Beware of the Flim-Flam

Remember when you were younger and you would hear older people say things like, "...that's how they get ya!" and you would think how awful it must be to grow up and be paranoid about everything all the time? I think I'm about at that age.

I feel like everyone is always out to 'get me.' Whether it's commercials on television, ads everywhere you turn your head, or every person on every internet who is selling "the best product in the world." There is a catch, a gimmick, a flim flam. And usually, in my semi-paranoid defense, there is.

I had the nerve to make an appointment with one of the home-repair sales peole who come around claiming their 'team is doing some work in your area' and they are seeing if they can HELP anyone else in the neighborhood. I know, I know, believe me the Bullspit-O-Meter was off the dial. I'm somewhere in between the guy in Insomnia who is constantly staring out his window, aware of every neighbor's move, and a semi-nosey citizen just keeping an eye out on the happs of the 'hood. 

Leaning toward Insomnia because while watching small children is definitely busy-all-day work, the mind really tends to wander. And there is not much going on around here. Definitely not any home repairs, other than the already-completed work on an abandoned home 2 houses to the West. I know, I hear the elderly already creeping it's way into my aging bones, but I've had old-lady tendencies for decades. I'm just finally aging into a time when I don't have to hide it anymore.

So, back to the story at hand. A nice young man, perfectly dressed in casual-end business casual approaches the door. We see him because the kids and I are having our mandatory winter "10 minutes outside" time of day. My 3 yr old marches up and says "Hi friend, you come-a my house?" (we may need to have the Stranger Danger talk with this one) and we all laugh. 

He very nicely, wisely, not even really salesman-ish-ly at all LAUGHS heartily and tells her, 
"Yes, I come to your house! My name is _____ [already forgot because: OLD] and what is YOUR name?" 

She tells him, they chat it up, and he's really good at being the nice guy at the party, who every girl immediately thinks will be a GREAT father because 'look how great he is with kids.' This kid has got it DOWN. He even asks if she is mine, and responds,
"You are so blessed!"

Mothers, hide your daughters. Voters, meet your future mayor.

So, long story short (too late) I agree to schedule an appointment with his company. For several reasons, not just the abundance of charm. Our house is old-ish and is definitely overdue for several repairs. We suck at this in a big way. Our knowledge of homes, repairs, what keeps them together, could find shelter in the shade of a snow pea. 

We mostly just really need a real grown-up to come in and tell us which things are urgent, and which things can wait, and which things are just aesthetic and we can just knock off some money from the price of the home when we move. I figure if we actually have someone in the business come and look at a few things, they will share their wisdom. 

Specifically, we have/had a mold problem in the attic. Mold is no joke, so we did kind of take care of it. And by that I mean, my husband let me, while I was pregnant, go up and spray the spots with bleach water and wipe it. Yeah, I know, welcome to my life. But obviously we're not worried enough to get a loan to get the problem completely, properly mitigated. Just worried enough apparently to wait for someone to come along and try to schedule an appointment, and maybe tell us if we're going to die a horrible death or not. I know, it's crazy we're in charge of the well-being of 3 human beings. Anyway, he tells me to expect a call and to go ahead and confirm and schedule an appointment.

The call came in almost immediately, which should have been my first clue. And whattayaknow, they just HAPPEN to have someone 'in my area' that VERY DAY, at the EXACT TIME I said would be a good time to reach both me and my husband. I KNOW, okay? But there are always tons of kids around and usually if I can knock something out sooner rather than later, the chances of it actually getting done are better. 

I probably should have called my husband to check, but it's one of those things he never wants to do, even though we really need to look into some options. Plus it was Wednesday night. Long story short, Wednesday night is one of the few nights he's not busy with his Bowlin' Night for nerds. Which means Tuesday & Thursday he schedules time with other nerds in a Star Wars Old Republic guild to play video games as a group. Yes, he's a grown man. 

That 'type' would be, easily manipulated by a small amount of charm.

