*RING*
ME-- (ANSWERS PHONE) Hello?
(SILENCE)
ME-- Hello?
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Hello?
(PAUSE)
ME-- Hello?
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Um, yeah. MR. AARON?
ME-- That's me.
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Hi. This is Matt, with API.
ME-- Uh huh.
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- We just wanted to call to tell you we'd like to send you a $1000 online gift certificate.
ME-- I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I have a strict policy here of accepting no solicitation over the phone.
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- (PAUSE) Um... This isn't soliciting. (ANOTHER PAUSE) Um... what's soliciting?
ME-- Selling things over the phone.
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Oh, no. We're not selling anything. I thought for a minute there you meant soliciting, like on TV shows... you know, like, with hookers.
(SILENCE AS I ALLOW THIS TO SINK IN)
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Uh, hello?
ME-- Yeah, um, listen, this still sounds like something I'm not going to be interested in.
MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Oh, no, it's really great! It's...
ME-- You have a nice day, Matt.
*CLICK*
(Still not sure who API is. Maybe the American Petroleum Institute offering a bribe for a survey?)
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Magic Keys to Satisfaction
I've had my Subaru Forester since February and have enjoyed it quite a bit--particularly its allowing-me-to-traverse-my-icy-hilly-blind-curve-filled-neighborhood-in-the-winter feature. It's a nice roomy car that can haul lots of stuff, such as heavy, enormous dogs and is plenty comfy. It also came factory-equipped with an Oh Shit-handle above the driver’s side door, which is an innovation that gives me far more comfort than any unseen airbag ever could. One of the only drawbacks to my ownership of it, though, is that since February I have only had one key for it.
When we purchased the car, four months back, we were given two key fobs and one actual key. We were told at the time that the previous owners of the car had not returned both of the keys, but were assured by our salesman—let's call him Stan—that he would be in touch with the previous owners shortly and they would return the second key within a very short period of time. Having two keys for our vehicles is pretty important in my family, as I'm married to a kind and wonderful lady who has been known on more than one occasion to lock herself out of her own vehicle. The two key fobs would certainly help in unlocking the car in such a time of need, but the wife doesn't even carry her own fob, let alone be willing to carry mine. Hell, I only started carrying mine after a series of embarrassing incidents involving the Subaru's tendency to blast the horn in alarm whenever the door is unlocked using the actual key alone. There is a way to tell it to stop doing that, but you have to tell it every single time and I can never remember the steps, so I just carry the fob.
Jump ahead to late April. We happened to be driving by the dealership, which prompted the wife to inquire if her key had ever arrived. It had not, so we stopped and I went in to ask Stan about it. I had to reintroduce myself and explain the lack of a second key thing. At the time, though, he was in the middle of a sale and asked if I could call him back about it some other time. He said was sure he had it somewhere.
Jump ahead to June. I never heard from Stan, nor did I call him back as requested, mostly because I sensed that there was no way he actually had my other key and that getting a new one was going to be a tremendous hassle. Eventually, though, the topic of the key came up again when I had to borrow the wife’s car to haul a larger amount of stuff than my car could handle and we had to trade keys. I decided it was time to get this key business straightened out.
I returned to the dealership, found Stan, reintroduced myself and told him I was still in need of the second key. He wasn't in the middle of a sale this time, but another salesperson was and had commandeered his office for it. Stan assured me that he thought he had it in his desk somewhere, but couldn’t exactly get in there during a sale. He asked if I could return later in the day.
"Well, either today or tomorrow," I offered.
It was at this point that Stan should have piped up to alert me to the fact that the following day was his day off and that he would not be there. Stan, however, is a salesman and sends off similar vibes to a particular weaselly sales guy I once worked with in radio, who’s nickname was, in fact, The Weasel. This is not to say that I think Stan is a weasel, necessarily, but like many of his erminey ilk he's all about the sale and not doing anything to mess that up, such as telling people things they might not want to hear. Clearly, he did not want to be the bearer of bad news and instead chose to have me return two days later pissed off. Come to think of it, that's pretty weaselly. So let’s put another check on the Shitfer Weasel Chart for Stan.
So after returning on his day off to find Stan absent and his even more openly weasel-like fellow salesman unwilling to help me for fear of screwing up something Stan might conceivably have in the works, I returned again two days later. I was determined that while I would not be openly hostile, I would also do nothing to disguise my annoyance with all involved.
Stan saw me coming, perhaps noted my expression, and immediately put down his pizza to go riffle in his desk before I could even open the door. Spouting apologies, he began pulling fistfuls of key fobs out of the desk in his search, looked in all the drawers, looked in his filing cabinet, and made more nervous small talk. Failing to find any Subaru keys, he apologized again and then disappeared into the depths of this particular building of the dealership complex for a full ten minutes, leaving me to watch his more weaselly-looking fellow sales guy slink around in an attempt to look busy.
Stan eventually returned to announce that he’d spoken with someone with technical skills and they were even then printing instructions on how to program a "new one" for me. Soon enough, another fellow came out, instructions in hand and followed me out to my car. At his request, I handed him my keys and he had a seat behind my steering wheel. He was there for under a minute when he emerged, holding up my keys by the fob with one hand and a second fob in the other. The second fob was our extra fob that my wife had left in the car while driving it days before.
"Does this one work?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"And yours works?" he asked, shaking the fob on my key chain.
"Yeah," I said.
"Then why do you need another one?"
Inwardly I smiled.
"I don't," I said. "We already have two key fobs. What we don't have are two physical keys."
The technician looked confused for a moment. "You don't have two keys?" he asked.
"Nope," I said. "That's why I've been coming in here asking for a second key for the past several days."
Wow that was a massively satisfying thing to be able to say. In fact, it was worth all the hassle so far just to be able to say it in a perfectly pitched tone of calm, polite, righteous indignation.
