I was at work on break when C called me with the news.
I wasn’t having a particularly good day because my manager, a woman who took pleasure making me feel like a stepped-on ant was continuing her mission to find an excuse to fire me. While early during my tenure I gave her enough bullets to pull the trigger and Swiss cheese me, I did get things turned around. I had recently been given the additional responsibility …show more content…
Knowing me though, I am sure the first word that came out of my mouth rhymed with “truck”, “stuck” and “muck.”
1 in 200. 199 chances to get good news, and we get the “1”.
I am convinced that I was now paying for every time I lied (several), every girl I cheated on (2) and that gold chain I stole from my mother's jewelry box for a girl when I was in the 8th grade (Juliet). Karma was once again being that difficult female she tends to be, collecting her debt, and like a joint tax return, my wife had to unfortunately share the bill .
As I have gotten older, I have learned that depending on one's experiences, life can teach you on how to deal with news that you don't want to hear. Sadly, negativity had always been my tour guide, and despite me portraying in the book that I was the “cheerleader” of my clan, I am just as bad as C most of the time when bad news arrives.
With that being said, the next paragraph may tick you folks off a tad.
The first thing that ran through my mind as I heard the news was “Great! My son is retarded! We are trapped for the rest of our lives!”
Yeah, that is sort of messed up, …show more content…
Noah obviously was on the “good list.”
(OK, I just combined God and Santa Claus. Well, I owed the big guy since I dropped him out of the saying a few paragraphs back).
When you receive this kind of news, you begin (albeit briefly) to reconsider why in the hell do you complain. We could have lost our son, giving birth to a dead child. That would have sent us off the deep end, probably putting undue stress on our marriage, never mind our lives. We human beings suffer from short term memory, never taking stock of the good in our lives. Been my major flaw for all of my life. I just shook my head, looking up to the skies and saying quietly "You, sir or madam, make little to no sense."
So for the next couple of weeks after this ray of sunshine, things were OK, even at work, with my boss actually getting off my case. The funny thing was that her vitriol towards me would eventually catch up to her (I am a big believer in that karma thing, which is why I still believe that I am paying for that stolen gold chain that I’ve never fessed up to my mother