Emergency Bags and Leaky Data

I love to listen to other people speak candidly and I love other people’s stories. Especially when they are good enough to steal for blog post material.

When we were visiting with our musician friends, I had the pleasure of watching the drummer and bass player compare the contents of emergency bags they keep in their cars. I don’t remember everything that was in each of their bags, I just remember this much: The bass player had fishing line, sunglasses, and water. The drummer had lyrics, vodka, and about 14 hand towels.

I figured between the two of them, they could do wet work. The fishing line could be used for garroting their target and then the 14 hand towels could be used to clean up the mess. Although, I don’t think that is what emergency bags are supposed to be used for.

The emergency bag show and tell ended and the drummer started talking about singers with impressive vocal ranges. Which led to a discussion about Steve Perry from Journey.

My friend Lizzie said that she saw him in a mall once and he went into the women’s bathroom.

Randy is not a fan of Steve Perry. He calls him Howard the duck. No idea why as I don’t think Steve Perry looks like a duck.

Randy: He went into the women’s bathroom so he could brush his vagina.

Me: Yes. Because that’s what people with vaginas do. We brush them. I know I like to brush my vagina at least 3 times a day.

Randy: With a toothbrush?

Me: Now you’re just being silly. We use a vagina brush.

Bass Player (using a radio announcer’s voice): Buy two vagina brushes and get one free.

Me: This is not your mother’s vagina brush.

The next morning, Randy and I went to the drug store to stock up on some cold meds as he was sick as fuck. While we were in the store, I found this brush for a dollar.

vbrush

We go back to my friend’s house and the drummer was up and about. I pulled the brush out and said “Hey, look! I got a vagina brush for a dollar”!

He had forgotten the conversation.

I’m going to say that my most awkward thing I’ve done in the past two months was to announce to a virtual stranger that I had a vagina brush. Seriously, we barely know each other.  We had to be reintroduced the night before as he didn’t recognize me. I’d hang shit on him in this post for that, but honestly, I have to be reintroduced to people a lot. I tend to blend.

I recovered like I normally do by babbling incoherently until I’m reduced to just making noises and hand gestures. I had a vagina brush to wave around like a conductor’s baton to help me out.

It occurred to me that a cheap round brush might make the worst vagina brush ever. Here is my list of things that would make a worse vagina brush than my cheap round brush:

razor blades

barbed wire

swords

sticky pine cones

live chickens

packing tape

incandescent light bulbs

As it turns out, no matter how tired and giddy you are from the day before, the vagina brush conversation can only be sustained for so long. More accurately, it shouldn’t be sustained for very long.

Lizzie told me a story, after listening to me bitch about my broke ass phone for the 10th time, about having to get a tech support guy out to their cabin because their internet was down.

To say that my friend and her husband are smart people would be an understatement.

Lizzie: So, the tech guy tells us “I see what your problem is. Your modem is full and the data is leaking out”.

Me:…

Lizzie: We didn’t call him out on his bullshit. We just asked questions to try to keep it going.

Me: Data that leaks out of the internet smells like cat piss. But I guess that is to be expected.

Lizzie: Yeah, whole websites are gone forever.

Me: And collected in the corners of your studio.

Lizzie: It has a sort of sticky, grainy consistency.

Me: You probably need Goo Gone to get that shit cleaned up. Because you don’t want that shit getting rancid. Internet people are weird. It would end up eating through your floors.

I’m kind of glad I had my forced electronics break. I would have forgotten a lot of this stuff had I not written down some notes. I think my notebook will become an extension of me from now on.

So, what do you guys talk about when you get together with your friends? Anyone else ever have that leaky data issue? What’s the dumbest thing a tech support person has ever said to you?

 

 

 

52 Thoughts.

  1. OMG, I’m dying laughing. Vagina brush. Waving your brand-new vagina brush at a virtual stranger. Jesus, I love you.

    As to the emergency bags, that cracks me up. My husband is a drummer and he would totally have lyrics in his bag. And maybe towels.

    Vagina brush. Lmao.

