Things I Never Learned in School

The other day, while I waited for the microwave to nuke a bowl of Shanghai noodles, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone coming from the bedroom. It rang four times before I found it in the laundry hamper. In an attempt to intercept the call before it went to voicemail, I flipped open the phone without checking caller id and found myself ear-to-voice with a telemarketer.  I wanted to hang up but couldn’t, because for a soul-harrowing four hours I was once a telemarketer myself and have no desire to encourage suicidal tendencies in others.

One November day in the late sixties, I was called to the principal’s office of my high-school and informed my attendance in class would no longer be permitted. (No, I wasn’t expelled for anything really bad like drug-dealing or beating kids up for lunch money. I was expelled for voicing negative opinions about education, frequently and in language best described as unladylike.  At the time, I was quite proud of my scurrilous vocabulary and gave others every opportunity to admire it. In retrospect, after learning to curse in four other languages and having spent a few months working as a deckhand on a package freighter, I know the cuss words available to a seventeen-year-old farm girl scarcely qualify as profanity.) Expulsion from school resulted in expulsion from home, where my opinions were equally unpopular,  and I soon discovered a big mouth is frequently an empty one. Tucking my attitude into a back pocket, I went looking for work.

I landed my first job, magazine subscription phone sales for five dollars a night plus twenty cents for every subscription sold. Back then, the only qualifications required for telemarketing were a good speaking voice and clear enunciation. (Recent conversations with telemarketers lead me to believe there are now no qualifications whatsoever.)  On my first and only night of employment, they sat me in front of a grungy black Bakelite telephone, handed me a script and some white pages ripped from a phone book. I never sold a magazine. I rarely made it all the way through the first sentence of the script. To this day, the sound of a disconnect followed by the hum of a dial tone makes me feel personally rejected. At the end of the night, I picked up my five dollars and trudged from the room, determined to starve to death before subjecting myself to that level of humiliation again and equally determined never to inflict it on another.

So, I listened politely to the young man from the cable company explain how I could save ten dollars a month for three years by switching to a new HD PVR, (high definition personal video recorder) then told him I didn’t have an HD TV. He checked with a co-worker and informed me the PVR would still work. After further questioning verified there were no hidden charges,  I agreed to order a new PVR, feeling a twinge of guilt at giving the poor kid a glimpse of success.

We chatted as I slurped up my noodles and he stumbled his way through unfamiliar computer screens, areas of the system he rarely saw. I sympathized with his complaints, telling him I’d worked in computers and had had the same experience with third party software many times, to which he responded he’d taken a few computing courses in university and asked me what programming languages I knew.

“You went to university?” I blurted out before I could stop myself, and learned I was talking to a recent graduate with a BA in English Literature. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Six years after putting telemarketing behind me forever, while my less obstreperous schoolmates were leaving university and taking jobs as waitresses, truck drivers, receptionists, and even telemarketers, I was working as a computer programmer at an insurance company, making enough money to support not only myself, but my deadbeat first husband, who never remained employed one second longer than it took him to qualify for unemployment insurance.  I’d scrambled my way up from the filing room in basement, via the first floor mail room, second floor telephone room and third floor claims department. It wasn’t an easy climb, but it taught me things I’d never have learned in school, where courses like “Buckling Down 101” and “Getting Your Ass in Gear 202” and “Taking Responsibility for Your Future – Advanced” are not on offer.  For some people, these are innate abilities. For a foul-mouthed, know-it-all like me, they were lessons that had to be bludgeoned in. I’ve always felt fortunate to have learned them while I was still young enough to benefit from them.

A few days after ordering my new PVR, I met up with a bunch of old-fogey friends and we had one of those kids-these-days conversations. If you’re over fifty, or know anyone over fifty, you’ve heard things like this before:   

Nowadays kids want two-hundred dollar running shoes and expect to be driven everywhere. When I was a kid, we walked to school barefoot. Five miles every day. Uphill. In blizzards.

We didn’t have Nintendo when I was a kid. We made our own fun with corn cobs and imagination.

