Note: This is an excerpt from my favorite book: One Hundred Open Houses. This is the book that
saved me from total deterioration at a certain time in my life. My agent took me to lunch in Sag Harbor. We changed restaurants twice. We'd look at each other and say, You want to leave? Let's go. After we finally settled down and started to eat, she said, Write another book. It's time. I like the book Julie/Julia. I like the structure - cooking all of the recipes in the one book. What if I did one where the structure was looking for an apartment and going to open houses, I asked? Great, she said. Do that.
One of the happy outcomes of having a bestseller (Three Daughters) is the spillover reader interest in One Hundred Open Houses)
Don't show me this message again!
The pseudo-porn magazine contact
has sent me an e-mail with a huge file attachment because his parent company has had ten lawyers drawing up the
contract. Lawyers on staff of
large corporations are lazy and careless.
They send you boiler plate stuff written in the Middle Ages and when you
point out that the terms are impossible to enact, they tell you to just cross
it out. When I try to open the
attachment, the message says that the file is compressed. I e-mail back that the file is
compressed and he tells me to use WinZip to open it. That’s like telling me I have to turn into a crocodile to
open it – in other words, impossible. I look on my desktop and there is an icon of a vice
squeezing a file cabinet as when you want to glue furniture. I click on the
icon and whoa! WinZip appears right over the e-mail. It says. “Do you want to
unzip this now?” I
love it when the message is clear.
Once I called Dell for advice on
an e-mail problem and the tech person in Sri Lanka or wherever told me to check
“Don’t show me this message again.”
The minute I checked it I realized I needed the message to get to my
e-mail. He said, “I’ve been working here 10 years and I know pretty much and I
could probably help you solve your e-mail problem but I have to follow the
rules.” I should have known he was
telling me in a subtle way to urge him to help me but (not knowing the next
help station was going to charge me to undo the damage from their bad advice,)
I said, “Oh, that’s all right.” I
think the people in Calcutta or Sri Lanka have better ethics. They are more empathetic and want to do
the right thing unlike American telephone companies. When I called back almost in tears, a soft voiced man said: “I know one way to help you get that
message back. It’s called ‘system
restore’ and it allows you to go back to any date you select and start all over
again.” And that’s exactly what I did.
I went back to May 10, a Monday, when I still had not checked: “Don’t
show me this message again.”
Imagine if you could do this in
real life. I’d go back to 1999 and
be rich again. And then I’d go
back to 1960 and accept a date with Butch Ordway. Or I’d go back… oh, hell, I can’t go back.
When I first came to work here,
I didn’t know how to transfer a call.
I was on overload for about two weeks and even with a gun to my head I
couldn’t have told you what color the walls were. Now I’ve used WinZip.
I open the contract and try to
compare what we sent to the pseudo-porn people and what they are sending to
us. It’s tedious and confusing and
I already have a slight headache
Before work today, I went to see
the dentist to see what is making the right side of my face hurt. They took an x-ray
of the pain site and I thought the technician was going to look at the x-rays
scream and say: oh, my god, your teeth are all messed up. That’s not what happened. She said my sinus was resting on the
nerve. If you thought they were going to say: you don’t need us, go home, no
charge. That was not the case. The
dentist looked in my mouth and said I had some fillings that were decomposing
and now he’s going to do a whole bunch of things that are going to cost a lot
of money. I’m obsessing
about it because in the moment of relief that my teeth were okay, I relaxed my
attention and the medical establishment swooped in and mapped out a plan to
keep me there for a year and separate me from thousands of dollars.
Three calls to the dentist’s
office and now his whole desk staff has doubts about me. I want to know why he can’t do
everything in one visit. I want to
know how much it is all going to cost.
I want to know whether it is necessary. For some reason the woman on the phone finds these
questions unreasonable and obscure, as if no other patient has asked them
before. In the medical
establishment, if you ask a question the staff always sees you as trouble. It’s
our own fault. The rules that the
medical man is the king and the patient is damn lucky to be in his presence
were made a long time ago. So I
have to let this bullshit dentist have his way about “decomposing”: fillings
that haven’t given me one iota of trouble. On top of that, without any
permission from me, he has numbed the entire left side of my face and ground
down one poor tooth to a nub. “You’ll need a crown on that one,” he says. Yes, I obsess but this dentist is
nuts. Trust me, he is nuts.
There was something on the news
today that vindicates my theory that you should never have a medical procedure
by the ‘top man.’ Every horror story I’ve ever heard about a procedure is
always prefaced with the words ‘he’s supposed to be the top man.’
This man went in for a knee
operation and when he comes out, the nurse is wheeling him to his room and says
casually: “Well you have a new
left knee.” And the patient says, ”It was supposed to be the right knee. The doctor marked it.” Sure enough there’s a big x on the
right knee but the numbskull replaced the left knee. And the hospital is only awarding him half a million
dollars. I would have ruined that
lazy crazy bastard. I’m ready to
stab that dentist who ground down my poor tooth. If someone replaced a
perfectly good knee and left me with the same problem I came in with, I would
never be done hunting him down.
Dr. Feldman was the name in case you need knee surgery.
I can’t stop thinking about that
dentist that absolutely ruined two of my teeth and drilled them down as if he
were excavating for a new subway or something. Why do people become dentists anyway, to be legally
aggressive? Now my mouth hurts and
I can’t eat peacefully. I guess I shouldn’t complain about that.
On top of this, Shana’s dog has
pooped in the office and in order to kill the smell they sprayed the kind of
floral scent that gives you a big headache. I just read a story about a woman who was frequently
‘employee of the month’ but had to quit because of the excessive scents people
wore to the office. While I’m
talking about scent assaults, I may as well call your attention to the soap
Lever 2000. I went up to my second
floor one day because I smelled the overpowering scent of cheap perfume mixed
with stale sweat. I thought a
cologne-crazed robber might be hiding up there. The smell was suffocating and it was coming from an
unwrapped bar of Lever 2000. I
began to feel nauseous and had to take it far out of the house and throw it
away. I would vote for any
candidate that would outlaw perfumed soaps, shampoos or anything else. Thank god for scent-free All.
Shana has no reprimand for the
dog. She loves, loves, loves the
dog. Twice the dog has done number
two in the office. Once right next
to the hardest working employee who takes twelve hours to tell you something
that could be said in half a sentence.
However, she claims to work until two in the morning (which, by the way,
is Shana’s dream employee). If you
worked past seven at night, she would hire you forever even if you were dealing
drugs.
So the hard worker had to go out
and buy Febreze and clean up the poop and spray everywhere. But then she said a brilliant thing and
a courageous one, too. She told
Shana, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners.
I know too many people who are
blindly in love with animals. Peta petitioned the government not to give
Timothy McVey any meat for his last meal. The reasoning was why should one more
living thing be killed for the monster. Ay, mommie! I know people who prefer their pets to humans and many
of them are women who never had children.
These people are perfectly okay with having the dog knock you down or
put his muddy paws on your best silk dress. They let cats sit on the dinner
table before and after you eat and only say, “Now Fluffy get off there,” in
that tone that Fluffy has learned means “I love you so much, you can sit on my
toast for all I care.” And Fluffy does want to sit on the toast especially when
it’s still warm.
When Oprah was on Ellen, they
had a dog love competition.
Ellen: What makes you happiest?
Oprah: Being with my dogs.
Ellen: How many do you have.
Oprah: Three and I’m getting two more.
Oprah: I don’t understand people who don’t love
dogs.
Ellen: Me either.
Where are you going after the show?
Oprah: To play with my dogs in the dog park.
Ellen: I’ll go with you.