The technician turned a cold eye in Stan's direction then stalked off toward the building, wadding up his instructions and pitching them at the nearest trash can upon entry. Stan looked sheepish in the illumination from my blazing righteousness, then offered that he felt like a huge idiot. I said not a word to dissuade him of this feeling.
Stan leaped into action to right his wrong. He piled into a golf cart and asked me to follow him down to another of the buildings in the complex. I was then led on a merry chase from building to building, eventually just joining Stan in the golf cart. At each stop, Stan was treated to having employee after employee explain that he was in the wrong department and would need to go talk to so and so over in such and such other department. Half an hour later I was still waiting for a key, but was at least standing in line in the correct department with the correct employee, who had only moments before sent Stan on yet another trek to locate a blank key for him to cut.
Upon Stan's return with the blank, he announced that he was going to head back up to his own building, since I didn't really need him there for the rest of the process. At first I was tempted to explain to him that I'd already invested far more of my afternoon—nay, my MONTH—in this little venture, all of which was due to his inability to follow up on assurances he'd made to us four months previously, and that until I had a working key in my hand he was just going to have to suck it up and waste some of his time, in addition to wasting mine. I almost said that. However, I'd long since decided that I didn't really like Stan very much, nor did I care to listen to any more of his uncomfortable attempts at small talk, which I sensed would likely turn to his default topic of sports. I told him to begone and he vanished in a puff of weasel-smelling brimstone.
The guy with the key-cutter soon produced a replica key for me, but explained that it wouldn’t actually work with my car until they cast a few spells on the magic chip embedded in it. The wizard for this was located in one of the previous departments we'd visited, back up the hill. I made the journey only to be told that the wizard in question had been sent on a quest and would be back in a sec. They advised me to go wait in the sun by the wizard's mystical garage bay. So I waited. And I waited. After ten minutes and half a sunburn, I went back up to the desk to inquire if the wizard had been alerted to my presence.
“He’ll be back in just a minute, sir,” the man said.
I returned to the garage to find that the sorcerer’s apprentice had appeared and was working on another car. He asked who I was waiting for. I told him the wizard’s name. (Don’t say his name, it gives him power.)
The apprentice nodded, but said that the wizard's quest had involved taking a vehicle to one of the dealership’s other branches. He would, the apprentice assured me, be back. I did the math in my head, though, and knew that the branch in question was a good ten miles away. What choice did I have, though? I waited.
Eventually, the wizard did appear. He was heavily tattooed with arcane symbols, his skin baked further by the blazing sun above. He was also the least weaselly person I’d met the whole day. I found him instantly likable even beyond the fact that he held the power to set me free from my now hour plus trial.
The wizard asked what wish he could grant me. I gave him my magic keys. He then asked me to search my heart to determine whether I truly only wanted two keys, or if perhaps I might want more, because once he applied his magics on them no more keys could ever be produced. I told him I was true of heart in my desire for only the two. He then produced a flat brown creature—his familiar, I’m sure—and inserted my keys into its orifices. It squeaked as he massaged the scales on the creatures back. A few moments later, he passed my keys back into my grateful hands with a hearty "There you go, big guy."
I climbed into my vehicle and found that both of the keys worked as promised. I waved to the wizard and sped from the parking lot, not even bothering to return to the office of the wizard’s supervisor for fear he would pass me a bill for all their work, and I would be unable to restrain myself from calling down furious wrath upon one and all. So far, they haven’t called to tell me otherwise, though one of their minions did call and leave a message asking if my experience was satisfactory. I have yet to phone her back.
When we purchased the car, four months back, we were given two key fobs and one actual key. We were told at the time that the previous owners of the car had not returned both of the keys, but were assured by our salesman—let's call him Stan—that he would be in touch with the previous owners shortly and they would return the second key within a very short period of time. Having two keys for our vehicles is pretty important in my family, as I'm married to a kind and wonderful lady who has been known on more than one occasion to lock herself out of her own vehicle. The two key fobs would certainly help in unlocking the car in such a time of need, but the wife doesn't even carry her own fob, let alone be willing to carry mine. Hell, I only started carrying mine after a series of embarrassing incidents involving the Subaru's tendency to blast the horn in alarm whenever the door is unlocked using the actual key alone. There is a way to tell it to stop doing that, but you have to tell it every single time and I can never remember the steps, so I just carry the fob.
Jump ahead to late April. We happened to be driving by the dealership, which prompted the wife to inquire if her key had ever arrived. It had not, so we stopped and I went in to ask Stan about it. I had to reintroduce myself and explain the lack of a second key thing. At the time, though, he was in the middle of a sale and asked if I could call him back about it some other time. He said was sure he had it somewhere.
Jump ahead to June. I never heard from Stan, nor did I call him back as requested, mostly because I sensed that there was no way he actually had my other key and that getting a new one was going to be a tremendous hassle. Eventually, though, the topic of the key came up again when I had to borrow the wife’s car to haul a larger amount of stuff than my car could handle and we had to trade keys. I decided it was time to get this key business straightened out.
I returned to the dealership, found Stan, reintroduced myself and told him I was still in need of the second key. He wasn't in the middle of a sale this time, but another salesperson was and had commandeered his office for it. Stan assured me that he thought he had it in his desk somewhere, but couldn’t exactly get in there during a sale. He asked if I could return later in the day.
"Well, either today or tomorrow," I offered.
It was at this point that Stan should have piped up to alert me to the fact that the following day was his day off and that he would not be there. Stan, however, is a salesman and sends off similar vibes to a particular weaselly sales guy I once worked with in radio, who’s nickname was, in fact, The Weasel. This is not to say that I think Stan is a weasel, necessarily, but like many of his erminey ilk he's all about the sale and not doing anything to mess that up, such as telling people things they might not want to hear. Clearly, he did not want to be the bearer of bad news and instead chose to have me return two days later pissed off. Come to think of it, that's pretty weaselly. So let’s put another check on the Shitfer Weasel Chart for Stan.