Someone, I can’t remember who, pointed out that suspension from school was a dumb form of punishment. “Those kids don’t want to go to school anyway,” she said. “It’s like rewarding their bad behavior with a vacation.”

Not having any kids myself, and unwilling to voice an opinion on something I know nothing about, I’d been letting the talk flow around me. At this point, I felt I could join in the conversation. “Getting expelled from school,” I told them, “was the best career move I ever made.”  

 

Where Ideas Really Come From

Recently, people have been asking me, “Where do you get your ideas from?” As it happens, my current book has an impeccable pedigree. Future works, however, may not be as explicable.

At the end of an incredibly dull day last week, I decided to perk up my evening by checking out a free music concert down by the lake with a friend. We had no clue who was playing, but after the day I’d had, the local seniors’ kazoo band would have been an improvement. Shouldering our camp chairs, we made our way to the park, where it became apparent, from the number of cowboy hats dotting the audience, that we were in for a country and western evening.

I’m not a big fan of C&W. The music is energetic and pleasing in a predictable way, but the whiney, adenoidal delivery of the pity-party lyrics drives me crazy. A good C&W performer can make a love song sound like a last minute plea from death row. Still, given that the alternative would be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, I was willing to be entertained by someone else’s pain. We set up our chairs on the weedless grass at the edge of the park.

(Surrealistically weedless - like none. This is utterly amazing, because two years ago, the province passed a law banning the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides. Since then, despite backbreaking hours of hand-pulling dandelions, plantain, thistles and vetch, my lawn and every other privately owned lawn in this town now looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland while government-owned property remains a lush monoculture of pristine blades. Is City Hall smuggling in bootleg weed killer from south of the border? If so, this would explain the shocking hike in my property tax bill.)

The headliner, Jason McCoy, stepped onto the stage. The crowd, which now filled the park and spilled out onto the streets around it, went wild. I was too far away to see what he looked liked – heck, I’d have had to be sitting on the stage to do that - but I googled him later and he’s firmly in the cowboy hunk category.  His first few songs were the standard busted-truck, dead-dog offerings delivered with an appropriate nasal twang. Then he launched into a song about never arguing with his wife in the interests of getting laid on a regular basis. The melody and chord structures were standard, but the lyrics were funny, and one line in particular struck me as unusually clever:

 “It’s a mighty fragile ego system.”

I immediately began plotting out a novel about an image obsessed couple who adopt a Chinese baby because it’s fashionable and the child turns out to be disabled in some obvious and unglamorous way. The instant I got home, I sat down at the laptop and looked up “fragile ego system” to see if my brilliant idea had already been commandeered.

I found a surprising number of articles, comments and blogs written by people apparently unaware that “eco” and “ego” are different words. (Okay, one of them is just a prefix. Even funnier, don’t you think?) The best was a set of council meeting minutes from a California town considering a new development. In addition to the ego/eco confusion, one woman “felt that annexations are inedible” and she “doesn’t want to see her rates go up farther [sic] and have water shortage and conservation because then have [sic] existing water is being adverted to the other side of the bridge.” I decided malapropism would make an excellent characteristic for my socially sensitive protagonists.

(For those of you who don’t have my twisted writer’s sense of humor, advert, when used as a verb, means to call attention to in speech or in writing. Picture a tour guide standing on bridge saying, “And if you will direct your attention to the other side of the bridge, ladies and gentlemen, you will see even more water.”)

Rock climbers in Virginia have named a difficult climb Fragile Ego System, which is, hilariously, located on Gonad Wall.  Hollywood and Brooklyn appear to be hotbeds of fragile ego systems, (Brooklyn? Really?) and it’s a fairly common derisive accusation flung about in forum bun-fights. The phrase is not, however, in the lyrics of any song. The actual line, that I finally found on a C&W website, goes like this:

“It’s a mighty fragile ecosystem.”

Before I write my novel about the disabled Chinese baby with malapropic parents, I’ll have to make up a story for when I’m asked where the idea came from. The truth makes no sense at all.