weird transition for me. I work in an environment that should make me hate people with a passion, yet I don't feel that way anymore. I find people amusing, but it's mostly outside of work now.

I also hate all the damn Christmas toys.

Now, I think that anyone who works in retail and has to listen to these damn things all day would agree with me. They are annoying. They aren't cute after about, oh, two days of people playing with them all day. Jim and I watched this girl talk to a toy like it was a little baby, not necessarily fascinated, but more likely weirded out from seeing this girl continuously talk to the toy.

It's not fun for me to go to stores anymore and play with the toys because I do find them so annoying now. I also don't really like Christmas music anymore. It's all I've heard on our Muzak since the day after Thanksgiving.

It grates on you after a while.

I had that realization after hearing someone press the button on that one toy that laughs hysterically for about 30 seconds befor breaking out into an awful rendition of a christmas song.

There's only one song that our Muzak plays that I find even mildly acceptable, and that's a version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." There's no singing, just music. It's actually pleasant.

I haven't heard it yet this year though. All I can think about is this one song that they play over and over again. I don't even know what it's called or remember who sings it, I just know that it drives me crazy. Of course it's the one that's played about 50 times a day.

Thankfully, it's been so busy lately that I haven't really been able to pay attention to the music though.

This past week was rough. I know Monday was bad because both Cora and I called off. I don't know what Cora's problem was, but I know I was throwing up all day and into part of Tuesday. Wednesday was very busy, Thursday I heard was busy, Friday was a complete nuthouse, and even today was a little busy.

Friday sticks out for me though because Nichole called off. Lennie and I think it was in retaliation for Monday, which wouldn't be cool at all, but it was okay. I closed with Jim and had a pretty good night after it calmed down. Jim and I talked about a lot of things that have been going on and I found some things out that could be of interest in the future.

Today wasn't really a great day for me though. I found out early in the day that I wasn't going to be able to go down and see the girl, Jessica, that I was going to see today and tomorrow. I know what happened and it's a very good reason why this weekend isn't good, so there's no hard feelings.

I was pretty unhappy for much of the day though. All I could think about was how disappointed I was that I wasn't going to be able to see this girl. She told me when I talked to her later on that she had everything planned out, but then everything went to shit. I told her it was okay, that we'd just get together some other time.

I'm still disappointed, but I feel better because I did talk to her for about an hour. I know she wanted me to come down and she made it clear about how she felt about me thus far, so I know she wasn't bullshitting me.

I just want things to work out for once. I'm getting tired of this kind of thing happening, although usually what happens is the girl just decides she doesn't want to see me. That isn't the case this time, so I'm pretty sure that we'll get together soon, it's just a matter of when.

As for what happened? I'm not going to say anything about it. It's complicated and I don't feel that it would be appropriate at this stage to talk about what happened and why.

I just hope that we do work something out because she's a really great girl.

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I've found the reaction to Jim Thome signing with the Phillies to be interesting. On one side, you have people who are bitching that it's just another case of a player taking the money and running. On the other side, you have people who say why the hell wouldn't you take that much money.

It's been pretty interesting to read about it.

I don't like talking about it though. Thome was one of my favorite players on the Indians. I don't like that he left, but I'm not one of those fans who thinks that liking a team is based upon which players stay and which players leave. I've pretty much conceded that this upcoming season's not going to be a very good one, but I'm not going to go around and bad-mouth the team and say how much I hate them.

I have better things to do than live or die with my sports teams. I'm not so hopelessly without a life to where I can spend all that time complaining about the most recent move made by one of the teams.

I'm not exactly crying a river over the Cavs being 3-18 right now. It's a shitty record, but I'm not walking around bitching and moaning about the team, it's management, or its players. I read how they did in the paper, see how they're doing, and get on with the day. If they win, yes, I'll spend a little more time reading, but I'm not a bandwagon fan.

It's the same with the Browns. Two weeks ago, they beat the New Orleans Saints 24-15 and life was pretty good around town. Last week they lost 13-6 to the Carolina Panthers. My world didn't come to a screeching halt. Was I disappointed? Yes. Was I going to denounce the team and rip every player out there? No.

There's a real simple reason for this. All of these guys are infinitely more talented than I am at their respective sport. I have no right to go and talk bad about them because they could all whoop my ass if they wanted to. These guys have some serious talent and I couldn't hold a candle to them if I wanted to.

I'm well aware of this. That's why I chuckle to myself when some of these "expert" fans call in and blast someone like Tim Couch or whoever is on the shit list this week. Couch can throw a football ten times better than any of you, yet you feel you have the right to say he's a bad quarterback?

Then again, I'd love to see some of these talk show hosts and callers be put into a live game situation. Here, take the football and try and play quarterback with four 300-pound defensive linemen charging towards. Let's see you make a good snap decision in about 3 seconds. Or try and hit a 95+ mph fastball. Let's see how much you talk then.

As a general rule, hardcore fans are morons. It's as simple as that. The casual fan understands that the players out there are doing things that most people can't do. The hardcore fan thinks that he or she can do whatever it is a player's doing better. It's almost funny if it wasn't so sad.

All of you who are spending all your time crying/bitching/celebrating over Thome being gone, get a life.

Sports mean a lot to me, but shit, let's get a clue people.