What Once Was…Write

Editor’s Note: I originally wrote this five years ago. It’s horrifying that I haven’t really progressed much beyond where I was then. I keep thinking I’ll see Rod Serling in my rear view mirror.

You know that feeling of getting lost while driving? You know, you are driving along and make a turn or two or three, things start to look a bit unfamiliar but you keep driving because that little voice in your head keeps telling you that you’re doing fine and you’re going in the right direction. Suddenly, you get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that you are lost. Hopelessly lost. You pull over and take stock: you are miles from your destination and have absolutely no flipping idea of a.) how you got there; and b.) how you’ll get to where you want to go.

That’s my life.

One day I was rolling along in life, things going pretty well, every task directed at helping provide happy and successful lives for my children, and at paying my bills and doing my best to prepare for and maybe, just maybe, to enjoy the autumn of my life. The next day, I was divorced, in foreclosure, car repossessed, living paycheck to paycheck despite working 60-hour weeks in a professional job, and buried under a pile of debt the amount of which is too obscene to speak out loud.

I tried moving out-of-state to allow me and my kids to recover. It worked, for the most part. The kids are thriving. I am grateful for that. I went back to school 30 years after my undergraduate studies and in 19 months, earned a master’s degree. I am proud of that. Then, after spending four years living 2,000 miles away from my extended family, friends and everything familiar to me, I moved back home. It wasn’t alone – it was with the promise of a new partner and with him a new life, new adventures, a new home, and even a half of a plan for a happy retirement.

Seven years later, here I am, all of those promises unfulfilled,  the only adventure being that I am still trying to live paycheck to paycheck. The added wrinkle (pun intended) is that now, at nearly 62, I’ve been fired because of my age and I am working as an office manager – something that is not in my wheelhouse. I need to work. I need to have something that will sustain me, pay some of the bills, keep my head above water and maybe, if at all possible, give me some small measure of satisfaction. To do this, I must compete with professionals who are 25 years or more younger than I am. There’s nowhere to hide the crow’s-feet, the double chin or the brown age spots on my hands, never mind the 39 years of work experience that somehow tends to make me a little jaded and a lot crabby. Those whippersnappers have a way of making you feel as if you should have just gone out with the dinosaurs. Besides, I can’t even get a job interview these days. And never mind thinking about meeting someone new to grow old(er) with.

It doesn’t help to know that many friends and family my age are already retired, and hopefully, worrying less and waking up looking forward to each day instead of still having to think about how to pay the bills. Retirement? Yeah. I am thinking that there will only be six people at my retirement party: three on each side of the casket.

So, I am still at the side of the road that is my life wondering out loud, “Where the hell am I? How did I get here? How in God’s name do I get home?” The only response is a tinny GPS-style voice in my head repeating, “Recalculating…”

I’ve had this story in my head for more than 30 years. I’ve told pieces of it to my friends and acquaintances. I’ve written three or four chapters of a novel that I hoped would allow me to finally get everything committed to paper (well, to laptop). But I’ve never been able to finish it.

I’m nearly 62 years old. My memory isn’t what it used to be. When I was young, my brother Sean could call me at one a.m. from a bar and ask me a sports trivia question and I always had the answer – so he always won whatever bet he had with one of his drinking buddies.

This week, though, while I could probably still win a bet about Miguel Cabrera’s lifetime batting average (.316), I discovered that my memory isn’t reliable enough to make book on anything else. Here at work the archivist found a story I wrote for the Grosse Pointe News in 1989. It was a 2,000- word story, plus numerous photos I took myself, about the merger of St. Ambrose Parish with two other Detroit parishes. I must have interviewed 30 people. I know I worked hard on the story because I read it and it wasn’t bad.

But I have absolutely NO memory of the story. I don’t recall writing it, doing the interviews, taking the photos or showing up at three churches for the three ceremonies involved in the merger. It’s like someone else did it. There’s just a big blank in my memory. So I got scared and decided I’d better start writing again. At least to get into the habit of it – with the overall goal of finally telling my story before I forget it.

Then again, I hope I wouldn’t forget everything about my story. Some of those memories are pretty strong:

Later that night, we were awakened by the sound of Mom having a severe asthma attack. There really isn’t anything on earth that compares to that sound. It was terrifying. Hearing it, we’d rocket out of our beds and out to the living room to help our mother. Gasping for breath, Mom would be standing holding on to the back of a chair. She would take short, quick breaths trying to fill her lungs with air. Her petite body would heave with the effort of holding on – literally – to life. Her eyes would be opened wide and if one of us stood in front of her trying not to look scared, she would stare deeply into that person’s eyes. And what was in her eyes? Fear, to be sure. But more. Determination? Fierceness? Love?

We’d be bustling around her, waiting for her to tell us what to do. “Don’t call the fire department yet,” she would sometimes say. “Bring me more hot water. When I tell you, squeeze my (atomizer) pipe into my mouth. Bring me a bucket, I have to urinate. Guess you’d better call the firemen now, it’s not getting better. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, please help me. Claire, please brush my hair so I don’t look so bad when I go to the hospital. I’m sorry, kids. I’m so sorry,” she’d say, struggling to breathe as she held on to the chair. As if she could help it. As if she could change any of it.

So, bear with me. I hope to write every day. And I would love someone to read what I write and give me some suggestions on how to make it better. Because trying to tell the story – THE story – is harder than you’d think.

