My husband is a would-be grifter. A grifter is a con artist who enjoys “shady dealings,” sometimes offering to pave your driveway with his “leftover” load of asphalt at a deep, deep discount. It’s not asphalt, Folks. It’s salt dough made of flour, salt, and water.
My husband isn’t the fake asphalt selling kind of con artist. He’s the ‘let’s get free stuff from the timeshare people’ type of con man. Unfortunately, he sometimes likes to drag me into his pit of shady dealings.
There was this once . . . well, it all began with a phone call from a Timeshare salesperson.
“How about a romantic weekend?” Sherwood called out over his shoulder, while pausing in his over-the-phone dickering.
“A romantic weekend? With whom?”
“Me,” he said.
“How far do I have to go?”
More phone dickering ensued.
“Right down the road at the Hilton Resort and Day Spa, right here in Orlando.”
“No planes? Some romance but not too much? Reading by the pool? What’s the catch?”
“No catch. It’s free.”
“Hmmmmmmm! Sounds like a hookup, and you know how I feel about hookups. I believe that you should pay all the cash money, so that you can use all your vocal cords when you complain.”
“Sign us up,” he said. The dickering ended and the hookup began.
In the truck on the way to “the romantic weekend” he let me know that 1) the grandchildren would be joining us, and 2) the grandchildren would be staying the night along with their parents bringing the total number of people in our room to about three hundred, and 3) I had to attend an hour and a half timeshare presentation—at 8:00am the next morning—the hookup.
“I am not attending a timeshare sales pitch. I hate those things. I won’t do it.”
“You have to, or they’ll kick us out, and besides, I kind of fudged to get us a free weekend. Usually, they won’t let you stay in their resort if you live locally, but the nice man on the phone . . .”
“You mean the other disgusting con artist?”
“The nice man said that I could use my Marietta, Georgia business address, and that there will be a free breakfast and gift cards.
“What are we homeless? Is this our new strategy to feed the family?”
I went to the pitch. I was wearing a bathing suit, reading a book, and sporting a bad attitude. I continued to read my book through the entire video presentation that promised Nirvana and gift cards should we purchase a Hilton timeshare.
The high-pressure sales lady looked at my husband, the crook, and said, “Your wife doesn’t seem to be too interested.”
“Hee, ha, hee, well, she’s here under protest. Hee, hee, hee,” he said as sweat dripped from his criminal brow.
“We’re not buying a timeshare,” I explained. “We live down the road. We’re here to eat your breakfast, sleep in your beds, use your toilets, swim in your pool, and collect our reward; besides my husband gets endless, free Marriot points from five star resorts. Can you beat free?”
“Mind if I call in my manager?” she said.
“Please. Call two,” I said, stuffing a bookmark into my book. “We’ll wait.”
The manager was very nice but determined to get to the bottom of our “situation.”
“Your phone salesman. The guy who contacted us suggested the work address scam. The guy who works for you. You know, the guy you hired to call us.”
“Shady, very shady,” the manager said.
“Excellent choice of words,” I said, glaring at my shady husband. As we left the presentation—early—my husband, the charlatan, turned, paused, and said to the nice manager, “I hate to be tacky but I understood there were gift cards involved.”
In disgust, I left the further dickering to change my identity and forge a passport. Later, at the pool, as I watched the grandchildren frolic, I turned to my husband, Mack the Knife, and said, “Seems like a lot of trouble to swim in someone else’s swimming pool.”
“But fun.”
That’s how it starts—a life of crime and shady dealings.
Linda (Law and Order) Zern
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Saturday, February 7, 2015
JITTERY MUCH?
To recap: I am not dead. I’m just concentrating really hard.
Several years ago, my husband couldn’t instantly get a hold of me via my cell phone, because it was dead, the cell phone. NOT ME. When he couldn’t immediately contact me from Kuala Lumpur or Detroit or Walmart or wherever he was wandering around, to let me know he’d forgotten to take out the garbage or something equally informative, he panicked.
So he called our daughter, Heather.
Who called our daughter, Maren.
Who told her friends at school that I’m a hermit and a nut.
Who called my husband, her father.
Who called our daughter, Heather, again.
Who called each other, over and over, whipping each other into a jittery frenzy.
Heather finally broke the cycle of hysteria by calling her friend, Maria, and saying, “I’m at work. Could you drive out to my parent’s house and check on my AGED mother?”
Maria!
