Unless you work here.
Dan - Good news! You were right about the fleas! There are fleas everywhere!
(I’ve been complaining all week that I keep getting flea bites while I’m working. Apparently, the little buggars got him this morning too.)
To completely understand the phrase “splitting headache” one would need to jump inside my cracking, chasming, grand canyon of a skull right about now, and experience the condition that has been brought on, undoubtedly, by all the staring at a screen all day, every day. which, oh yeah, I am doing now.
Ok. now I have wine. Much better. Next step, food. Simple things are kind of hard today. What a day.
The light is out in our company “breakroom.” (A closet that is essentially a kitchenette, the center of which is a refrigerator apparently full of roadkill, by the smell.) As I fixed my morning tea and bagel today, the relative darkness reminded me of scary things, and that reminded me that it’s October, and that made me think about Halloween and ghost stories. So, today, I’ve decided, begins the kb.com scary storytelling series. (yay…my first series…)
Here’s number one:
CW and I have a storage unit. A lovely, 5×5 cube of orange corregated steel rented from that storage conglomerate who’s stuff is all the time orange. It holds a variety of cast-off objects and too-old electronics, and sits three stories underground inside an enormous, old factory building on the west side of town.
In some ways, it’s the coolest place I’ve ever been. In other ways, it makes me think of a specific type of hell that scares me and scares me, until I almost don’t want to go there. Which makes it just that much more interesting.
Anyway.
To access the units, one loads stuff from cars or vans or what-have-you onto creaky dollies on the building’s ancient loading dock, and then roll those things inside the building, at which time you have a choice of two enormous, steel-gated elevators to ride. The first, CW found (much to my dismay, without me) takes you only to an abandoned floor of the factory where there are no lights, vast, empty space, and definitive evidence of rats the size of terriers. The other takes you to the storage units. To ours…way, way underground.
The elevator is “manual” in an automated type of way I suspect was popular 60 years ago, with two steel trap doors that barrel down (and up) to close like four-ton jaws from hell, right about eye level. I decide that if I’m not careful, I WILL lose an arm here someday. You hold the button, and the elevator jerks in the desired direction - for us, barreling downward.
So, we make it to the sub, sub basement. A cavernous concrete tomb full of brightly-painted storage lockers, balanced by hallways that lead nowhere, or simply careen on and on into blackness. To turn on the lights, you dial a timer on the wall. Here’s the thing: CW’s personality dictates that when confronted with a dial deliniating how many minutes of life-affirming brightness we will receive in a dark, endless, sub-terranean space, he will casually crank the dial one way, and never, ever think to look at how much time we’ve actually given ourselves. So he does, and we make our winding way to our little locker.
Several trips later, we’re standing in front of the unit (way in the back nether-reaching corner of the building by the way), and I think to ask, “hey - how much time do you think we have left on the lights…?” and which exact nanosecond, the lights click off and we enveloped in absolutely, oh my god we’re going to be lost forever and never seen again in this three-block wide, 120-year-old pit of hell, DARKNESS.
I’ve never really been afraid of the dark, but at that moment, i think I came the closest to completely, totally, FREAKING RIGHT OUT that I have ever been. I just stood stock still, eyes wide open, staring into this utter nothingness - and all the time I’m wondering when, not if, something is going to creak out of the nearest locker, grab me with its bony arm, and pull me inside.
It felt like a whole eternity. So long I was absolutely sure CW was lost in the maze of lockers, spinning right and left and hitting corregated steel at every turn…but so far away I couldn’t hear his screams.
And just about when I thought I couldn’t take it any more - right when my brain almost took over my legs and caused me to run, wailing into the darkness in a random direction, the lights clicked on.
This is what Halloween should be - the scariest parts you hope for when you’re six and wandering through the church-run haunted house. Something eerily quiet. Lonely and musty smelling. Ancient, bizarrely claustrophobic, and totally like real life…just much, much darker.
Recently, I got myself added to a discussion list run by some people in the media industry I know - mostly guys, some gals, all intelligent, well read, open-minded. Well, all but one, I’ve found out.
