Sneak Peak Sunday: Unsafe at Any Speed

Good evening!

As most of you know I recently released "Unsafe at Any Speed:  Elsie W.'s OTHER Book"

Below is a chapter from the book for you to check out.  Remember, you can purchase this book by clicking on the cover there to the right--------------------------------------------------------->

Enjoy!

Elsie had a major issue with the fact that we did not get paid breaks. I’ve worked a lot of jobs and the concept of a paid break is quite foreign. Apparently, at some point in her working career, she worked for a company called Monuments, Inc. It was the best place in the world to work, according to Elsie. She could take as many breaks as she wanted and she got paid. They even flew her to Arizona once to see one of her kids. Best place ever to work.

          Would it shock anyone to know Monuments, Inc. is out of business?

          Elsie railed under the rule of no paid breaks. She complained about it endlessly. She demanded she be given two twenty minute breaks every day, paid, in addition to her lunch hour, which she also wanted to get paid for.

          The fact that NBM refused to entertain her demands didn’t phase her. Didn’t make her work harder or maybe look for another job. Nope, when NBM said she couldn’t have paid breaks, she just made very sure she got them anyway…by using the bathroom. A lot.

          Elsie and I were the only two women who worked in that office and I have this thing about restrooms. I like them to be very private. The one at Stuff, Installed, was not private. It was the worst kind of restroom. It was large, with a lock on the door I didn’t trust. The commode was too far from the door for me to be able to shove a foot in front of it in case someone tried to burst in on me. The fan was SUPER loud, but covered nothing of the intimate…gross…sounds one tends to make in a rest room. Quite the opposite, the fan in there seemed to amplify everything that went on in the bathroom.

          I know. I have issues. But this book isn’t about my issues. This book is about Elsie. Elsie had no problems with the bathroom. She loved being in there. She realized that NBM being very uncomfortable around women, wouldn’t dare to say a word about how much time she spent in there.

          She was right. At least for a while.

          Elsie, though she didn’t start work until 11:07 AM and had Fridays off, was simply unable to conduct personal business outside of the office. Thusly, she felt the need, every day, to make prolonged personal phone calls during working hours, something NBM loathed. When she started making these calls in the bathroom, I had to hail the greatness of her evil genius. She figured something out before I did, and we were powerless to combat it. Because, really, who is going to yell at a woman in her sixties because she has to use the bathroom?

          Because I’m an observer of life, and because I’d pretty much started writing this book at this point, I chose to not be the office tattle tale. I figured everyone in the office was an adult, and since I was not only the newest hire, I was also the lowest paid person in the entire company, being the “potty police” was way above my pay grade. So I simply kept, track, for my own amusement, the number of trips Elsie made to the ladies’ room and how long she was in there, how long she spent coughing and how much time she spent yelling into her cell phone.

          The numbers were astounding. Her longest span, that I tracked, as a thirty-three marathon session with her doctor’s office. It might sound like I’m being heartless, that this poor lady should have been given the time she needed to talk to her doctor’s office. But before you pass judgment, ponder this:  that call, like many to that particular doctor’s office, was a screeching debate about the bill she’d racked up and refused to pay. Her defense was that she had health insurance through work, she paid for said insurance, the doctor’s office had no business billing her for anything, especially anything called a ‘co-pay.’

          Apparently she was in deep to the doctor’s office in large part because, and again, I am not making this up, she would go to the doctor’s office complaining of symptoms her CAT had…so she could get medicine for her CAT on her health insurance. (Wouldn’t you think they would get suspicious when a sixty year old woman complained of coughing up hairballs?)

          These phone calls were always peppered with bouts of her Death Cough, the one symptom, apparently, she refused to see a doctor for. The Death Cough was a delightful concophony of noise ranging from a loud cough to throat clearing, to massive phlegm gagging. (And she wondered why on earth we thought the snot wad under her desk came from her.)  It was an annoyance when she was in the office. When she was in the bathroom, with the sound amplified by the exhaust fan, no one could get anything done on the phone because the entire office sounded like a tuberculosis ward.