So after returning on his day off to find Stan absent and his even more openly weasel-like fellow salesman unwilling to help me for fear of screwing up something Stan might conceivably have in the works, I returned again two days later. I was determined that while I would not be openly hostile, I would also do nothing to disguise my annoyance with all involved.
Stan saw me coming, perhaps noted my expression, and immediately put down his pizza to go riffle in his desk before I could even open the door. Spouting apologies, he began pulling fistfuls of key fobs out of the desk in his search, looked in all the drawers, looked in his filing cabinet, and made more nervous small talk. Failing to find any Subaru keys, he apologized again and then disappeared into the depths of this particular building of the dealership complex for a full ten minutes, leaving me to watch his more weaselly-looking fellow sales guy slink around in an attempt to look busy.
Stan eventually returned to announce that he’d spoken with someone with technical skills and they were even then printing instructions on how to program a "new one" for me. Soon enough, another fellow came out, instructions in hand and followed me out to my car. At his request, I handed him my keys and he had a seat behind my steering wheel. He was there for under a minute when he emerged, holding up my keys by the fob with one hand and a second fob in the other. The second fob was our extra fob that my wife had left in the car while driving it days before.
"Does this one work?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"And yours works?" he asked, shaking the fob on my key chain.
"Yeah," I said.
"Then why do you need another one?"
Inwardly I smiled.
"I don't," I said. "We already have two key fobs. What we don't have are two physical keys."
The technician looked confused for a moment. "You don't have two keys?" he asked.
"Nope," I said. "That's why I've been coming in here asking for a second key for the past several days."
Wow that was a massively satisfying thing to be able to say. In fact, it was worth all the hassle so far just to be able to say it in a perfectly pitched tone of calm, polite, righteous indignation.
The technician turned a cold eye in Stan's direction then stalked off toward the building, wadding up his instructions and pitching them at the nearest trash can upon entry. Stan looked sheepish in the illumination from my blazing righteousness, then offered that he felt like a huge idiot. I said not a word to dissuade him of this feeling.
Stan leaped into action to right his wrong. He piled into a golf cart and asked me to follow him down to another of the buildings in the complex. I was then led on a merry chase from building to building, eventually just joining Stan in the golf cart. At each stop, Stan was treated to having employee after employee explain that he was in the wrong department and would need to go talk to so and so over in such and such other department. Half an hour later I was still waiting for a key, but was at least standing in line in the correct department with the correct employee, who had only moments before sent Stan on yet another trek to locate a blank key for him to cut.
Upon Stan's return with the blank, he announced that he was going to head back up to his own building, since I didn't really need him there for the rest of the process. At first I was tempted to explain to him that I'd already invested far more of my afternoon—nay, my MONTH—in this little venture, all of which was due to his inability to follow up on assurances he'd made to us four months previously, and that until I had a working key in my hand he was just going to have to suck it up and waste some of his time, in addition to wasting mine. I almost said that. However, I'd long since decided that I didn't really like Stan very much, nor did I care to listen to any more of his uncomfortable attempts at small talk, which I sensed would likely turn to his default topic of sports. I told him to begone and he vanished in a puff of weasel-smelling brimstone.
The guy with the key-cutter soon produced a replica key for me, but explained that it wouldn’t actually work with my car until they cast a few spells on the magic chip embedded in it. The wizard for this was located in one of the previous departments we'd visited, back up the hill. I made the journey only to be told that the wizard in question had been sent on a quest and would be back in a sec. They advised me to go wait in the sun by the wizard's mystical garage bay. So I waited. And I waited. After ten minutes and half a sunburn, I went back up to the desk to inquire if the wizard had been alerted to my presence.
“He’ll be back in just a minute, sir,” the man said.
I returned to the garage to find that the sorcerer’s apprentice had appeared and was working on another car. He asked who I was waiting for. I told him the wizard’s name. (Don’t say his name, it gives him power.)
The apprentice nodded, but said that the wizard's quest had involved taking a vehicle to one of the dealership’s other branches. He would, the apprentice assured me, be back. I did the math in my head, though, and knew that the branch in question was a good ten miles away. What choice did I have, though? I waited.
Eventually, the wizard did appear. He was heavily tattooed with arcane symbols, his skin baked further by the blazing sun above. He was also the least weaselly person I’d met the whole day. I found him instantly likable even beyond the fact that he held the power to set me free from my now hour plus trial.
The wizard asked what wish he could grant me. I gave him my magic keys. He then asked me to search my heart to determine whether I truly only wanted two keys, or if perhaps I might want more, because once he applied his magics on them no more keys could ever be produced. I told him I was true of heart in my desire for only the two. He then produced a flat brown creature—his familiar, I’m sure—and inserted my keys into its orifices. It squeaked as he massaged the scales on the creatures back. A few moments later, he passed my keys back into my grateful hands with a hearty "There you go, big guy."
I climbed into my vehicle and found that both of the keys worked as promised. I waved to the wizard and sped from the parking lot, not even bothering to return to the office of the wizard’s supervisor for fear he would pass me a bill for all their work, and I would be unable to restrain myself from calling down furious wrath upon one and all. So far, they haven’t called to tell me otherwise, though one of their minions did call and leave a message asking if my experience was satisfactory. I have yet to phone her back.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Nerd Confessional
I have a nerd confession I have to make and, perhaps, an apology to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.
