My parents are assholes, and
bullies. But they are in different ways. That manifested itself last night.
They came home late, and Mother
wanted to eat later than the rest of us. While I was trying to pound through
four pieces of fried chicken and a sizable mound of rice, Father told me Mother
wanted me to help her downstairs. That usually means some shit she needs done
online. Maybe I've written about this before.
There she was, in her office,
staring at her laptop. She makes online payments all the time, and like the
other times she needs my help, she has a problem with a payment. Specifically,
however, this one's different: She wanted to put the entire amount of a bill
due on her credit card, but she mistyped and inputted a charge 70 cents short
of the whole balance. So she wanted me to go in and fix it.
This is the company and the website
-- the remittance arm of the Clark County Water Reclamation District. I'll have to write out the track to hell I couldn't get
off of: After putting in Mother's account number and zip code, I had to choose
pay by credit card. Since this only accepts one-time payments, I had to put in
all My Father's credit card information.
That's where this incident starts to
go downhill. My mom keeps track of so many sites she pays online on that she
keeps a notebook, filled with the website name, the credit card information she
wants to apply to that particular company, account numbers, security codes,
password answers, everything. At first I couldn't find the security code in the
entry for this website, then I forgot to add the last four digits of the
number.
Finally, I thought I should just pay
the whole thing a second time. I told Mother they’re going to see the double charge
and give it back, or at least keep it as credit for future Clark County Water
bills, if a public works could do such a thing.
But Mother put the kibosh on that,
whining, "Nooooo!!!!!!" and forcing me to not put, uh, $100 on her
card. She didn't want to charge more money on that credit card, even though it
looks like that was the only way we could modify the charge, which was only seventy
cents shorter than it's supposed to be. That pushed my button; her whining
sounds exactly like My Fucking Father when he doesn't get his way. So I may
have yelled at her then.
Mother then came up with a genius
idea: Why not just charge 70 cents to the bill to make up the difference? Yeah,
that's a great idea, mom! Except that the website will not accept credit card
payments less than one dollar. Are you fucking kidding me? Shit.
At one point during this futile
search she said, "Why don't you call them?" That's another button
pushed, for two reasons: 1) I hate going on the phone for online problems
because I think problems that are created online should be solved online; and
2) she presupposed that it is I that should call them, even though this is my
parents' fucking bill for their fucking property in Vegas, and I just stepped
in and was appointed by them to clean up their fucking mess. You know what, Ma?
Why don't you fucking go call them?
So I poke around the website some
more. And I fucking tell you, there is no edit payment button, no similar
setting or link that lets the customer go back and change a pending payment,
just in case, oh, I don’t know, if they typed in the wrong goddamn amount.
What year is this, 1997?
At some point a third button of mine
had been pushed because the architecture of this government website is so
goddamn linear -- going straight down the fucking tubes! -- that I'm convinced
someone taking a crash course in HTML can whip up a better online payment
system than this piece of shit. Is too-simplistic-yet-difficult-to-navigate
websites a red state thing? Because My Father owns property here in Minnesota,
and even though it's becoming redder and redder each day, there still seems to
be a sizable Democratic (if not progressive, if not socialist) population, and
it seems as if that leads to better government services – don’t laugh – such as
trying to fix the wrong amount on a charge you want to pay. Swear to Buddha,
our county district would allow you to fix a pending payment. Because
we're compassionate that way. And we
know that sometimes you put in the wrong goddamn number.
If there's something I overlooked, I
overlooked it because I was scouring that fucking website for about ten or
fifteen minutes before Mother stepped in and told me to stop searching. Then
she said something that I've heard pretty much all of my life from her: "I
thought you could find your way around a simple website and change the amount
on my credit card."
I don't exactly remember what I
said. What I do remember is that I snapped at her accusation that I
disappointed her because I didn't know how I could fix an online one-time-only
payment site that I wasn't aware existed until Mother told me.
But I finally gave in because I
needed to go out into the hothouse that was the weather and run another fucking
errand for the 'Rents. But on my way out I hear Mother again, insulting me with
a phrase similar to the one above, but a much more exact sentence I've heard
uttered from that cunt's lips most of my life: "I thought you were a smart
boy."
As I said before, either from the
top of this blog post or a previous one, both my folks are bullies. Yet they
have exquisitely different approaches. Father
whines and threatens bodily harm more. But Mother ... well, as I may have said
before, it looks like My Father and I clash a lot, but it boils over quietly
because we're always fighting (well, I’m not fighting, it’s more like he's
jumping on my case, but that's another story entirely). But when Mother and I
fight, we fight. Accusations fly and fingers get pointed when I decide
to stand up for myself, and shit gets stupid real.
Mother also insults a lot, and
that's what really got my goat last (Tuesday) night. So I respond to her
utterance with an angry yet (hopefully) logical argument: "Don't give me
that crap! If you're so smart, you wouldn't have put in a charge of
$127.00!" And I left. Fuck yeah, it felt good to finally tell Mother her
shit stinks like all of ours.
Unfortunately, I felt kind of guilty
with the way I showed her up. Well, not really. Then, yes, really. Shit, man, I
don't know. I'm now scared of what recriminations she’ll try and make me suffer
as a result of calling her out on her bullshit. We crossed paths after this,
uh, tiff for dinner, but she didn't say anything.
Later that evening I use getting a
Coke as an excuse to go back into Mother's office, where she's still there,
staring at the website. First I make a "pttsch" sound, trying to say
"I told you so!" while I actually say out loud, "And you're
still not done looking. ..." I showed weakness afterward, pacing back and
forth outside her room, wrestling with myself over helping her or not.
I finally made up my mind, went
inside her office and said, "Once you give up, I'll call tomorrow." I
didn't really mean it -- I mean, I had to work, there's no way I can just drop
everything and give a government agency in Nevada a call, you know? But I hope
it's a way to make peace.
But will there be peace between
Mother and I? I don't think so. She'll cram her feelings down because it's the
next day, but at some point in the near future, she's going to blindside me
with allegations of her hurt feelings stemming from bad memories like this one. My God, she's an asshole.
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