          It took NBM quite some time before he realized her subversive little scheme to get paid breaks. Part of his delayed realization was that whenever Elsie came in one door, he went out the other. It wasn’t that he trusted her to be doing her job while he was out, he couldn’t take her chasing him around all day saying, “NBM, can I tell you something?”

          But one afternoon, during an especially entertaining phone call with her car insurance people (I will address Elsie’s endless car adventures in the next book, “Elsie W.:  Unsafe at Any Speed.”)  NBM stood in the Tunnel of Sound, four feet from the bathroom door, and listened to the coughing, the gagging, and the yelling.

          “Is she on the phone in there?”

          “Yes,” I said, keeping my eyes on my own computer.

          “How long has she been in there?”

          I checked my running notes. “Twenty-one minutes.”

          He stared at the door for a beat, then looked at me. “Does she do this often?”

          I’m no tattle tale, but I certainly wasn’t not about to start lying to NBM. A direct question is a direct question. “Yes,” I said, flipping through my notes, “two to three times a day.”

          When you add that time to the seventy-seven minutes she always took for lunch, the lost work time was staggering. And that didn’t even count the time it took me to take notes.

          His jaw dropped. What manager wants to find out that one of his employees is spending large chunks of the day in the bathroom, on the phone?  He waited, standing there, for another seven minutes while Elsie wrapped it up with Triple A. She emerged, he pounced.

          “Were you on the phone in there?”

          She turned that crazy spinning eye on me, because I was the one to blame for uncovering her oh-so-covert method of getting paid breaks. “I was using the bathroom.”

          I give her points for guts.

          NBM: But were you talking on the phone?

          ELSIE: Well, yes, I made a call while I was using the potty.

          I don’t know about you, but I think the word ‘potty’ should be reserved for children. Adults should use it only when speaking to children under the age of six.

          NBM: And you were in there for a long time.

          ELSIE: Not any longer than anyone else.

          NBM:  I was standing out here for almost ten minutes. That’s excessive.

          And I was sitting there for ten minutes, watching him watch the door. And PM was sitting at his desk watching me watch him watch the door. That’s at least forty minutes of labor time spent on Elsie making a call in the bathroom.

          ELSIE:  I don’t think it is. And can I tell you something? If you gave us paid breaks we wouldn’t be forced to sneak our cell phones into the bathrooms while we tinkle.

          “Tinkle” is another word I’d reserve for children under the age of six. And what is this “we” business?

          NBM:  We’ve talked about this, and you are not to be making phone calls while you’re in the bathroom.

          ELSIE:  If I were a man, you wouldn’t care what I did. You never care what anyone does around here just as long as we women are stuck under your control.

          NBM:  Elsie, my office.

          She swept past him and he slammed the door, a rare show of emotion for him. I couldn’t hear him, I never could because the angrier NBM got the lower his voice got. Elsie, on the other hand, could be depended on to raise her voice to a shrill shriek, and to repeat everything he said, so I really didn’t miss much. He spoke softly, she raged about how the women in the office were being treated unfairly. The conference ended, however, like all their noisy battles:  with the two of them smiling and laughing as they walked out of the office.

          I’d like to know what kind of power that woman had in that office because that is a super power we could all use.

          Immediately upon emerging from the office, NBM left to run an errand and Elsie returned to the bathroom, this time to call her doctor’s office again. Length of time in the bathroom:  twenty-six minutes. Maybe if we moved her desk in there, she would have accomplished some actual work.

          At this point I gave up hope of ever using the office bathroom and just waited until lunch when I could walk to the local fast food place and use theirs.

Sneak Peak Saturday: Elsie W.: Unsafe at Any Speed

Good afternoon!

