Sunday, February 26, 2006

A Sheep By Any Other Name...

Holly lives in my town. She has a mother (or maybe it's a grandmother) who worries about her alot. She has an active social life and friends who call her early in the morning to see how she is recovering from her night's activities. They call her, "chiquita." Her antics are a source of genuine amusement and, perhaps, envy on the part of her friends. Holly recently changed her phone service from the standard, old-fashioned method to broadband.

I don't know Holly.

But I'm getting her phone calls. Many, many of her phone calls.

I can now answer the phone by saying, "Hello, I am not Holly" and it will make sense (somewhat) to whomever is on the other end of the line. It doesn't always work, but you'd be surprised how often it does.

I'm starting to really hate Holly...or maybe I'm just a wee bit jealous of her. I'm not sure.

Either way, I am not so impressed with her friends and family. From what I can tell, Holly and I do, in fact, have different numbers. They are distinctive by a single digit, though, and this is enough to throw them. I guess the lesson here is, "don't drink and dial." Or "a number programmed into your phone can actually be changed when needed." Or "leave the cranky middle-aged sheep alone before she starts tracing the calls and coming to your house to torture you with hand knitted toilet-tissue cozies." Could be any of those...

The funny part of all this (and I use the word "funny" loosely, here) is that many, many moons ago I used to work for a small company that provided ferry service via a cruise ship between Portland, ME and Yarmouth, NS in Canada. It was a pretty fun job for the summers, but, every once in a while, you'd get a customer who was a little tough to deal with. Generally, they wanted to call you back repeatedly in order to ensure that their accommodations for the overnight voyage were luxurious enough to meet their high standards. When that happened, we all gave fake names so we'd have a heads-up before taking the call. Can you guess what The Sheep chose as her alter ego? Yup, I was Holly.

Karma? Kismet? Irony? Coincidence? You be the judge.

I'm too tired from explaining to people that I am not Holly anymore.

In between playing Social Secretary to the Infamous Holly, I have been able to get one more skein of the Lincoln plied and set. I've also gotten in a tiny bit of knitting, but nothing in the way of an FO to post. Whatever I get done today will be it for the week, I'm afraid. This time tomorrow I will be squeezing children back into snowsuits and boots (once I locate them from the pile on the floor) and trying to direct them to the correct buses because they have used the past week off to forget everything that had meaning to them when at school. Then I will be taking 48 phone calls from parents who want to know why I sent their child home with the wrong boots or mittens because I, too, have forgotten the really meaningful stuff. Gotta love vacation!!!

SA

1 comment:

mrichme said...

I'm sorry I stop calling you!