  2. I prefer natural bristle vagina brushes, myself.

    We get scam calls from guys from India all the time trying to get us to let them into our computers so they can steal information. We play along, pretending to do what they say. They always start out with something like, “Your computer is sending a lot of data. I’m with Microsoft and we want to fix that.” My computer is “sending a lot of data”? WTF does that even mean? And if you’re with Microsoft, why do you care? If you said you were with Comcast, it might be a teeny bit more plausible. But we play along and say things like, “Gosh I typed in what you said, and I got an error message that says ‘Some asshole is trying to scam you. You should tell him to fuck off. Do you wish to continue?’ What should I do now??”

  3. A “tech” guy that says something like that should be fired, evicted from his house, and live on the street for trying to pull that kind of bullshit! People like that make me cringe. Even if he was trying to slip one by some “regular people” or “computer illiterate” people, you still don’t talk like that. It’s ridiculously degrading to those people’s intelligence and plain rude. What an idiot.

  4. I have nothing so awesome as leaking data but without fail, every damn time I need to call tech support the first question is “did you try turning it off and back on?”. I understand that there are some stock questions that tend to get asked but I always call in and the first thing I say is “ok…this is my problem…” followed by “…and here’s what I’ve done so far.” I once got caught in an infinite loop with a rep that apparently ran out of words but wasn’t allowed to hang up, he just kept repeating “well, sounds like that’s what you should probably do. Unless you want us to send a tech out.” after I told him I was just going to buy a new router and set it up myself.

    • Oh yeah..I love that. I TRY to start with all the typical things I tried first…but then they always ask if you have done the things you JUST SAID that you’ve already done.

  5. Hahaha! That was hilarious! Wow. Something as memorable as “vagina brush” and he didn’t make the connection?? Weird… or maybe his buzz wore off. My husband swears his dad doesn’t remember all the fucked up things he says when he’s drunk & then he’s clueless why certain people aren’t talking to him. I called bullshit on that immediately.

    Tech-support dumbassery? I can’t really recall, BUT the dumbest thing any idiot, collections, call-center agent said to me was “You’re LYING. You ARE Michelle Jesaldi (what it phonetically sounds like they’re saying EVERY TIME they’ve called my house for the past 7 years!) and I KNOW that Paul Jesaldi is THERE with you”.

    Apparently they owe someone a LOT of $$. Apparently, call-center moron did NOT know who he was fucking with. I said he had NO right to know my name and that I was writing down the 800-number he was calling for and that I would be filing a harassment complaint against him and his employer.

    • Yeah, I had the number of someone who had people calling him for money and they got really shitty. I am not Greg. I am also not a dance instructor. holy hell.

  6. This one is priceless! Vagina brush…ba ha ha ha ha.
    My emergency bag has some blister plasters, one piece of cotton wool and 2 flu capsules. It really should contain a bottle of JD and a bar of chocolate, but then I’d know where it was and would be constantly redefining what constitutes an emergency.

  7. That was a classic !!!!! I am sitting at work trying to laugh to myself because being at work is not laughing matter right now and I’m not being very successful so getting strange looks over the top of the computer !!!!
    Don’t you hate it when you have to be re-introduced to people because they are too dumb to remember they have been introduced to you already – when that happens I normally go to great lengths to remind them of the occasion when we were first introduced !!!
    Next time I’m out shopping I’m going to have to see if I can source a vagina brush – wonder what the people at the chemist would say if I went in and asked for one ????? Maybe they have a list of strange items asked for by customers and I could make it onto that list ?
    Have the best day Lovely Lady !
    Me xox

  8. My emergency kit in my (what’s that little cupboard thingie under the dash called again?) whatever?
    Anyway – it contains window wipes, to clean the nicotine off the interior windscreen from time to time, 2 plasters that I’ve never been able to open, a bottle of soda water (?),
    and a pack of plastic knives and forks.
    I’m all set for any emergency, right?

  9. Haha, that’s hilarious! Hmm, let’s see. Well, today for weird conversations, I debated whether or not saying “I’m going to bite you!” counts as using your words. (It totally does.)

