An American in Norfolk

Well, Monica over at 5 Cats Shy has tried to help me out once again by tagging me on a "7 things about me" blog, but I'm passing once again. I didn't realize I offended her by not continuing her meme yesterday, so now I imagine she may get overtly hostile! I mean no offense, really, but I just couldn't accept her offer today. I could barely get past her first "thing" because it reminded me of one of my most absurd childhood memories. Monica's first "thing" is that she's deathly afraid of ketchup.

See? I knew you'd understand.

So here I am without anything creative tonight. I could drag out another humiliating story (there seems to be no end to them), but I want to read and enjoy a glass of wine so I need to keep this short.

Today was relatively tame and ordinary -- for me at least. I'm only scheduled to work 4 hours on Fridays, but worked all day because I owe the state some time {cough} facebook {cough} and because next week is short due to the holiday. My friends Gloria and Ruth decided to order in some Chinese food since it was a full-fledged blizzard in Norfolk (read: sporadic flurries that turned to rain before hitting the ground) and we didn't want to leave our building. Another friend, Leslie, and I decided to join them. I tried phoning and got busy signals at both numbers. I then decided to write out our order and fax it over. The fax went through but never connected. Our fax machine stores the fax and tries again if a connection isn't made at first. So I was kind of stuck. I couldn't go phone in the order for fear that they'd receive the fax order and we'd wind up with two. I waited a while and then hit 'cancel' on the fax machine. This coincidentally woke the machine up and it tried connecting to the Chinese restaurant once again. Fortunately, the fax machine is very much like me and gave up after two tries. I got a printout telling me to phone the remote location.

I returned to the office and phoned the restaurant. I got through this time and placed the order. I prefer my full name of Amy Jo to Amy, but use 'Amy' when ordering food to avoid the name being mangled into Mary Jo, Joanne, or Suzanne (it's happened). So I left the name of Amy and then realized later that we have another employee named Amy at work. Since our Security section was going to page "Amy" when the food arrived and it so happens Amy is pregnant and probably capable of lunch theft, I went out to Security to tell them about the food order:

Me: "If you see an Asian man bearing Chinese food, please page me..."
Him: "I'm only supposed to page you if it's an Asian man, not a..."
Me (laughing): "That's right, just an Asian; not an Irishman, or an Italian, or a..."
Him: "...American..."

Uh.........

Just then, a Southern 'gentleman' in the lobby chimes in with something that ends in "chinky".

Dear God.

I don't know what he said, but for the life of me, I can think of nothing inoffensive that would end in the word "chinky".

It was at this point that I exclaimed, "Dear God, I have to get out of here!" and ran back to my office.

The food arrived, I was paged, and I had to laugh because the delivery man was in fact "American" -- a Caucasian male.

I brought the food back to the office and realized the name on the order was "Irma" something and the address was not ours. Crap! I ran into the lobby, saw the elevator had already taken The American away, and headed for the stairs. Somehow, when running down flights of stairs carrying a sack of Chinese food, they seem to multiply. I kept thinking I was at the bottom, but damn there was another flight of stairs! I burst out of the building just as The American was getting in his car. I explained what had happened, he apologized, thanked me for saving him a trip back from the other location, and we got everything squared away.

After all that effort, I sucked most of my Chinese food down. I was stuffed to the point of mild nausea and confident I wouldn't be eating dinner. But damned if my stomach wasn't growling with hunger pangs an hour later! What the hell is that all about? It always happens with Chinese food. Maybe I'll buy "American" next time.

Good grief.

Hi Mrs. Schmidt! I'm sure aspects of this were very confusing for you...