As many of you know, I released the second Elsie W book a little more than a week ago, so now it's time for a little bit of a sneak peak for you to see what you should be buying for yourself and your friends!

To purchase for any e-reader or to read on your phone or computer: 
CLICK HERE!

To purchase for the Kindle or in print form:
CLICK HERE!

enjoy!

Elsie W. and I were the only two women in the office at Stuff, Installed, a fact that never ceased to annoy me. The sales guys called her my “partner in crime.”  I think they did that just to get me riled up. See, there were a few things about Elsie that…well, made me want to distance myself from her as much as humanly possible.

          Elsie W. was a non stop eating machine and a complete disaster mess of a human. She worked an odd shift, Monday through Thursday eleven to eight, and then Saturdays she worked eight to five. Maybe her odd work hours were a contributing factor to her social and hygienic quirks, or maybe she worked those odd hours because she was socially and hygienically off kilter. When I worked with her during the week, she spent the bulk of her time gathering, preparing, eating, and relieving herself of food. She got hired at Stuff, Installed about six weeks before I did, back in the summer of 2011. She told me by the fall she’d gained eighteen pounds. Three months, 18 pounds. Given the amount of food she shoved down her gullet in that time, I was surprised it wasn’t a bigger number. I’ve battled weight my whole life, so I’m to the point I don’t eat that much during the day. Just watching her pack it away made me gain weight.

          I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me see if I can start closer to the beginning of things so you don’t think I’m a horrible person telling stories about a poor little old lady.

            Shortly after I began working at Stuff, Installed, the company moved to a new location. It was a beautiful office, with a wide open showroom. Everything was shiny, new, and clean.

          And then Elsie moved in.

          When I say she was a non-stop eating machine what I mean is that from the time she walked through the door with her rolling cooler and four purses, most of which contained food,  she started eating and she didn’t stop eating, as far as I know, until she drove home at night. Then again, I’ve seen the front seat of her car. There’s a very real chance she didn’t stop eating even then.

          When you work in an office, most of you know, snacking typically consists of a small bag of something that isn’t sticky, doesn’t melt, and won’t interfere with your work, especially if you need to be on the phone. A snack is something you can eat quickly, you can eat it walking, and you don’t run the risk of spilling it on a surface that needs to stay clean.

          Elsie had no such snacking guidelines. A typical morning for her involved arriving at 11:07  (Her start time was 11, but she was never, ever on time.), making one phone call, (to prove to NBM, our boss, just what a dedicated employee she was) and then heading to the galley kitchen to make the first “snack” of the day. This snack usually had three parts:  salad, wilting under a layer of heavy dressing; a protein, chicken legs, pork chops, meatloaf; and a hearty helping of mashed potatoes.

          Just to contrast, back then I got to work at 7:30. My breakfast prior to arriving is usually a bowl of cereal or a bagel eaten quickly over the kitchen sink while yelling to my youngest child that I was LEAVING IN FIVE MINUTES and if she wanted a ride to school she’d better turn off the Fall Out boy CD and get a move on. I ate lunch, usually some sandwich and fruit I packed for myself, at 1:30. Between those two times, I consume two cups of coffee. Can someone explain why I continue to have a weight problem?

          I digress.

          So it took Elsie roughly half an hour to prepare this snack and eat it at her desk. She then shoved the mostly empty plastic container back into the fridge where she also stored, just in case she gets peckish around noon, a six pack of yogurt, a head of lettuce, four bottle of salad dressing, a loaf of bread, a large jar of peanut butter (She never had any jelly. She’d steal NBM’s home- made jam. He never figured out why he couldn’t remember eating so much of it.) and a pan of brownies.

          That’s just the fridge. In her desk she kept two family sized bags of snack chips and a complete series of two liter bottles of soda pop.

          Do not misunderstand. Elsie W was not what most would think of as obese. She was heavy, sure. But she was heavy in a sort of cute old lady way (she was in her early sixties, not at all old) She was just a complete, total non stop eating machine. Like sharks, you know, if they stop moving they die. Elsie, I think, if she stopped eating, she’d die. At the very least, she wasn’t taking a chance.