Over the past few weeks, there's been a lot of talk in nerd news circles and even in straight up regular media about the prospect of a Ghostbusters 3, a potential film possibly starring all the original cast. Don't know if it will happen, but there's a big part of me that would LOVE to see a really good Ghostbusters movie again, because Ghostbusters 2 just didn't cut it for me, despite and maybe even because of Peter McNichol's best efforts. Reading the various stories about it, along with Murray's appearance talking about it on Letterman, got me thinking about the original. It's a film I loved as a kid, saw at least four times in the theater and watched our VHS copy of it countless times over the years following. I think it may have even been the second VHS movie we ever bought, following Michael Keaton's Batman. Thinking back on the film, though, from my perspective 26 years later, I decided I'd found a flaw in the storytelling that stuck in my craw.
In my memory--having not seen the film as a whole in probably 10 years, at this point--the first time we ever see or hear about the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the film was when he turns up at the end and stomps through the city. While the 400 foot marshmallow man is trashing his way to Central Park West, Aykroyd's character Ray Stantz tells the other Ghostbusters that he remembers the character from roasting that brand of marshmallows at Camp Cucamonga and knew it could never ever harm them. To me, though, this seemed like a plot point that should have been set up earlier. If I'd made the film, I reasoned, I would have had Stay Puft Marshmallows prominently product-placed throughout the movie and might have even included a Stay Puft TV commercial cut to the Ghostbuster's TV commercial, just to build up the product and character in the audience's collective mind.
Cut to last weekend. We were watching the 10-year-old son of some friends of ours and were grasping for something to entertain him with other than 8 solid hours of playing the Arkham Asylum game for his Playstation 3. (Don't get me wrong, I loved watching and playing that, too, but the kid beat it, so what are ya gonna do?) Flipping through the channels, I spied Ghostbusters on AMC, instantly realized it was going to be the edited-for-television version and thought nothing more about it.
"Hey, that was Ghostbusters," the kids said.
"Yeah?" I asked. "You want to watch that?"
"Yeah."
"Have you seen it before?"
"Some of it," he said. "I've never seen the end of it. There's a lot of talking and I fall asleep and all I want to see is the ghosts," he added.
"Okay. Sure," I said.
So we flipped it on and, being 10 at night, I hit record on the DVR, cause I know he's never gonna make it through. Sure enough, we get to the talky part, shortly after the Ghostbusters have established themselves and the first half of the movie's special effects budget has been exhausted, and he's asleep. But before all that, not too long into the film, the kid spotted something I'd never EVER noticed before in all my viewings of Ghostbusters, which true Ghostbusters fans reading this will likely already know and be insulted that someone who claims to be brethren is only picking up on it now, which is: in the scene where Sigourney Weaver's Dana comes home to her apartment, but just before shit starts going nutty, she walks into her kitchen, sets down her groceries, unpacks a carton of eggs and some other random baggy looking thing and she turns to fiddle with something in the background scenery, leaving the egg carton to pop open and start spattering eggs that instantly fry on the countertop, when the kid pipes up with "Hey, there's the Staypuft Marshmallow Man."
"Where?" I asked.
"Right there," he said. And, a second look later, I realized with equal parts dawning horror and respect that the random baggy thing beyond the eggs, that I've heretofore been too distracted by the eggs and the creepy music to notice, is a bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows complete with a marshmallow man logo. This was when I told the kid how I'd only recently been thinking that the movie needed more of that kind of product placement and here it was in front of me the whole time.
This was all the challenge the kid needed. His eagle eyes spotted another Stay Puft logo appearance, painted on the side of a building during the sequence following the grid shutdown at Ghostbusters' Central. I wouldn't doubt there are other such placements in the film, but those two were enough to qualify for setting up the character--although I still argue there were too many distracting elements in each scene for anyone but the most eagle-eyed spotters to notice on the first viewing, but they're there.
So, to Mssrs Aykroyd and Ramis, writers of the film, an apology for doubting you. Now, if the both of you would kindly rewatch Ghostbusters 2 and then go somewhere and think about what you did and start concentrating very hard on ways to ensure you never ever do THAT again, especially in any third installments, we can call it even.
Over the past few weeks, there's been a lot of talk in nerd news circles and even in straight up regular media about the prospect of a Ghostbusters 3, a potential film possibly starring all the original cast. Don't know if it will happen, but there's a big part of me that would LOVE to see a really good Ghostbusters movie again, because Ghostbusters 2 just didn't cut it for me, despite and maybe even because of Peter McNichol's best efforts. Reading the various stories about it, along with Murray's appearance talking about it on Letterman, got me thinking about the original. It's a film I loved as a kid, saw at least four times in the theater and watched our VHS copy of it countless times over the years following. I think it may have even been the second VHS movie we ever bought, following Michael Keaton's Batman. Thinking back on the film, though, from my perspective 26 years later, I decided I'd found a flaw in the storytelling that stuck in my craw.
In my memory--having not seen the film as a whole in probably 10 years, at this point--the first time we ever see or hear about the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the film was when he turns up at the end and stomps through the city. While the 400 foot marshmallow man is trashing his way to Central Park West, Aykroyd's character Ray Stantz tells the other Ghostbusters that he remembers the character from roasting that brand of marshmallows at Camp Cucamonga and knew it could never ever harm them. To me, though, this seemed like a plot point that should have been set up earlier. If I'd made the film, I reasoned, I would have had Stay Puft Marshmallows prominently product-placed throughout the movie and might have even included a Stay Puft TV commercial cut to the Ghostbuster's TV commercial, just to build up the product and character in the audience's collective mind.
Cut to last weekend. We were watching the 10-year-old son of some friends of ours and were grasping for something to entertain him with other than 8 solid hours of playing the Arkham Asylum game for his Playstation 3. (Don't get me wrong, I loved watching and playing that, too, but the kid beat it, so what are ya gonna do?) Flipping through the channels, I spied Ghostbusters on AMC, instantly realized it was going to be the edited-for-television version and thought nothing more about it.
