Friday, April 20, 2018

Over halfway through April, can you believe it?

It's been a long while since I last updated. So this one will be a bit longer than usual.

I'm in my last full semester, which is a big part of why there haven't been any updates. It's hard going, not just because of the subjects (which are actually the easier of the reasons), but also because it's so close to done that I have more trouble concentrating on actually DOING the work.

In late January, early February, I think early February, I managed to get a bug bite on my foot that ended up causing trouble with my right knee and then in mid-February, I nearly blew out the knee. Damaged the LCL (the ligament on the outside of the knee that does most of the work of straightening the joint. That resulted in HUGE doctor bills and 5 weeks of physical therapy. But no surgery, so I'm super grateful for that. I still have to do a lot of physical therapy, though. The knee is not yet back to 100%. But it's still healing, so I'll take it. I need to get more walking into my schedule, which would help it heal faster. But I just don't have anywhere that I can fit it in.

The bird is still being entertaining. She's definitely into puberty, her behavior is so very typical of puberty it is almost funny. She wants so badly to come out as soon as I get home, but the moment I open the door to let her out, she turns her back to me and shoves her face in her food bowl to show that she is FAR too busy to come out and see me. LOL

Last week, I believe it was, I offered her my hand to come out during a study break. She turned her back, so I shut the door and left the room. There was a shocked silence for a couple of minutes, then outraged shrieks, and rather desperate calls for me to come back. But one of the few things I won't back down on is that she needs manners. She isn't allowed to be out without supervision, as she's in the front room and there are too many things that she could get into and hurt or kill herself if she were out. While I won't force her to come out, she doesn't get to make demands about when or how she comes out. Not allowed. Whether she likes it or not, I'm still above her in the food chain and always will be.

This weekend, she's at birdy daycare while I did a final tonight. I'll pick her up tomorrow to come home. I needed the time to cram and not have her screaming to come out (which I'd totally let her do if she didn't try to "help" on the keyboard...

I did take my second to last final for the semester. And I passed it. Hurray!

I have 5 more weeks, 1 more final, and a paper to go. Then next semester is a shorter class and my thesis. Hopefully, I'll be done before the end of summer!

I'm going to tell a story from here... and parts of it will be rather vulgar (not because I like vulgarity, but because this is more of a cautionary tale, and the vulgarity is being repeated from what the speaker said.)

The tale of the Moronic Wrong Number Guy

So remember I mentioned that in mid February I nearly blew out my knee? Yeah, me too. ;)

About 5 days after the damage happened, I hobbled my way to the doctor. It would have been sooner, except I couldn't get down the stairs. There was a whole fiasco with Amazon orders, the orders being marked "delivered" when actually they were just dropped at the door to the apartment complex office (where the office hours clearly state that no one is in the office on Sundays when the package was dropped off), packages getting "lost" and all kinds of other things. That part all ended with me on the phone to Amazon being VERY angry.

Anyway, I was hobbling to the doctor and of course it started to snow, because why wouldn't it?

I find a pretty good parking spot and am trying to negotiate my way to the door and my phone rings... It's a number from inside the state, but it's not a number I know.

In normal circumstances, I wouldn't answer it. I blame the painkillers for the fact that I did.

So I answer it and say "Hello?" as one does here in America.

A voice on the other end say "Hi, I thought it was about time to give you a sexy phone call." (and yes, he did try to italicize "sexy". Mostly, he sounded kind of stupid, but you don't normally tell people that when they are strangers on the phone.

I say something like, "I'm sorry, but who is this?" and get "Oh, don't you recognize my voice?"

Dude, if I recognized your voice, why would I be asking who it is? Chalk one up in the Not So Bright column. I respond with "No, I think you may have the wrong number."

The Not So Bright Wrong Number Guy spends nearly 5 minutes arguing with me about whether or not I know him. I promise, I don't know you, guy.

After he FINALLY believes me that I really don't know who he is, nor do I know who he was trying to reach... I get "Gee, I'm sorry to have bothered you, but I must say you have a really sexy voice." He then compared my voice to an actress from the 50s, but I cannot for the life of me remember who anymore.

I hung up the phone and thought no more about it. I then proceeded into the doctors office.

I check in, and am told to sit down as there is about a 40 minute wait. It's a walk-in (or hobble-in) clinic, so that's not uncommon. I'm quietly playing a game on my phone, and I get a text message from the Wrong Number Guy... really? Who does that?

I get a message that says "Wow really nice phone voice too bad I got a wrong number lol"

This tells me that you either have little education, or purposefully ignore your education.

Moving on. He keeps trying to engage in conversation over text. I go see the doctor. The short version of the doctor visit was that he thought I'd ruptured the ACL or one of the stabilizing ligaments. He prescribed heavy duty painkillers, physical therapy, and bed rest for the rest of the week.

I manage to get home, and THANKFULLY got my cane that was supposed to have been delivered the previous Sunday (4 days earlier.) . So now I could hobble a little more easily.

I follow doctors orders and take one of the major pain pills. And that's when things got weirder. I had responded to the guys text messages, which again I normally wouldn't do. But my judgement was impaired, and the texts seemed harmless enough. (And they were, they were just basically conversation about the weather.)

Anyway, I get a message asking if he could call me. And when I'm not stoned on pain killers, the answer would be no, I don't think so, followed by being blocked. This time, I said sure, but that I would only be available from X time to Y time. He didn't call at the specified time, and I moved on to the rest of my evening. I came back to a whiny voicemail about why didn't I answer his call? Followed by a couple of text messages along the same lines.

I responded pretty firmly with a message that I was busy and I had only been available during the time specified.

Didn't hear another word from him after that.

I promptly forgot about him because I don't know him and he was just a blip.