          That Elsie treated the office as her own home was a source of constant irritation for NBM, our boss. He was a very tidy fellow, and he expected those who work for him to be tidy as well. Our shop, where the guys who install the stuff we sell store their stuff, is clean. How clean? The fire inspector told me recently it was the cleanest place he’d been to that month.

          No one can say the same for any space Elsie occupied.  You knew immediately that you were in her presence, or at least on her trail, by the marks she’d leave, and the clouds of fruit flies hovering nearby.

          I wasn’t aware of this when I first started working with her, however. At first I thought she was just an odd, lonely woman who liked her snack food. As a new employee, I wanted to make a good impression on those around me, so I kept a candy dish on my desk and filled it with those little chocolate kisses. Everyone was a fan of that candy. Especially Elsie.

          Elsie thought of the candy dish as her own personal snack machine. Our desks were about six feet apart and she found a reason multiple times a day to roll her chair over to my desk and scoop up a red press on nail claw full of kisses and then roll back to her desk.

          Elsie’s job at Stuff, Installed was that of ISP, Inside Sales Person. She was to make at least one hundred outgoing calls per day, mostly following up on customers who had had an estimate done by one of the sales guys, but hadn’t purchased. These calls were calls Rebounds, and if she managed to get one of these people to agree to take another look at their estimate, and if they did buy the stuff we install, she would get a bonus. In short, not only was she paid a nice hourly wage to make one hundred phone calls, she got a bonus when one of those phone calls goes well.

          To make one hundred phone calls in an eight hour day is not that hard, especially when that’s all that is required of you. My job at Stuff, Installed was CSA, Customer Service Assistant. This was a broad brush of a job description that encompassed basic office work, filing, scheduling both sales and service appointments, helping the PM with the scheduling of installations, filling building permit applications forms, scheduling building inspections, and yes, making outgoing sales calls. As I got better at my job I sort of became the office mom, helping the sales guys find the correct address for a sales call when they were lost because Elsie had typed in the wrong address. Some days the install guys would have me help them placate a grumpy customer. I have a great phone voice and, apparently, a lot of patience. NBM liked to push small administrative things to me, since he was very busy watching the weather or baseball on his cell phone. By the time I’d worked at Stuff, Installed a year, there wasn’t a piece of paper in the building that didn’t cross my desk at least once.

          Oh yeah, and I still was supposed to make as close to one hundred outgoing sales calls a day as I could.

          But this isn’t about me. This is about Elsie, and how her job, her ONLY job was to make one hundred sales calls a day.

          To do that, one would expect she’d be at her desk most of the day. Not so. She spent quality time in the bathroom, typically making personal phone calls. Or she’d be in the galley kitchen, making food. Or she’d be wandering through the shop to the neighbor’s office where she took advantage of their very cheap soda pop machine prices.

          The good news was that we always knew how to find her. We simply followed the trail of bread crumbs, food stains, coffee spills, or, thanks to my chocolate kisses, those little paper flags. And it didn’t matter where the stain, crumb trail, spills, or kisses flags started, you always knew exactly where the trail would end:  at Elsie’s desk.

          Looking back, I like to think Elsie left the trails so she wouldn’t get lost in the office. When I’m feeling charitable, I like to think of her as a confused lady who liked her snack food.

          And then I think about things like how she loved to microwave trout for her lunch, making the entire office smell like a fish hatchery, and I remember why a book like this had to be written.

An open Christmas letter from me to you.

Good morning!

Merry Christmas everyone!

I realize it's not chic in this country to wish people a Merry Christmas.  I mean, there's been this cultural battle about how we should greet each other this time of year.  What I've seen is that after all the yelling and screaming at each other about "Merry Christmas"  or "Happy Holidays" we've wound up just grunting at each other, acknowledging each other with the bare minimum of effort.  Sort of like every other time of the year.

