The Liberal Lens: Finding Life in the Moment

I decided that I wanted to post something a little silly instead of the usual articles, poetry, and short stories. As a treat. For myself.

The Unending Headache

I have been nursing an incredible headache the entirety of today (that is, Sunday, 12/1/2024); and, it appears that someone clued in the universe. It keeps throwing rocks at me just to prove a point, I think. I couldn’t tell ya.

What’s the point of headaches anyway. What purpose do they serve?

Typically, pain is a response from the body to stimuli to make us avoid that stimuli. For example: sticking a fork into a live socket. Pain will teach you real quick why that’s a bad idea.

So what stimuli am I receiving to where my brain has to constantly pulse with every single heart beat? Like someone is scraping away at my patience with coarse sandpaper? Absolutely unfair.

But, that does bring to me a story from today that I do want to share with the group. Something that will make you give you a little laugh.

Storytime with Will F. Kay

So, my primary function at my work is to be a dispatcher. I sit in an office and field questions from clients regarding electrical work. It’s this whole thing, but I don’t want to go too deep into it as I’m sure you are not interested in the differences between sockets and dimmers and surge protectors.

I had a call today with a client that really stuck out to me. It wasn’t even a client that we served necessarily, but a prospective client who called our 24/7 office number.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Thank you for calling our electrical contracting company, my name is Will F. Kay, how can I brighten your day?

“Do you guys fix plumbing?”

I’ll let you process that question for a minute. I had only a few seconds to process it, and I spent most of those seconds rubbing the headache out of my eyes. Quickly, I took a look over at my company’s website, made sure I was still working for an electrical contracting company. Yup, same ol’ light bulb.

Then I looked back at the phone and in a moment of brilliance, I posited this:

“That’s a good question! We are electricians!”

Which is utterly brilliant. Take my word for it, please. The caller, a gentleman, did not take my word for it.

“I don’t know, I think you guys do construction work, right?”

Hm. I see where he’s coming from. If I also thought that electricians were general construction workers, I would also be confused. But, instead of answering his question, I followed his question with another question:

“Well, if electricians did plumbing, what would plumbers do?”

And that seemed to answer the question. I would have to assume, but I couldn’t bee too sure. I was hung up on shortly thereafter, and I went back to the deluge of tasks I was being bombarded with, and of course my headache was still pounding away at my sanity.

I’m not sure if there is a message to take from this, other than the fact that headaches suck and some people really should Google their questions before calling a company up and asking the question. But, this is why I am an employee and not in the C-Suite, I guess. I get to answer questions with questions and try my best not to get reamed out over a phone call.

Hope you are all doing well, because I sure am not!