"Hey, that was Ghostbusters," the kids said.
"Yeah?" I asked. "You want to watch that?"
"Yeah."
"Have you seen it before?"
"Some of it," he said. "I've never seen the end of it. There's a lot of talking and I fall asleep and all I want to see is the ghosts," he added.
"Okay. Sure," I said.
So we flipped it on and, being 10 at night, I hit record on the DVR, cause I know he's never gonna make it through. Sure enough, we get to the talky part, shortly after the Ghostbusters have established themselves and the first half of the movie's special effects budget has been exhausted, and he's asleep. But before all that, not too long into the film, the kid spotted something I'd never EVER noticed before in all my viewings of Ghostbusters, which true Ghostbusters fans reading this will likely already know and be insulted that someone who claims to be brethren is only picking up on it now, which is: in the scene where Sigourney Weaver's Dana comes home to her apartment, but just before shit starts going nutty, she walks into her kitchen, sets down her groceries, unpacks a carton of eggs and some other random baggy looking thing and she turns to fiddle with something in the background scenery, leaving the egg carton to pop open and start spattering eggs that instantly fry on the countertop, when the kid pipes up with "Hey, there's the Staypuft Marshmallow Man."
"Where?" I asked.
"Right there," he said. And, a second look later, I realized with equal parts dawning horror and respect that the random baggy thing beyond the eggs, that I've heretofore been too distracted by the eggs and the creepy music to notice, is a bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows complete with a marshmallow man logo. This was when I told the kid how I'd only recently been thinking that the movie needed more of that kind of product placement and here it was in front of me the whole time.
This was all the challenge the kid needed. His eagle eyes spotted another Stay Puft logo appearance, painted on the side of a building during the sequence following the grid shutdown at Ghostbusters' Central. I wouldn't doubt there are other such placements in the film, but those two were enough to qualify for setting up the character--although I still argue there were too many distracting elements in each scene for anyone but the most eagle-eyed spotters to notice on the first viewing, but they're there.
So, to Mssrs Aykroyd and Ramis, writers of the film, an apology for doubting you. Now, if the both of you would kindly rewatch Ghostbusters 2 and then go somewhere and think about what you did and start concentrating very hard on ways to ensure you never ever do THAT again, especially in any third installments, we can call it even.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
*sniff*
Still no kitty.
We've only had one call about her since the last post I made and that was a second call from someone working at the nursing home that called about the cat that looked nothing like Avie two weeks ago. This was evidently someone other than the two ladies we met and talked to there before. They called to say they thought they might have our cat there, only they hadn't seen him in a little while and he actually looked a bit different than the cat in the picture. Yep. They said all that. I assured them that he wasn't our cat, but neglected to mention that I thought I'd seen him at the pound.
Speaking of orange cats, the other night before bed I went into the garage to close the garage doors and otherwise secure the house. Before doing so, I thought back to the number of times that Avie had gotten herself trapped in the garage by sneaking in there before I shut the doors for the evening and then not coming out of hiding and making herself known before I managed to get back in the house. We'd find her in there the following morning, no worse for wear but certainly annoyed that she had no soft place to sleep. She did this with such frequency that we just started keeping a litter box out there. So, as I went to enter the garage, I thought to myself how wonderful it would be if I opened the garage door and found Avie waiting on the top step. She wasn't there when I opened the door, but when I triggered one of the garage doors to close, I saw another cat come flying from around my car and flee the garage through my car's bay door. It was another orange one. That was last week.
Last night, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of a meowing cat from outside. I was instantly awake and my first thought was that it was Avie, come home to us and crying in the rainy night. Then I realized the cries were coming from the direction of our next door neighbor's house, or perhaps further down the hill, and not from our back door. Still, I got up and went out on the back deck to make sure. I listened for a while, but didn't call out to the cat for fear of waking the wife and causing her to freak out that Avie might be home if I was up calling to her in the night. As I returned to the inside of the house, though, I saw the wife come down the hall.
"Did you hear the cat?" she said.
"Yep. I don't think it was Avie," I said.
"It sounded like her," she said.
So, wife already awake, I went back on the deck and called out to her for a few minutes. No kitty turned up, though. I imagine it was the orange one.
The other day, while driving near the area where Avie disappeared, we had the depressing realization that even if she was trying to get home, we have a small river running through our town which she would have to ford. The mental image of the cat running up and down the western bank, looking for a way to cross, but finding none, brought tears to our eyes.
Meanwhile, more serious drama has been afoot Our friends who were keeping Avie for us are now splitting up. Not over Avie, of course, but due to unrelated, ongoing troubles. It's very sad. I've had a handful of friends divorce before, but this is probably the first ongoing, active, friends in the same town you live in divorce I'll probably be a witness to.
In fantastic news, though, my brother-in-law has returned safely from Afghanistan. We'd been trying to time our trip to Key Largo to coincide with his return, but he assured us that any plans we made to that effect would nehehehever come to pass, cause that's just how the Army works. And, indeed, his return wound up being a week later than originally scheduled, though that was due mostly to the Icelandic volcano. We're headed down this weekend to do a mother's day/brother-in-law's day combo celebration, with many biscuits and much chipped beef gravy scheduled to be consumed by all.
We've only had one call about her since the last post I made and that was a second call from someone working at the nursing home that called about the cat that looked nothing like Avie two weeks ago. This was evidently someone other than the two ladies we met and talked to there before. They called to say they thought they might have our cat there, only they hadn't seen him in a little while and he actually looked a bit different than the cat in the picture. Yep. They said all that. I assured them that he wasn't our cat, but neglected to mention that I thought I'd seen him at the pound.
