Monday, July 19, 2010

Sallie Mae Can Kiss My Donkey!



You will all have to forgive me for this post, as I feel a little complaining/ranting is in order. Last week started out mildly enough, I had survived hand nursing four guinea pigs for several days, and things were looking up. DUM DUM DUM DUM….cue dramatic music. Unfortunately, my luck ran out Wednesday afternoon as one of the pigs died from aspiration. You see, guinea pigs are ridiculously eager eaters, and will suck milk right into their lungs despite the stressed and sleep-deprived ministrations of their caregiver. Sadly, I lost a second pig to this same fate on Saturday. This spurred me Sunday in deciding to abandon nursing them, and install them in a cage with pellets, grain, water bottle, etc. Well, the best laid plans are meant to be smashed into a hopeless pile of crap. Our boar guinea pig (with whom I had hoped to install the babies), had them wedged under the food dish in less than a minute. Buying a fifth cage for our temporary pets (am hoping to send them to good homes soonJ ), was not an option, so I set to building one out of supplies on hand; namely the plastic mesh from an old baby gate, pvc poles from a discarded play-tent, and an ungainly Tupperware dish. All was going as well as can be expected, when I suffered a characteristic lack of coordination. You see, I was crafting and removing said supplies with a pair of Chicago Cutlery scissors. Now I’m not sure if these things were intended to de-bone chickens or what, but they sure as heck do a bang- up job of cutting thick plastic. Things got dicey when my pinky, displaying dexterity here-to-for unseen, decided to bend itself into the bone crusher (I’m not sure if this is the intended purpose of this lil feature, but between the blades and handles of these scissors, there is what looks like a giant wire stripper with TEETH)! I will try to post a picture of the offending instrument, but given my recent luck, I won’t count on any success. The upshot of all this is that my neighbor has offered to put a stitch in the nail if it does indeed decide to fall off. I love having skilled friends. Put Sunday to bed watching a depressing movie that ended on an iffy note, and hoped for tomorrow, Orphan Annie style.


Late Monday morning finds me trudging, on foot to our local gas station, which if given a pot of coffee and a redbull, I could theoretically hit with a rock from my back porch. So what if I have been cleaning all morning and haven’t bothered to change out of my comfy, pocketed, manly sleeping pants? Well….I walk in and see the clerk, cigarette dangling precariously from the corner of her mouth with an ash built to at least three quarters of an inch, stocking the drink station. She reluctantly leaves her post, cigarette in tow, to “service” me, and gives me the most disgusted up and down look I have seen since junior high. Now I’m no expert in social stratification, but I’m thinking that if you are filling in mornings at the gas station, smelling of patchouli, with an ashtray full of suspicious leavings, and a face that says truck stop parking lot, you have NO cause to be critical of another person’s mode of dress. After my weekend, this woman’s behavior made me want to abandon a lifetime of pacifism, go out in that parking lot, grab the largest rock to be found and relieve my government of 10 years of social security payments (she didn’t look the health conscious type, so this is actually a generous estimate).


And the hits just keep on coming….


All set to head to the over-priced local haunt to get my fix of chocolate chips, I am interrupted by a phone call from an unknown number. Alas, it is the ole college debt rearing its ugly head. Here follows a near verbatim snippet of our conversation.


Vulture: It appears you have an unpaid debt of XXXXX.


Me: What?! I went to Purdue, not Harvard. I never borrowed such an amount!


V: Well, XXXX amount of that is due to incurred fees.


Me: What fees? Is that a Liberal Arts degree penalty fine?


V: No, that is a fee allotted to your debt managers.


Me: What? Did the government hire a tribe of out-of-work Sierra Leone warlords to track it down, cause I think I would notice them in my neighborhood!


V: That fee is besides the point.


Me [two full minutes of incredulous ranting]


V: Well, with nine monthly payments of XXX (the sum of a modest house payment, or four hours with a high priced escort), we can have you in the black and there will not be a negative report made to the credit bureau..


Me: Not likely pal. If the government wants their money so badly perhaps they could take some extra from the Citibank payoff and do me a solid, or…they could give me a job and take it out in trade.


V: Your being unreasonable ma’am. Surely you could afford that sum.


Me: Hahahahahaha


Well that about sums it up for now. Nothing has died today, haven’t lost any necessary range of motion in the extremities, and I have finished my summer reading program. So, I guess it could be worse. After all, I don’t have to poo in a Wal-Mart bag…

3 comments:

  1. Your punch line summed it up nicely! Sorry your week was so awful. Your scissor-pinky story made my flesh crawl!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay, I'm really, really, really sorry that I laughed at the thing about the store. And also the pot of coffee and Red Bull thing.

    The loans, however, I did not laugh. Cause my old have come back up but since Obama did the health care reform thing and the school loans were included, mine have all been transferred to something new (the government?) and girl, they are giving me a sweet deal to pay off the old stuff and the new stuff from grad school. I thought Sallie Mae was out of the picture now. WTH?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The "instrument" looks lethal so it's good to know that the damage wasn't fatal.

    Also, it's good to know that nobody died. Not a fun week and that loan story...pity you can't just wish such calls away into a parallel universe.

    ReplyDelete