i fell in love with you today
the way you kind of rolled your r's
trying to sound more sophisticated
i think thats what did it
your voice was soft as my most favorite blanket
your laugh was sudden and mirthful
i could see your eyes
i could feel you curves
even when i told you about the 49.99
you just smiled with your words
making my fluttering heart drift slowly
to where it belongs
and then you said
"honey do we want to get dvr"
....
i know he isn't good enough for you

to whom it may concern


i was given a rude remark by one of your door door people

as he approached my house in hawker, on saturday 13 june 2015

he made a ******* coment saying, don’t worry we are not going to rob you

it’s like he was put there to tease me or something, i found it very insulting

and if i knew his name, i would make sure he was sacked, i realise that it is

his word against mine, but he will never get anyone supporting unicef with that

attitude, i know it’s stupid to think he’ll get the sack, but he was terribly rude

you see, i am not an old stick in the mud, i love life, probably more than him

he shouldn’t be working for unicef, because when i said i ain’t interested in a normal way

he said oh buddy, settle down, i know that this was uncalled for, ok, i think you should

tell this man by looking in your book to see who was in hawker on 13 june 2015 and

let him know that, i hate him, i am not offended i am just concerned of your business

HE WAS RUDE

When I was eighteen I worked for a company called GLENCOM. You probably haven't heard of them, you're not supposed to.
They're the invisible middleman.
What happens is, when a company wants to set up a call centre but doesn't have the space or the manpower to do it themselves, they call Glencom.
Glencom then puts together a team of people in Swindon,
teaches them the bare minimum about the product they need to sell and sticks them around a table with headphones on,
completely cut off from the people around them being force-fed phone numbers for eight straight hours a day.

They do this for dozens of companies. And there are dozens of companies just like it.
Producing nothing, just doing other peoples ***** work.
The jobs they don't want to do themselves.
Like Telemarketing. Cold-Calling.
You know when you've just got into the bath,
or you're sitting down to dinner and the phone rings and you think
'I don't want to answer that but it might be important'
and when you answer it it's someone you've never met desperately trying to sell you something you don't want?
And no matter what you say they don't seem to listen, or care,
they just keep reading standard procedure from a script until you can't take it any more and you just hang up?
Chances are, that person is a Glencom specialist telephone agent.

I loved that job, I really did.
You probably think I'm crazy for it, it's the kind of job that middle class kids do for a little extra cash while they're at university,
until they get sick of the soul-crushing routine of getting yelled at and hung up on, yelled at and hung up on and they stop showing up after six weeks.
Year after year, cold-calling is rated in the top ten things people hate about the modern world.
I was part of the problem.
And I loved it.

You see, when you get one of these phone calls, you don't realise that it's a real person on the other end of the phone.
Of course, you do know that it must be a person, that's common sense.
It's just not in your nature to think of that disembodied voice as having a face and a mind
and a favourite food .
and a family
and a history
and a home that they go to every night at seven thirty.
They're a spirit.
One-dimensional.
So you don't treat them like a real person,
and that's OK, really it is, we're used to it.
As far as you're concerned, whoever you're talking to is just a faceless corporation,
so you yell, and you swear,
way more than you would if you were face to face with someone, say, at your bank or in a shop.
Every little thing that has ****** you off that day gets unloaded onto that person because,
for those five minutes,
with your bath getting cold,
or your dinner getting overcooked and blackened,
they are everything that's wrong with society.

So by the time you finally slam the receiver down, and return to whatever it was you were doing,
you're face red, out of breath, can't remember the last time you were that angry
they've ruined your evening.
You swear you're going to complain,
but you know that if you do that you'll just get caught up in their red tape and rhetoric all over again.
There's nothing to do but let it go.
So you do, and with it, something strange happens.
All that anger and tension that you've been carrying around all day just leaves your body slowly.

The traffic that morning;
your workload at the office;
that cold you just cant shake;
the barista who got your coffee order wrong, but your were running late so didn't have time to complain and get a new one;

All those little things that you can't control,
it doesn't seem worth worrying about them now.
You think of how angry you were at that little voice coming out of the telephone speaker and you feel sort of proud,
like it makes up for bending over and taking **** from your Boss all those years.
from your bank all those years
from the gas and electric companies
and your phone company and internet service provider all those years
from your politicians all those years
all that doesn't sting so much any more.