Anyhowdy, through kids making tons of noise I schedule an appointment for that very evening, 7:30. I assume this appointment will be for some nice person to come out, hear what kind of work we would like to talk about and get some details from us. I also (foolishly) assume this is going to be a really quick appointment and they'll have to come back out to look at everything another time. When it's say, light outside. What a fool I am.

This person, another extremely polite young man who talks to the children, shows up on time and is slicker than otter snot without even seeming to be. A very young man in casual clothing, asking all the right questions and saying all the latest buzzwords about 'customer service' and 'recommendations from clients' and 'awards won' by their company in industry categories he knows damn well we have no knowledge of, and also no interest in really checking up on. 

Am I really going to contact Door and Window Magazine if that is even a thing (I think it's an e-zine b-the-w) and ask them,
"Excuse me, did you award Power Remodeling the Blah Blah of the Year Award last year?"
I mean, wouldn't it be incredibly ridiculous for them to pay to print up literature that says that, just to hand out to people, if it weren't true? Again, who really cares.

We talk to this guy for what feels like forever, and in my defense, he DID look at the mold issue in our attic and assure us it's not one of those 'you have to get out of the house NOW' type situations (knew it) and he did point out some interesting things happening in what is called in the industry the "decking" of our roof. That's what I gathered from him, when I was kind of paying attention, in between tending to the children, to be the inside wood-work just under the roof. 

Our decking is seeping sap, and that sap is growing lichen. Gross, for sure, but probably not immediate-horrible-death-causing. Phew! 

Of course as part of his pitch he told us if we don't mitigate that like really soon, we'll have to pay tens of thousands more to replace that as well as the roof, that he also assures us needs to be replaced. 

Even though it was dark outside before he even arrived. 

Incidentally, and of course I mentioned this to him as well, the inspector and selling real estate agent also told us we would need to get a new roof "right away" when we moved in to this house 7 years ago, and it literally does not look any worse today than it did then. 

The mold is new-ish, that is from the Polar Vortex shitting of snow we got last year. It snowed so much in the Midwest last year, in November and stayed until March, that we had snow IN OUR ATTIC. 

That's how much snow we got. It snowed inside our house. Why do people even live here?

Well, anyway. After a really long time of talking with my husband, he goes over options, specific items which need to be replaced, versus the items that we just really should replace, and goes over some options. Most of which I walked away from to 'deal with the children' (mwu-ahahah.) My husband thanks this kid for his time and information, and tells him he has to think this over and call him back to discuss further another time. 

This is where the sweet young boy slowly changes from Nice Guy to Evil Snake-Oil Pitchman. 

Like that scene in the last Harry Potter book when sweet, old Bathilda Bagshot morphs into a horcrux.

from www.tumblr.com/tagged/bathilda-bagshot

The guy wants to quote him a price today, because as it turns out their company offers this very special "First Appointment Discount" which could save us thousands of dollars. Because everyone knows having this young kid come out one more time would certainly justify padding a price thousands of dollars. That just Business, Son. *eyeroll forever* 

He not only quotes us the low-low price of $30,000 for a new roof, but wait, that is without the First Appointment Discount (barf!) He will not accept that we need some time to digest this information, this crazy high price that may as well be a bazillion dollars, and the fact that oh I don't know, maybe we don't just HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY sitting around. 

Like we have piles of cash everywhere just like the Simpsons. I'm surprised you didn't trip on one of them in the attic, actually...

See? We NEED people with power tools to get up in there.
from www.simpsoncrazy.com

We were just waiting for someone like you to tell us how to spend all this cash. How lucky you just happened along, really.

During this time, the childrens' bedtime has come and gone. I've brushed their teeth (which Daddy normally does) and done the night-time aniating of the stuff animals (which Daddy does way better than I do, as they pointed out) and I've read them books, do I really need to repeat it at this point? And he's snuck away from his pitchman to kiss the babies goodnight, and apologize for being busy, and tell me whisperingly (because our house is pretty small) how this guy is turning up the heat, and has been classically trained in SELLING and CLOSING 2.0

from wealthartisan.com

Time ticks away, I hear them chatting. I'm always really tired right after the Nighttime Ritual. I think it's the singing that does me in. Well, that and the Getting Up Early and Running Around After the Children as well. So I could go into the kitchen and join in the discussion, but I vaguely overhear tense voices and decide that maybe I need to go to the bathroom real bad. 

