A Short Tutorial on Declining Solicitations

So I get this call just before dinner and this woman starts right in with Hi, How am I today and before I can say I’m busy here with some friends who are visiting she gushes Golly it’s good to talk to someone who wasn’t like the last person she called who was as cranky as her mother-in-law and I’m going, Holy Replay, Batlady, this is the same solicitor of two days before who had really pissed me to the gills.

Now, I could have just quietly hung up the phone. After all, I had guests who were listening in, wondering who I was talking to that it was so damn important to interrupt our conversation and usually with company I don’t answer phones, but … well, no excuses. I had violated my own directive and was guilty of abject rudeness. And the irony was we had been talking about this very solicitor a few hours earlier, me still wound up about it, and now here was my tormentor calling back with her canned little speech about her crummy mother-in-law.

Maybe you’d have lost it too. I don’t know. Maybe you’re like me, cranky as that woman’s husband’s mom. But whatever … I barged in on her pitch to save breasts, half shouting to shut her up, and said “You called me two days ago with this stupid speech and when I tried to explain why I wasn’t going to give money you hung up on me. YOU HUNG UP ON ME!” And then I told her to, let’s not mince words here, I told her to go fuck herself. Aiiii….

I know. One small rudeness doesn’t necessarily deserve another. And worse, I regretted not trying to tell her how her first call sort of put a dark blot on my day and even the next day. Silly, sure, but it did. And how maybe in the future she could respect people who for whatever reason didn’t put a check in the mail by not hanging up on them when the money wasn’t forthcoming. Sure, all those things you think of … later.

So now I’m remorseful, feeling bad once again, a victim of myself, another Trump banshee flinging his own feces against the wall. Does it mean I should get Caller ID? Do I need anger management mediation? Should I quit answering phone calls, stop watching the evening news, cancel my subscriptions to the paper?? Should I, out of guilt, send money to the breast cancer people? Not like I know which breast cancer group called ….

I just don’t know. And now, every time the phone rings, you KNOW what I’m thinking. I’m thinking it might be that woman one more time. Telling me how nice it is to hear a voice that wasn’t as cranky as that last caller. No, not her mother-in-law, the one who told her to go fuck herself. Jeez, if nothing else I got her mother-in-law off the hook.

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