Humor by John Christmann
Fall Apologies
I am turned away from my laptop looking bitterly out the window. The sky is bright, but advancing north winds hasten stark clouds across the sky and noisily rustle the tree tops. With each gust the large oak trees get a little more threadbare, shed a little more of their color. Underneath a few fat squirrels rummage noisily through the thick crinkly ground cover in search of acorns.
I huff in frustration.
“What’s wrong?” asks my wife.
“I can’t keep up,” I snap.
She follows my gaze out over the blanket of rust-tone colors strewn across the lawn and places her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll help you rake the leaves,” she says.
“No, it’s not the leaves,” I tell her gesturing wildly to my side. “It’s all the paperwork! I can’t keep up.”
Surrounding my computer on the dining room table is a spread of documents: bills and urgent notifications and schedules and response requests and print outs of things to read and forms to fill out.
Somewhere among this pile is something extremely important. But I won’t know what it is until I sort through the accumulating morass. Not that it matters; I don’t even have enough time to prioritize a To Do list.
To reduce the volume of paper that routinely occupies a seat at our dinner table now, I cleverly converted as much postal communication as I could to electronic formats. Now I get emails alerting me that I have paperless statements waiting for me somewhere online.
Fortunately, I had the foresight to write down all of my user names and passwords. They are on a slip of paper somewhere on the dining room table.
Of course the really important emails that demand my attention are buried out of sight in my inbox under the cover of a hundred other messages I can’t get to. Going through my inbox is like raking the yard one leaf at a time.
I am lucky that fall is so beautiful; to take my mind off of all the communication that I can’t keep up with, to soften the nagging suspicion that I just missed the bus, to temper my frustration that life is accelerating and someone else’s foot is on the gas pedal.
The other day I became enraged at my bank for levying a hefty service charge all because I never read the nondescript, wordy email message they sent a month ago notifying me of a potential fee I might incur if I did not go to the website within two days to verify that I read and understood the email.
I pawed frantically through the stacks of papers on my dining room table, found my username and password, navigated the cryptic tabs on the bank’s website, and finally found a customer service telephone listed in the world’s smallest font hidden behind a popup ad to obtain more credit.
I desperately needed to vent my anger toward a human representative from the country’s second largest bank. Hopefully one that would cry.
A kindly woman answered the phone to inform me that all service operators were currently busy. She politely invited me to leave a message. But I didn’t want to leave a message. I wanted to yell at someone for all the endless paperwork on my table, for the hundreds of emails I couldn’t possibly read, for preying on my inattention and charging ridiculous fees for it.
I wanted to give her, who I projected to be the bank chairman, a vigorous lesson in customer service. And I did: like a brisk north wind I whooshed her up in dry leaves and sent her spinning in perpetual spirals against my school-yard wall.
When I finally paused to take a breath, she informed me that I had mistakenly dialed a translation service for the hearing impaired and that all the service operators were currently busy.
I slammed down the phone, angry that I couldn’t even yell indignantly at people who were hard of hearing.
In utter frustration, I turned my attention toward the window. Outside soft leaves fluttered haphazardly from the sky. In the filtered October sunlight they rested still on the ground; a tranquil bed of gold waiting for my attention.
Like I said, I am lucky that fall is so beautiful where I live.
I called the poor woman back using the wrong number I had just dialed, but this time a man answered the phone. He asked if I would like to leave a message.
“Yes,” I replied contritely. “I apologize.” I said it loud in case he couldn’t hear me.
But I doubt anyone will get my message, even if it is translated into text for the hearing impaired. After all, it is autumn and the beautiful leaves are rapidly accumulating.
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