When Automated Customer-satisfaction Emails Go Horribly, Laughably Awry...

Last night, we had to take our Staffie into the ER at nearly 4AM. We were there to have her put down (due to her kidneys having finally, totally failed). Undoubtedly, in the coming days and weeks, there will be many more posts as I work through my thoughts on yet another loss of pet(s).

This morning, after getting back from dropping her body off at the cremation service, saw new mail notification on my laptop. It was an auto-generated email from our veterinarian's office. It finished out:

We look forward to seeing you and Cira again soon.

Yeah... Maybe your computers should be configured to "know" what services were rendered and whether it's appropriate to send that email.


Yes, I laughed, but it was through a flood of tears that were not happy tears.


Don't get me wrong, even (especially??) in euthanizations, customer-satisfaction is a great thing to try to capture. Just make sure that the tone and content of emails sent for such purposes is appropriately adjusted.

Humor in Strange Places

Earlier today (14:00 on Friday the 13th, to be exact), I had a double root canal procedure performed. Prior to the procedure, I was, to say the least, "anxiety-ridden". I mean, jus the name of the procedure is anxiety-inducing. "Root canal".

I mean, I'd always heard horror stories, but never really knew what it was. Something about the name made it sound like they bored into the roots of your teeth through your gums. To be honest, what they actually do isn't much better: the drill into your teeth through the top an obliterate your nerves. Even knowing that, ultimately, there'd be no nerves left to feel pain, I definitely went into the procedure with a feeling of dread. It being scheduled for a Friday the thirteenth didn't help those feelings at all - though, I guess the scheduling seemed "apt" (for lack of a better word). So, I brought a 0.5mg Xanax pill with me to help keep myself from climbing the walls.

Now, I don't know whether it was the Xanax, my underlying (probabaly "twisted" sense of humor) or that the procedure went exceptionally well. Whatever it was, it wasn't the horror show I was expecting.

To be honest, as I sat there in the chair, with a rubber block between my left-side molars, mouth utterly-numbed and a rubber-dam stretched across my mouth like a workman's tarp, I really mostly felt like a carpentry project. Or, maybe I felt like a prop in a BDSM scene? Whatever. The situation isn't one that I'd volunteer for, but it wasn't the horror-show I was expecting.

Before the novocaine and fixing of the rubber components, I'd taken my Xanax. The doctor was nice enough to have his assistant crush it to a fine powder so that I could stuff it under my tongue and get the effects much more quickly than normal. So, by the time the work started to go down, I was fairly relaxed. In fact, I almost nodded off a few times while the procedure was going on. Dunno whether that was simple boredom, the Xanax or a combination of the two.

/me shrugs

At any rate, the situation was such that I was finding many things about it amusing:

• As they explained the hardware they would be putting in my mouth - in particular the rubber dam - my mind couldn't help but wander back to highschool. My time in highschool was during the peak of the HIV hysteria. I remember the health classes and other materials promulgating the use of rubber dams to make oral sex safe.
• As the doctor began drilling, and I smelled the smokey scent associated with it, I was reminded of the old Bill Cosby commedy routine that talked about the burning smell, among other things.
• I notice that the scope he was doing the procedure through was a Carl Zeiss machine. Now, Carl Zeiss has, historically, made some very fine optics. That says, they're an old German company. They were also very popular with the Nazis, for a while. So, it seemed amusingly apt that they would be the purveyors of such fine tortured devices.
• This led me to thoughts of comedy movie Nazis conducting comical torture sessions.
• This led me to have amusing images of Nazi uniform-clad BDSM people I've seen over the years
• This led me to think, "I wonder how many dental professionals practice BDSM in their personal lives"

And so, my mind continued to drift from one amusing thing to another. At several points in the procedure, as I chuckled to myself at the thoughts running through my head and the overall silliness of the situation, the doctor would stop what he was doing. As a good, conscientious doctor, he was concerned that I was in pain.

I wasn't, but with all the hardware in my mouth, I wasn't really in a position to articulate that, "no, I'm just amused by the situation." Probably just as well, he'd probably have thought it might be a good idea to call the guys from the local psych ward to come pick up the wacko that thinks having a root canal is funny.

At the end of it all, the least pleasant part of the procedure was the not being able to talk during it. I mean, with all the things running through my head, I had a real need to make snarky commentary. The fact that I couldn't was rather frustrated.

Now, I'm sitting here and my teeth feel like they've been replaced by shards of broken glass. I went into the bathroom and discovered one more bit of comedy: pulling my lips back far enough to survey the ravaged teeth, I realized my mouth now looks like I'm a carny-worker. Awesome.

