2007-07-17 1-800-CALL-MOM

"Now, we don't like 1-800 numbers and central dispatching. It's just a thing with us. We like to go person-to-person, the old-fashioned way. Like, on my momma's birthday, I don't pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CALL-MOM. I go there in person and give her a kiss on the cheek, okay?" (quote from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson)

Okay, today is my mom's birthday, so I went there. Hence the quote. But that's about all the good I did today. I managed to annoy almost everybody else: Ines, because yesterday she invited me to barbecue today and I forgot that I don't have time. Alex, because I forgot to tell him so. Axel, because I ate the last steak (lunch, not barbecue). Sascha, because I didn't invite him to the climbing tour. Did I miss anybody? Oh, Thomas is on vacation, so he had no chance to get into my line of fire. Good.

Later this evening, my parents and I watched TV. There was a show about German emigrants. They had this totally weird family who went to Denmark. It was a wife and a husband, their four kids, the wife's mother and the wife's sister. They moved only 500 kilometers, so it's not really a big deal. But these eight people made almost every mistake you could think of. First off, they didn't speak the language. None of them. Not a single word. Secondly, they put their complete household in two trucks and moved into a house which they had never seen from inside before. Also, they didn't know that the town was mostly inhabited by tourist. The average age of the locals is like 80 years. Next bad mistake was that not one of them had a job there. Which isn't surprising, considering their Danish skills. Their inability to convert currencies while they were shopping was hardly necessary to round off the picture, but it was there nevertheless.
Argh!