And then brush my teeth. 
And wash my face. 
Hey, I haven't flossed in quite a while. I should do that now.

At some point I decide to just go to bed. Selfish yes, but you should maybe know that lately my husband has taken to pointing out just how much weight I've gained, as well as my poor choices in clothing, and that kind of thing. Typically we would totally approach these things as a team. We usually take a "Good Cop, Bad Cop" approach, and it may (or not) shock to find that I usually play Bad Cop. You work with your strengths, people. However, being the old, fat person my husband claims I am, I just left him to fend for himself. 

He came looking for me in the final rounds of the battle, I believe that was about the 2nd or 3rd time he thought Bathilda was leaving 'any minute.' He told the guy in no uncertain terms 'we're done here' and then he pulled the old, 
"I'll just go get you a business card out of my car" trick. He must have called his boss, because he was out there for about 15 minutes. 

This man had already gone to his car to get a bag full o'tricks, samples and some huge model of a section of gutter, all of which was spread over our kitchen table and floor like the worst LARPer game of all time. 

At one point I hear the boy asking, "Have I done something to offend you?" Later my husband told me he answered him, "Well, I told you I' done discussing this for today and then you went to your car and got your computer."

He tried a few other tricks, and eventually 6 days later he got the hint and went home. After over 2 and a half hours. My husband was pretty upset about the end of the situation, and proceeded to tell me all about it. I mean, I did make the appointment.

The next morning I finally had the chance to look up the company on Yelp and I saw many other people said the same thing. I gave some neighbors a heads-up and got some similar stories. This is obviously why they insisted on coming in for a meeting that day, before we had a chance to do any research. 

I should have known at the insistence of the quick meeting that there was going to be a catch. I'm not saying that's always a waste of time/money, but I have found that when I've gotten an offer that "ends soon" it's usually because they don't want to give you time to figure out what a bad idea it is. 

When someone offers a quality product, for an honest price, they don't mind when you have time to check with past customers and do some research. When a company RUSHES to get into your house immediately, and offers you a "first-appointment discount" just think about WHY they're in such a hurry. Give yourself time to consider all the options.

I have no idea if they do good work or not, and I never plan on finding out. If a new roof really does happen to cost $30,000 we will just move. If we EVER have to talk to anyone from this company ever again? I'll learn to build my own home, out of sticks and wet newspapers. Mold issue? We'll move and I'll build a new home out of sod. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I miss my little condo??

Do you have any experiences like this? I mean, besides with used car salesmen. Have you ever been suckered into the time-share scam? That was really rough. I think I've just about completely mentally blocked that from my memory.

Fixin Ta Marry My Sister

Yep. You read that right. 

This summer Imma marry my sister. 

I apologize for the display of the racist flag.
This was the only good "marry my sister" pic I saw.

Marry her to her fiance, Peach, that is. In case you missed my zillion other inappropriate announcements, I am a minister in the Universal Life Church and can marry people. I've been waiting for a long time to announce that, in just that fashion. Because of Drama. 

Peach had axed me before Thanksgiving what I thought about the idea, and I CANNOT KEEP A SECRET so I had pretty much been avoiding my sister, to not "be that guy" that blew the surprise. But now the rat is out of the bag.

The rest of this will be BRIEF, you are welcome. Long week, lot going on. 

I'm thankful this week over.

My son got a job. (car porter, b-the-w.)

Saw a form for "Direct Deposit" in his car. It's the little things. Usually only the little things....

My 4 yr old can, and LIKES TO, get us coffee in the morning. We make it the night before w/a timer and there is no glass container, it just comes out of the machine when you hold a cup to it. Because I broke so many of our previous ones.

My friend is home from a tough week of aggressive cancer treatment.

