"I am very, very, very upset right now!" the man said. He was standing in our living room on Cowee Mountain and using our house phone to spew his anger at the person on the other end of the line. Tom and I rent our home on occasion to people who want to vacation in the mountains, and our new tenants hadn't been in town five minutes before they had become victims. His wife was standing next to him, goading him on. They were furious. They had been misled, he said. They had been taken advantage of, and he was "sick'n tired" of people who took advantage of others. He talked about a time in 1976 when he witnessed a man pocket $20 of his hard-earned money. He brought up other incidents dating back decades when people just like the person he was talking to on the phone had ripped him off.
I was speechless as I listened to this man vent. When he threatened to call the sheriff, the tension increased tenfold. Yes, they had reasons to be upset, but was it necessary to call in the big guns? When he realized the person he was talking to would not be able to right the wrong, he became even more verbally abusive.
"You people," he yelled, "sit back and wait for your prey to cross your devious path, and when you have them right where you want them, you spring your trap." Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! The person on the other end of the line must be the scum of the earth.
If you've read any of my previous posts, you know that I am a believer in respect. Respect seems to have lost its "cool" these days, especially in Hollywood, the place where many of our youth and their parents, aunts, uncles, and next door neighbors look for moral guidance and behavior mentoring. Reality television has shown us that it's okay to cross the line of civility for whatever reason. For Hollywood, bizarre behavior increases ratings which equals more money. For others, it's behavior that feels good in the moment.
You say you ordered your steak medium well, but it came to your table still mooing? Scream at the waitress. It's okay! No, really it is. What? The person sitting behind you in church every Sunday sings off key? Turn around next Sunday and say, "Your singing sounds like two !@#$%! rabid cats in heat!" Just say it. It's okay. The next time you're at a restaurant and the people who came in after you are served first, get up, walk over to the their table, say a few curse words and then knock their food on the floor. Just do it. When you perceive that you've been wronged, it's acceptable to say and do whatever you want in order to feel better. And if that venting can be directed toward someone who can't see you, all the better. Take, for example, the angry man in our living room on Cowee Mountain yelling into our phone at the scum bag who wronged him: me.
That's right. I was the devious scum bag who sat back and waited for Sick'n Tired and his wife to cross my path so I could spring the trap and do what? I was confused. So why am I going to jail?
"Your website clearly states that smoking in your house is permitted!" The wife yelled past her husband and into the phone. "And yet I see a 'Thank you for not smoking sign' on the door. That's deceptive advertising. We want our money back right now!"
I was in Indianapolis when I saw that our house phone in Franklin, North Carolina, was calling me on my cell. How nice, I thought. Our tenants were calling to say they had arrived safely. But this was not one of those calls. After discovering their dilemma (they didn't want to smoke outside for several days), I felt terrible and apologized for the mistake on our website, but I was four hundred miles away, and Tom was fishing, so "right now" was not an option. After Sick'n Tired had emptied all of his ammunition into me and had stopped to reload, I broke through my fear of confronting and said, "Why are you so mean? Why are you treating me with disrespect?"
In an instant, he went from furious, mean and threatening to calm, nice and chatty. My question was the perfect antidote to the poison that was pulsating through his body. He was past it and wanted to be friends. I was still shaking and wanted to hang up. So I did.
Welcome to Western North Carolina...Trout Central!
14 years ago
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