I like to say I live my life by one rule and that rule is “Please don’t make me be an asshole.”
I imagine the following I’ve built over the last two decades (OMG, two decades!) has largely come because it’s fun (for everyone but me) to see what happens when I am forced to be an asshole. It’s never me who starts it, yet it always seems to be me who finishes it, as I accelerate from “nice, mellow, minding my own beeswax” to “screeching she-devil” approximately as quickly as a Tesla goes from 0 to 60. Most often this acceleration occurs in conjunction with my having to speak with a customer service representative after navigating a poorly designed automated voice response unit.
My comeuppance is always my nerd husband who’ll afterward explain to me in far too much detail how the call center did a bad job designing the call flow prompts. Sometimes he’ll even sketch me a diagram on Vizio. (He’s also the one who says you have to scream “Agent! Agent!” and not “Representative!” as they’re usually not designed to recognize that word.) Believe me, I pay for the sin of not having enough patience.
Anyway, the whole thing about having one rule isn’t exactly true. I have MANY, MANY distinct and arbitrary rules by which I live my life, including one where the heat can’t be turned on until November 1 and the AC until May 1, which is a rule Fletch perpetually breaks because he has deemed it “stupid” for us to sit here either shivering or sweating for no reason other than an arbitrary decision I inherited from my father who absolutely never violated this rule, despite how miserable it was for everyone.
Another one of my rules is I don’t prank people, at least not face to face. It’s not that I’m anti-prank, it’s that I have zero poker face. I literally cannot hold my shit together if I see the fruits of my prank labor about to detonate. I blow it with my laughter every time. That said, I am the first person to prank friends via Amazon purchases and our friend Lisa has a Christmas tree full of pornaments to prove it.
That’s why I’m so proud of what I pulled off with Fletch yesterday.
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