Alternative post title – HERDING CATS.
Being the holiday season, there are many shows to see and events to attend. Sometimes you may be tasked with transporting a group of seniors, like a mother and her friends, to a show. Here are some pitfalls and pointers. This is meant to be humorous and embellished, but there's always a germ of truth in there somewhere.
Here goes:
Lie about the show time. Unfortunately they may already know about the starting time, or you've pulled this one before and they are onto it.
Estimating the "rounding up" and transportation time: Let's say the show starts at 7 PM and you generously estimate a 45 minute drive time to get there. Go ahead and add at least 50% to that, then arrive a half an hour even before that, so at this point it wouldn't hurt to hit their door by 5 PM. It doesn't matter anyway. At least one of them will still be in a bathrobe.
Upon arrival: Do the usual greetings and *BRIEF* chit-chat, then cut it off and get "on task". Head immediately to the television and shut it off. See if you can discreetly find all the telephones in the house (there may be hidden extensions). Unplug them, or turn off the ringers if there is a switch. More on this later.
Majorly important: DO NOT sit down, and politely decline all offers of a snack, coffee, etc. That sofa is a spider's web waiting to trap you. If you fall for it, then you'll be surrounded, a coffee or pastry will appear out of nowhere, and you might as well flush those tickets you paid for down the toilet. So, DO NOT SIT DOWN! You have work to do.
The next half hour: Stay focused. Redirect all conversation attempts back to "we need to get going". Mention "anybody need to go to the bathroom?", but this will have little effect really. Help gather coats and those 20-pound purses that cause about half their back problems. Begin the herding.
Let's march! You'll walk a fine line here as you try to shoo everyone towards the door. You want to use firm language without letting any profanity out. It's OK to let profanity ring loudly inside your head. Once you get everyone near the door, it gets tricky. Any of those cats can shoot off on a side trip into another room before you even realize it. Trying to get that one back will result in you losing the rest of the platoon you had assembled.
The moment of truth: passing through the door, AKA, the gates of hell, or the "running the gauntlet": This is important. Social custom dictates that you go first and open that door, however, you must ignore this and be THE LAST ONE going out, keeping that herd of cats in front of you at all times. *IF* you go first, you'll walk out to that car, stick the key in the lock, then you'll look back, and *not one of them* will be behind you. You go back inside, then realize you're doomed. The television might be on, someone's pawing through a magazine, you smell coffee (coffee!?!), and another one is on that phone, which rang because you forgot or were unable to complete your sabotage on it earlier.
Going mobile: The car is so cramped from all those bodies and 20-pound purses, but you're moving! You might wonder if you should have rented a van, or small bus, but you're on the road, though there is still some danger. Bathroom! You're defeated. You have to stop. You may be tempted with a small detour like, "let me just dart into this pharmacy and get my prescription". Firm and polite, remind them that the pharmacy *is* open on Sunday and they can go then. Then the trump card may be played: "it's heart medicine". Try to call the bluff: "don't you have just one more in your purse?", or weigh the odds of a slightly elevated risk of a coronary "event" later on that evening. If it happens after the show, at least they had kind of a nice time! 😀
At the theatre: since it's now about 15 minutes into show time already, see if they offer late seating, like at the end of act 1 or during a musical interlude. Whew! :happy: You're done! Congratulations.
Note: this was written to be humorous and for my entertainment, but "The Truth is Out There!"
Fuenteovejuna did it 
One to those – Tv shutting – Phone jamming devices may help as well. These guidelines are also true for escorting a bunch of young children…Only replace the coffee with ultra sticky soda, mostly on your clothes…
OMG, you know my grandmother!The sofa trick was her specialty.Mm, this may have come out wrong, but it was.Although she was always ready long before time for an out, it was impossible to make a quick visit.
Nice post. :cool:I bet its easier to round up the kids if you can get them excited enough about the event at hand.