He feels great.

He looks great.

He's in great spirits.

We've been emailing and texting silly stuff all day, every day (yes, even more than usual) and it's amused and distracted us both. I have no fingerprints anymore, bonus.

I brought him these rubber feet & he wore them to chemo.
He told the nurses his feet were swollen. Indeed.

Is that 10?
SURE IT IS.

Have a great weekend, y'all!
I apologize if I don't hop around much, lots to catch up on and my phone is on it's last leg. If phones had legs. 

I also have yet to find verbiage for the wedding I'm officiating in March. That is COMING UP, yo. I did get a book that tells what needs to happen, and suggests the order/flow of the ceremony, but I'm talking the actual words. That are supposed to be you know, lovey, or something. I'm not that kind of girl, you guys. I do dick jokes, and this is their first wedding! I don't want to mess up their wedding day, in my family you only get a few of those, and your first? Is the toughest.

I do not want to improv that day, because not only am I afraid dick jokes would just slip out, but also if you lived through the 80's it is almost literally impossible to stand before any group of people and not say,

Right?! from prince.org

"Dearly beloved we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life..." and I do not have Prince's hair to pull that off and I have no clue what 'Electric Word Life' even means. Other than forever, and that's a might long time. But I'm here to tell you, there' something else....

See? I'm doing it already.

Would it be rude to just READ from a paper for the whole ceremony? I hadn't really thought this through when I agreed to do it.

Writing To Say I Have Nothing To Say. YET. #1000Speak

Yes, that's right. It's Monday morning, and I have nothing on my mind. Well, that's not the truth. I have approximately eleventy million things on my mind, and I'm having a hard time sorting through all of that just now. 

Credit card bills
3 yr old potty-training
Let's just say it's not going great
My good friend is facing a tough week
My son's ticket/court date
My teenager, in general
Did I leave the iron on?
I'm not getting paid for today
I still don't have my new debit card
Didn't I buy lettuce yesterday?
I SWEAR I got it, I can picture it
I can't find the lettuce, where is it?
HOW do I get groceries without cash or a debit card?
Do they still take checks in 2015?
Do I still HAVE checks?
WHERE the H-E-double-hockey-sticks IS my lost coat?
Who was I supposed to call today?
The weird disease I recently found out I have (it's NOT life threatening, but all of my nails may disappear and they don't know how to stop it, or what causes it, or what.)

Anyway, I definitely cannot pick one topic to write a post about, except a project I learned about last week. It's a project called "1,000 Voices For Compassion." A great idea.
This is the idea in a nutshell, prompted by all the terrible-awful items in the news nationally and world-wide:
Let's get 1000 bloggers to write posts about compassion, kindness, support, caring for others, non-judgement, care for the environment etc, and ALL PUBLISH ON THE SAME DAY (Feb 20th) to flood the Blogosphere with GOOD! Use the hashtag #1000Speak to promote this event.

Even though I'm not what you would call a 'serious writer' or a good writer, or even a 'good person' I will be putting some words and sentence-type phrases together. If for no other reason than Life is hard, but together we're strong. And you know, helping other humans and whatnot.

Really jumping on a theme w/pics today

This project already has over 825 writers, so chances are there will plenty of people who use the English language correctly. 

What this world needs, IMHO, is compassion in many different voices, from many different backgrounds, coming together to improve our overall communication. Not just with proper grammar and you know, 'complete sentences' but also with terrible jokes and borderline appropriate behavior. 

THIS is the voice of my people. We're weird, we walk the line of acceptable, but we're also human, and we can also feel feelings. Even if we try to keep that crap way down in places people don't really talk about at parties.

This movement, and every good movement, needs many voices. YOUR VOICE. You can write about pretty much anything you want. YOUR thoughts on any specific topic, or anything about compassion in general. 