Because you just stuck it to the man.
You stood up to the big corporations and you got the upper hand.
You start to see the funny side,
you'll tell everyone at work about this.

That's the thing about telemarketers: They're one of those little annoyances that people love so much,
like the weather or queue-jumpers.
Something we all hate, but can all relate to,
a lynch-pin of small-talk,
that inoffensive comedian you like so much was talking about it on tv the other night.

But this time you get a chance to stri ke back.
It's not like getting a parking ticket,
or stubbing your toe,
you get to yell at this inconvenience, tell it exactly how you feel without any fear of repercussions.

Without you realising it, that telemarketer has just done you a valuable service.
You've just saved yourself an hour in front of a punch-bag,
or a session with your therapist or *****.
Without knowing it you are in a better mood than you've been all week,
so you don't smack your kids when they spill paint on the carpet.
And you don't yell at your wife when she forgot to pay the electric bill.
You float on a cloud of air until bed time, and probably make love to your partner for the first time in weeks.
You sleep a healthy eight hours and wake up to breakfast  and coffee and drive to work feeling like you did when you first started there,
when you could still see a bright future ahead of you.
All thanks to that soulless,
faceless,
nameless
disembodied voice on the other end of the phone.
All thanks to me.

I worked out that in any given day,
I got yelled at or told to ******* or otherwise unnecessarily lashed out at maybe thirty out of every hundred calls.
That was thirty families who were going to have a nice dinner,
without the usual arguments for once.
Maybe a few times a week I could prevent an abusive husband from having that one whiskey too many and bashing his wife from room to room.
If you believe in a butterfly flapping it's wings in Tokyo, and all that,
then maybe I, without ever leaving my desk, could stop a ****** from happening, perhaps once a year.
I was making a difference and all I had to do was let my computer dial a random phone number and to introduce myself as
'whoever calling from wherever to let you know about a valuable promotion...'

When I realised all this I decided I would work harder to up my productivity.
A hundred and fifty calls a day,
two hundred.

And I had to provoke more anger.
Subtly of course, I would try to be more obnoxious and inept.
I got peoples names wrong;
I talked over people.
Soon I was getting fifty hang-ups a day.
So I, like a good employee, constantly tried to better myself.
I sniggered at peoples names;
I requested needlessly extensive and intrusive personal information;
asked to speak to 'the man of the house'.
I was getting balled out with every other call.
Seventy, eighty, ninety times a day.
Every time I was called a nuisance I gave myself a pat on the back.
Every time someone said they wanted to speak with my supervisor, I just said they weren't in and then rewarded myself with a cookie at break time.
I got more competitive with myself.
I considered it a personal gift when I got someone with an Indian name,
or a speech impediment.
Gay couples were a Godsend.
I corrected peoples grammar;
I cursed;
I slurred;
I made thinly veiled ****** references.

I was thorn in the side of everyone just trying to enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon.
I was the itch that no-one could reach.
I invited venom, longed for hatred.
Because if it was aimed at me, it may as well have been aimed at the moon.
I was a necessary evil.
I was the common enemy of the whole country.  
I can't say how many relationships I must have saved,
how many lives I touched.
Suicides prevented? You never know.
I was making the world a better place, one botched customer service attempt at a time.
I was saving people without them even knowing my name.
The anonymous benefactor,
the masked hero.
I was Zorro, I was Batman.
And I loved it.
I thrived on it.
I had found something I was good at.
I could have stayed there, soaking up insults, absorbing peoples troubles, lightening their burdens, forever.

Until three months ago when my manager saw my sales reports.
He, of course, didn't understand why we were really there.
He thought it was about money, about generating figures for whatever company we were hired by that month.
He threw buzz-words and management speak at me.
Improving Revenue.
Optimising Productivity.
Promoting Synergy.
Utilising Opportunity.
Sentence fragments that wouldn't make sense if he meant them.
Nonsensical ramblings littered with capital letters.
By Glencom's standards, rather than my own, I was the worst specialist telephone agent that he had ever seen.
I didn't bother trying to explain.
He wouldn't have understood,
I wanted something real.
Glencom could have been the first call centre to truly,
what's the phrase he would have used? Attain it's Potential.
We could have been pioneers in the business world, providing a service that the public really needs.
But there was no point, he had listened to recordings of my calls and had no choice but to fire me on the spot.

