Decoy Uniforms and a phone call

2:02 PM 7/2/10

(*I think they must have given me the word 'decoy' to use.  I looked it up in the dictionary.  I saw the word 'decoy' in The Amber Spyglass, so my short-term memory remembered that word.  I think they might be making a joke because of being a 'bird' and one of the definitions of a 'decoy' was a decoy duck, a fake duck.  I don't normally use the word 'decoy' and was just calling them fake uniforms, but it 'seemed amusing' to call them decoy uniforms today.  So that's probably their suggestion.  This is after I wrote all of this and saved the draft.  Every once in a while I get voices telling me something along the lines of 'I do not think that word means what you think it means.'  (From 'The Princess Bride' - the word was 'inconceivable.')  The other idea was that they were newer and more intensely colored and better than the real uniforms, which fits with the blog the other day about fake animals being more attractive than the real ones if they have something sexually attractive that is intensified more than the real ones.  That would definitely be 'their joke.'  And tucking in my shirt makes my butt stick out even more than usual, which I don't want.*)

My decoy uniforms worked out okay. The McD uniform was almost better than the real ones. The very day that I first wore my new fake uniform, the real uniforms arrived and were being distributed. But it doesn't matter. I'll need so many more of them in the future that I will still have to buy my own even if they really did order some more. People were noticing that the shirt collar was really stiff. That was the only major difference. It had a pocket on the front of the shirt too. And no McD logo. I happened to find some cargo pants, the kind that have pockets on the legs, which match the McD cargo pants.

My Weis uniform, on the other hand, wasn't so believable. First, Samantha, the deli manager, looked at me, laughed, and said, 'That's like, a GIANT apron.' My Wal-Mart apron was down to about my knees. I laughed with her and explained that I bought myself a new uniform because (making a long story short) I was chemical sensitive and I got something on my uniform that I was having a reaction to.

Curtis saw me, and scowled a little, and said, 'Your uniform is REALLLY blue.' 'Royal blue' is the Weis uniform color. Mine was a shade darker and more intense than the real uniforms. I tried to explain the same thing to him, chemical sensitivity blah blah, but instead I got nervous and I laughed at myself in a crazy way, ha ha, I'm just a crazy person raving about chemical sensitivity, ha ha. I feel that way because all of my family thinks I'm insane and the drug residues aren't real, so when I say it out loud to Curtis, I feel like he's going to react that way too. I can write things, but if I say them out loud to the real person, depending on my mood, I might feel like they don't believe me. So when I laughed at myself, he gave me a strange look and then walked away. I was having sort of an anxiety attack and feeling like he didn't like me.

He told me he DID get a message on the phone from me. I said I didn't get a call back. I still don't know if he called back or not. I got a couple hangup calls where nothing is on the answering machine. And back in the days when I used to have caller ID, I would get strange numbers from other countries, and stuff like that, on my caller ID, so I gave up on trying to use it, because of the phone phreaks using it to harass me. If someone I wanted to hear from really did call me, the phreaks could hide the number behind a fake one, or they could redirect the call so that I didn't even get it at all, or whatever. Whoever they are, whether it's individuals, a group, a corporation, the government, or something else, whoever. So I still don't know if he even tried to call me back - he didn't say.

I didn't get a lot of chances to talk to him yesterday, because there was pressure for me to get stuff done. I tried once to see him before I left. I used an excuse to go to the back room. I was making pizzas, and in reality, I really do need to go get red and green peppers for pizza, if I want to use them, so I have to go to produce and do a transfer. Technically, I don't HAVE to get peppers. I could have used some other ingredient. But it was my excuse to try to go back there. But when I went back there, there was another guy whose name I can't remember. He's not 'The Invisible Guy,' but this is a guy whose name I don't know because we usually didn't work at the same time, and I've never really been able to see his name tag. If someone told me what his name was, I'd remember it. Anyway, he was talking to Curtis when I went back there, and so I just filled out my paperwork for the transfer. But 'they' were giving me suggestions for something I could say to try to 'make conversation.' It was a question that I didn't really care about and didn't need to ask, but 'they' suggested it, and it was all I could think of to say, since 'they' won't let me speak my own words and be myself. So, as a puppet, I said what they told me to say. I asked him if his grandmother was buying him a new car.

But I was scared and excited, because I was standing at the same table where he was, and the other guy was there, and I wasn't saying my own things, and I couldn't talk very well. My voice wouldn't come out, so I spoke really quietly, in a low slurred voice, and almost jumbled the words, because I was nervous. He probably wasn't able to hear me very well. But then he answered, and he tried to include the other guy in the conversation about his car, because it wasn't socially appropriate for me to walk in and start talking intimately to him in front of someone he was in the middle of talking to. He got the other guy into the conversation so it wouldn't be just me and him talking intimately. And this particular guy WOULD notice that it was unusual, my tone of voice, and my talking to him about his private life, and that particular guy might ask him about me.

And actually I don't even really care, or didn't at that moment, about his grandmother buying him a car.

He said he hoped she would buy him one, and he talked about the brakes being bad on the car he has now. And as usual, I did the wrong thing, I sort of laughed, but not loudly, because he said if it was raining he had to start putting on the brakes much earlier so that he could stop before he got to the stop sign, and actually it was scary, not funny. It was one of those days where everything I did felt like the wrong thing and I was SURE that he was going to dislike me, especially since I was on less St. John's Wort and I wasn't friendly anymore.

Afterwards he walked out and saw me making pizzas, and he scowled at me, and I don't know if he was actually annoyed with me, or if he was just having a cigarette craving, because he did go out for a cigarette after that. I said, 'Bye! I'm leaving... right now...' I waved at him a little bit. I didn't get to see him because I was still stuck there for a couple minutes finishing things up and we didn't cross paths.

I wasn't super-friendly and smiley that day, because my uniforms weren't covered with drugs. But my car seat vinyl still has stuff on it, and the hats are a little bit contaminated, but not badly. So I'm still getting drugs onto my new uniforms. It won't matter because I will just buy more, and I've been trying to wipe the car seats off. So these uniforms will gradually be ruined too. But I reassure myself thinking that the source of it, the storage unit full of my contaminated belongings, is now being sorted out and stuff thrown away, or packaged up, or cleaned, or whatever needs to be done with it. Every time I do that, more molecules of ephedra and the other drugs go away and don't come back. Small drug residue incidents in the future won't be as bad as the original accident, because I won't be growing and handling plants and seeds inside my apartment and then spreading it all over the carpet. Any future incidents will come from other drug users, like the doctor's office and Peter.

I called him again today and left a message. The voices got paranoid and they wondered if he gave me someone else's phone number as a practical joke, since the voice mail doesn't even have his voice on it - it's just the generic phone lady's voice. I won't know until I see him. I can only tell him, little by little, what I would like to do, and let him accept it and understand it, and let him talk back to me about how he feels and what he wants.