Marie who lives in a whole other village, Marie, who got in her car, drove to our country home (also our city home) and finding all the doors, window, and portholes open assumed that I had been eaten by cats—also raccoons.
I was in my office—working.
Proving that what we’ve got here is a hefty case of the jitters.
While it is true that I live alone a great deal of time, I am not a complete idiot. I try to wait until my husband is home to clean the chimney, re-organize the hayloft, chop down trees, or check the crawlspace for expired squirrels.
And as far as being murdered in my sleep by criminal types, I believe that most criminal types are stupid people, the kind of people that get stuck in chimneys. And if I can’t outsmart some nimrod stuck in my chimney then shame on me.
That’s why I sleep with the cat. Plan A is that I will throw the cat at the stupid intruder and make my escape out of the bathroom window. At which point I will run to the ditch out front and hide behind the enormous stump that the county hasn’t carted away from storm damage. It’s the main reason I haven’t called the county about the eyesore stump by the road. That stump is part of my master escape plan. I have a detailed schematic drawn up.
Please note: That stump has been hauled off since I first reported on the above foolishness, thus changing plan A to plan B.
Unfortunately, plan B has me hiding in my neighbor’s barn in my *scanties. So sometimes I sleep in my bathrobe with my cell phone in the pocket, except that my cell phone is quite often “dead,” thus kicking off jittery meltdowns in the first place. Go figure.
Linda (Chimney Sweep) Zern
*Scanties is a southern word for clothing you don’t want to be caught wearing while hiding in a ditch.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
R is for Respect
Marriage is about respect. Marriage is about mutual respect and approbation. (Approbation is a fancy word meaning respect and is supposed to impress you with my big word brain—also my ability to use a thesaurus.)
Marriage is about laughing in all the right places—respectfully, of course.
My problem with the whole respect deal is my husband, Sherwood. He’s a nut. He’s a traveling nut, who might be mildly frightened by big city street vendors.
I called my husband in New York City during the big freeze and was shocked when he answered his phone out-of-breath and gasping. He sounded like he was either running from panhandlers, in the middle of being mugged, or dodging pedi-cabs.
“What is going on? Are you being mugged? Say ‘uncle’ if you are.”
“No. I’ve . . . (sounds of gasping) . . . just been . . . (tearing cough) running down Madison Avenue.”
“What? Is it the street vendors? I know how you hate those guys. Are they after you? Say ‘cheap crap’ if they are.”
“No, no . . . (sounds of fifty year old lungs trying to expand) . . . I just thought I knew where my work conference was being held—but it turns out I don’t, and it’s like a minus three degrees around here. No self-respecting mugger would come out in this weather.”
“Oh my gosh . . . people are freezing to death up there, while walking their dogs to make yellow snow.” I knew it was entirely possible that my husband was wearing the equivalent of a windbreaker in single digit cold. “You’re going to die. Do you have a hat?”
“No.”
“Gloves?”
“No.”
“A scarf?”
“I looked for a scarf before I left Florida. Does that count?”
“Have you found your ears? When you find your ears, we’ll discuss the impact of good intentions on a blizzard.”
I had a vague memory of Sherwood pawing through my underwear drawer looking for a blue scarf he had owned—TEN YEARS BEFORE in another state, possibly another universe. I remember telling him, “Honey, don’t you remember we used that scarf to tie a towel on a shepherd’s head for the Christmas pageant? That thing is long gone, probably one of those three kings absconded with it.”
He tried to reassure me.
“After I left my hotel, I walked for a couple of blocks and thought, ‘Hey, this isn’t too bad. I’m okay.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh no! What happened to my ears?’”
“Honey, that means they fell off. Your ears are off. Check. Look around on the ground.”
He ignored me.
“And then,” he said, “I saw a woman with a scarf the size of a blanket wrapped around her head, and I thought seriously about snatching it and running for it. You know like on Seinfeld.”
“Babe, Jerry snatched a loaf of bread, not survival gear,” I said, firmly. “Now listen carefully, I want you to look for the steam coming up from the underground through the grates and head for those. You may need to roll some homeless folks around—homeless folks that, by the way, will probably be more appropriately dressed for the cold than you are.”
“I’m way ahead of you. I’ve been running from grate to grate; that’s why I’m breathing like this.”
I ignored him.
“And, you’re not going to want to hear this next bit, but you’re going to have to BUY yourself a hat and what not—to stay alive, which is the opposite of dying.”
He groaned. “But there’s no where around here to get anything, nothing, no where.”