No. I'm not writing this while kited on Vicodin. While the doctor was nice enough to write me a script, I'll likely end up not using it. Historically, pain killers don't so much remove my ability to feel pain as make me so dizzy and nauseous that I'm too distracted to fully process the pain. So, the script is sitting with my keys and credit cards, unfilled. Chances are, it will stay that way.

Creative Ways to Die

When I was in college (waaaaay back in 1988-1992), I used to post to Usenet, quite a bit. I was recently digging through the Google archives of Usenet. I found the below "classic" post.
When I was going to college, squirrels were an ever present danger(?) at Penn State's University Park campus. They were everywhere. They were fat. And they were in no way afraid of humans. God help you if you had squirrel-snacks on your person and weren't terribly aware of your surroundings and the swarms of beady eyes tracking you as you transited the quads.
Any way, during this period of time of posting on Usenet, I found the lovely gem of a newsgroup, alt.suicide.holiday. At the time, it was more an avenue for dark humor than the group of insufferable twats that it became. I've always been a fan of dark humor and it was a perfect outlet for my "creative urges". So, I'm kind of happy that the below survived in the Internet's memory...

Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!thj100
From: THJ100@psuvm.psu.edu (Thomas H Jones II)
Newsgroups: alt.suicide.holiday,alt.tasteless,talk.bizarre,alt.horror
Subject: damn tree rats!
Message-ID: <90102.012900THJ100@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 90 05:29:00 GMT
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 54
Posted: Thu Apr 12 06:29:00 1990


    was kinda funny (well, only if youre a sadistic bastard like myself), but
recently a friend of mine was out feeding the local "tame" squirrels which
infest our campus.  those little suckers gotta be about the fattest squirrels
youll ever see.  theyre kinda cool, though, cuz you can just get some nuts and
such, bend down, make a ticking noise and theyll come running to you (after
playing their stupid "im a timid little creature of the forest *blink, blink*
game) and you can hand-feed them.  any way, he did this and things went ok for
a little while till the little f*cker decided that he wanted to see if the
protein you get from flesh (in this case:  human) is any better than the pro-
tein found in the acorns and peanuts.  he bit down and held tight.  supposedly,
it didnt even come off when my friend started to shake his hand around.
    any way, it got me to remembering other things ive seen these squirrels do.
ive seen them jump other people who were feeding them.  ive seen them hop up
on fence posts to beg for food.  and ive seen them JUMP on people who have nuts
in their backpacks and try to get at the nuts (you should see the way people
spaz when *that* happens.)  you ever see those nature films that show sharks in
feeding frenzies?  well, if you go to the student union building and get a bag
of nuts from one of the machines on the ground floor, you can get the squirrels
to do the same thing just by placing the open bag in an open space and calling
the squirrels over.  just amazing to watch sometimes.  (another fun thing to
do while theyre all frenzied is to run screaming into the middle of the group
and tree them.  they sit there chattering at you until you go away and let them
down.)

    any way, on to the suicide part (and, yes, it involves the killer squirrels
from hell, as they are locally known.)  here's my plan:

    go to a local grocery store and buy a coupla bottles of peanut oil (peanut
butter will sufice, but its messy.)  now, if its a sunny day, you can make the
whole suicide look like some kind of terrible accident and all the little tree
rats will be exterminate after your death.  ok, back to the sunny day:  take
the peanut oil and thouroughly coat yourself in it (actually, if you have a
bathtub available, it would be good to take a nice long bath in it so that it
can be soaked into your skin.)  once nicely coated in the oil (people will just
think its suntan oil, hence the desire to do it on a sunny day) go outside to
someplace you know that squirrels hang out (which around here is EVERYWHERE you
go. *argh*)  just lie down and wait.  if you arent feeling particularly pa-
tient, use the squirrel attracting sounds.  assuming that all goes well, a
swarm of ravenous squirrels will gather around you and go nuts (pardon the pun)
and gnaw off all the nutty tasting skin.  it will probably hurt like all hell,
but if they remove a significant portion of your skin, you will die of blood
loss, shock or, if you get "rescued", infection.  maybe even leave a note
saying you kept having visions of the planters peanut man and that he told you
that peanut oil made a great tanning lotion?  eeuu... grisly.  makes my stomach
turn just thinking about it.
    wonder if theyd use it as a base for a movie like the birds, only about the
arborial vermin which infest our campuses:  _Death_From_Above:__A_Story_of_
Mutant_Squirrels_