Speaking of orange cats, the other night before bed I went into the garage to close the garage doors and otherwise secure the house. Before doing so, I thought back to the number of times that Avie had gotten herself trapped in the garage by sneaking in there before I shut the doors for the evening and then not coming out of hiding and making herself known before I managed to get back in the house. We'd find her in there the following morning, no worse for wear but certainly annoyed that she had no soft place to sleep. She did this with such frequency that we just started keeping a litter box out there. So, as I went to enter the garage, I thought to myself how wonderful it would be if I opened the garage door and found Avie waiting on the top step. She wasn't there when I opened the door, but when I triggered one of the garage doors to close, I saw another cat come flying from around my car and flee the garage through my car's bay door. It was another orange one. That was last week.
Last night, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of a meowing cat from outside. I was instantly awake and my first thought was that it was Avie, come home to us and crying in the rainy night. Then I realized the cries were coming from the direction of our next door neighbor's house, or perhaps further down the hill, and not from our back door. Still, I got up and went out on the back deck to make sure. I listened for a while, but didn't call out to the cat for fear of waking the wife and causing her to freak out that Avie might be home if I was up calling to her in the night. As I returned to the inside of the house, though, I saw the wife come down the hall.
"Did you hear the cat?" she said.
"Yep. I don't think it was Avie," I said.
"It sounded like her," she said.
So, wife already awake, I went back on the deck and called out to her for a few minutes. No kitty turned up, though. I imagine it was the orange one.
The other day, while driving near the area where Avie disappeared, we had the depressing realization that even if she was trying to get home, we have a small river running through our town which she would have to ford. The mental image of the cat running up and down the western bank, looking for a way to cross, but finding none, brought tears to our eyes.
Meanwhile, more serious drama has been afoot Our friends who were keeping Avie for us are now splitting up. Not over Avie, of course, but due to unrelated, ongoing troubles. It's very sad. I've had a handful of friends divorce before, but this is probably the first ongoing, active, friends in the same town you live in divorce I'll probably be a witness to.
In fantastic news, though, my brother-in-law has returned safely from Afghanistan. We'd been trying to time our trip to Key Largo to coincide with his return, but he assured us that any plans we made to that effect would nehehehever come to pass, cause that's just how the Army works. And, indeed, his return wound up being a week later than originally scheduled, though that was due mostly to the Icelandic volcano. We're headed down this weekend to do a mother's day/brother-in-law's day combo celebration, with many biscuits and much chipped beef gravy scheduled to be consumed by all.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Kitty Search, the Disappointment Continues
Yesterday afternoon, I was preparing dinner when the phone rang. The caller mentioned that her neighbor had told her that I was looking for a calico cat and a female calico had been hanging around their house for the past week or so.
"Where do you live?" I asked.
Turned out they lived next door to the very first person I had given a flier to when I began distributing them April 12. This was a location only a block away from our friends' house, from which Avie had disappeared. Instantly, I knew it had to be her.
"Can you catch her?" I asked.
"Well... she's on the back porch right now."
"Can I come over right now?" I asked. They said sure.
I immediately tried calling the wife, but she didn't answer.
On my way across town, I was elated. At last our search for Avie "Kissy" Kitty was finished. There was no doubt in my mind that this wasn't our cat. I envisioned bringing her home, feeding her and then allowing the wife to come home to find Avie curled up on the back of the chair where she likes to sleep and just watching the wife's face when she saw her. That would be magic! Crap! Did we even have cat food in the house? We'd left Avie's bag with our friend. Maybe I could pop by and pick it up from her and give her the good news too.
My surprise was ruined then when, a few blocks from the house, the wife called to tell me she was done with work. I told her of my mission. Excited, she said she'd meet me at a nearby grocery store and then we drove over together, still in separate cars.
I pulled into the driveway of the house to find the neighbor lady I'd given the flier to there as well as the man whose wife had phoned me earlier. He was crouched by the bushes surrounding his house, trying to coax a cat from within them. And then my eyes fell upon the cat's face and I knew it wasn't Avie. There was nearly black fur on top of its head. I put the car in park and got out.
"Aww, no," I said.
"It's not her?" the neighbor lady said.
"Nope."
We chatted until the wife could park. She had pretty much the same reaction as I did upon seeing the cat.
Once again, the home owner tried to convince us that we should take this cat off their hands, as it was very nice. And, as tempting as that has been, we just cant' do it. After watching our kitten Milo Soulpatch die from panleukopenia, we can't risk bringing another cat into the house unless it is vaccinated in advance--and that's an 8 week process. The only reason we were able to bring in Avie is because my mother-in-law kept her in North Carolina for those 8 weeks.
The neighbor lady said she hoped we eventually found Avie and noted that sometimes pets do find their way home. The house owner also said that he thought there were two calicos that had been visiting and hoped the other turned out to be Avie. We do too.
"Where do you live?" I asked.
Turned out they lived next door to the very first person I had given a flier to when I began distributing them April 12. This was a location only a block away from our friends' house, from which Avie had disappeared. Instantly, I knew it had to be her.
"Can you catch her?" I asked.
"Well... she's on the back porch right now."
"Can I come over right now?" I asked. They said sure.
I immediately tried calling the wife, but she didn't answer.
On my way across town, I was elated. At last our search for Avie "Kissy" Kitty was finished. There was no doubt in my mind that this wasn't our cat. I envisioned bringing her home, feeding her and then allowing the wife to come home to find Avie curled up on the back of the chair where she likes to sleep and just watching the wife's face when she saw her. That would be magic! Crap! Did we even have cat food in the house? We'd left Avie's bag with our friend. Maybe I could pop by and pick it up from her and give her the good news too.
My surprise was ruined then when, a few blocks from the house, the wife called to tell me she was done with work. I told her of my mission. Excited, she said she'd meet me at a nearby grocery store and then we drove over together, still in separate cars.
