X-Family Dynamics, Irritating AT&T Minions and A Touch of Evil

[mallorys_camera]

The Number Two son is really, really hard on phones.

For his 18th birthday last year, I'd saved and skimped and hoarded so I could buy him the iPhone of his dreams. This phone does everything but give blow jobs. He finally broke it some time last month and it's now (allegedly) in the hands of the repair guy. Problem is that it's been in the hands of the repair guy for over 10 days now, and it's still not repaired.

RTT and Max both have phones on my account. The AT&T Family Plan. This is expensive and no doubt ridiculous, but it comforts me in some deep psychological sense to think that at least in AT&T's eyes, we are still part of a family.

So anyway, Ben and RTT decided that the way to get RTT a replacement phone while his was out of operation was to get AT&T to activate a SIM card in a replacement phone. Fine and dandy, except that they did not apprise me of this plan. Kind of like the bad old days, right? When Ben would try to initiate complicated transactions on various of my financial and other accounts without telling me, and the various account guardians would get suspicious and instantly put those accounts into lockdown, and it was just one big fucking mess.

No, I never thought for one moment that Ben was attempting to cheat me or defraud me in any way. This was his way of being helpful. Except it never worked, ever, and always resulted in huge screaming matches and hurt feelings and more deposits of resentment in the joint account labeled Our Marriage.

###

I spent Wednesday this week hanging out with BB in Brooklyn. Every single part of the evening was Big Fun. Of all my pals right now, I think I like BB the most because I can just feel him liking me back, rooting for me, going out of his way when he can – which, sure, means when it doesn't unduly inconvenience him – he's a pragmatist, after all, and I like that about him – to do nice things for me.

He just really likes me. Character flaws and all.

BB and I are both obsessed with horrible diseases. Not the ones that actually kill you, but the ones that make you wish you were dead.

I was describing Ben's health problems from the summer before last --

"-- So my X-Husband had this abscessed tooth, right? Except he couldn't afford to go to the dentist. And he was in this huge amount of pain, so he was taking massive amounts of ibuprofen, and of course, ibuprofen destroys your platelets.

"So one night at his house, he practically passes out. He tells the Girlfriend, 'Get me to the emergency room.' They're still not realizing that this is a medical emergency of epic proportions, so she drives him, they don't call an ambulance.

"In the ER, they discover my X-Husband is bleeding heavily from esophageal varices, so they naturally assume he's this big time alcoholic --"

"And was your X-Husband a big-time alcoholic?" BB asks.

"Not in the least," I say. "I mean before I met him, he had several meaningful relationships with high-ranking members of the pharmacological pantheon, but alcohol? Nein.

"Anyway, he falls into this deep coma --"

"Coma?" says BB. "Wow!"

"Yeah. Hepatic encephalopathy. I was really terrified. I actually thought Ben was going to die --"

"Ben? Wait. Why are you talking about Ben?"

I frowned. "Ben," I said. "My X-Husband."

"Wait," said BB. "Ben is your X-Husband?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Wow," said BB. "I always think of Ben as a character in LiveJournal. A positive character. He says many witty things."

"He is a positive character," I said. "He's also my X-Husband."

"Wow," said BB. "Who knew?"

I found this really hilarious.

I suppose it does say something that after an incredibly messy breakup, Ben and I have evolved into being really good friends. I suspect what it says is that I have a talent for friendship but absolutely no talent whatsoever for marriage or romantic partnerships, and that now that I have transmitted my superlative DNA to the F1 generation, I should avoid them.

###

Anyway, AT&T was not buying RTT's attempts to broker a SIM activation. So RTT started trying to get me on the phone, which was impossible, because I was out doing a food drive all weekend and I am not one of those people who takes my phone with me everywhere I go. I've written before about my phone phobia: I really dislike talking to people on the phone. I kind of have to do it twice a week when I talk to Max and Jeanna because there's no other way of keeping in touch with them. In the old days, I used to have phoners that would go on for hours with Lucius and Abe. I'm not really sure how I was able to suspend disbelief with those two individuals except that Abe is an epic conversationalist, and Lucius and I would stay on the phone doing the mind meld thang while we watched endless episodes of America's Next Top Model.

Alas! Lucius is in an assisted living facility, felled by a stroke from which I suspect he will never recover. And God knows where Abe is.

So when I get back to my phone, I find this series of increasingly irate and accusatory messages from Young Master Entitlement: Why haven't you picked up your phone? You have your account set up so you can make changes to it and Max can make changes to it, but I can't – Yeah. Well. Robin. There's a reason for that – So call AT&T and activate my SIM card!

This pisses me off no end, so I pick up my phone, dial Ben, tell him, "Fuck you!" Hang up.