Here's another one:My mom wanted to take the "flock" to a show in a nearby city at a place called LJVM Coliseum. I had to buy the tickets. They were a fortune, and I needed to get paid back this time, and suffered a bit of stress because of it.My mom and I both worried about how to get that group over there as it's a 45 minute drive on a fast busy highway, and I didn't want that group trying to drive. It was a gospel show, so I made it clear that I had zero interest in seeing it but would try to help and arrange things.I suggested a limousine which would totally relieve me of doing anything else. 😀 OMG, way too expensive, plus they all would have viewed it as an extravagant waste of money.I found out there was a hotel very close to the coliseum, so I called to confirm the location, and the staff said that indeed they were diagonally across the street and could see the entrance from the desk. Asking if they thought an elderly group could make the walk, they said "probably" (lol), but that the hotel shuttle would take them right to the door if needed. Sold!I booked a room as a staging point for the upcoming "manoeuver" which would give them almost 30 hours to assemble, primp, get eggs laid, etc., plus a few of them could go the day before and maybe enjoy a meal in the restaurant and a few drinks in the bar before going to get some religion.It worked fairly well, but I got complaints about the room being too small (wasn't half the size of a football field), dirty (meaning wasn't like a hospital operating room), and not on the ground floor (there was an elevator, sheesh! lol).It's all in a days work. Got to keep 'em happy plus it makes for great stories.Some months later they somehow planned and executed a trip to the beach four hours away all by themselves. They pulled it off though two of them no longer speak to each other and nobody will say what happened.I should open a travel business.
That must have been the infamous strap on incident :lol:It's oh so typical to complain about trivial stuff for those older chicks when something is arranged for them.They probably would make worse choices if they arrange everything themselves, but you wouldn't hear one single bad word about the whole trip.The benefit of older age is a selective memory and deafness. 😀
Whatever you do, don't hop in at your moms, waiting for your brother over a cup of coffee. :no:
I don't have this problem since I don't own a car. My only annoyance is when I need to meet my brother and he arrives always at least 30 minutes late. Like you are down in the street waiting, call him on the phone and he wakes up when the phone rings.
I guess all those problems with old women come from you being too gentle. I would simply adopt the drill sergeant approach. :)It doesn't work with my brother… Listen this, one day we had to leave for a long travel riding our bikes. He arrived late. Once he was here he had all his stuff tied on the bike with a rope and it was falling, so I had to re-do the whole envelope (which by the way included a scuba diving equipment) Then we left and he needed gas. Once at the gas station he remembered he had to go to the post office because he was already late for paying the bills and it was the last possible day… in short we left something like 2 hours later.Another interesting habit of his: he doesn't fill the tank with gas, he just put some amount of money (don't ask me why and how he makes the calculation) so at some point along the road I have half full and he is empty. It gets annoying when it happens on top of a mountain and the closer gas station is 50km far. And when it happens he says it is my fault because I wanted to travel the wrong road.
Can you belive it, he is an engineer working in constructions. 🙂
Seems to me your brother leads an "easy" life. 😆
I can believe all he does is thinking and calculating :DI am just kidding ;)But it doesn't mean a thing really, his degree or professional occupation.
As I mentioned, the stories are embellished and a little hyped, but all of it has happened in some form or another, at some time.I do love 'em all, but it's fertile ground for poking a little fun.Oh, that telephone has wrecked more plans than anything else. From doing mild body blocks to prevent access, to saying, "let it go, we'll take care of it later", it can stop all the action in a heartbeat: "well Myrtle's in the hospital and it could be something bad".The "sofa trick" (dax, lol) must be universal the world over, and I suppose it stems from lonliness after the kids are grown and gone. I had a friend from Colombia who would brief me before going to his aunt's house: "whatever you do, don't sit down on that sofa or we're in for a minimum of 5 hours". I walked in with him one afternoon, forgot, and plopped my ass down on that thing. I heard him mutter "goddamnit" under his breath. It was well dark outside before we got out. I was so jacked up on coffee and so full of snacks, then the liquor came out………Yet another. I was in Mexico City one summer trying to learn some Spanish, and a friend and I were running around town but had to stop by his grandmother's for a moment. He said, "please don't make ANY comments about any photograph in the house". Of course I forgot, and did, and we were there all day as box after box of photos were brought out and explained. I actually enjoyed it some, and learned more Spanish there than I would have in a month of classes. I love looking at pics, even if they have nothing to do with me, and to this day I spend a lof of time looking at them on flickr and my opera. I even appointed myself as family archivist and digitized over 600 35mm slides that spanned from my parent's early years to when I was a teenager. When I get older, maybe I'll trap some youngun for a 5 hour session with those! 😀 My mom also does the partial tank of gas thing. I hate to think of her outside holding a gas hose, so I always try to fill it for her, but have had to start refusing to buy gas unless it's a fill-up. The "just put in $20" thing has been put off limits. For information, almost all gas stations here are self-service, and the very few that aren't are well known by the elderly and handicapped, so are always packed with cars.Related to that is being instructed to drive several miles to buy the gas because it's a nickel a gallon cheaper somewhere else. I've gotten out the calculator to show that even on an empty tank that the savings is only about a dollar and maybe a few cents, and that running the engine is not worth it. The complaints still come, lol.Oh, there are about a 100 more funnies that I could go into…:p
I think mom's love is the same everywhere.Besides italian cooking rulez 🙂
I know, I just ordered a pizza 😆
My mom does this: she put something on fire in the kitchen then she forgets it. I see a cloud of smoke and yell from upstairs "is there something that is burning in the kitchen?". My mom disappears for a while then answers "no there was nothing on the fire"… :)Another time she had put that thing you use to water flowers in the sink to fill it, then she went somewhere else, the thing got full and then poured water out of the sink on the floor. When water reached the electrical plug of course the power went off. I asked my mom what she had done and she answered "me?", then went to dry water of course without shutting power off (fortunately it was already off by itself).
