Adorable Work Anecdote

The company I work for has several funeral homes as clients, and so I speak to a lot of nursing homes and assisted living facilities who call to report the deaths of their elderly residents.  

This was the opening statement of a death call I got last night:

“Hi, my name is Sally Jones, and I’m calling from Such and Such Assisted Living Center to report that one of our residents, John Smith, went to Heaven.”

………I’ll pause a moment to let that properly sink in……

A grown woman, nay, a grown professional woman said that one of her patients had, literally, died and gone to Heaven. Oooh boy.

I’ve been doing my current gig for a long fucking time, and I have never, ever taken a death call where someone left the deceased’s eternal forwarding address. 

Is she kidding? She has just got to be kidding, I thought to myself.  

Because nursing home staff sometimes get jaded to the whole death thing, they do occasionally get a little flippant and borderline disrespectful to jazz things up a bit when they call us. 

However, having never spoken to this particular nurse before, I was wary.  So I took the information I needed and refrained from adding my own jokes (“Was Jesus driving the bus?”). 

At the conclusion of the call, and since I was almost near death myself with curiosity about whether this woman was serious or not, when I patched her through to the funeral director so he could dispatch the body removal service, I couldn’t resist listening for a few seconds to hear how she introduced herself to him:

“Hi, I’m Sally Jones, calling to report a resident who’s gone to Heaven.” 

She was as serious as a malignant tumour. 

Tuuuuuesday Afternoons

…are always spent in varying states of exhaustion. And this one is no exception.

The following post is prefaced with apologies for any and all typos, inanities, and inadvertent threats to harm the president. I assure you (and any lurking FBI agents), that the presence of any of the above is regretable and absolutely unintentional.

I worked all night until 7:00AM and then did my volunteer gig tutoring at an adult literacy center for a few hours, so I should not be here. I should be shuffling off to get some shut-eye. But having just watched Dawkins on CNN, sleep has slipped down in rank on my to-do list.

I was so pleased with his appearance.

It’s such an exquisitely rare occurrence to encounter anything even remotely challenging to religion and the existence of God on national television in America that, when there’s promise of an actual M.A.S.D. (Motherfucking Atheist Show-Down), I worry that the good guys will lose their cool and overplay their hand in all the excitement. Y’know, choke.

I remember Dawkins clenching his jaw and swallowing visibly hard at Ted Haggard’s aggressive blustering in The Root of All Evil. So I admit, I had my fingers crossed, imagining a brutal horror show of an ill-conceived round table going at it ruthlessly.

But, ah, embarrassing crisis handily averted. Well done.

That Christian who couldn’t stop trying to shout everyone else down was certainly an insecure little asshole, though, wasn’t he?

Norm at onegoodmove has got all the pertinent video, interesting commentary, and interesting reader comments.