Tags: shortstories, commitment, blog posting, regular routine

“Blast. We needed him in for this meeting. I’ll have to cover then. What time are we meeting them?”

Such a casual comment barely intersected with the reality that somebody had lost a loved one. Of course, eavesdropping isn’t exactly the most moral of activities, but that never stops me.

Sitting enjoying my lunch I couldn’t have missed what these two were discussing. They were right behind me and – as we say in this part of the world – fond of their own voices.

Very fond.

By now I’d got their measure. Serious minded career men: that’s how they’d like to think of themselves. Shiny suited used car salesmen with limited imagination and even less humanity is how I thought of them.

“Yeah. Cancer, I think. Anyway, that proposal he was working on needs a lot of tidying up, Tim. You up to it?”

“Of course. You can count on me.”

It was hard to listen to this. Somewhere, not a million miles away, some guy was mourning the loss of his father. In one moment his life was changed forever and his work colleagues were measuring that loss in the number of minutes’ extra work they’d have to do.

I did my best to forget about their comments and concentrated on the serious business of chowing down. It didn’t take much concentrating, to be honest. As the two used car dealers – excuse me, businessmen – stood up to go, I felt a wave of relief come over me. Their careless attitude towards human life seemed callous. Never once had they discussed how Geoff might have been feeling. Never once did they express any empathy for the guy.

“I’ll bring the car round, Tim. You wait here. It’s absolutely foul outside. No point both of us being soaked.”

“Right. I’ll take care of the bill then – Bill”

The slightly forced laughter suggested that little joke had been played out many, many times in the past.

I was tucking into dessert when there was an almighty crash outside. There had been a car crash right outside the restaurant.

Ghouls. That’s what people are. Still, I can talk. Carnage and destruction and a crowd appreciating the unfolding drama. I have to admit I was one of the crowd. Ghoulish spectators.

Of course, the accident involved Bill. He’d lost control in the rain and ploughed into a parked truck. Died instantly they say. Wouldn’t have felt much, they say. Notify his family, they say.

Tim just nods wordlessly. He looks shocked.

When he takes out his mobile I feel sorry that he’s going to be the one to deliver the awful news. I imagine that Bill’s wife is a caring wife and a good mother. His children will take it hard. I wonder if they will take time off work?

“Martin? Tim. I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid. Bill’s had a car crash and – well – it’s bad. No. No, he isn’t. He’s dead, Martin.”

I can only imagine how Martin is coping with that news over the phone. The shock will probably make him numb for a few minutes.

“No, of course not. I’ve got all the paperwork with me. Don’t worry; I can cover the presentation with my eyes closed. That account is as good as ours.”

So, not talking to Bill’s relatives then.

“Martin. If it’s not too soon to ask; after I bag this account can we schedule a time to discuss where I go from here? You can count on me. I can handle all of Bill’s accounts. No problem.”

The phone call is interrupted by the police officer who needs a little more information. Tim puts his phone away.

I realize there is nothing more to hear. My own pager is beeping. I’m needed for my next appointment in about a week. I always get plenty of notice. It gives me time to get to know my clients. Learn a little about them. Sometimes even eat with them. Or near them. Eavesdropping is so useful, sometimes.

Watching Tim drive off in a taxi I smile. There are times my job makes me sad. But my next client was going to make me very happy. Very happy indeed. Tim didn’t know it yet, but he was my next client. Unfortunately for him.

Call me an old softie, but as the angel of death I don’t always want to take people. Not always.

But taking Tim would be my pleasure.

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Author’s note: I haven’t posted many stories for a long time on here and I thought it was about time I started posting a few more. This particular story started out as a commentary on just how callous people can be when someone dies (the conversation was a real one I overheard).

But I couldn’t work out where to take this and after letting my mind wander I decided to make the narrator the angel of death. Probably because I’ve seen a film recently called Click, which has a shop assistant who turns out to be the angel of death.

I found some information about drug treatment online. One quote in particular I thought was very important.

“The first step is to truly want it”

That’s such good advice. If you truly want to get clean, or give up smoking come to that, then you’ve already started the journey. I think maybe a lot of addicts would view getting clean as giving something up (the drugs) when in fact they’re gaining something very valuable – health and wellness.

1800nodrugs.com offers a lot of information and having a website means it’s possible to get a lot of that information completely anonymously. That’s probably an important first step – taking away the pressure of having to face potential disapproval by admitting you have a problem.

Looking at that site and thinking about my previous posts, it looks like an excellent place to start if you want more information on drug rehab.

Sadly, a great many people do need to start looking. At least this is a no-cost way for them to get started.

I’m proud to say that I’ve almost never taken drugs (explained below) so I’ve never needed rehab. But there are a good many people who do need help and it must be terribly difficult if you’re in that position, knowing that you need help, but not always able to find it.

When I was a young man I was always against drug use, but a few of my friends did it. As so many people did back then. Fortunately they never did it while I was around because I would have taken off – I was rather intolerant in those days. Many years later I met up with one of my close friends of the time.

Over dinner he told me how his wife at the time (now his ex) had made a ’special’ cake which had the effect of sending me temporarily deranged. I don’t remember the incident, but he found it hilarious to recount it to me.