Enjoy the wonderfully exhilarating experience of hanging up on someone before they can get a word out of their mouth.

Then I sit on the phone with AT&T reps for the next two hours, cycling through five (cout 'em) factotums who tell me, Impossible! We can't do that! And where did your... "son"... get this replacement phone anyway? until I finally reach the one who says, "Acivate a replacement SIM? Sure, I can do that. No problem."

Meanwhile Ben is texting me various groveling apologies, and I am texting him various groveling apologies and eventually RTT's phone is up and running again --

Sorry you got stuck dealing with annoying att people, Robin texts.

They are INCREDIBLY annoying, I text.

How's program enduring with federal shutdown?

I haven't been paid in two weeks. I expect the situation will resolve itself at exactly 11:59pm on the evening of October 16. In the meantime, I may have to eat Meezer --

Nooooooo! Rutger is much more plump anyways

True. Plus Meezer hunts and brings me mice. Protein! Rutger roast it is.

Road kill stew. Yuuuummmmmy. I'm coming to NYC this weekend so perhaps we can hangout at some point? Should be around fri late night til Monday morning

Definitely! I'm busy Sunday but maybe Saturday afternoon?

I'm pretty busy Saturday but we can probably work it out. Plan on renting bikes and visiting 18 different landmarks across NYC.

Wow! Way cool! Should be 19 landmarks, of course, since it's yr 19th birthday.:-) Maybe I can take you and yr pal – I assume there's a pal, yes? -- out to dinner. Or bring sandwiches. Does he like fricasseed feline? We'll figure it out. It would be great to see you on yr 19th birthday.


###

He'll be nineteen years old next Saturday. October 19.

I had an epidural with Max, but I decided to do natural childbirth with Robin. The epidural had interfered with my ability to push. They had to use forceps and vacuum extraction on poor little Max, and he was born with this massive bruise on his forehead, which I'm sure gave him terrible headaches for the first three weeks of his life.

I didn't want Robin to have to go through that.

The pain of natural childbirth is beyond anything you can possibly imagine. It's as though every molecule in your body is disassembled and reassembled again as a howling wolf on the dark side of the moon.

The thing I remember the most is that Ben sat there with me, and that he howled when I howled. And that that comforted me. I felt him alongside me in that dark planetary void.

The labor was much shorter than the epidural labor.

But, unfortunately, it did not save Robin.

He aspirated meconium, and ended up spending his first ten days in the Intensive Care Nursery at Kaiser Oakland. Such a stoic little Boo he was, he never cried, he just lay there staring with his massively huge eyes. And when I finally got him home, he would get stiff when I snuggled him. I literally had to teach him how to cuddle.

I wonder to this day whether that ICN experience scarred him in some profound psychic way. Affected his ability to feel empathy for other human beings.

I think Justin's suicide was the first time in his life when he realized that other human beings feel pain that is as compelling as the frustration he often feels himself.

###

I was completely exhausted after battling AT&T, so I went to bed with a pint of coffee ice cream, a bad novel (Nelson DeMille's The Gold Coast), and a strange movie: Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil. Another relic of the BB assignation earlier in the week. BB had spent a lot of time hunting down key scenes from A Touch of Evil on YouTube and playing them for me.

A Touch of Evil is a very strange movie. I think I would have liked it better if its original language had been French or Serbo-Croatian. What I've come to realize about myself over the past decade or so is that I'm not actually all that smart. Meaning: I really don't like to work very hard to understand things.

You really need to put a great deal of effort into erecting the critical scaffolding inside your own head that will facilitate viewing A Touch of Evil as a great movie. Without that intellectual parade stand, A Touch of Evil is kind of this weird camp universe where Charlton Heston has black shoe polish in his hair so you'll think he's a Mexican, and Janet Leigh is cheerfully gang-banged and "injected" with marijuana, and Orson Welles lumbers around flirting with an aging and decrepit Marlene Dietrich and looking for all the world like my poor pal Lucius dying by slow degrees in his assisted care facility 3,000 miles away.

Being human. Such a strange experience, no?

Comments

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

AT&T sounds like it was sucktastic. But the day out must have been lovely, and yep being human is strange. But often good strange.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I would say good strange and bad strange in equal measure actually. :-)

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

I agree, but I'm trying to be positive and optimistic about everything this week (and failing).

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I prefer to go into the office of the phone company and annoy a human into fixing my problems. In person, they cannot hang up on me.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

They can't actually hang up on you at AT&T since they record all customer conversations. It was just very frustrating playing customer service roulette. Iknew sooner or later I'd get someone who'd be able to do what I needed to have done. I just had to keep calling.