Good morning. Hello. How are you? #724
Getting the booster, evil guy at CVS, a few conspiracy theories I buy into.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. I got my booster yesterday, so… yay. I also feel like shit for it so… yay. My arm is in pain, and I generally feel like shit. Run down and achey. Good times.
Man. I do not want to write this thing at all today.
My booster was scheduled for 10:45, right after Emma comes down and takes over for watching Jane. It was at the CVS just up the road. There was one person giving shots out. They booked six people for every fifteen minute increment. Which means they expected this poor lady to give out a booster shot — plus most of them were getting flu vaccines as well — every two and a half minutes. When I got there, at 10:40, she will still working on the 10 AM appointments. When I left, at a little after noon, I was the last of the 10:45 appointments she got to. There were twenty people in line behind me at that point. There were eight people in line when I waited an hour and a half. I feel bad for those people.
People in the line were very chatty. Almost everyone in line had had COVID before. Everyone was wearing a mask, though, that was nice, but I suppose the early adopter booster line is a place where you’d expect everyone to wear a mask. One guy had his dog’s first birthday. Her name was Maddie, short for Madeline. He made a card for her. He photoshopped her face onto the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting. It was very cute.
There’s this guy that works at the CVS that I just can’t stand. I loathe him so much I am slowly moving all my prescriptions to the local pharmacy up the road. He’s just the worst. He is polite, but only pretends to be polite. He thinks because he has mastered his emotions and does not snap or raise his voice he can be condescending and not listen to people and boss them around. Every time I see him, I feel a visceral hatred for the guy. I was waiting in line to check in, and he was helping a customer. Someone came up, breaking his Soup Nazi protocol, and said he just had a quick question. The evil man said “Sir. I am with someone right now. I need you to get in line.” The dude was not having it. Not in a mean way, but rather in a “this dude is wrong, this question is quick and he will answer it.” So he just ignored what the man said and asked his question, which was the right thing to do, because his question took one second, and the answer was going to take less than a second.
“Do you guys do the Moderna shot Pfizer or both?”
The place only does Pfizer. The evil man could have just said “Pfizer.” But he did not. He was obviously butthurt and offended this dude asked his question when he had told him to get in line. At the same time, though, you could tell evil man knew the dude was right, it was a quick question, and he could tell that it would be less work to deal with this guy now than in line, and maybe, just maybe, there was a part of him deep down that thought he should be helpful. But no way was he going to just answer the guy. So in the end, this is what he said:
“Sir, I am with another customer right now you are going to have to get in line. I can only work with one person at a time. We only have the Pfizer shot.”
Really remarkable. That is evil dude in a nutshell. He is my nemesis if I ever had one.
When you first interact with any CVS pharmacy person, they need your name and date of birth to find you in the system. This means, of course, you need to give them to them. But what order, and how quickly? Do you say firstnamelastnamedob all at once? Last first? One at a time? Who knows which is the most helpful order and timing to give to these people. But evil man has an opinion! But it changes! Evil man’s opinion is “what ever order you are giving this to me in, I am going to firmly and faux-politely interrupt you and ask for it in a different order.” I have A/B tested this. There is no order that pleases the man. Last time I gave him last name, first name, dob. He immediately told me to slow down and give them one at a time. This time I just gave my last name and waited for some sort of prompt to give them the next one, and he informed me he needed my full name and date of birth, as if I was being an idiot.
I have, multiple times, had to firmly stop this man and explain to him why he is incorrect about something, chastening him momentarily. I cannot be the only one. None of this makes even the slightest dent in his supreme confidence, supercilliousness and condescention.
My god this guy just burns me up.
Anyway.
The other day in a Slack group I’m in, someone asked “name a conspiracy theory you believe to be true” and I couldn’t think of one but Emma and I were chatting recently, with Nick, and I thought of two conspiracy theories I believe to be true. Mostly. I suspect there are more. Maybe this will be an ongoing list:
Marjorie Taylor Greene is the Capitol Riot pipe bomber. Prove me wrong.
Madison Cawthorne was probably telling the truth about those orgies.
My history of conservatism books have turned into a slog and I am mostly miserable reading them. 2,600 pages no problem, but these last 500 or so pages are like pulling teeth. Jimmy Carter did the Camp David Accords, that was very impressive, redeemed him a bit in my eyes. In some ways I feel bad for the guy, he really fell for the Republican propaganda about stagflation and big government, he thought he was advocating for some hard choices, but really he was just being played. I wonder what he thinks about it now. I wonder what he thought, in later decades, after he was out of office, seeing that the United States could expand government spending without causing inflation. He’s probably a little embarrassed about getting played like that. But then there’s his absolute reluctance to assist Harvey Milk and all the other Californians fighting a homophobic Prop 3 until even Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford had come out against it. The dude is a bummer. I am bummed. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that post-presidency Carter is a saint but man. That guy really whiffed things. And now I gotta read about Reagan’s ascendency and more about Jesse Helms and Orrin Hatch and all these people I have loathed my entire adult life and… it is hard, it is hard. I am trying to plow through. I should just stop, it is starting to mess with me, but I hate not finishing a project and I look forward to bragging for at least a decade that I have read these books in their entirety. I need that moral authority. I am like evil CVS man.
Moody and quiet mix for today. Very excited about new Jay Jay Johansen I love that guy so much. Pretty into this new Jockstrap band did I say that yesterday? I don’t know much about this Gloria De Oliveria but I am into what I’ve heard so far. Also very into the new direction the Regrettes have taken, real new maturity to this new record I am into it. And a few classics, gotta have a few classics. Tweedy has done some new acoustic moody versions of some old hits. Thinking about Taylor again as we get closer to the release day of the new record. And thinking about Bauhaus cuz I’m still sad about their cancellations.
All right this is all I can muster today. Gonna be a pretty low-energy day, not gonna lie. Peace be with you.