I have been pretty busy lately, and haven't blogged much, but I thought I'd write to you, my friends, in the form of a typical American Christmas letter:  Except this isn't going to be painful to read.

 So here we go:

My Dear Friends:

This has been a tough year for many people, and that's pretty true for me as well.  My little family spent far too much time this year waiting in emergency rooms, talking to doctors, buying prescriptions for multiple medical issues we never saw coming.  It was sort of a mash in the head, starting on Easter night.  When I look back on 2013, I'll think of it as the "year of the medical bills."

Had the year ended on March 31, I would deem this year a failure, a dark, black hole.  But the year didn't end, thankfully, and there were moments of great hope and beauty along the way.

On a professional front, I got my rights back for Dream in Color and I created not one but two new covers for the book.  I also released my two Elsie W. Books 

"Elsie W.:  Unsafe at Any Speed.""Elsie W.:  Not While I'm Chewing"

And I'm currently working on a third book for my "Wicked Women" series, a book I hope to have released by Valentine's Day.

 

 

I think my favorite day this year was a very hot day in July when the four of us went to our church to have our picture taken for the new church directory.  The four of us did not want to be in the stifling hot classroom at nine at night. None of us likes getting our picture taken and let's face facts:  I haven't improved my photogenic features in the ten years since the last church directory.

But there the four of us were, the last photo session of the night for the photographer.  It had been a very tense time in our house since Easter Sunday night and frankly, we were a very fragile bunch.  But something happened during that session:  The four of us laughed together for the first time in a very long time.

We sat in that hot, miserable room, all of us looking really, really awful for different reasons.  (I personally picked a shirt that simply doesn't look good on me.  It's too light for my fair skin.  Normally I wear it under a sweater, but like I said, it was July.)  But there was something that was so funny about the photographer, what we were doing , and everything, it was like a dam broke and all the tension that had hung over us broke and we laughed together and healed.

I keep this picture on the fridge.  I love remembering that day because it was so special. Some time ago I realized I like the way I look because I look like a blond version of my aunt Carol, who is a beautiful soul and if I turn out to be like her I will be a success in my life.

Now here we are, and it's Christmas.  There's trouble in every corner of the
world.  And yet, I can't help but feel optimistic.  Maybe the world leaders will continue to screw up on a monumental basis, but if we here in the real world can shut out the shrieking, shut out the anger, and reach out to each other, we are going to be okay.

So whether you celebrate Christmas or not, let's all take a minute and see the beauty of things, even in the smallest things.  Leave an extra five dollars as a tip for your waitress.  Hold the door open for a string of people at the post office.  Give your mother a hug even if she makes you insane every day of your life.  Don't give the biggest or shiniest gift, give the one that speaks from your heart.  Hum or whistle a happy song.


Friends, I celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ.  My basis of my faith is hope.  In my writing, I bring to life characters who are very flawed, but have hope.  If I take nothing away from 2013, which started out so very, very wrong, I can take this:  Hope is never lost where there is kindness, love, peace and laughter.

So, where ever you are, whatever you are doing right now, I want to wish you a heartfelt Merry Christmas...and my hope is that we are all just better to each other in 2014!

 

JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS! Unsafe at Any Speed is finally here!

Good morning all! 

Well, after many fits and starts, and one major melding project, "Elsie W.;  Unsafe at Any Speed" is FINALLY available for purchase!

TA DAH!

 

Now, I know you all want to get in on this so here are the links:

FOR THE KINDLE CLICK HERE!

FOR A PRINT BOOK CLICK HERE!

FOR EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE CLICK HERE!

I'm really proud of this one, and I'm pretty sure this is a good one for you to give to that friend of yours who is stuck working with a horrible co-worker!  If you liked "The Office" and "Office Space"  you are going to LOVE Elsie W.!

ENJOY!