It's Friday, Dear, But It Still Isn't Your Week, or Shock The Doggie

All right. I survived the Convenience Store Fiasco of Monday. I made it through the Afro-Mullet Hairdo Debacle of Monday and Tuesday. I passed the Who Is This Moron Looking Back In The Mirror At Me Test of Wednesday morning, and I even rose above the Nosetip Pimple Menace of Thursday.

I was so looking forward to today.

But I guess when Friday is still part of a week like this, well, I shouldn't have bothered being excited.

It all began in the wee hours before I went to bed. It was around, oh, 2 am in Betland, and I was washing up the final few glasses before turning in, and I decided to get a nice mug of ice water to take along to bed with me. So I put my mug up to the icemaker and heard the familiar grind it makes when a piece of ice gets stuck in the rack and there's no ice made to come out. So I went to jiggle the ice from the rack, only to find - there was no ice there. Or anywhere.

And I started to get the sneaking suspicion something could possibly be wrong.

This morning I got up and started out with an Orange Crapius drink. Wait, first of all, an aside here, to let you know just how much the gods hate me this week. After I banged myself in the eye buying coffee, I got up this morning and realized my thermal coffee mug was at work. Where I'd left it yesterday. I had no way to get my coffee to work so I had to wait until lunch to have coffee, and of course, by lunch I had a pounding headache. Just so you know.

I mixed up the Crapius and went to get a cup of ice to add in, as one can never have too much ice in a Crapius. (I think that’s on the jug of the powder – “Remember! One can never add too much ice!”) No ice again. And then I started feeling around. My frozen items were not as frozen as I’d like them to be. In fact, they weren’t near as frozen as I’d like them to be. And so I started to panic, not only at the thought of drinking a lukewarm Crapius, but also that something was wrong with my fridge.

I hung around work till lunchtime, when I then came back home and called the Fridge Man. I had to leave a message. I then started thinking not only about my slowly defrosting items in both the fridge and freezer, all of which I’d spent about $80 buying just the day before, but also that there was the distinct possibility someone would be in my house, which looked relatively as if a bomb had just detonated inside it. So I ate a little while cleaning up the place. And while the coffee brewed. And while my head pounded.

On my way back to work, I picked up all the perishables I could bag and took them by the folks’ for safe keeping. And upon arriving back at work, I found I had a call back from Mr Fridge. He could come immediately, a fact for which I was extremely grateful. I sent the folks to my house to let him in and hoped for the best.

And soon enough, one new heating element and $120 cash later, my fridge and freezer were all better. So he told me. As I was handing over the $120 cash.

You know, the gods must have suddenly realized that I’d had two $50 bills tucked away in my handbag for something special. And they said, “Ohhh, no. No, I don’t think so. In fact – tee hee – let’s make it more!”

I worked the rest of the day and then headed to Mom and Dad’s to get my food items. As I was pulling into their driveway, I happened to look over onto the passenger seat of Podmobile2, only to find that there upon it was the TheCompanyIWorkFor bank deposit, which I’d forgotten to take to the bank. I had about $5100 of cash and checks there in my car, and about 20 minutes to get it to the bank to deposit it.

I walked into the folks’ house, explained my hurry, and gathered up my frozen goodies. Then, in true parent fashion, my mom – remember, this is the woman who loves to tell me long drawn-out stories while I’m standing in the nude, trying my best to cover myself, and my embarrassment, with a towel – began to tell me a long drawn-out story about the Fridge Man. I stayed as long as I could, explained that here on my Friday Chill Night I’d really rather not be arrested for embezzlement (ooh – shades of Janet Leigh in “Psycho”), and then I hit the trail back to town.

Where I reached the bank, the slowest bank in the history of banking, by the way, and got in the line of approximately 37 cars waiting to be, well, banked. Finally I gave up, swerving out onto the street to park, go inside TheCompanyIWorkFor, get the night deposit key, walk back to the bank, deposit the $5100 I wished was mine but wasn’t, and hopefully make the short trip back to The Pod.

Which I did.

So, this week has kicked my ass from pillar to post and back again, and I’ll be happy to see it end.

However!

One thing I have to mention.

While I was home for lunch, I saw a commercial. It was a very long commercial, BBCAmerica seems to really like those long commercials, and was for one of those systems whereas you put a collar around your doggie’s neck, and put another device near where you don’t want your doggie to be, and voila! Your doggie stays away from that particular place. This would be because your doggie is in the process of being shocked into submission.

Now, I’ve got to say right up front that I hate this idea of doggie training. I mean, I can honestly say that I’ve never had a bad dog, other than Bill, but he wasn’t bad, he was just evil in the mind, the kind of dog that would pull a pocket knife on you or steal your grocery money, but I can’t get over the innate cruelness of these shocking devices.

But all the people in this commercial were just so happy that their beloved doggies were staying away from all the things that doggies aren’t supposed to be around, like the trash, the furniture (another thing that pisses me off – dogs were meant to be on the furniture, if you ask me), and so forth.

There were several families with several different doggies, but the commercial people kept coming back to this one family with a very sweet-looking Yellow Lab. And this poor doggie. They had him being shocked to keep away from the trash can. And there he was, panting, sitting about 3 feet away from the can, looking longingly as if it were his best friend. Just sitting there, right next to the trash he couldn’t enjoy having a good go-through.

And then later there he was sitting about 3 feet away from the kitchen counter, which held a nice juicy sandwich on a plate. And he looked longingly, panting, thinking, “Oh, God! Oh, God, I don’t ask for much in this life, and when I do I never get it anyway, but please God, if you really exist, just please let me just get one bite of this sandwich without being shocked to death.”

And this commercial had the audacity to tell us that this is going to keep our family – and our pet – really happy. Now how this is going to keep a pet happy is so far beyond me I can’t even fathom it right now.

Not with the week I’ve had, anyway.

Betland’s Olympic Update:
* It’s Chill Night here in Betland. The pajamas are at the ready, though not on yet, I’ve got two movies to watch, I have my favorite coffee mug, and the coffee I gave my eye socket for, and so the world can kiss it for now. At least till tomorrow.