Wow! This is legendary stuff! 😆 You can try this. Set aside the entire day to do all the driving and errands the person in question wants. You'll find that the list is infinite, and that you could burn an entire tanker full of oil and still not scratch the surface.Which nationality of mothers/grandmothers is the most world famous for their dramatic (or strange) displays of love? Is it Italy Lorenzo?Does Jewish-mother chicken soup really have curative powers? Would chicken soup from a Jewish mother living in Italy be a "superfood"?
Oh, do you know the italian-jewish community is one of the most ancient of the world? It started when the king of Israel sent some ambassadors to Rome asking support against some neighbor. The Romans said "sure" and sent some legions to Israel, occupying the place and re-naming it Palestine. Since they were formally "allied" they did not level every town making the villagers slaves like they usually did but they left the king in his place, asking only tributes and the submission to the supreme authority of the roman emperor. This went on for some centuries, with the Jews making some rebellions from time to time (the zealots were "insurgents" from the Roman's point of view) which the Romans crushed since at some point the Romans decide to pacify the place in their style, destroying the Temples, killing some and enslaving some others. That started the "diaspora", the spread of the Jews across all Europe.One of the miths of today's Israel is the fortress of Masada, where some jew rebels resisted to the Romans on top of an hill until the Romans took "artillery" (different kinds of catapults and big crossbows), then while raining stones and javelins on the defenders they built a steep ramp and approached the fortress wall. At that point the jews inside the fortress, knowing they would be executed and/or enslaved, committed sucide, including women and kids.
Yeah my shameless granny was a ruling champ :DOnce my step father offered to get her groceries with the car.She thanked him plenty and excessively, while still trying to maintain the humble old woman act.Then came the release of pure evil.Butter in store AMilk and eggs in Store B …You get the picture.Stepfather 's face was bloodless after receiving his shopping note 😆
Matamoros in spanish means "arab killers" (moros means "dark skinned people"). It is referred to the war that allowed the christian kingdoms of northern Spain to conquest the south that had been occupied by the Arabs. The campaign was completed right before Columbus left for his travel to America.
I'm considering posting about a Mexican mother I know of from Matamoros as related by her children here. Good stuff!Thinking…..This topic is almost too universal. Will we get in trouble from one of the mothers?I'm cutting up a chicken right now for a casserole while thinking of all the love-food we had growing up.
It's only a can full of beans. :right:
Read a lot about them moros in Spanish lit. Southern Spain is amazing.I saw a box of bean/rice mix in the supermarket the other day that was labeled "cristianos y moros".
It was from a Mexican company anyway, so blame Canada.
If you are interested, this is the list of the EU presidents that rotate every 6 months (sorry they are in italian): lug-dic 2008 – Francia gen-giu 2009 – Repubblica Ceca lug-dic 2009 – Svezia gen-giu 2010 – Spagna lug-dic 2010 – Belgio gen-giu 2011 – Ungheria lug-dic 2011 – Polonia gen-giu 2012 – Danimarcalug-dic 2012 – Ciprogen-giu 2013 – Irlandalug-dic 2013 – Lituania gen-giu 2014 – Grecialug-dic 2014 – Italiagen-giu 2015 – Lettonialug-dic 2015 – Lussemburgo
Canada? I better tear that letter to Merkel to pieces then.
In today's Europe it is not politically correct any more.