I have about 300 customers and about 6 are bat-shit crazy. Not a bad bit of ratio or percentage, actually.
I work at the same job I worked at earlier rounds of Little Bored Fauntleroy (LBF). I've worked here 13 years. I get paid a pretty good amount to do very little. Very, very little. I am getting paid right now.
There is no fresh air where I work, there are no windows so I require face coverings. I have been double-masked since 2020. To be honest it's not that big a deal, nor horribly uncomfortable. I mostly just want to GET PAST THIS, so whatever it takes.
My bat-shit crazy customers are often very communicative, and maybe were all my customers oversharers they too would be b-sc. I am on the clock and thus a trapped listener. I express no opinion. Where I work is not my business, I merely manage it.
When she came in, she sat down to chat and moved the mask off her face to around her chin. During the 45-minute tale, if the mask creeped up while talking, she readjusted it back down to around her chin - while never entirely unhinging it from her ears which is the curious part. And here is the tale she told:
In the process of moving from LA to the midwest to be nearer her mother, and because "Fuck LA," she'd been driving cross-country a few trips, transitioning her life away from here to there one carload at a time. Her mother was requiring help now, and it would be an opportunity to spend time with her until her death, whenever that might be.
It was her second round there. She'd taken her mother to a doctor's appointment. The following day she felt like she was coming down with a cold, but she assumed it a "stress cold," though she'd never previously had diarrhea with a stress cold. She took no precautions. Within two weeks her mother would be dead. She'd contracted COVID, she gave it to her mother.
During the unraveling of this horrible story, she would blame everyone but her own opted actions. For instance, had the car rental people not put her through what was a twenty-minute prologue of stress, she'd not have thought she had a stress cold. Also, she had on hand only enough hydroxychloroquine for herself. (I'll let you fill in the blanks on that one.)
All I was thinking was, You killed your mother. All I was saying was, Wow, that's awful for you, I'm so sorry to hear it. Because no other offering is my place. Nor desire, really, towards something this innately horrible. How is this not murder? Negligent homicide?
I stared at the mask around her chin. I thought, "And you've learned nothing."
I don't know that I will live long enough to see what becomes of this cultural shift, this post-Donald Trump, post-George Floyd, post-COVID era. It is remarkable, really, but we don't seem equipped for the task. Well, I guess we don't all agree on The Task. We could use this to burn down our extinct narrative and build a union that reflects our realities while endeavoring a better version of them. But we can't even define our terms.
