Suzy Says

I felt like Pee Wee Herman today. No, not the porn movie arrest. You know, the part where someone knocks at his door, and he opens it with happy anticipation, only to discover it’s a door-to-door salesman, and slams the door shut, screaming Salesman! in utter horror.

It all started with one of a series of phone calls from a guy who wants us to hire him. If I had a dime for every time he’s called or emailed me, I’d be able to pay my PG&E bill. I was planning to get back to him after a conference call with my partners today – when I would have an update and an actual decision – but he forestalled my call by several hours. And I got to call him again after the decision was made. Yay!

I really hate it when people like this win the business. I feel like they’re just being rewarded for their bad behavior. If your kid wouldn’t go to bed, would you give him/her a cookie?

Didn’t think so.

Later, when I was making breakfast, two guys loomed in my window and front door. It was, you guessed it, our buddies, the Jehovah’s Witless. Again. And on a weekday morning. I Pee Wee’d them and got back to the business of making toast.

Audrey in particular gets perturbed when people come up the driveway, or loud things, like the street cleaning machine, drive by. She starts making an urgent-sounding meow and pawing at the metal blinds, which clank against the windows and immediately make me long for a valium the size of my head. She also does this when I walk around outside while talking on the phone, but at least then I’m not inside to get the full effect.

So Audrey started doing her alarm mew, with the usual accompaniments. I wondered if the Witless really could be as witless as all that, and peeked out the window to see a guy digging around in the garbage. Not the recycling, the garbage. His chariot, in the form of a shopping cart, awaited him. He who steals my trash, steals trash, I reasoned, as I went back to trying to make our on-line database produce a report.

Hours later, the system was still being as stubborn as a teenager, and I was on the phone again when a guy came up on my porch and started yelling “Strawberries!” and waving a box of them around. It was hard to shoo him away while preserving a modicum of professional demeanor.

No-one offered to cut my lawn with invisible equipment, though.

Living in obscurity – or at least the woods – is looking better and better.