No Echo

This minute I am upset. What better shoulder to throw myself on than that of the collective blogging community?

Before you read on please do remember: I have the patience of a saint. I do bear with call center  staff, making allowances for the shit jobs they do, realizing that they are only mouthpieces of company policies.

But there are limits. And my limit was (nearly) exhausted.

Call center staff have their scripts. I appreciate that. Neither are they nor I robots. How many times do you actually have to plead with them to not read you the same shite again and again. Reminding them of what we covered yesterday and today, and then some. Suggesting a way forward. No, no. Not at all. Let’s go back over the past. I nearly lost it. Which is not my style. In the end I asked to end the conversation as it was going nowhere, resume same conversation later today when I’ll have regained my composure and, maybe, they will have taken time to think (outside their box).

There is something so dehumanizing, impersonal, about the world we now live in it has power to condense me into despair.

U

The Sculptor – One

I quote a useful reminder to myself:

“It is a bad allocation of intelligence, resources and money.”

Let’s leave money out of it since I haven’t spent any. The resource, badly allocated, is my time. Maybe even emotion better allocated to those who can read a heart. Intelligence? Well, I don’t mind throwing it about with abandon. It’s an infinite resource. Time isn’t. So, I’ll waste a bit more and then lay some wasters to rest.

Yes, we are back to the Alternative Comment Box.

Where to start the narrative since there are so many options? My mental health? So generously speculated about by one Sculptor, and one John who only a couple of days ago advocated that mental health should NOT bear stigma. My question why “mental health” is then, so often, all over blogland, is used as an insult, a personal attack, a way of shaming someone into shutting up? Naturally, no answer was forthcoming. It happens when people run out of rhyme and reason to justify their limitations. And I quote the Sculptor aka Tom:

“John. Why do you tolerate that ghastly woman Ursula? Because she has mental issues you think you can help with?”

No, let’s start somewhere else to make the narrative a little more tense.

I question a commentator on the Sculptor’s blog. It’s, as far as I know, an elderly lady – though why I even mention that I don’t know. Mitigating circumstances?

Sa(i)d old lady, let’s call her J, wishes some wastrels dead. So I reply

“How charitable to wish on anyone “being hit by a bus”. I suppose you are also in favour of the death penalty, wish Trump dead whilst priding yourself on your Christian “values”, ethics and morals. I take it you are American?”

This made me, on two blogs, not only “that disgusting woman” but also “that ghastly woman” (don’t say the Sculptor doesn’t use his Thesaurus to vary his disgust at me).

John who took Tom’s batton (always doing the Svengali’s bidding) says that “J is one of life’s sweet people….everyone knows that”.

To which I replied:

“Yes, John, Joanne may be one of life’s sweet people. However, even the sweetest can, occasionally, put a foot wrong, are not above criticism.

I didn’t “attack” Joanne. I thought her comment out of order. You can’t go round wishing for people to die. Sorry, but that’s way off my moral compass. And I said so.

As to “bitter and personal ATTACKS” [Tom accuses me of] – well, Tom, you are the expert. And when you can’t think of anything else to admonish me with you resort to questioning my mental health. Truly inspired as reasoning goes.

Greetings from that “disgusting” woman,
U”

And before you ask: Yes, my comment was deleted. Again. Tom’s calling me disgusting was let to be stand. Yes, Sweethearts, that’s the justice of this world, that’s balance, fairness.

So I am disgusting and off my trolley because I question a sweet old lady calling for someone to die in revenge for the poor Sculptor having to do his sculpting in a metal container in the middle of a UK heat wave (!). That’s right. Let them swing for it. Mind you, having said that, a friend of mine (American), also a very sweet Lady albeit not an old one, also wishes someone dead (Trump). Maybe that’s how it’s done in the States. Hang them. Shoot them. Take a short cut.

To be continued …

U

Anything goes

Where no etiquette exists you have to make it up as you go along. Blogland will, eventually, write its own rule book.

I am not being facetious here. I am in a quandry. Seriously.