That job was the only thing I had loved for a long, long time. T
he only thing that gave me purpose,
my reason for getting out of bed,
for putting on trousers and shoes.
It was all I had and I lost it,
blacklisted by the employment agency that placed me there.
For a while I tried calling people at random from the phone book but it didn't work out.
You have no idea how much it costs to make a hundred phone calls a day on a pay as you go mobile.
Ten pence a minute
times by sixty minutes an hour
times by eight hours a day  
minus a half hour for lunch equals more than jobseeker's allowance is willing to provide.
I switched to contract but these days everyone has phone number recognition,
so everyone can see that you're calling from a personal phone rather than a business one.

Eventually I started getting phone calls from the phone company explaining that I'd be cut off
and fined if I was using a personal phone for random telemarketing without a license.

The operator was clear, polite and ultimately very helpful.

******' Amateur.

Okay.

You used to be a *****.

Now don’t get self conscious. We all used to be *****. Check out the period at the end of this sentence. That tiny little dot is around 600 microns wide. When you were a ***** you were about 40 microns wide. And you were so cute back then too with your little tail wagging all over the place and your love of swimming. Boy could you swim. In fact if you hadn’t outswum your siblings, you might be a slightly different version of yourself right now. Maybe you’d have a higher-pitched laugh, hairier arms, or stand two inches shorter.

You had a great life as a ***** but always felt incomplete. The truth is you weren’t whole until you met an egg. And then you two began a nine month project to make a cool new version of you. It took a while but you grew arms and legs and eyeballs and lungs. You grew nerves and nails and eardrums and tongues.

For a ***** to meet an egg it means your mom met your dad. But it’s not just them. Think about how many people had to meet, fall in love, and make love for you to be here.

Here’s the answer: A lot. Like a lot a lot.

Before they had you, none of your ancestors drowned in a pond, got strangled by a python, or skied into a tree. None of your ancestors choked on a peach pit, were trampled by buffalo, or got their tie stuck in an assembly line.

None of your ancestors was a ******.

You are the most modern, brightest spark of years and years and years of survivors who all had to meet each other in order to eventually make you.

Your nineteenth century Grandma met your nineteenth century Grandpa down at the candle-making shoppe. She liked his muttonchops and he thought she looked cute churning butter.

Your Middle Ages Grandpa met your Middle Ages Grandma while they both poured hot oil from the castle turrets on pillaging vikings. She liked his grunts and he thought the flowers in her hair made her heaving bosoms jump out.
Your Ice Age Grandpa crossing the Bering Bridge in a woolly mammoth fur met your Ice Age Grandma dragging a club in the opposite direction. He liked her saber-tooth necklace and she dug his unibrow.

Your ancient rainforest Grandpa was picking berries naked in the bush while your ancient rainforest Grandma was spearing dodos for dinner. She liked his jungle funk and he liked her cave drawings. If it wasn’t for the picnic they had afterwards, maybe you wouldn’t be here.

You’re pretty lucky all those people met, fell in love, made love, had babies, and raised them into other people who did it all over again. This happened over and over and over again for you to be here. Look around the plane, coffee shop, or park right now. Look at your husband snoring in bed, your girlfriend watching TV, or your sister playing in the backyard. You are surrounded by lucky people. They are all the result of long lines of survivors.

So you’re a survivor, too. You’re the latest and greatest. You’re the top of the line. You’re the very best nature has to offer.

But a lot had to happen before all your strong, fiery ancestors met each other and fell in love over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years …

So let’s stop for a second and pull back again. Let’s pull way, way, way, way back.

Okay.

Let’s go on a field trip. Put your shoes on because we’re heading outside.

Take a bowling ball and drop it on the edge of your driveway. That’s our Sun. Yeah, the ball is only eight inches across and the actual Sun is eight hundred thousand miles across but that’s our scale for this little brainwave. Okay, now walk down your street ten big paces and drop a grain of salt on your neighbor’s lawn. That’s Mercury. Take nine more paces down the street and drop a peppercorn for Venus. And then take another seven paces, so you’re now two or three houses down the block, and toss down another peppercorn.

