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I Should�ve Taken That Left Turn at Albuquerque |
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Hello and welcome. If you're new here, be a dear and Read my Disclaimer. My diary not good enough for you? Fine, be that way. Try these instead: plf
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2000-10-21 - 6:01 pm� I'm so glad it's the weekend. Work was just not a fun place to be on Friday. I was left scrambling in the morning because the person who I was filling in for this week made a big fat mistake. She forgot to record a ride request in the book, so I spent a good chunk of the morning trying to find a driver, and then get in touch with the family of the client to let them know that someone was going to be able to pick up this client and bring him home. That's kind of the short version of the story. The long version involves the client's daughter yelling at me and calling me incompetent (even though it wasn't my mistake and I was the one trying to fix it), the client's wife sobbing on the phone, and begging me for some assurance that she could count on our service, and then me sitting in the bathroom for 15 minutes trying to stop crying over the whole thing (which only made me cry more, because I was embarrassed and angry at myself for crying). I could deal fine when the daughter was yelling at me. That made me defensive and almost gave me more confidence in the myself. When you yell and are rude, you become a hell of a lot less sympathetic. It was the wife's crying that got to me. I can deal with people being nasty, but not with people crying. I have trouble keeping from crying when someone I'm with is crying. It's a chain reaction sort of thing. It bothers me, because I really hate losing control. The afternoon was even worse. One of my coworkers got a call around 1:30 that her father had just dropped dead of a heart attack. He was still quite young-- in his late 50's I think-- and had seemed to be in perfect health. Not that it would have made everything okay if he had been ill... but it would have been less of a shock to her at least. I felt so horrible for this woman. She's only 4 years older than me, and she has to deal with the loss of a parent. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying not to imagine myself in her situation. I can't even imagine what I would do if I lost my mother. It's just unfathomable to me. The whole thought makes me feel sick to my stomach. The situation did bring something else to mind though. Watching her react to the loss of her father made me wonder how I would react to news of my own father's death. I don't know how I'd react if it actually happened. I was talking about it with my brother last night, and he pointed out that it could never be the same for us as it is for my coworker because our father isn't really a parent to us. This is true. When I imagine my mother dying, everything inside me just sort of seizes up in terror. When I think about my father dying I don't feel anything. I can't even describe it as feeling numb. I just feel nothing. When I was little, before I ever even knew that divorce was a possibility, I used to imagine how much happier everything would be if my father would just die. I just thought everyone would be better off without him. We wouldn't have to worry about playing quietly so we wouldn't wake him up. We wouldn't have to deal with his frequently bad mood. We could have people over to the house. Mom wouldn't have to watch money so carefully (I didn't quite factor in that he was our sole source of income at that point). As I got a little older, there were times when my brother and I actually did entertain the possiblity (the hope?) that he was dead. If he didn't call us for a little while, or if he didn't show up one weekend for a visit our first thought was always "Maybe he's dead." The thought never made me feel bad. When he didn't show up to pick my brother and I up from the bus station two Februarys ago, and we arrived home to find the living room in shambles and him nowhere to be found, we were nearly positive that he was dead. We spent the day planning his funeral. We weren't worried about him. We weren't afraid or saddened by the thought that he might be dead. The most we felt was annoyance that he would go and die when he was supposed to pick us up from the bus station.
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The big 3 0 - 2006-06-03 Hello again - 2006-05-03 Random stuff in place of an actual update - 2006-03-15 Pictures. Just Because. - 2006-02-23 Christmas 05 - 2005-12-26 Currently listening to: |
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