A blogger has finally, against all odds, managed to throw me for six. Our blogging relationship died some time ago, briefly resurrected in the last few days.

Why am I floored? I left him a brief message acknowledging my own role in what went wrong within a particular circle of bloggers, at the same time questioning whether he felt any responsibility [for his own role] too.

I received an answer back to the effect that his (very old) mother was dying in hospital (location specified) and for me to “fuck off”.

I am sorry for his imminent loss. However, despite my sympathy, I fail to see how anyone can wallop you with a fact I wasn’t aware off, neither does it make any difference to the rationale of our exchange. I find it vaguely distasteful (and this is not a criticism, it’s just how I feel) to “use” his mother’s possible demise to tell me where the door is.

Am I missing something? Obviously I’ll leave well alone though my first instinct was to impart my good wishes. But having been told to fuck off under the pretext of your parent dying, to me not quite congruent, it’s probably best to do just that [eff off].

Well, who’d have thought it: He finally managed to shut me up and leave me with a bad taste into the bargain.

And for those I need to spell it out for: This is not about point scoring. I am genuinely bewildered.

U

Trilling

In the wake of my last post, and your assorted favoured instruments doing what instruments do (who’ll provide the crescendo?) I will throw my own screech into the ring. Namely the chatterbox.

Don’t dismiss the chatterbox and come to me with bland spoutings of silence is golden” (though it is, and one of the reasons I rarely listen to music when working, instead spending most my life enveloped in relative silence). What’s the other one put forward by those who have little to say, yet trying to justify being a little vacant? “I am a good listener”. Really? How about being a good conversationalist? You know, like ping pong, a game of (table) tennis? Back, forth, back, forth … Then, naturally, and it’s a pet hate of mine, and was amply targeted at me by a woman of questionable integrity and even less brain matter and now having run out of steam: “The empty kettle makes the loudest noise.” What eludes the poor sausage that repeating the same saying again and again doesn’t make her (or the saying) any more interesting or true. She’d have been better advised to fill her own kettle. At least, at boiling point, she’d have made a hissing sound instead of just running dry.

Yes, so, once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox. It’s a gift. Trust me. I have drawn people out of themselves who consider themselves tongue tied, particularly on the phone (yes, phone phobics are my speciality). Of course, one could and would and possibly should agree with one of my sisters who once said to me, tartly: “There is no such thing as a short (telephone) conversation with you, is there?”. She was cross with me at the time, and also right. There isn’t such a thing as a short telephone conversation with me. Not even when you are phoning from a callcentre. I have made friends with people in call centers, weeping at my far removed shoulder, thanking me for talking to them as if they were part of the human race, not just doing a shitty job.

Yes, chatterbox. Like any instrument you need to fine tune it (a bit like Lorna’s and Shoshanah’s much desired singing voices and/or bodies) and Maria’s hardening finger tips. I once did stop in my tracks when FOS (father of son) suggested it might be less time consuming (for him) if I stuck to written communication which, apparently though not evidenced by this post, tends to be concise and to the point. I interpreted it as a sort of a backhander of a compliment.

Anyway, and then I shut up, you will suffer, like with any art, for refining your powers as Ms Chatterbox. Not least because you tempt people into lying to you. One hour on, they’ll tell you someone is at the door, the dog has died or whatever a suitable excuse may be to get me off the blower.

Apropos of nothing: Today John told someone (not me) that he (the other) was a “tit”. I have been wondering: Obviously what is a tit to a suckling baby, and a singing bird to the enthusiast, is someone else’s arse. Or some such.

U

Sticks

Cheerful Monk aka Jean posted a cartoon on rescue dogs. Since I can’t leave an answer there (I did alert Jean that her new fire wall is the Cerberus of all gatekeepers) I’ll leave my comment here instead:

“Every time a dog wags its tail what I, first and foremost, feel is their sense of anticipation, a dog’s hope. That’s why it’s hard, almost impossible, to disappoint a dog.”

U