You got it.

That peppercorn is Earth.

Here we are, basking in the blazing sun, twenty-six big steps away from the bowling ball. Our giant planet is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere but here’s the crazy part: It gets a whole lot bigger.

If you keep walking, Mars is only couple more houses away, but Jupiter ends up ninety-five big paces down the street, out of the neighborhood, and halfway to the corner store. By now a dog is probably slobbering in the bowling ball finger holes and kids are flying by you on their bikes, slurping drippy popsicles, and wondering what’s up with this nut tossing crumbs on the sidewalk, acting out some demented suburban version of Hansel and Gretel.

If you want to finish up our solar system, you’re going to have to start taking two- and three-hundred paces for the remaining planets, eventually dropping a grain of salt for Pluto half a mile away from the bowling ball. You can’t see the bowling ball with binoculars and it’s getting cold out for your long walk home.

But here’s the crazier part: That’s just our solar system. That’s just our bunch of rocks flying around our big bright bowling ball star.

Turns out our big bright star and all its salt and peppercorns are racing around a cosmic race track with two hundred billion other big bright bowling ball stars. You’d have to cover the entire Earth with bowling ***** eight thousand times to represent the number of stars in our race track. Did we mention this race track has a name? Yup, it’s called the Milky Way galaxy, presumably because the scientists who first noticed it were all eating delicious Milky Way candy bars late that Friday night down at the telescopes.

So basically our bowling ball, salt, and peppercorns are flying in the fast lane around a ridiculously giant race track galaxy called the Milky Way with billions and billions of other bowling *****, salt grains, and peppercorns, too.

But are you ready for the craziest part: That’s just our galaxy. Guess how many giant racetrack galaxies are in all of outer space? Oh, not many. Just more than we can possibly count. Honestly, nobody knows how many galaxies are out there in the big blackness. All we know is that every few years somebody stares out a little further and finds millions more of them just shining way out in the void. We don’t know how deep it goes because our rocket ships don’t blast off that far and our thickest, fattest telescopes can’t see that far.

Now, all this space talk might make us feel small and insignificant, but here’s the thing, here’s the big thing, here’s the biggest thing of all: Of the millions of places we’ve ever seen it appears as though Earth is the only place that can support life. The only place! Oh sure, there could be other life-giving planets we haven’t seen yet, but the point is that Earth could easily have been a clump of sulphur gas, be lying in darkness forever, or have a winter that dips a couple hundred degrees and lasts twenty years like Uranus.

On this planet Earth, the only one in the giant dark blackness where anything can live, we ended up being humans.

Congratulations, us!

We are the only species on the only life-giving rock capable of love and magic, architecture and agriculture, jewellery and democracy, aeroplanes and highway lanes. We’re the only ones with interior design and horoscope signs, fashion magazines and house party scenes, horror flicks with monsters, guitar jams at concerts. We got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and roller coaster rides, clean sheets and good movie seats, bakery air and rain hair, bubble wrap and illegal naps.

We got all that. But people, listen up.

We only get a hundred years to enjoy it.

I’m sorry but it’s true.

Every single person you know will be dead in a hundred years — the foreman at your plant, the cashiers at your grocery store, every teacher you’ve ever had, anyone you’ve ever woken up beside, all the kids on your street, every baby you’ve ever held, every bride who’s walked down the aisle, every telemarketer who’s called you at dinner, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, everyone who’s cut you off on the highway, everyone in the room you’re sitting in right now, everyone you love, and you.

Life is so great that we only get a tiny moment to enjoy everything we see. And that moment is right now. And that moment is counting down. And that moment is always, always fleeting.

You will never be as young as you are right now.

So whether you’re enjoying your first toothpicked turkey cold cuts and marveling at apples from South Africa, dreaming of strange and distant relatives from thousands of years ago, or staring into the blackness of deep, deep space, just remember how lucky we all are to be here right now.