I pulled into the driveway of the house to find the neighbor lady I'd given the flier to there as well as the man whose wife had phoned me earlier. He was crouched by the bushes surrounding his house, trying to coax a cat from within them. And then my eyes fell upon the cat's face and I knew it wasn't Avie. There was nearly black fur on top of its head. I put the car in park and got out.
"Aww, no," I said.
"It's not her?" the neighbor lady said.
"Nope."
We chatted until the wife could park. She had pretty much the same reaction as I did upon seeing the cat.
Once again, the home owner tried to convince us that we should take this cat off their hands, as it was very nice. And, as tempting as that has been, we just cant' do it. After watching our kitten Milo Soulpatch die from panleukopenia, we can't risk bringing another cat into the house unless it is vaccinated in advance--and that's an 8 week process. The only reason we were able to bring in Avie is because my mother-in-law kept her in North Carolina for those 8 weeks.
The neighbor lady said she hoped we eventually found Avie and noted that sometimes pets do find their way home. The house owner also said that he thought there were two calicos that had been visiting and hoped the other turned out to be Avie. We do too.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Kitty Search: One Week Later
The search/wait continues, sans kitty.
I went by the local humane society every day last week, except for Thursday, but Avie wasn't there. By Wednesday the staff all knew me and just waved me on back to the cat room whenever I walked through the door. And when I emerged from the room, hopes dashed, they told me how sorry they were and encouraged me to keep looking. When I went in Friday afternoon, a staff member I hadn't met yet was at the front desk. After I'd explained my cat search to her, she asked what kind of cat Avie is.
"She's a low calico," I said, parroting what I'd been told earlier in the week was likely to be Avie's specific breed. "She's white with gray and orange blotches."
The woman paused. "Long tail or short tail?" she asked.
"Long."
I saw something perk up behind her eyes. "You should go on back there," she said.
Suddenly my heart was thumping with hope. Her manner suggested that a cat matching Avie's description was back there. In the cat room, I turned to the first of the stacked cage units lining the left hand wall and felt immediately disheartened. Inside the middle cage was a male cat with Avie's coloration. This was one I'd seen on Monday and knew was male due to his size, but by Tuesday was willing to give him a second look just in case and had gone so far as to poke my finger in the cage to jostle the litterbox and make the guy up so he would look at me. Nope. Giant, male cat head with the wrong color pattern to begin with. This was probably the cat the lady was thinking of.
As I made my way down, though, there was another cat with Avie's color scheme, if not exact pattern. Then, in the last column of cages, there was a tiny kitten who looked very similar to Avie, nursing at its orange mother.
Hope brimming, I turned to the opposite wall to find two more cats with Avie's coloration, one of which was actually female and had her back to the cage door so that I had to call "Kissy kitty?" until she turned around to reveal a mostly dark face. No Avie.
The lady at the desk looked at me with raised eyebrows of anticipation as I exited. I shook my head, but did note for her the five kitties with similar color scheme. She encouraged me to continue coming back, as they got new kitties in every day.
On Sunday we a lady from a local nursing home phoned to say she had seen my MISSING CAT poster in Kroger and thought she might have found Avie. We were overjoyed and began taking down the address so we could rush right over.
"It's a beautiful cat," she said. "He's just very, very friendly."
"Um... `he?'" I said.
"Yes."
"You're sure he's male?"
"He's, uh... Yes, I'm pretty sure he's male," she said.
"It's probably not our cat. She's female."
"Oh," she said. We decided to go over anyway, though, on the off chance that the woman was somehow unable to properly identify if a cat had junk or not. What we found when we arrived was an orange and white cat that resembled Avie not in the slightest, particularly in the fact that his junk was large and prominent. He was indeed very friendly and had, we were told, been hanging around outside the place for the past month. If they'd told us that part, we probably wouldn't have come at all. Since we had come, though, they tried to get us to take him off their hands and kept emphasizing how nice and friendly he was. We declined. We're just not ready to take in strange kitties when we still have hope that ours will return to us.
Today, I returned to the humane society. Avie still wasn't there, but I believe I recognized our friendly, junk-equipped cat friend from Sunday afternoon.
Dammit. Now I feel guilty for two cats.
I went by the local humane society every day last week, except for Thursday, but Avie wasn't there. By Wednesday the staff all knew me and just waved me on back to the cat room whenever I walked through the door. And when I emerged from the room, hopes dashed, they told me how sorry they were and encouraged me to keep looking. When I went in Friday afternoon, a staff member I hadn't met yet was at the front desk. After I'd explained my cat search to her, she asked what kind of cat Avie is.
"She's a low calico," I said, parroting what I'd been told earlier in the week was likely to be Avie's specific breed. "She's white with gray and orange blotches."
The woman paused. "Long tail or short tail?" she asked.
"Long."
I saw something perk up behind her eyes. "You should go on back there," she said.
Suddenly my heart was thumping with hope. Her manner suggested that a cat matching Avie's description was back there. In the cat room, I turned to the first of the stacked cage units lining the left hand wall and felt immediately disheartened. Inside the middle cage was a male cat with Avie's coloration. This was one I'd seen on Monday and knew was male due to his size, but by Tuesday was willing to give him a second look just in case and had gone so far as to poke my finger in the cage to jostle the litterbox and make the guy up so he would look at me. Nope. Giant, male cat head with the wrong color pattern to begin with. This was probably the cat the lady was thinking of.
As I made my way down, though, there was another cat with Avie's color scheme, if not exact pattern. Then, in the last column of cages, there was a tiny kitten who looked very similar to Avie, nursing at its orange mother.
Hope brimming, I turned to the opposite wall to find two more cats with Avie's coloration, one of which was actually female and had her back to the cage door so that I had to call "Kissy kitty?" until she turned around to reveal a mostly dark face. No Avie.
