2000 Bucks to Get Screwed?

Must be common for some guys, but it was new to me: paying two thousand bucks to get screwed….

Actually, let’s put the record straight—I’ve never paid anyone anything to get screwed.

OK—drop the cheap humor. The work of today is recovering from the surgery of yesterday. I now have two screws—titanium, they are, and the surgeon said, “bones just love the stuff…”—in my left mandible.

Compare and contrast—started every exam question I ever took as a child. “Compare and contrast ancient Greek attitudes towards democracy with our own.” Why? What was the point?

But it stuck. And there I was, absorbing the fact that my bones love titanium (yeah, but what about the airport metal detectors?) when the surgeon began a somewhat lengthy and more-technical-than-I-wanted description of the procedure.

I noted one of the many plaques on the wall—the surgeon, I am happy to say, is a fellow of the American Academy of Osseointegration. (Just added that to the computer’s vocabulary!)

And it was new for me, too. ‘What would that be like,’ I woundered. (Wanted to write ‘wondered’ but going back to retype, I turned up again with ‘woundered’. Seems appropriate, somehow….) It’s wounderful—sorry, did it again—to think of all these oddball academies. Remember the German ornithologists with their passionate debate about the ‘near passerine’ status of the Motmot? Interesting to know how that would compare—and contrast—with the American Academy of Osseointegration.

Also interesting to compare and contrast—look, can we just call it ‘cc’ from now on? I’m still groggy from the anesthesia—the historical role of the surgeon / barber with our current tooth guys. “Do you like your smile?” the questionnaire asked.

No—why should I?

Two hundred years ago, the question would have been ridiculous. And maybe still is.

It was also interesting to cc Franny’s story with my own. As usual, we’re going parallel, here. She lost her mind, I lost mine. She battled for death, I battled for life. Six months before her death, she had a root canal. And there I was, yesterday, holding the same drug—Vicodin—that I had held so many times in Wisconsin. The pain wasn’t bad, but hell, I’m a druggy. Why wait? I chugged it down, and felt like a zombie. 

Right——no drugs for the non-suicidal brother, either….

Mostly, though, I am comparing and contrasting my own life, as it has changed in the last years. And speaking of zombies, is it too much a cliché to point out the effect of corporations and corporate life on the human psyche?

Right—I was never too into it. They used to give us stress balls——the little rubber spheres emblazoned with the corporate logo–Wal-Mart!—and its happy yellow face. This struck me as odd—the very thing causing you the stress is giving you a stress ball AND putting their name on it. The idea was to do to the company through the stress ball what you couldn’t in any other actual way.

Wanna smack that secretary? Have a stress ball, honey.

Well, everyone ignored them, of course. But Marc? No, he just couldn’t take it seriously. And when they presented everyone with a new and improvered  (woundering about that word?) version—a stress ball with a little elastic band—I was delighted. 

So there I was, doing my TBWA (should have been “coaching by walking around"—CBWA—but mine was “teaching by walking around”), and fiddling with my stress ball. “What are you doing with that thing,” the electronics buyer would say. He’s gotta sell sixty million dollars of gadgets a year. And was he roaming the aisles with a stress ball?

Hell no. He was glued to his computer screen, trying to figure out what happened to the thirty iPads that disappeared from the Guayama store.

“I’m relieving my stress,” I’d say.  

“Hunh?”

“I have a good deal of stress….”

This was not often taken seriously.

OK—it was NEVER taken seriously.

Marc—with stress? He sits in his office—far far away from anyone, especially his boss, and throws pencils at the students! What’s he got to be stressed about?

Good point, actually. There was only one of me—unlike the buyers, of whom there were many. My boss was a sweetheart. The students—most of them—loved me. What did I have to be stressed about?

I considered this this morning, as I walked past the bust stop where I used to sit…

At 5:30 in the morning.

Oh, and coming home at 6 PM, and racing for the toilet in the hotel next to the bus station. It could take 40 minutes for the yellow bus from Caguas to arrive. Then, it would take another hour to get home.

And of course I’d been drinking coffee all day….

Having talked all day, I would ache for silence. Raf could throw me into fits of irritation by asking perfectly bland questions.

“When do you want dinner?”

Answer in my mind—I WANT FUCKING DINNER WHEN IT GETS ON THE FUCKING TABLE, ASSHOLE!

Answer through my lips—“half an hour.”

Or, “Do you want Hollandaise sauce on the asparagus?”

NO YOU ARE NOT FUCKING MAKING HOLLANDAISE SAUCE BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS SPILL THE FUCKING FLOUR ON THE STOVE AND I AM TOO TIRED TO CLEAN THAT UP AND WASH THE FUCKING SAUCE BOAT.

“Great!”

So justified or not, it seems I did have stress—unrelieved by balls. Somehow it crept into us, despite all the motivational talks we got in the monthly meetings. Because yes, the company paid SERIOUS money to motivate us.

“Mejor, mejor, mejor” sang the ancient lady who had battled cancer and won and gone on to a wonderful (no wounderful for her!) new career of telling everyone how she had done it and how we could too! And how did she do it? Here she prompted the associates (read workers) to sing the answer—‘mejor, mejor, mejor!” We sang. Better, better, better! 

You can imagine the fun I had with THAT!

There was the guy you whirled around for no reason, put his finger on a button, and started to sing! (Odd, are all motivational speaker closet singers?) Oh yeah, and he ended up giving me a dollar bill. 

Why? 

There were thirty of us in the room, and he had finished telling the story about someone who had given HIM a dollar bill and told him he could do whatever he wanted in his life and now he was here in this room living his dream and it was time to pay it forward and so even though there were times when he really could have used that dollar bill he NEVER NEVER spent that dollar because the message was so important and life changing that…

“So why did you give it to me?” Of course I had to ask….

“There’s just something about you. You have the makings of a leader….”

The guy with the stress ball?

Well, the dollar got put under the laughing Buddha that sat on my desk and that in fact now sits on my desk. The Buddha and the dollar bill got packed away, as I got packed away, and delivered. As I have been delivered. For every day and in every way, I am getting…

mejor, mejor, mejor!