If you feel that sense of wonder and beauty in all the tiny joys in life then you’re part of an international band of old souls and optimists, smiling on sidewalks, dancing at weddings, and flipping to the other side of the pillow. Let’s all high five and keep thinking wild thoughts, dreaming big dreams, and laughing loud laughs.

Thank you so much for reading this.

And thank you for being

AWESOME!

The Devil is everywhere
He's the telemarketer who calls during dinner
He's hiding in your untuned guitar string
Hell last I heard good ole beelzebub was down in Georgia
But where's God been lately?
We used to talk everyday
Now I can't even get a one worded text
I've been to his many houses but no one was home
Just more like me hoping to catch a glimpse of him hiding in the shadows
I call and act like he's listening but I know I'm just getting his voicemail
And I broke the machine by leaving one to many messages
Maybe he's behind on his phone bill

Dear Grandma,

How do I remember you?

You left a challenge, a challenge that has been running through my mind for the past 6 months.

Do I remember you for your Movie star looks,
or your most valued picture? (The one with ******, you, your father, and Jesse Owens.)

Do I remember you for your love of expensive things,
and your love of the Olympics?

Do I remember for you athletic ability, or for your distain of the Irish blood that runs in my veins?

Do I remember you for cutting flowers together in the garden, or for cutting me out of family pictures?


Do I remember you for your blue eyes?
Or the extensive **** memorabilia that you collected?

Do I remember you for your love of red lipstick,
or for your classist view of the world?


Do I remember you for your modeling career, or the way that my father took all your money before you were dead and put you in the cheapest nursing home he could find, and then left you there to be sedated into oblivion until you died? (A fate I would not wish on anyone).

I guess only time will tell.


Although you did not teach me the lesson that most grandmothers teach their grandchildren, you taught me some life lessons that have changed who I am and how I act for the better.

Seeing you, when I was just 7, malnourished because of your inability to cook, instilled in me the absolute necessity to know how to cook for myself and those around me.

Seeing your apartment choked to the ceiling with everything from newspaper clippings, and designer coats, to mayonnaise jars and mold, made me see the point of cleaning my room, and not having to many belongings.  

When I was 8, seeing you be cruel to the cleaning lady because of the color of her skin, made me feel sick, and resolve to try and treat everyone I met and knew with equality and fairness.


Watching you squander your money on anything the telemarketer had to offer makes me think twice before I buy anything I think I might need.

You have given me many valuable lessons weather you intended to, or not.


I have heard that the line between good and evil runs in every human heart. This is something I believe. I truly believe, that there was good in you.

The last time I saw you, you were barley conscious.

You said three words to me. "I'm glad you came" and smiled. I will remember you for that smile, and I will remember you for the things you taught me.

I wish you well wherever you choose to go next.

I promise to you that, you will be remembered.

Sincerely, your Granddaughter

We live in a town with an Indian name
An Indian name from a language that's no longer spoken
An Indian name from a people who may no longer exist

Sometimes someone will say what the name of our town means in the Indian language
And we'll marvel at that
More likely we'll just laugh

Because our town is nothing like the way the Indians said it is
It's a place with a lot of fast-food restaurants
And it's a place with a lot of sit-down restaurants where you can't buy anything that costs less than $40

If we leave this town
Sometimes we'll talk about how we're from this town
Or how we're going back to this town
And then when we get back there maybe
We'll get a call from a telemarketer who can't pronounce the name of our town
That's not how you say it we'll say
It's...

And that will be one of the only times that a word from this Indian language is ever said

We left the front light on last night,
Hoping you'll find your way home,
Through the fog and the beasts,
We didn't sleep last night,
We couldn't bare the thought,
We couldn't think,
Where did you go?
You didn't come home,
And we still don't know,
Like insomnia infested zombies,
We paced into the early hours,
All these worried tears,
Never, never scared us so much,
Then the phone rang...

Only to be a false alarm,
A telemarketer,
Who couldn't quite speak our language,

Once a bright home,
Now so dark and soulless,

A Tap.     Tap.      Tap.
In the early hours,

"Hello Officer..."

I've never collapsed before,
I've never screamed so much I've choked,
And I've never thrown up swallowed tears,
But they found you,
The police man said they found you,
Mutilated in a ditch,
By the park.