Below is the link to the Facebook page, please request to join and get to know the GOOD PEOPLE in this world you always hear about, but rarely run into anymore.
Here is the link to the Facebook page, you can request to join.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/306227992909657/

I know, if you're anything like me you already belong to 47 Facebook groups and every time you log in, you have 89 notifications because you've given up trying to turn which ones off and whatnot, but this whole thing will be over next month and you can un-join the group, or whatever Facebook calls that. 

I feel like I'm old enough now to not keep up on the all the computal lingo, and if not blame my Early Onset Elderly Syndrome. Now turn that damn music down and go and write something nice. And pull your pants up!

The Post You've Been Waiting For....To Get To A Point

Last week, that thing happened where you read someone else's experience from the past and it triggers a memory of something you had filed away under "Useless." Only now, now enough time has passed that you have perspective. Now you realize it's time to write about it, and the happening blossoms from a bud of memory into a full flower of a story with a lesson and everything. You know you must write about it and it's going to be funny, and maybe a little sad but the protagonist is triumphant in the end so like all good stories it was worth the ride. 

And then you don't write it down and you forget. 
Because: MOM NUTS.

Then you become a little obsessed, trying to remember everything you've read and blogs you've visited and can't really think about anything else but alas, it's gone. Just like Nemo in the boat off to Sydney, and there are so many other things that need immediate attention and you have to just not care, because there's no Dory that 'saw a boat' and now you can't afford to care anymore and you have to just keep swimming.

Don't you hate when that happens?

Maybe it only happens to me. I also lost not only debit card, but a coat. A whole coat. How does one lose a whole COAT in January in Chicago? It's been -30 degrees Farenheit with the wind chill, so clearly I didn't wear it somewhere and come home without a coat, so where is it? I looked in EVERY room and every closet of this house and it doesn't appear to be here. I texted everyone I visit and called the grocery and Target where I usually shop, no coats. They even asked me, "You think you LEFT YOUR COAT here?" I know, it was a long shot. At this point, I'm just really curious. WHERE IS IT?

But, the show must go on as they say. You pay good money for entertainment here, and that's what you're going to get. And also wild lying. Last week I wrote about the 90's, well a tiny portion of random things I remembered about the 90's. 

from www.cooperscorner.info

Thank you to the great people who brought up things I can't believe I forgot, like the earliest giant cell phones that weighed as much as baby. In fact the first phone I had was an extra one my BIL at the time had through his work. It was $11 a month and was for 'emergencies only.' I had no desire to use often, if you spoke on it for more than 2 minutes, not only was your arm tired, it literally got warm, and then HOT. That was pretty creepy. My friend Amy called it "The Baby" and told me she almost threw her back out when she used it. These cell phones weren't a 90's thing, they were available in the 80's, but I didn't have a cell phone until the late 90's. The smaller ones aren't nearly as funny. 

Thank you to Clark for reminding me of the slow porn of the 90's and the noises a modem used to make. 

Seriously, if you've never heard the modem noise you really need to take 25 seconds and listen to the beginning of this. Let it play as you try to read the rest of this. And good luck with that, the noise is about a biscuit above eagle talons on a chalkboard. Yet somehow we were supposed to be doing work with this noise happening all around us, while waiting the world's longest 5 minutes to connect to the internet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHW1ho8L7V8

Right?! Could you work with that happening all day? Also trying to mentally block out a cruel co-worker playing music like "Zombie" by the Cranberries, over and over and over, which became a popular version of torture when I was an office manager. You couldn't complain about it either, because the answer to that was Rick Astley. And that is the song and the CD that would not die. 

I'm not kidding. Three young men, two middle-aged men and I really tried to destroy this disc, but nothing we did kept it from playing. We threw it, we stepped on it, we tried so many different things to destroy it and scratch it and it just continued to Rick Roll us. That disc really took a lickin and just kept on ticking. It's the perfect metaphor for the Rick Rolling trick that will never die. After you hear that song a certain number of times, you get this PPSTD. Post-Pop-Song-Traumatic-Disorder. I'd rather hear the modem noise. Hands down every time.

