FILED UNDER: Latest reason I’m an asshole: for doing things I say I will instead of things others expect me to do instead (without telling me).
I woke up today with the hot California sun sniper-targeting my face through the venetian blinds I failed to flip last night from horizontal to vertical. As I pulled the string to raise them and allow the sun to fully welcome the day into my room, I was unaware that every second that I let tick by not calling our nearest Apple computer store was actually irrevocably destroying my aunts day and possibly life.
Evidently an entire day’s schedule had been planned around a field trip to the far off exotic land of The Oaks Mall that was simultaneously so important as to be the foundation for everyone’s day, but also so meaningless as to skip unless the Apple store appointment necessitated the travel.
“What the fruitcake”, you say? Come. walk with me…
BACK STORY:
My aunt’s eldest daughters twins, Matt & Kylie (now 4) are visiting my aunt/their grandma for the week and my mom flew back here with me from Texas to stay and help keep them in their cages and issue their beatings while they’re here (and also to make me grilled cheese sandwiches and do my laundry). The kids visit has been easy-breezy-beautiful as far as I’ve observed and hasn’t stressed anyone out to my knowledge, but perhaps notsomuch, since a volcano of rage just blewed uped in my direction over events one normally doesn’t associate with a breakdown.
The compact disc drive on my Aunt’s iMac quit working, so she couldn’t burn family picture CD’s or watch a “how to get better” (she has CFS) instructional series DVD she recently purchased. She was achieving both tasks with an external DVD drive of mine in the mean time, but my Macbook Pro’s “A” and “V” keys had died for some reason, so I’ve been meaning to make appointments for both computers to have them diagnosed and probably repaired.
THE SET UP:
My mom started nagging me to make these appointments with Apple, apparently thinking I have some insider connections to get us seen, since when I directed her toward Apple.com/retail to make a separate appointment for just my aunts computer at her own convenience, she acted like that was an impossible task.
Yesterday I finally checked the availability with Apple and reported back that the day was more wide open than Courtney Love at a Rave, but that i’d rather go another day (which she preferred too) – So I said I’d check tomorrow and we’d go then.
How-ev-errrr – When I woke up today, everyone was “dressed and ready” to go to make that 2 mile schlep of a car ride to the mall at 11 o’clock sharp. Plans changed away from me and my mom going with the 2 computers, to a major day trip with my aunt and the kids coming along to play in 30 square footage of play-area at the mall… I was annoyed at this action-plan since I was working on my aunts computer for a week and a half to fix the problem and was feeling like I was making progress so naturally wanted to be sure I had failed before hauling the damn thing into a place of business. My casual treatment of the Apple store timing was met with a nervous panic from my mom like this was a much bigger deal to the rest of them than I was treating it as, so I checked the Apple Genius Bar schedule online to see what their openings for the day looked like. The only open slot was at 5pm.
Evidently, going to the Apple store at 5pm instead of 11AM was the. worst. fekking. thing. imagine-ab-le…
THE REACTION:
My mom calls out from my room to my aunt in the kitchen that the morning is filled up. And then… 2 and a half weeks after the 4th of July: Fireworks…
My aunt was pisssssed. She was furious that she had “gotten dressed” and done her hair to go out in public and I had sabotaged it all by not fulfilling a commitment to make the appointment for 10 or 11AM or whatever made up time that I never committed to. So she yells a few “well this is just GREAT” type crys of frustration and starts telling the kids that they can’t go play at the malls play area now because I was bad and didn’t do what I was supposed to – so now I have 4 year old twins telling me “BAD Richard!” and so on, on top of a fuming aunt and a panicked mother who doesn’t deal well with confrontation while I’m just kindov floating along in a confused haze of WTF.
This is where its starting to become clear that I was set-up…
Aunt continues on with the “now the children can’t playyy!” line of BS and I point out that playing at the mall is not off-limits unless you have an Apple store appointment (che-doy) and they should go anyway, only be reminded that the play area is just a stupid non-eventful area that isn’t worth bothering with unless you’re there anyway. Okay? So I saved you a trip to a crappy play area… you’re…welcome?… Notsomuch.
The performance of Angry McNutters only escalated in the face of reasoning that should point out why this wasn’t a big deal. The inertia of being pissed had already set in and wasn’t going to screech on the brakes over a simple speedbump like there being no justification for it.
So there she is, stomping around complaining, using all transitive verb forms of the word “fuck” – all because “she was told” that there was going to be a trip to Apple that morning and now her world was shattered. I never like when people mis-use the indignant complaint “I was told”, because the whole reason to use an ambiguous complaint like that is because you’re bitching at someone who isn’t to blame. Otherwise you’d say “YOU told me”. But when I apologized that whoever told her that an appointment was going to be set for sure was mistaken, that just added to the list of “logic that isn’t helping the situation”.
At this point she’s pissed that the target who was already fired upon was not to blame, so she did the thing where people yelling at you get mad that you’re calmly responding to their ranting and preventing them from huffing away with the satisfaction of having the last word. so every time I’d respond, she’d tell me to shut up and stop talking. “Why don’t you stop arguing and leave me alone?!” was said in a few different forms, and while I didn’t say so, I objected to the term “argument” cuz, eh, since when is getting yelled at by someone, an “argument”?
I finally quit responding to the condemnations and went back to my room, got a blank DVD and popped one into her computer to test it.
Wouldn’tcha know it… as coincidence would have it: it turned out I had fixed the problem with her iMac in my hour long diagnostic scans last night… The drive now burns and plays DVD’s no problem… A trip to the Apple store would have been a big waste of time.
Naturally, this awesome resolution blew by with a reaction about -99 to the rage at the problem NOT getting fixed just 20 minutes earlier. though I did get a “thank you”. No “oh – and also, sorry for raging at you over nothing”. Just an explanation from my aunt in her defence that the reason for what she called an “attitude” was that she has wanted to watch these DVD’s so badly so she can improve her health.
Not one minute later however did she also add, without a hint of irony or self awareness, that “of course, I won’t be able to watch them for another 2 weeks when the kids leave and I have time”….
FML