The lady at the desk looked at me with raised eyebrows of anticipation as I exited. I shook my head, but did note for her the five kitties with similar color scheme. She encouraged me to continue coming back, as they got new kitties in every day.
On Sunday we a lady from a local nursing home phoned to say she had seen my MISSING CAT poster in Kroger and thought she might have found Avie. We were overjoyed and began taking down the address so we could rush right over.
"It's a beautiful cat," she said. "He's just very, very friendly."
"Um... `he?'" I said.
"Yes."
"You're sure he's male?"
"He's, uh... Yes, I'm pretty sure he's male," she said.
"It's probably not our cat. She's female."
"Oh," she said. We decided to go over anyway, though, on the off chance that the woman was somehow unable to properly identify if a cat had junk or not. What we found when we arrived was an orange and white cat that resembled Avie not in the slightest, particularly in the fact that his junk was large and prominent. He was indeed very friendly and had, we were told, been hanging around outside the place for the past month. If they'd told us that part, we probably wouldn't have come at all. Since we had come, though, they tried to get us to take him off their hands and kept emphasizing how nice and friendly he was. We declined. We're just not ready to take in strange kitties when we still have hope that ours will return to us.
Today, I returned to the humane society. Avie still wasn't there, but I believe I recognized our friendly, junk-equipped cat friend from Sunday afternoon.
Dammit. Now I feel guilty for two cats.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Kitty Crisis Day Two
The fliers we distributed had some response, but still no kitty has manifested.
Mostly people called to suggest to us that we check the humane society, as there is an infamous, though still semi-anonymous person in the area known for capturing stray cats in a live trap and taking them there. He's also been known to trap non stray cats as well, though, as evidenced by the number of neighbors who are pissed off at him for having to go get their cats out of hock. We'd already heard this rumor, though, and had actually gone right to the house of the alleged cat-trapper the night we found out about Avie being missing to ask if they might have her. The man's wife denied that they trapped cats at all and suggested that the large, wire-frame cage in their side yard was for carrying their beagles around. Some of the people who called asked us to phone them back if we are able to determine the identity of the trapper because they want to go over and have words with them. We don't know for sure that the people we talked to are the trappers, but other neighbors have confirmed that theirs is the house the trapping is getting done at. I don't really care about the trapping, so long as it nets my cat in the process and she gets returned to me, but there are quite a few people upset with them.
The major leads we had came from a person I met on the street while distributing fliers, who said she had seen a cat matching the description following a mother and child as they walked. Someone had asked the mother if it was her cat and she said no. This behavior at least matches Avie's to some degree, as she has been known to follow me and the dogs when we go on walks and once followed the whole family as we went walking around the neighborhood. Later, a man phoned to say he'd seen a similar sight and that the cat was last seen headed north on his street. At this news, I returned to his street and knocked on every door, passing out fliers to everyone and leaving them behind for those not at home.
When I returned home, there was another message from a lady who said she'd spotted the cat just down the street from our friend's house, lingering in a yard there. So the wife and I piled back in the car and drove across town to check this out. No cat--or, at least, not ours. This was, however, the same area in which I'd earlier met a lady I'd determined was probably crazy, but who had at least given me a sighting tip. I'd seen her on her porch, smoking a cigarette, and had walked up to give her a flier. She'd barely taken a look at it when she said, "Oh, yes. I saw this cat across the road the other day. She was running and playing and running and playing." The sing-song nature of her voice when saying "running and playing" made me certain she had never seen my cat. Not that Avie doesn't play, but she doesn't play to any degree that would fall under such a sing-song description.
No calls so far today.
As one of the comments for yesterday's post stated, it's not uncommon for cats to find their way home. As kids, my sister's cat (my former cat Winston's mother) used to disappear for months at a time only to show up at our door pregnant. She'd hang around us until she'd had her kittens. Once they were gone, she'd be off into the world again, no doubt with another family in another neighborhood. Then, months later, she'd turn up pregnant again. After the second litter, we got her fixed, after which we never saw her again. We always wondered if her other family ever tried to take her in to get her fixed only to be told the job had already been done.
One of that cat's kittens, my sister's cat Cleo, decided she didn't like my sister's new apartment and walked home. Granted, my parents lived less than a mile away as the cat walks, but the homing instinct was still not to be scoffed at.
And then, in college, one of my roommates brought one of his family cats from home into the house we were renting. The cat was miserable with us and was constantly trying to escape. He frequently escaped through a dryer vent hole in the laundry room floor, which we took to covering with heavier and heavier items, because he was very strong. Finally, he muscled his way around two full 24 can flats of Cokes and a tuba case and was gone for good. A week or so later, he turned up back at the roommate's parents' house across town.
We're hoping that Avie will have a similar homing instinct and will turn up at the back door in a week or so. She's got a good walk ahead of her, though, if she does, cause she disappeared clear across town and there's some pretty major traffic, including an Interstate between there and here.
Meanwhile, I have visited the humane society twice. They had posted the picture of my cat in their cat-housing room, so their staff can check it, but they took me back further into the building to show me a calico that had come in from this morning. I hoped and prayed all the way back that it would be mine, as one of the rumors I'd heard yesterday was that the cat-trapper had caught him another one and was planning to take it in today. It wasn't Avie, though. The humane society lady--who looks like she's worn to about a frazzle--told me I was welcome to look through the cats in their cat room to double check that Avie wasn't there. She wasn't but the plaintive meows from the cats who were there were enough to break your heart.
After leaving there, I spent an hour driving around in the neighborhood she disappeared in, calling her name. Not that the little beast has ever been seen to be active in daylight before, or anything, but she didn't come out of hiding if she was around at all.
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