*I know one person who may read this and not know what "Rick Roll" is, so I'll 'splain. Because if you watch it happen, when it's not happening to you, it's really quite funny. It's a bait and switch video situation, where you think you're going to see and hear one thing (say the trailer for Star Wars Episode VII) and then some mean bastard suddenly plays this Rick Astley song and video from the 80's. 

Rick Astley, bee-the-dubs, is a lovely ginger-haired gentleman who wrote a catchy pop song in 1987 called "Never Gonna Give You Up." If you listened to any pop music radio station, you heard this song at least 10 times a day. This became one of those earworms that bordered on psychological torture. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_b7RDuLwcI

Years later, I worked with some sadistic rich people who developed a callous to happiness from having too much money, so the only way they could be happy is by torturing other people. Mostly they were subtle, let's just focus on the small things. 

It's okay, I grew up with brothers as I've written about before, so not only did their constant pranks not bother me, I countered them. They did win in the end though. They eventually broke my spirit, once by getting me to volunteer an entire Saturday painting as a "relationship building" exercise.....but wait there's more.....we won a contest at the event that resulted in us winning a luxury box at a hockey game, and then they convinced us that this luxury box we won at our 'team building' event, would go to better use on clients. This meant we couldn't go to the game, but the partners could go of course, because they needed to be there to personally ingratiate the clients. 

Nevermind that they could have purchased a luxury box anytime, without even having to cash in any stocks, bonds, or selling a week at any of their summer homes, and this would have been the only time ever the lowly office staff would ever be in such a box, but hey, thanks for being great team players. We'll buy you lunch from the deli instead. Now where's that report I made you stay until 7pm proof-reading, even though you make jackspit and you're a new mother with a baby at home? See, pranks are fun!

Okay, that tangent really got away from me. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, 90's things I forgot about. Like pay phones. I don't know when they disappeared, but humans being the way we are, we took this glorious little weather-controlled booth and filled them with ads, graffiti and urine. 

If you were born after 1995, you may never have seen an actual phone booth, and have to GTS (google that sh*t) unless you're a Superman fan. 

www.reddit/comics

See kids, the world used to have to communicate by landline. If you were driving around, you had to get OUT of your car to find a telephone. I know, it was crazy. People died from having a cold, BUT we could sometimes find other people to pump our gas for us. Everyone had jobs and you could get to the airport 20 minutes before your flight.

Anyway, pay phones. Some were wall-mounted, often located in the lobby area of grocery stores, libraries, bars, brothels, etc., anywhere you would wait for a taxi or a ride to pick you up. Even more interesting to me? Were the free standing booths.

from jumpingpolarbear.wordpress.com

Fascinating, isn't it? It may be a nostalgia hallucination, or I'm officially crossing over into pre-elderly but this is a beautiful sight to behold for an old lady.

Like a single-stall bus stop. Think of as a Tardis, without the time travel.

These used to be for more than just urinating in. You could make calls, for a quarter in my day, but in our shows and movies calls were only a dime, and sometimes you would hear people say things like "..go ahead, it's your dime." That's where that came from.

Not only could you make calls, call a LIVING operator for free, but as Angel pointed out, on some phones you could even get a CALL BACK. This I did not know. This is her comment, I'm copying and pasting it here because I found it quite fascinating:
"...you would have to find a payphone that would allow a call back (you could do this by inserting your money and dialing the number of the phone you were at. If you got a busy signal, the phone could get call backs. If you got a recording, it COULDN'T get callbacks, AND you lost your money!) Then you'd have to page the person and wait around for them to call you there. But sometimes, instead, they would page YOU back from a payphone somewhere else! And sometimes we would give eachother a code... like if you see a phone number, followed by the number 77, it is me!" 

Right?! Who knew? Did you know that was a thing? If I did, I completely forgot. I don't think I ever had any idea, even working for PageNet, THEE pager people. Fail. 

It's way too late for us in Chicagoland, where we haven't seen phone booths for quite some time. Even when you would hear talk about one it would be inoperable, just a prop inside a restaurant or dive bar. Universities were rumored to have old wooden ones, with outdated phone books, in less-traveled hallways harder to find than Hogwarts' Room of Requirement. Mayhaps you could only find them if you really, truly needed them. 

