Saturday, September 19, 2015
A Nice Story
...no, really
When Jer’s embarrassing disease struck, he went to the
hospital clinic.
There, Dr Arnols treated him with the standard protocols.
And the candystripers giggled.
He missed a day at work, and his assistant foreman, Alan,
took over.
The trucks were loaded and unloaded efficiently.
On a followup visit to the clinic, the candystipers became
sweet and caring.
Alan: “What can you expect? Unpredictable. They’re
Apprentice Women!”
Definitely no apprentice, Ginnie Rockham, of Personnel,
had dropped into the hospital and silenced the girls.
Her main quarrel was the vague number assigned to
Jer’s disease. The insurance company would never
pay the claim.
It was almost as if the hospital also embarrassed.
Well, Ginnie Rockham wasn’t! And the new number designated
more specifically.
She went to the loading platform and informed Jer, and would
have nothing to do with any embarrassment whatsoever.
“Let’s grow up!” she admonished. “What else do we have to do?”
Well, there was something. A cursory look at personnel files
in Jer’s office engendered her disgust.
Thereafter she dropped by an hour a day to instruct Jer and
Alan. The main problem was that the old cards had been
scanned haphazardly into the computer. At her last visit,
she brought an IT woman, Belle Destiny-Grassley. The Destiny
had been her husband’s name, who met his in Iraq.
“I’m the walking wounded!” she warned Alan when he asked
her out a week later. “It won’t be a barrel of laughs.”
Meanwhile, Ginny invited Jer to a family picnic. “You’re the
only self-effacing man I’ve ever met.”
Other dates followed, for both men.
“You know,” Jer told Alan in a slack time, when the just-
unloaded trucks shimmered in heat, “I’m popular. Me!
With her family. I can’t get over it!”
Her Uncle Merilwill, “Murl,” finally returned an Eagles cap
he had forgotten at that initial picnic, and the men
discussed that team a full two hours.”
Jer apologized at having only beer and cheese crackers in
the apartment, but Murl proclaimed: “But the company
is Porterhouse and caviar!”
Jer shrugged. “He likes me. They all like me. And Ginny
would kill another woman!”
Alan admitted it couldn’t go better with “Ole Destiny” also.
Culture Vultures, they had hit every play and concert and
poetry reading they could find.
Then, both men stared at the shimmering trucks a full minute.
“A day at a time!” they simultaneous blurted.
Labels: Culture Vultures, day at a time, Destiny, disease, embarrassing, embarrassing disease, medical insurance, Romance