So fast forward 6 weeks (roughly) and this past Monday at 11:23pm, I get a text message.

Now I'm studying. I've got a final in less than a week, and had just had a major "Class in a day" class session on the Sunday before to try to help me prepare. So I'm transcribing my notes, setting up a conference call with my professor to go over some things that I didn't understand, and studying to try to make sure I'm ready for the test...

So I was a bit startled when I get a ping of a text message at nearly 11:30pm. Most polite people do not text at 11:30pm unless it's urgent. This was most definitely NOT urgent.

It's a text from a number I don't recognize says "Are you busy?"

I had to take a couple of minutes to figure out who the number was for. I was less than thrilled to see it was Wrong Number Guy.

I text back with just "Studying for a test"

The response was "Mind if I call and say hello?" (Why do you need to call and say hello? It should have been pretty clear that I really wasn't interested. But you know what, maybe you need a bit more clarity to this message.)

So I text back with "I cannot talk for long. But I can take a short break." I'm not on pain killers this time. So we're going to have a bit of a conversation, where I will be polite, but you WILL get the message this time.

My phone rings.

I am still working, so I don't pick up the phone, but I do have BlueTooth headphones and I use those to pick up the call.

The voice on the other end doesn't bother to introduce himself. (Yes, I do know the name he gave me before, but even though I'm mostly mocking this whole thing online, I won't put up his name or his phone number.)

The conversation started off with the basics, how you doing, things like that. I kept my answers short, and distracted and very uninterested.

He tells me that he just got back from some time in Belize. (My first response that I did NOT say was "Why, did it take a long time to pass the drugs you were muling?") . I mumble some inane response about it being warmer there than here. He starts talking about how the weather there is so lovely (honestly, I don't remember most of this babble section. I was still typing up my notes.)

Then, in under 4 minutes, we're back to him telling me how sexy my voice is.

I interrupted him and said "No, it's grating and annoying."

He stumbles some, and then gets onto a new tack wherein he starts gushing about how he can TELL that I am the type of person who tells it like it is and I'm so FULL of passion... This is where his voice started to turn slimy... as he then said "I bet most of the people around her don't know how passionate you are... because you keep it all bottled up inside."

(Dude, this same line was tried on me about 20 years ago. It didn't work then either.)

I didn't actually respond to this statement, and so he waited a few beats and then said "But that's NOT GOOD FOR YOU!!" (Whatever.)

I'm still working, but my headset died, so then I had to actually switch to holding the phone with one hand and typing with one hand so I could finish scheduling my conference call.

Then after another minute or so of me not responding much to what this idiot was saying... I get "So... I was thinking about an experiment...." And he left that hanging there, apparently hoping that I would be just DYING to find out what he was thinking. (News flash... I wasn't.)

When I didn't answer, he stumbled in his delivery again, and asked "Do you ... want to hear what I was thinking about?"

My response (red flag alert!) was "No, not really, but I'm sure you're going to tell me, so go ahead." (VERY uninterested voice.)

(By the way, here comes the vulgarity, and honestly, if you could have heard the smarmy slime coming from this idiots mouth, you'd be laughing as hard as I do every time I remember this. Boys of the world... This is absolutely how NOT to talk to anyone you might want to have sex with either virtually or in person.)

The twit on the phone then proceeded to say "So... I'm laying here in bed..."

...

"Naked"...

...

...

"Humping a pillow..."

...

(Really? You normally do that to pillows and then call strange women on the phone? Right, a) your pillows probably all should be burned. b) you need a life. c) buy a DVD and some tissues. They won't laugh at you all over the place and tell most everyone they know about the laughingstock that is you.)

"I was wondering if you might like to help me out here..."

To which I responded with "No, not really. I'm busy. I have to get back to studying. But you have fun on your own."

And then the whiny voice returned with "oh, come on! It will just take 2 minutes!"

(Seriously, if it only takes you 2 minutes, you're doing it wrong.)

I replied again with "No, you go take care of it on your own."

Whiny voice now complained "But solo isn't any fun!"

(Even more seriously, if it isn't fun solo, then you are really REALLY doing it wrong!!)

Then he had the gall to ask "Well, could I at least send you a picture?"

I was done by now and told him "No, I'm busy. Have a good night."

And then I hung up on him.

He's since been blocked on my phone. I left out the part where he wanted to call again later in the week and then whined because I told him I was busy for several more months because I'm in school.



The first lesson here is the one I knew already... don't answer calls from numbers you don't know.

But more than that. Don't be dumb. This guy is DUMB. I have his name, I have his phone number. I have the area that the phone number is billed to. I can find out what carrier his number is on. I can take all of that to the police if I really wanted and get him slapped with a restraining order or worse. It's possible that he could lose his phone number and service if I really pushed it.

I could pretty easily get his full name, address, and a lot of other information about him just because of what I have right now.

Just because I'm female doesn't make me stupid. It doesn't make me desperate to have a man or anything else in my life or between my legs.

If he had actually been polite and friendly, without being stupid and vulgar, odds are good he wouldn't have been blocked on my phone. We might have even had more conversations. It's even remotely possible that it could have become a friendship.

But I can't blame the first woman for giving him a wrong number. I just wish she'd had the boobs to say No to him instead of giving him a wrong number which happened to be my number.

I do laugh at the whole scenario. His vulgarity and idiocy are hilarious to me. He's now a standing joke in my office because I've told most of the people I work with the story. Give it a month and hundreds of people will know the story. Most of the men I know who have heard it cringe while they laugh because they are laughing at him and are horribly embarrassed by his behavior.

And now I'm out of stories for the night. I need to finish up my work for tonight and head into tomorrow.

Odds are really good that updates are going to continue to be sparse for a few more months. But we'll get there. :)

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