  10. Funny that Randy should say that about Steve Perry… The only time I saw Journey (I believe it was ’78 in the East Gym at Humboldt State when I was 17) I thought he was female for most of the show. I only figured out my mistake during one of the last songs when he did this weird pelvic-thrust dance thing and it became apparent that he did not, in fact, have a vagina. Or maybe he does; I didn’t actually see it, but it didn’t seem like anything anyone would do with a vagina if they had one. I’ve always just written the incident off to the quality of the pot they were growing in Humboldt county back then.

  11. OK — I’m a little OCD about being prepared for emergencies. My car emergency kit has a solar blanket, water, some Cujo food, flashlight, toilet paper (because I’m not going to wipe with LEAVES, dammit!), a lighter, and duct tape. I also have some cash stashed somewhere in my car…but I don’t remember where I hid it now.

  12. Some of my favorite conversations involved “things that can be eaten with Cheez-Whiz” and other conversations that make no sense whatsoever, even in context. I have a list of things, one of which is, “ghetto deer want to carjack you.” Sadly, the days of these conversations are over for reasons best not gone into here. Luckily, I have new avenues of conversation to pursue and better ways to put them to use.

  13. my favorite thing that came out of this post were the tweets! hahaha nothing catches your attention like “vagina brush.” I know it got mine! Attention that is, not my vagina. Wait, what?

  14. Oh Michelle. I’m so glad I found 3 bars of service in a tiny notch of my camper window today so I could have a laugh…

    I have conversations like that– I had one recently that I will probably blog about; it was awkward and I ended up randomly talking about nothing and using hand gestures until I could exit. I’m a dork, it can’t be helped.

    Oddest phone-tech person comment I have heard was the one where you get a sales call from someone who says, in a curiously sing-song East Indian accent that:

    Him: My name is Kevin and I’d like to ask me a few questions about your family’s television viewing.

    Me: Well. KEVIN. Actually now is not a good time. I’m in the rose garden and have got my hair tangled in a rose bush. And…I can’t really help you because our family doesn’t watch Television.

    Him: Can I tell you why you don’t watch television?

    Me: Well, Kevin. You can sure as heck TRY…

    In all fairness, he was trying to say, “Can I ASK you why you don’t have TV?”…but it made for a fun awkward pause in the conversation.

    Ok. I’m ready to really be camping now.

    Oh. PS. Around here, those are called Bug-Out Bags, and people take them Very Seriously. I know people who can rebuild a small town with the contents of their BOB. 😉 lol

    • BOB! I love it. I’m going to have to tell my friends to rename their bags!

      Can you just imagine the kind of awkwardness we could inspire if we were both in a real life conversation??

  15. Oh my gawd!
    Hilarious.
    One tech support idiot told me I needed a Mac. (I have always been a ‘PC’ Person–not to be confused with Politically Correct–but, you know, PC, Windoze.
    😉

  16. I do NOT know how I missed this post the first time… I laughed out loud at the vagina brush guy having forgotten the convo from the night before…

    … and the dumbest thing a tech has ever said to me is that if I unplug both ends of my cable from my modem and my computer, turn it around and plug the opposite ends in, that should fix my issue with being offline for no reason.

    Um… um. WHAT? I called him out on it, and he just shrugged (over the phone, you could practically hear it) and said “hey, sometimes it works”… yah, as a COINCIDENCE… MAYBE. jesus.

    🙂

  17. OMG – I’ve just re-read this and we had this same conversation yesterday. Dad came home from hospital on Sunday and yesterday Al was trying to sort out his laptop and he was turning it over and over looking for something – can’t remember what. And Dad asked him what he was looking for and Al said “Just making sure that those programs I’m deleting are actually leaving the computer.” and then my Mom asked if she should go and get a bucket so that Al could put that between his legs to catch all the data so that it didn’t go into the carpet. Man we were laughing so much – think it did the old people the world of good as neither of them are in a good headspace at the moment.
    xox

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