Chasing the White Rabbit

I guess in my old age, my mind can only celebrate Halloween once, since after going to a Halloween party on Saturday, I’m having trouble understanding why people are still talking about Halloween and why the costume stores are still open. I forgot that we've still got a couple more days to go before the real thing. I think my quota is dressing up once per year, and then I’m done. I'm ready for Thanksgiving and all the fattening that comes with it.

So Saturday marked the beginning of the last mercury retrograde of the year. For people who don’t know what mercury retrograde is, it’s an astrological phenomenon that occurs three times a year, lasting for about 3 weeks (plus/minus a week before and after for its effects). It affects travel, communication and anything electronic or mechanical, so expect flights to be delayed, snark-fights to erupt between friends, family and coworkers, and computers, cars, phones, DVD players and toasters, etc. to malfunction. Even if you don’t believe in astrology, keep an eye out for mercury retrogrades because kooky things will happen. And make sure you back up your computer.

Like right now. For the first time ever, blogger crashed and wiped out my post, and now I’m recreating it in Word like I should have done in the first place.

So on Saturday, Reggie and I decided to dress up as Dr. Burke and Dr. Yang from Grey’s Anatomy for AD’s Halloween party since it was comfortable, required minimal investment, and we fit the racial profile. I managed to get my hair really curly like Sandra Oh’s, but I couldn't mimic her blank, indifferent expression since my blank look naturally looks somewhat pissed off. We get to the party and there are some really great costumes from this girl who dressed up as the Tivo Icon (the black TV screen with Tivo written across it) and Shaun from Shaun of the Dead, to Cruella DeVille, the boss from Office Space and K-Fed. I tried to think what Dr. Yang would drink, and I figured she’s the kind of girl who likes the hard stuff, so I started with a Jim Beam and Coke, and followed with a tequila shot. About 10 minutes after the tequila shot, I remembered that I’m not a hard stuff kind of girl, or an anything-with-alcohol-content kind of girl and I started feeling sick. So I went outside, found myself a dark corner by a tree, and did the whole, I think I’m going to throw up, okay, no I’m not. Okay, maybe I will. Okay no I’m not, bit. So I’m huddled up by the tree in the shadows, when suddenly, I see a rabbit hop into the middle of the street. I’m talking a big fat white bunny rabbit with floppy brown ears, just sitting in the middle of an urban street not far from the gnarliest LA freeway, twitching its nose at me. So I’m whistling at it and making non-threatening sounds, trying to get it to come close enough for me to pet it. It takes a while but it slowly makes its way over, until it’s about 4 feet away, just outside of arm’s reach. In my drunk head, I’m thinking about how funny it would be to go back to the party with a bunny in my arms, and all I want to do is pet that damn thing cuz its fur looks so soft, so for no reason in particular, I jump the bunny.

The bunny takes off down the street and I’m booking after it, until it crosses into someone’s front lawn. There’s a crack in the sidewalk that’s got one portion raised significantly higher than the lawn, and I step right on it, spraining my ankle and landing on the lawn in a heap. Now spraining an ankle is no fun, no matter how much hard liquor you’ve got in your system. Reggie comes running up and at first he thought I was joking because all he could see was me hunkered down by a tree one moment, and booking down the street the next. He asks me what the hell I was doing and I told him I was chasing a rabbit. He looks at me like I’m crazy and says matter-of-factly, “Julia, there’s no rabbit.” I tell him there was a rabbit, and he says, “There’s no rabbit.” Now he’s looking at me like he’s really frightened for me, like there might be something seriously wrong but he doesn’t want to scare me by pointing it out. So he’s picking me up, and my body’s screaming with pain, but I’m yelling that there was a rabbit that was white with brown ears. We go down the street back to the party, and on the lawn next door, finally, is that damn rabbit, sitting there in the grass like nothing was wrong. Reggie stares at it and finally says, "I guess there was a rabbit." Reggie went back to the party to tell everyone we had to go because I sprained my ankle chasing a rabbit, and the best answer had to be Matt's, who said, "Do you mean chasing a rabbit metaphorically?"

So I must have been really out of it by the time I got home, because for the next couple of days, I couldn't find my cellphone until Brian woke me up one night to tell me he just fished my phone out of the washer. It had been in the pocket of my scrubs.

We went to Sprint the next day on my lunch break, and being Sprint (worst in customer service), we waited an hour and a half until we were helped. So I'm trying to find out if there's any way that they can pull my phone numbers from my dead phone, when this big black guy who looked like Bernie Mac starts getting irate. He's asking the girl to get the manager and she tries to tell him that there isn't one on duty. He's mad because there are 15 people waiting in the store, he'd been there for a couple of hours himself, and there wasn't a single salesperson on the floor actually helping anyone (this girl appeared to be "training" the one guy standing at the front of the store taking names of people who came in. Literally, they were just standing there waiting for people to come in, despite the fact that the only other 3 employees I'd seen in my time there had all been in the back for a very long time). So he's getting angry and she's telling him that he doesn't have to be rude. He says it's his perogative if he wants to be rude and there had better be someone out on the floor to help him right away.

Finally this guy comes out and says he's the manager (of course it's gotta be the guy helping me). So the black guy is saying how he's been waiting and the service is awful, and the manager says he's rude and that he should leave. Now the girl is chiming in and telling him, "Just get out." So the guy gets mad, though, he never gets emotional. All of a sudden, he's slammed the computer monitors at the register onto the floor and he's saying, "Do I have your attention NOW?" He grabs display phones and pulls them out of the wall. "Is this what I need to do to get some service around here?" He starts grabbing computer equipment and flinging it off the desks. Sprint employees start coming out of the woodwork--flying out of the backroom, running down the street. One even screeches up in a car. There were only 3 employees there the entire hour and a half I was there (not including the 2 that did nothing but stand by the door and take down names), and suddenly there were about 15 of them. The guy even pointed it out, "Oh now all of a sudden this place is full of Sprint employees." It was pretty ridiculous how all of a sudden there were all these attentive Sprint employees who must have all been on "break."

So the guy's tearing up the store and finally the cops come and arrest him. The guy was smart though, he never threw a punch even though the manager did shove him and try to fight him. A bunch of us customers were milling around because the store had our phones and we couldn't just leave, but the consensus was that, while this guy acted pretty inappropriately, this is the kind of thing that happens when your customer service is ridiculously terrible and your employees are apathetic and rude. This isn't the first time I've seen someone flip out at a Sprint store (I've wanted to shake some of these people myself sometimes), but it's a shame that the guy who flipped was black, so they could write it off as a stereotype. I hope some of the customers write the CEO a letter about this incident the way they said they would. Sprint needs to run a tighter ship.

So needless to say, I'm still without cellphone. When I get a replacement phone, I may not have your numbers so please email me your #'s or if you call and leave a message, please leave a number so I have a way to call you back. At least until my phone stops going straight to voicemail, which will mean I've finally gotten my phone back.