“Order a new phone system,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.

In June, after putting up with two years of awful phone service, my workplace set about finding a new phone system. Well, actually, the Boss said: “Peggy, get us a new phone system.” On my first day.

Our provider at the time was Grid4, a company that could not a.) keep the phones running 24/7 and b.) could not help provide us with T1 or Ethernet service because they were not compatible with the copper lines that existed in the parish and in many other places.

My boss wanted new phones because the phones would be non-operational for days and weeks at a time. Since Grid4 could not do the job, we looked into Comcast. Grid 4 agreed to let us out of our three-year contract and then Comcast engineers came out and researched our system and told us they could handle the job. Their exact words were “no additional work will be needed to implement this solution. We would estimate 2 – 3 weeks from the date we submit your order to installation. There will be about 5 – 15 minutes of downtime which can be eliminated by forwarding your main line to a cell phone until installation is complete.”

WRONG.

In August, Comcast installers came out to install and found they could not do so. The phones are internet-based phones (VOiP) and our IT system was actually not a system at all. It was a 6 or 7 little modem-connected hubs all around our two buildings. The hubs didn’t talk to one another and sometimes they didn’t work at all (kind of like a dysfunctional family).

So, we hired an IT firm to come in and do a survey and scope of work proposal. The proposal to build a new network with two pathways – one for data and one for voice – was something in the neighborhood of $18,000. “What else can we do?” the Boss said. Tin cans and string wouldn’t suffice, so we went for it.

In September, the IT firm (SecureSolutionsIT) came in and worked hand-in-hand with Comcast installers. At some point during that original set up of 22 phone lines, Comcast discovered that our two buildings were not connected with any working cable. The only cable was underground and that would be extremely costly for the IT company to access and use for the new IT system (including tearing up concrete we had just paid to repair and replace last summer).

So…Comcast went back to the engineers who decided that we needed to break up the phone/data installation into two separate projects. We agreed. That second installation took place in October. It, too, did not go well. In all, the two installations took more than three months and throughout, the phones would go down sporadically. Except for the Boss’s phones. They stop working nearly every day, often for days at a time. In the meantime, the Boss also asked for his old phone number back. We called Comcast to get them to do that (when they installed the new phones, they gave all the phones a new number).  The Boss wanted his number of 30-years returned to him. Comcast says they’d love to do that, but Grid4 has taken possession of the old numbers and won’t let them go (or “port them out”). We make more phone calls and schedule more service visits, fill out online request forms, follow up with calls, and threaten legal action.

Finally, Grid4 releases the numbers – which don’t belong to them anyway. Good news: the Boss gets his number back. Bad news: it doesn’t work all the time. Telemarketers (“we see you are due for a new back brace”) get through, but no one else does. We call Comcast service again. A technician comes in, does a little digging and then tells us that the problem is not theirs but the fault of the new IT system.

We call the IT company. They come and do some more digging and find out that no, it is indeed a Comcast malfunction. We call Comcast again. They tell us they can’t schedule a technician for a week. The IT company says their work is done, but they agree to come back whenever we call to fix little things at no extra cost. They do, but all of the phones still don’t work.

In the meantime, we continue to work on getting all the alarms connected and operating at peak efficiency. We call the alarm company and they have teams of engineers from two outside companies come and tell us what we need to do. But first, they recommend that we install new cellular phones since fire systems need to have two communication methods and one can’t be VOIP. They give us an estimate of $3,800 to do that work. They also state that they cannot install the “pre-work” that needs to be done. That our people need to do it. And it’s not easy or cheap:

1. Customer will need to provide a penetration point going down in to the basement needing an 1 ½” hole with an 1 ¼” PVC sleeve going to a 4×4 weatherproof box.
2. Customer will need to install a 4×4 weatherproof box.
3. Customer needs to get an electrician to provide a dedicated outlet near the fire panel to be on the same circuit as the fire panel.
4. Electrical permit will be pulled and a post-installation inspection will be mandatory.

At this point (last week) all the phones (except the Boss’s ) are working. But the fire alarms aren’t Then Comcast comes back and tells us that they will send us a subcontractor to work on the alarms because there is no reason we need to spend all that money that ADT wants us to spend. The subcontractor comes and works all day on the lines. During that period, the polar vortex causes the 96-year-old building’s boiler to create enough steam to replicate the set for the horror movie, “The Fog.” Plumber comes to fix that. Then we discover that after the fog, none of the phones in our buildings (all 22 of them) work. Comcast says it doesn’t know why. Subcontractor says it doesn’t know why. ADT says it doesn’t know why. IT company says it doesn’t know why but will help figure it out. Ten days, 13 emails and 11 phone calls later, many of those phones still don’t work (the ones in the office do). At this point, no one is scheduled to come look at the problem, although we have two phone calls and an email out requesting service.

We have invested more than $25,000, eight months (not counting the previous two years of terrible phone service) and hundreds of Peggy-hours of time and frustration in this project – and have been held hostage by no fewer than 9 different companies, subcontractors and consultants – and we still have a phone system that is just one step above the tin cans and string – barely. Today alone I spoke with Comcast four times and all they did was tell me that we need to get the IT Company back to fix the stuff they worked on. “So, can we help you with anything else today?” the last Comcast rep says. As if.

Sigh.

Prayers to St. Jude are most welcome.