Next time I’ll make the right choice, and my epitaph will read, “DIED COOL.”
This conversation took place before Google existed. And boy howdy, there are some really awful toupees out there. Just be bald, it’s cheaper and you’ll look better!
Tales of the BossLady are anecdotes I wrote several years ago when I was working for a, shall we say, rather eccentric woman in the real estate business. Though I have long since moved on, I present these little stories as I originally wrote them, in the present tense, as if I were still slaving under her kooky and mercurial whip.
BossLady rather abruptly started talking about Feng Shui one day. We’re still sitting around in our makeshift “office,” post-hurricane, watching boxes and file folders and other detritus build up around us, and one day she just…asks me if I know anything about Feng Shui.
I replied, truthfully, “Well, I know about it, but I don’t really know anything about it.” One of my relatives had expressed an interest in Feng Shui years ago, and I had gone with her to a Feng Shui store (yes, they exist). I know that it’s the art of object placement, and that certain colors of certain items in certain sections of certain rooms do different things to the energy, or something, when they’re facing a certain way. Or something.
Actually, I immediately started thinking of that episode of “Sealab 2021,” “Murphy Murph and the Feng Shui Bunch.” BossLady and Captain Murphy share some alarming similarities.
Anyway, BossLady said that she had heard a lot of great things about Feng Shui, so she ordered a course on it. She made a few noises about how she thought it might help the business. I said, “Mmmmmm,” for lack of anything better or more polite to say.
The following week, a box came to the house marked “FENG SHUI.” She was very excited when I told her the box had come (it was a really small box, about the size of a small town’s phone book, so I’m guessing the “course” consists of a small book and a CD-ROM or two), and I expected to have to listen to her yap about the Magic of the East and how it has So Much To Teach Us, but I never heard another word about it afterwards.
If she has since Feng Shuied the “office” in any way, it has been so subtle as to escape my notice.
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Wait! I need closure on that anecdote!
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Thank you, “Supermann.” Again with the LOC BLOCs.
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That’s nice, but it wouldn’t have saved my marriage.
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As much as I appreciate being linked to, I’d really much rather people do it because they actually like my site. Call me old-fashioned.
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Not sure what unlocking my nonexistent iPhone has to do with this, but thanks anyway.
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I’m not sure exactly how many points there are to that story, but I’m glad to hear that people will consent to it anyway.
I take it back. Everybody should have a pushbroom on their face.
In other news, I came home from work last night to find my cable out. After calling Comcast and going through various troubleshooting options, the technician asked if by any chance I’d had any landscaping done. Long story short, the guys who mow my lawn and trim my trees had, in fact, mistaken my cable outside for a weed that needed whacking; it was thoroughly shredded. No TV, no Internet, and no comic update! (After I raised hell with my landlord, the culprits showed up today to splice the wires back together for me, so I should be back on schedule now.)
One of my favorite nature trail spots is adjacent to a small stadium, home to a local baseball team. The other day I headed over there in the morning for a hike (several hours before anybody would be showing up for a game) and parked waaaaaay in the back, in the free zone in the grass, near the trailhead. A parking lot attendant golf-carted himself all the way through the completely empty lot to try to strongarm me into parking even further away, because apparently my one little car would deprive some hapless baseball fan of a free parking space in the grass at the rear of the lot. Lord save me from rent-a-uniforms who have nothing better to do than puff themselves up.
I suppose it’s possible for shut-ins to have wild parties, in the same way that it’s possible for PETA to host a charity pigeon shoot.
In the real estate system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The BossLadies who make all the goofy executive decisions, and the Realtor Assistants who do all the actual work. These are their stories. (Specifically, my stories from a journal I kept several years ago.)
This was another adventure in “capturing” information about potential clients. To make a long story somewhat shorter, BossLady signed up with a company online to have a toll-free phone number. She would put this toll-free number on our real estate signs, which are posted on the properties we have listed. The number isn’t posted anywhere else, not on our flyers or our Web site or anywhere other than real estate signs. That way, whenever someone calls this number, BossLady would know that they definitely saw the sign and were in the vicinity of one of our properties.
So, when people see our signs and call this toll-free number, supposedly the phone system “captures” not only their phone number, but also their name and address — even if they have caller ID blocking. (I was rather concerned about this when she first mentioned it. I looked at the FCC’s Web site and discovered that this is completely legal, which disappoints me mightily.) BossLady talked up this “capturing” technology like crazy when she first found out about it. I expressed a mild consternation about it and let the subject drop, since it was obviously going to happen no matter what I thought. She was crazy about the idea though. She loves the idea of being able to get all the vital statistics of anyone who shows even the faintest interest in our properties. She doesn’t give a crap that people might not want to be added to a mailing list unless they ask to be.
Anyway, I recently had my first occasion to jump into this information-”capturing” world. BossLady was out in the field, and she called me to say that someone had called the toll-free number (she gets a beep or a page whenever this happens), and she wanted me to go online and find out who it was. So I went to the toll-free company’s site, where all the fabulous information is supposedly “captured.” However, the only information I saw was the person’s phone number. No name, no address, no nothing.
I couldn’t resist.
I said to BossLady, “I thought this was supposed to capture their name and address too.”
Her response, rather hasty and defensive, was, “Well, sometimes it doesn’t work if it’s a cellphone.”
This may not sound like a big deal, but after the incredible fuss she made about being able to “capture” people’s names and addresses with this service, you’d think such a thing would be a greater disappointment. Especially since people are most likely going to be calling this number from their cellphones, since they are only seeing this number when they are on the road and drive past our signs.
Schadenfreude? Yeah, a little.