This one person has a specific agenda in contributing to the group: to rile anyone and everyone. Yeah, yeah, that’s the nature of a free-form discussion. I know. And I have NO problem with him giving his opinion - on anything. Politics, state of the nation, trends, even when he imposes his rather twisted views of the female gender, our “place” in the world, etc. That doesn’t even phase me, really. It’s just sad. What made me mad was that he took it upon himself to bring a problem he had with one specific girl to the entire discussion group. That was wrong. Childish. But it certainly served his purpose well - he then proceeded to use his problem with this person as a platform to slander all women, everywhere. And I think now he’s intending to take us all on, one at a time.
So, understandibly, his subsequent derogatory references to lesbians, arab women, and any woman who has the jewels to speak her mind in ANY way (we’re all cunts by the way who should never speak unless spoken to), ruffled a few feathers. Raised a few mildly disinterested male eyebrows. Who knows. And then the whole thing snowballed.
Husband of the slandered woman wrote to stand up for his wife’s honor. Nothing too harsh. Nothing particularly confrontational, even. Just a request for a sincere apology. He got a big, fat, F-U back, complete with more ridiculously childish ranting about how much of a bitch his wife is, and some very strange references about how “northern” women (I’m guessing above the mason-dixon) would never let a girl “act like such a cunt - they’d generally kick her ass.” As a northern woman, I’m baffled. Not sure what else to say. Oh. And husband also got threats of physcial violence.
And with that, all hell broke lose.
A girl in the group wrote to admonish the woman-hater for his tastelessness regarding bringing his beef with the girl into a public forum. She was called a “whiny, crying princess” and summarily told to shut up and mind her own business like any good woman should. Lovely.
So, I added my comments to the fray. I’ll say this. My argument was well founded and contained no slams on the guy personally. (as much as I might have liked to postulate about why, oh why, a man might have such a problem with women. All the obvious reasons that have to do with rejection and tape measures and overcompensation for various weaknesses apply here). I was restrained. Cool. Rational. I got a few jabs in, but they were warranted. Maybe I’ll post what I said here in a more detailed re-cap sometime (i’m considering starting another blog devoted to this whole situation actually).
what I got back was, at best, the most vile thing I’ve ever had said to and about me. You want to know the definition of whack-job? Try a man who suggests that I “shut up or put out” (and that this is all that I’m good for), that “100% of the Arab, muslim, african american and mexican world, + most right wing christians know that women are inferior to men,” that I am an idiot for suggesting that the fact that he feels it is his right to speak his mind about what he feels, no matter how extreme, but should someone in a skirt challenge him, that they’re an automatic cunt (and that any man who backs her up is gay or has lost their balls), and that I am hopeless, fat, ugly, etc…and cannot now, nor should I ever hope to keep a man.
You know, them’s fighin’ words. And that’s an understatement. Honestly, he’s very lucky my brother lives in Indiana and that CW rather more enjoys watching me fight my own battles than fighting them for me. Regardless, I didn’t actually give this dud of a man the satisfaction of truly replying. I said “sticks and stones, man” - and then referred the last line to CW - because if I’m so fat and stupid that I can’t keep a man, good lord, what’s HE been doing hanging around for 8 years now? The proud and all-knowing male authority ought to have notified him! Maybe he just changed addresses too many times.
What’s worse is, (and not a lot could have been worse at that point, so this is especially disturbing) is that I then got a weird, psychotic apology. Apparently he ‘didn’t know who i was’ and my more than platonic association with CW makes me somehow “cool.” I about lost my lunch. It sickens me, scares me, that this guy would respond to a woman he doesn’t even think he KNOWS in this way - no prior knowledge of them, no idea who they are. It doesn’t surprise me, however, that as soon as he knew I could put a face to the ranting, that he lost all his nerve. So - my final verdict is this: The guy’s a misogynist. A bigot. Possibly crazy. But he’s also ball-less scum. And I think that’s pretty fitting.
You know, now that this has a few days distance, I’m thinking that part of me does kind of want this guy to get his ass creamed by several of my closest friends. But, I think I rather more like what did happen. Most people responded very curtly - said they never, ever wanted to see him again, end of story. No fuss, no more attention-mongering, they just cut him off. CWs company did the same actually - bringing the slanders to the attention of his employer (who is a friend) just because they thought he might want to know what kind of person he was setting loose inside his clients’ offices. And then they vowed to terminate their business relationship until this guy was off their payroll.
There’s no moral here really. And no end to the story - yet anyway. All I know is that I knew, somewhere in my little paranoid, cynical heart that guys like this actually existed out there. But I never, ever, ever thought I’d meet one.
Huh. Wasn’t pleasant.