Patrick M Brennan

(ENTER BILL. BILL wears a short-sleeve white shirt with a name tag, a black tie, pressed slacks, and unassuming black shoes. He is in a television commercial:)

BILL:The looks on their faces when I’ve done my best to help ‘em – that’s what makes the job worthwhile.

ANNOUNCER 1:(Voice Only)Bill O’Keestis. Father of three, and a Flawed-Mart employee for fourteen years.

BILL:We’re here to help the customer find exactly what they’re looking for, and when they’ve found it, they need to know that they’re going home with the best price they could possibly pay.

ANNOUNCER 1:He’s been an assistant manager for the past eight years.

BILL:And if that means that we have to work a few hours off the clock, well, we’ll do whatever it takes.

ANNOUNCER 1:He’s finally got enough time with the company to qualify for health insurance.

BILL:I’m not asking my people to do anything I don’t do.

ANNOUNCER 1:And he’s finally got a wage that lets him afford it, unlike most of the people he manages.

BILL:It’s been a long time since I had that health insurance.

ANNOUNCER 1:He used to run the hardware store downtown. But the hardware store isn’t there any more.

BILL:People want low prices!

ANNOUNCER 1:Neither is downtown.

BILL:I don’t mind working a little overtime. Neither do any of the people I manage.

ANNOUNCER 1:Of course, it’s completely against Flawed-Mart policy to ask or expect our sales associates to work off the clock.

BILL:I was only doing what the store manager told me to do.

ANNOUNCER 1:And we don’t expect our managers to alter employee time cards.

BILL:He told me to do that, too.

ANNOUNCER 1:I said, our managers don’t alter employee time cards.

BILL:I have three daughters at home.

ANNOUNCER 1:Of course there are targets to meet. Flawed-Mart works hard to keep payroll costs down, in order to pass the savings to you.

BILL:I need this job.

ANNOUNCER 1:We don’t tell our managers to time-shave. We don’t have to.

BILL:My wife is sick. I need health insurance!

ANNOUNCER 1:And it’s men like Bill O’Keestis that keep Flawed-Mart the kind of place it is.

BILL:It won’t happen again. I swear!

ANNOUNCER 1:A place where you can find the finest Chinese-made products at the lowest rock-bottom prices.

BILL:Please!

ANNOUNCER 1:Flawed-Mart. Always willing to find a scapegoat. Always.

BILL:It’s the fucking media! If they hadn’t run this story, who’d've cared!

ANNOUNCER 2:(Voice Only)Now seeking sales associates in your area! Apply at your nearest Flawed-Mart.

Someone who knows asks the question: If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? Andrew Brown’s got a good point. I like OpenOffice and I use it on a daily basis, though I don’t think it’s terribly buggy. It’s never mangled my documents the way Microsoft Word has. However, I have never contributed money or code to OpenOffice, even though I really should.

I sometimes listen to the “alternative music” channel on XM radio. One of their shticks is to use the station ID break (which is wholly unnecessary on satellite radio, isn’t it?) to taunt their listeners, who are hip and ironic enough to enjoy having their hip ironic hipness ridiculed.

So the other evening, while I was driving home, my XM radio said of the alternative music channel, “…the music that used to make you cool … The way the minivan and the stock options don’t now.”

And meanwhile the XM radio display, which usually displays the artist and the track title in big bright amber letters, read:

You’re out of Huggies, alt boy.

And I thought, “I do NOT own a minivan. And we use Pampers, so there.”

They think they know me. Hah!

Was it simple intolerance? Xenophobia? Class resentment? Insecurity? Mental illness? Self-loathing? Or a combustible mix of all of these? Whatever it was, put on display on this video segment from Trading Spouses, it made for a hell of a show (in more ways than one, apparently). This poor woman from Louisiana loses it when she returns from “dark-sided” Massachusetts, and launches into a tirade about being a “prayer warrior,” about “gargoyles,” about the horrible “soltice party” [sic] she attended, about how she had to force her hosts’ children to go to a Catholic Church! I watched slack-jawed – appropriately enough, I suppose – as this woman screamed at her husband and children, humiliating herself and her family on national television. (and I thought, “those girls aren’t going to let their mother ever forget about that“) At one point, she tries to throw out all the crew members who aren’t Christians, and screams, “Get the hell out of my house – In Jesus’s name, I pray.” Brilliant.

It was great TV. I feel sorry for her, because there are no do-overs on national TV, and she’s had her bite at the apple, and she will forever be the fundamentalist crazy fat lady on the TV who doesn’t even know what a solstice is. (Hint: It has nothing to do with Satan.) However, sorry as I feel for her, it was still great TV.

If I had written her words as dialog, I would have been accused of being an anti-Christian – or anti-Southern – or anti-fat bigot, a hater of people who are not like me. If I had written her words as dialog, they would have been dismissed as totally unrealistic and over-the-top. Now I have a counter-example. Serious, steadfast, insular, raging lunatics really exist, utterly convinced of their own rightness and the rightness of their particular version of reality.

It’s sad, and I pity this poor woman and her family – not that she would care. I come from the hated state of Massachusetts, and I’m not a Christian, so I must be dark-sided. For what it’s worth, I agree with Margaret Perrin that astrology, psychics, and tarot cards are baloney; where I part company with Margaret is that I don’t think they’re evil. Also I eat less.