OK, so where was I? Oh yeah, fixing My Fucking Father's phone. ...
I forgot to add that before I reset it, I went outside to make sure his phone not receiving calls wasn't because of bad reception. While I was outside, nearing the end of a spring day where it was warm and the sun was still shining copious amounts as it set over the horizon, I heard this huge banging noise that seemed to come from somewhere in the backyard. Was it My Father, or one of the neighbors?
I tell Mother that I don't know what to do. Then, it slowly dawned on me. The day before she wanted help sending photos of some bad shipment to the people who sent it to my parents' workplace. At first I thought I could help over the phone. When that didn't work, I figure I'd help her once they came home. I tried everything to no avail. Once I told Mother about it, she asked me: "Can you download the images to one of the computers and send it through e-mail?" And I said, "Sure!"
Whoops. I realized when I fiddled with My Fucking Father's iPhone that it was hijacked. And when I tried to plug it into my laptop in order to rip the photos, I synced it up with my iTunes system. I guess that whenever you do that, you let Apple know that phone has been "jailbroken" and it shuts down phone service. And by the way, I still wasn't able to rip the photos.
---
As I was trying to deal with this problem-on-top-of-a-problem, Mother calls me upstairs. I go out to the backyard. It's My Fucking Father holding up what looked like the guts of an old TV.
Then I look to my right. The huge TV is gone. We had this giant Zenith that we used to watch everything one when we were young. It was an sixties- or seventies-era TV, and since my parents were busy being breadwinners, that became our babysitter, our friend, our true companion that would never hurt us.
But we hadn't used it since we got new TV's about, oh, two decades ago. Since then it's largely been used as a platform for our Buddhist votive (if that's the right word) -- where we put all the Buddhist incest pots and statues of the Buddha. It was in what we'd loosely call the "family room," except none of the family did anything there. My Father put the sculptures he believes are valuable on top of the TV, which sat right next to the plant that's gotten so tall it needs to be pruned.
But it's gone now, all of it. What the giant Zenith left in its place was a huge rectangular brown spot where it used to be. So that's what all the noise was coming from: He was tearing the TV apart! Now why would he do that? Why would he break down such an innocent appliance that was fine just where it was? Was My Fucking Father mad about the phone? Was he pissed off that he thought Grandmother stunk up the joint with her lunch? Was he pissed at me for switching propane tanks because he thought it was unnecessary? Knowing him, it was all of that, plus some other things I don't know and don't understand.
He needed help loading the inside of the TV, the cathode ray tubes and the huge monitor, into his minivan for dumping. At one point he yelled, "Hold it!" as we stumbled down the stairs and out the front door. Damn, that thing was heavy.
And it's gone. An obsolete TV, and years upon years of childhood memories.
---
Meanwhile, after I gave up on fixing My Fucking Father's phone, I went back to the online real estate thingy Mother wanted me to do. She fires up here laptop and shows me the bank statement that she was reading to me over the phone earlier in the day. It looked familiar, as did the website she sent me to over the phone.
She insists that she can pay this online because she did this before. This website, cabanc.com, sucks (don't go to it, you'll just be frustrated because it is not user-friendly). I try to get to a page where you can pay online one time. For five minutes I go over and over this fucking site. I ask her for the username and password because I know for a fact that we've been through this; that statement is something she showed me before, and we through a whole lot of bullshit to get this real estate company account set up. She says we haven't. I get angry and yell; she gets angry and yells.
Finally, by the grace of Buddha and God, I see what looks to be a registration page, where you send in your name and address and account number of the property in question. So I was about to type it in when My Fucking Mother said that she now wanted to know if we could pay monthly online. I thought she hated that! But I didn't verbalize that; I was too damned fatigue with her arguing with me, plus I wanted to see if I could exercise after I got done.
She wanted me to call. She rarely likes going to the phone. I hate going to the phone. And I despise going to the phone because My Fucking Mother wants me to. But for some reason she wanted me to call these "Cabanc" people to see if she could pay montly online. I was so goddamn frustrated by what I believed was this unnecessary change of heart that I called the wrong number; I used the Minneapolis area code instead of the real one, whichever that was.
I then dialed in the right number, that of the vice-president whose region oversees this state. A really nice guy, though I think I caught him in the middle of something, he deftly answered my question. Turns out they have a one-time payment system online but not a monthly installment plan system. Weird; most other sites I've helped set up accounts for Mother have it the other way around. She also made me ask this VP if there's a fee involved with paying online. I think it's a ludicrous question, but Mother says that most of the real estate sites extract a fee when you pay. There isn't.
So I thought that meant that she wants me to set this up. No, My Fucking Mother said, she'll just do it some other way.
"But I thought you wanted me to set this up for you!!!" I said.
"No, forget it," My Fucking Mother said.
"So I did all of this for nothing???" I screamed.
And she stammered something and I just got fed up and walked away. All of this bullshit for nothing. This was one of those days where I didn't accomplish a goddamn thing.
Fuck this. Fuck all of this.
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