The word on the street (web) is there are still some here and there, and apparently Manhattan has FOUR, but that article was from a couple of years ago and was about some tracking devices put into the phone booth wall. It could track where people were going by their mobile devices. I can't pretend I'm not intrigued. 

In looking for pictures of that, I stumbled onto this picture which shut everything down. I don't remember 99% of dreams and I'm glad because research has shown that listening to someone else's dream is statistically the most boring thing you can hear. HOWEVER I have had I believe 3 nightmares in my life, and one of them took place at the top of a staircase that looked EXACTLY like this:

In my dream I was stabbed through the cheek at the top of this staircase, that's probably all you want to know about that.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/top-lists/pssst-the-best-secret-bars-in-new-york/

Okay, this has taken a weird turn even for me, and I'm about out of time. I think I just need to call it. 

Time of Death: Monday.

Mayhaps when I have these brain fog days I just shouldn't post. 
_________________

One last tangent for the road: 

This is the world's most famous phone booth, according to one blog post I just read looking for a picture. The Mojave phone booth. Looks familiar from TV, doesn't it? People actually visited it, and protested when they had to take this down. They had to take this down from the noise and litter caused by people VISITING THIS PHONE BOOTH.

The concept was interesting enough to make this a good read. Click here if you're also curious how a phone booth becomes famous: https://jumpingpolarbear.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/the-legendary-mojave-phone-booth/



,

Crap I Bet You Forgot Even Existed

One thing I have been thinking about doing is writing better, and approaching some serious topics. Yes I do think about stuff like that, usually while looking for perverted hashtags on Instagram. The latest greatest I found is #BananaHammock check it out. I spent a month there.

With the title of this post, I'd say I'm off to a great start. While I was out of town over the holidays, I did some research, and by that I mean watched Netflix on my tablet. Which is NEW this year, so 'New Year/New Me?' 

I asked for a tablet because I grew tired of people trying to call and text me on my TV. Annoying. 

So yeah, probably 2015: Same Old Me. Oh well if NEW Coke, and then the immediate release of Classic Coke, has taught us anything it's don't broke what isn't broken. Or something.

Netflix just started streaming the sitcom "FRIENDS" and it's giving me a major 90's boner. I want to fax something.

Chandler had a BETTER phone with a metal antenna.
Remember breaking those?

I never thought about trends from the 90's. To me it's not like the 80's, which brings immediate images of neon colors and plastic Madonna bracelets. While watching a few episodes, I started having some flashbacks to crap I completely forgot even existed. Like T-shirts under dresses. 

My oldest sister was Queen of a white T or tank under a sundress. The bomb.
She also rocked one little charm on a piece of leather as a choker.

Remember denim overalls as fashion? If you're a farmer you probably still rock those bad boys, but it was urban fashion in the 80's and then we acid-washed them and rolled up one leg for the 90's. This picture of your mom (that's when that started) is probably not accurate.

I don't about these heels. wheretogetit.com

I say 'we,' but you never could pay me to wear overalls. They didn't design them for women with giant breasts, just like they don't really design any real clothing that isn't lingerie my for people born this way. I did rock some sweater vests, though. Wool, crushed velvet, I even wore a denim vest. I think I wore that at least 3 times. For whatever reason. 

In my defense, we didn't take selfies, so you either had to catch a printed out picture of yourself (or digital pic toward the end of the 90's) before you realized what an idiot you looked like. Unless you had someone close enough to you to tell you the truth. I luckily had older sisters who were constantly asking if I just came from greasing the car. (I had greasy hair, apparently.)

However once I needed to make that cheddar, I joined the world of florescent lighting office jobs. Good timing, too. In the 90's, business casual took off so I built my wardrobe around vests, 'dressy' T-shirts and long skirts. With chunky boots. Minimal use of high heels, that was dope.

