From a Slate.com article, Ads We Hate:
|
Over the past few weeks, my girlfriend has been looking into international cell phone plans. At the Verizon Wireless Web site, she had an online chat with a sales representative. I feel compelled to share this verbatim transcript:
Chelsea seemed pretty eager to get out of there at the end. Unfailingly polite, though. |
Joe took me to campus, where we tried, to no avail, to jump my car. I called AAA, who estimated an hour’s wait for the tow truck.
Almost two hours later, the guy showed up with one of those huge flatbed tow trucks, which barely fit in the parking lot.
“What’s it doing?” he asked before even attempting to “hook me up.”
I turned the key so he could hear the noise, and he said, “Just a second.”
He went over to his truck and came back with a stand-alone battery with jumper cables attached to it. I thought, but didn’t say, “That’s not going to work; my friend just tried to jump it with his car.”
“Turn the key,” he said, and my car started right up.
“What’s with that,” I asked explaining my friend had just tried to jump me. He started on some long, technical explanation about the computers in new cars detecting a mis-match in power, and it not jumping for that reason. Some such thing as that that left me incredulous.
I rode over to Jiffy Lube, where I know I bought a battery with a 5-year warranty in May of 2003. Well, Jiffy Lube no longer sells batteries, and my only option was to call customer service, who told me I could take it to any Interstate dealer.
I had no idea that Interstate was a batter maker, I thought he was talking about one of their “interstate Jiffy lubes” or something, though I didn’t know what that would mean either.
When I asked him if he could tell me where the nearest dealer was, he said, “Just take it to any Firestone store.”
I decided I wasn’t going to do all that, and drove it home, planning to call AAA’s remote battery service in the morning if it didn’t start again.
I did get my oil and air filter changed while I was there.
When we left for dancing, my car wouldn’t start again, so we took Robert’s. Dancing was fun tonight—we had the most dancers ever at one time there tonight than I’ve ever seen. Fun stuff.
Patrick, a guy that started dancing with us a few weeks ago told me the funniest story about his family reunion coming up. It’s amazing the shit that families (including my own) keep secret.
This was one of his family’s: Recently, in the last five years, his twin cousins had their 40th birthday. Their mother (Patrick’s aunt) had planned this birthday way ahead of time, and good thing, as she died before it happened. However, she had written the twins a letter—to be presented to them at the event just in case.
Mind you almost everyone else in the family knew what this letter was about to reveal to the twins, and had been keeping it “secret” for years and years and years. The letter told the twins that they were adopted. And further, that their real parents were the people next door (both deceased). The mother had begun to lose her facilities, and in fact, a little later on, had entered into an insane asylum (Are they still called that?) a mental health facility, where she eventually died. When the woman had started losing her mind, Patrick’s aunt took in the twins to live with them, and eventually adopted them.
And finally, for reasons that Patrick didn’t explain to me, his aunt didn’t take in the other brother, who still lived next door. So the twins also found out that their next door neighbor friend was really their brother.
I had to have a drink after hearing all that.