My worry turned to confusion then to suspicion and finally to frustration.
“I thought you said you were in New York City. Madison Avenue—the pulsing heartbeat of the world’s pacemaker for commercialism, right? That Madison Avenue?”
“Un huh.”
“Buy yourself a scarf! Before you die! Find a street vendor! Find a guy that opens his trench coat and says, ‘Want to buy an electric blanket or maybe a blow torch?’”
I spent the rest of the day afraid to watch cable news for fear that I’d see my husband scuttling like a hermit crab looking for a better fitting shell along the streets of New York City. The news anchors would be pointing at him, mocking, and saying, “That guy is going to die.”
Respect in a marriage is a funny thing. I know it makes me laugh quite a bit.
I’m just wondering where Sherwood is going to prop his glasses, what with his ears falling off and all.
Linda (Bundle Up) Zern
Marriage is about laughing in all the right places—respectfully, of course.
My problem with the whole respect deal is my husband, Sherwood. He’s a nut. He’s a traveling nut, who might be mildly frightened by big city street vendors.
I called my husband in New York City during the big freeze and was shocked when he answered his phone out-of-breath and gasping. He sounded like he was either running from panhandlers, in the middle of being mugged, or dodging pedi-cabs.
“What is going on? Are you being mugged? Say ‘uncle’ if you are.”
“No. I’ve . . . (sounds of gasping) . . . just been . . . (tearing cough) running down Madison Avenue.”
“What? Is it the street vendors? I know how you hate those guys. Are they after you? Say ‘cheap crap’ if they are.”
“No, no . . . (sounds of fifty year old lungs trying to expand) . . . I just thought I knew where my work conference was being held—but it turns out I don’t, and it’s like a minus three degrees around here. No self-respecting mugger would come out in this weather.”
“Oh my gosh . . . people are freezing to death up there, while walking their dogs to make yellow snow.” I knew it was entirely possible that my husband was wearing the equivalent of a windbreaker in single digit cold. “You’re going to die. Do you have a hat?”
“No.”
“Gloves?”
“No.”
“A scarf?”
“I looked for a scarf before I left Florida. Does that count?”
“Have you found your ears? When you find your ears, we’ll discuss the impact of good intentions on a blizzard.”
I had a vague memory of Sherwood pawing through my underwear drawer looking for a blue scarf he had owned—TEN YEARS BEFORE in another state, possibly another universe. I remember telling him, “Honey, don’t you remember we used that scarf to tie a towel on a shepherd’s head for the Christmas pageant? That thing is long gone, probably one of those three kings absconded with it.”
He tried to reassure me.
“After I left my hotel, I walked for a couple of blocks and thought, ‘Hey, this isn’t too bad. I’m okay.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh no! What happened to my ears?’”
“Honey, that means they fell off. Your ears are off. Check. Look around on the ground.”
He ignored me.
“And then,” he said, “I saw a woman with a scarf the size of a blanket wrapped around her head, and I thought seriously about snatching it and running for it. You know like on Seinfeld.”
“Babe, Jerry snatched a loaf of bread, not survival gear,” I said, firmly. “Now listen carefully, I want you to look for the steam coming up from the underground through the grates and head for those. You may need to roll some homeless folks around—homeless folks that, by the way, will probably be more appropriately dressed for the cold than you are.”
“I’m way ahead of you. I’ve been running from grate to grate; that’s why I’m breathing like this.”
I ignored him.
“And, you’re not going to want to hear this next bit, but you’re going to have to BUY yourself a hat and what not—to stay alive, which is the opposite of dying.”
He groaned. “But there’s no where around here to get anything, nothing, no where.”
My worry turned to confusion then to suspicion and finally to frustration.
“I thought you said you were in New York City. Madison Avenue—the pulsing heartbeat of the world’s pacemaker for commercialism, right? That Madison Avenue?”
“Un huh.”
“Buy yourself a scarf! Before you die! Find a street vendor! Find a guy that opens his trench coat and says, ‘Want to buy an electric blanket or maybe a blow torch?’”
I spent the rest of the day afraid to watch cable news for fear that I’d see my husband scuttling like a hermit crab looking for a better fitting shell along the streets of New York City. The news anchors would be pointing at him, mocking, and saying, “That guy is going to die.”
Respect in a marriage is a funny thing. I know it makes me laugh quite a bit.
I’m just wondering where Sherwood is going to prop his glasses, what with his ears falling off and all.
Linda (Bundle Up) Zern
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