2001-02-20 - 23:59:31

An Ugly Day

Warning: Unpleasant entry ahead.

As might be expected the ordeal from the previous day left me utterly exhausted. Nevertheless I was up early the next day because I had a lot of catching up to do. I had been away for three so I had to do Monday's work as well as everything else associated with Tuesday. On top of that I now had a big pile of chess scoresheets to wade through, and so on.

The first thing I did was call the garage where I usually take my car to see if they could fix my door sometime soon. They said that they could take my car today, which was a small miracle.

I was just getting started on the pile of games when the phone rang. It was one of the nurses at the adult home where my father is living. Phone calls from them are almost never good news, and this was no exception.

"Mr. Hamster," she began, "First off let me say that this isn't a crisis..."

Uh, oh. Beware of phone calls that start like that.

Before I go into what she told me, there's a little fact that I should mention. I haven't talked about it before because it's gross and depressing and depressingly gross. My father has a major incontinence problem. The old guy leaks like a sieve, and the problem has gotten worse in the last few months.

It started when he was still living at home and I was taking care of him. Occasionally he would wee in his clothes. More often, he would got to the bathroom in his bed. I'd change the sheets every day and try to get him to be more conscious of the problem, but it kept reoccurring. He was also in total denial about the situation.

One time I was chastising him for pooping in the bed, and he flatly denied being the source of the problem. Someone ELSE was doing it! At that point I kind of lost my temper, and exclaimed: "If you're not doing it, who is? The Poop Fairy?"

The Poop Fairy wound up being a running joke between my brother Harry and me... but I see that I'm straying off the subject.

Like I say, the problem has gotten noticeably worse in the last year or so. The people at the adult home (named "Hotel Happy" by my brother Harry) have been making my father wear adult diapers to save the upholstery around the place. This hasn't always been successful since my father often outsmarts them by taking his Depends off. Their counter-move was to make him wear "pull-up" Depends that are harder to remove once you are dressed. Now, every time I see one of those "Pull-Ups" diaper commercials ("Look at me! I'm a big kid now!") I wonder if my dad's stars are showing today. (In-joke)

After driving everyone crazy with thirty years of second childhood, my dad is now having his second infancy. Swell. All of which leads me to the phone call I got today.

Apparently while changing my father's bed one of the helpers there noticed that his mattress was in, shall we say, a distressed state. That is, after months of being regularly doused with urine, the poor mattress, which should have lasted for another half-decade, was now almost BLACK with mold.

Ewwww...

So I had to find a new mattress for my father IMMEDIATELY!

One of my weaknesses is that when I get phone calls early in the morning before I am fully awake I tend to be very polite and obliging. While this is a nice way to be, often I find myself regretting the pleasant promises I make while in this state. They wanted me to get a new mattress for dad delivered there TODAY, and I said I'd try.

They'd also given me a list of supplies I had to pick up - among them a vinyl mattress cover for the new mattress. Too bad they didn’t think of that one sooner!

After I hung up the phone, it occurred to me - how on earth was I going to buy a mattress and get it delivered the same day? What am I, the Mattress Fairy???

I also began to think that I should have bawled out the people at Hotel Happy for letting it get that bad without letting me know. What the hell am I paying them for anyway?

While I was slowly waking up and getting angry, the phone rang again. It was, of all people, Mr. Congeniality, who I talked about in this entry. Recently I've been calling him by another name: The Chess Asshole. This guy has to be the most insensitive prick in the world and just talking to him is a hugely depressing experience. He has a totally negative outlook, but at the same time he is relentlessly aggressive conversationalist. He likes to find ways to put me down and puff himself up, and is constantly mining for information that he can use against you at some later date. In addition he acts like a frigging phone stalker, calling and calling at all hours until he finally gets you. Recently I've taken to screening all my phone calls, just so I don’t have to talk with him.

So this was not the person I wanted to be talking to this particular morning. As soon as I picked up the phone started bitching at me about something chess-related, and I just was not in the mood. I told him I was incredibly busy and I didn't have time to talk to him. I think I then hung up on him in mid-sentence.

My head started to throb. It was going to be a long day.

I had a ton of errands to run, and everything to be moving in slow motion. On top of this, other drivers seemed to be making a major effort to piss me off. It seemed like a had a sign painted on my car "Please Cut Me Off." I was seriously hating humanity.

I managed to get a good mattress but the best I was able to do was get it delivered the following day. No place I talked to could do it sooner.

I was coiled up like a spring when I finally reached Hotel Happy with the news about the mattress. I think the nurses there realized that they were dealing with someone an inch away from homicide so they were very nice and apologetic to me. I think they realized that they'd screwed up and I hadn’t called them on it.

Also, I'd had a lucky break. While at the mattress place, on a whim I decided to buy a boxsprings also and it turned out that the Hotel Happy crew had forgotten to tell me that the old boxsprings was a rusted horror. So some logical thinking on my part saved me a huge hassle.

Fortunately, they had an extra mattress at Hotel Happy for dad to sleep on until the new mattress arrived. So I didn’t have to kill anyone. And I didn't have to talk to him while I was there either. Things were starting to look up. Maybe I'd survive the day after all.

I took my car to the auto dealership and they discovered that they'd ordered the wrong part for my door. Could I bring it back next week? Sure, what the hell. My time is worthless anyway. But they did have one piece of good news: I could open and close the door without worrying about it falling off. All I had to do was make sure it didn’t swing too widely. Okay, I think I can do that. With that out of the way, I headed home. Waiting for me there, of course, was a huge pile of chess scoresheets.

Speaking as a chessplayer, I'd have to say that my first bad move today was getting out of bed. It was all downhill from there.