This was me eeeryday in the 90's. creativefashionglee.com

I also took advantage of the Elaine from Seinfeld white socks with shoes, because that is super comfortable. Let's bring that back, but in a few years when I have to get a real job again.

Laugh away, it's totally comfortable.  tulsa20something.com
Especially when you're white-girl dancing like Elaine. Guilty.

This is what I wore every day in the 90's (and beyond,) add a blazer some days, and usually higher, chunkier boots. Whatever you're picturing, chunkier.

For once in my life, I could reach stuff on shelves.
I could kick some ASS. If I didn't fall over. polyvore.com

Those above were for dress-up and these below were for after work. I may have been a lesbian for awhile. It was pretty borderline amazing. Hella tight, to put in 90's slang.

Some older guy walked across a bar to stare at these on my feet one time
when I was playing pool. I was wearing men's jeans, I also remember.

I also rocked more plaid than a lumberjack, but I maintain this is not a 90's trend. Plaid and flannel is timeless. Classic. 

This was a co-worker dressed as me for Halloween. Notice: Plaid.
I dressed as her, she me. We won a contest and a gift card and took a 2 hr lunch.
Man, I miss working, and getting a LUNCH BREAK.

Like grunge music. I will never forget Pearl Jam and Nirvana. They got me listening to music again. Before that, I turned to talk radio and audiobooks on cassette to escape pop music. 

The 90's were a great time technologically. Color became common on our computer monitors, floppy disks got smaller, we had e-mail and we didn't even hate it! 

This sums it up perfectly. We were happier to get email than snail mail.
This was before spam and stupid corny joke forwards.
harvestretailmarketing.com

This was the first .gif I ever saw, my entire office of investment bankers marveled over it. Wicked.

Technology got more interesting, and more colorful.

I not only had a pager but I worked for Page-Net, THEE pager people. 

I worked with retailers and resellers of pagers, so you can guess how classy most of our clients were. 

I'm not saying they weren't on the up and up, but I don't know many legit business people who would try to slip a customer service rep a c-note for a favor or a 'good number.' I even got one for Christmas, too, from the mob group! I mean, uh, allegedly. Just kidding LOLOLOLJKLOLOLOL KIDDING. I'm totally kidding. That so didn't happen ever. 

Do not place a hit on me, Tony, I'm a standup guy.

They would call us, or sometimes come IN to the office to explain how we just had to "cut their beepers back on" because their customers were threatening their lives. I thrived in this atmosphere as you may imagine. 

You could MIX the color of the carrier clip!
It was all that and a bag of chips.
myallpage.com

We got to pick and have a pager as a job perk. They offered 2 different styles, and I think 4-5 colors to chose from. Not these colors pictured, we had like Goldenrod, some fancy blue, I believe it was called BIMINI blue (shown in the picture) red and maybe purple. We didn't have many, back in the day.

If you're familiar with pagers you know they only send numbers, so we had to come up with codes to send each other messages if we didn't have or didn't want to call voice mail for an actual message. 

Like when your brother spells "BOOBIES" on a calculator. There were tons of codes, everyone had their own but some were universal, like "143" meant I Love You because of the number of letters in each word. Pager Leet (1337) Speak.

This was about the only time I had to use numbers in real life, Mrs. Mogy.
Happy to report I never received a '187.' latimes.com

 Yes, that was a lot of freaking work so Motorola quickly gave us, and we got to try out, the ALPHA-NUMERIC pager that could send....get ready for this....TEXT messages! I know, it was legend....wait for it....dairy. I felt like a doctor.

This was also prime time for "Top 10" lists so I would
write and send those to co-workers almost daily. order.pageplus.az.com

I'm sure there are many more things that I completely forgot even existed, but that's all I can think of right now. The 90's were a tough time for me personally, so my memory is sketchy at best, partially from trying every single available anti-depressant, anti-anxiety and prescription sleeping pill on the market at that time. And partially from sheer will of trying to block it out. 

What reminds you of the 90's? 

Even if you weren't alive, is there a band or something like those electronic flying toasters that just screams "90's" in your mind?