This particular couple never got into it deep enough to need rehab, but I’ve known people who have needed rehab and when you see someone you care about in that particularly deep hole that is addiction, it’s amazingly painful. Especially because in the end, you can’t really help them. They have to make the decision for themselves.

It’s interesting to me that Stone Hawk drug rehabilitation center has a philosophy that seems to say the same thing. You really can’t stand in moral judgement over someone when you’re trying to help them. All you can do is give them the space to make the decision for themselves and then give them some tools to back it up. I guess that’s why they achieve a 76%+ success rate.

For every person who goes into rehab there are many more who don’t. To those who don’t, it’s probably important to know that help is available.

drug treatment

In my own case the last time I was very involved with the concept was about 6 years ago. I used something called ACT! which at the time was a pretty powerful CRM software.

Times have moved on since then and I’ve been looking at crm software for the modern age.

To say it’s developed in leaps and bounds would be an understatement.

Nowadays, and with the maturity of the internet, you can capture information about virtually every aspect of your relationship with the customer. When I think about my best experiences with companies trying to sell me things, it’s always been when they take the time to understand what I want and put me first.

So a product that can help you to do that has to be at least worth a look.

There’s a great website at blog reviews which allows you to get paid for your posting. I can certainly see that would encourage some people to post to their blog more frequently.

The biggest problem, that I’ve seen anyway, in the blogosphere is when a good site starts up and then dies some time into it. I suppose there must be dozens of reasons why that could happen, such as illness, lack of time, lack of interest. But surely lack of motivation must be one of the biggest causes?

Payperpost is a website that I joined recently. It’s a given that they pay you for making a post and the amount can vary from a couple of dollars to $15 or $20. I don’t think anyone will ever retire on that kind of money, but for many people it might just make the difference between making a post and not bothering.

The site itself is clean, colourful and easy to use. Very Web 2.0, in fact.

I’ve suggested to my brother that he signs up and starts making a blog. He has a computer. He has the internet. He has time.

He has no motivation.

Getting paid for blogging might actually change that.

I’ve even got signup links to the site on the bottom of all my posts now. There are so many people out there blogging for free. I think it would be pretty good if more joined in this cultural change.

I’ve just been looking at a couple of new gambling sites on the net.

I did try a bit of gambling online a few years ago, although it was a different kind of gambling called spreadbetting and arbitrage sports betting. I was successful for a while, but then I got busy at the place I worked at and I couldn’t really go online during the day to place my bets.

Poker always looked like fun, even though I’m not a good player. I’ve tried a few of the big name sites and I have to say the modern software used to run these sites is much slicker than it ever was.

This site, JackPot City Casino, is more of an arcade style site, in my opinion. If you like slot machines it’s a good example of its kind.

Now this one, Online Casino, is more my cup of tea, because the idea of being a poker professional appeals to me – a lot!

There’s only one slight problem: I have no skill as a poker player. I think that’s because I haven’t sat and really practised it. I don’t suppose playing about 20 or 30 hands is enough to develop really good skill in anything.

Now my niece, well that’s a different matter. She actually worked at a casino for a couple of years and was trained on all the games, including poker. She keeps trying to teach it to me, but gives up in frustration when I don’t get something as quick as she’d like me to.

Good poker player she may be, good teacher she isn’t!

When she was growing up a lot of teachers thought she was what used to term ‘backward’ in the UK. A ’slow’ learner. Actually, she’s very intelligent and has degrees in nursing, psychology and computing to prove it.

But her reading is still slow compared to ‘average’ and back then, some 30 odd years ago, it was almost non-existent.

In the end she virtually learned to read overnight. She had a motivation that was incredibly strong: she fell in love with Starsky and Hutch. I’m not kidding. And since there was a Starsky and Hutch magazine with information about her favourite characters on tv she started reading almost overnight. She was about 12, I think.

We didn’t know anything about dyslexia back then, even if the experts did. So we just thought it was the way it was.

I’ve been reading up a little on a website that aims to help treat dyslexia. What I’ve read astonishes me. Seems that one of the keys to overcoming dyslexia – or perhaps even avoiding it in the first place – is to teach children all the vowel sounds in the English language. I know when I was a child I was taught the five, a,e,i,o,u. But when you speak English there are many more actual vowels than that. You can hear them, but we don’t teach them to children. That has got to confuse them. Why is a sometimes eh? and sometimes a (short ah), for example?

Doesn’t really make sense, does it?

Dyslexiadecoded have an online course you can access for free to help train anyone who has dyslexia.

You can get Free Help for Dyslexia by clicking the link.

Here’s their press release

Dyslexia? Now there is Free Help

Now there is free online help for people who have dyslexia or simply did not learn to read well while going to school. It is a click-‘n-learn program. Students and adults may learn decoding, basic reading skills, and advanced reading skills all with the click of a mouse.

The program is called ReadingBySix. It provides a systematic approach to helping people defeat dyslexia and related reading problems. You will notice measurable progress from week to week provided participants are active in their studies and do their assignments. The online courses are virtually free when you give a small donation. If you choose not to donate, they are completely free.

Dyslexia is a distinct learning disability characterized by difficulties in decoding individual words. These difficulties may not show up in other cognitive and academic abilities. Dyslexia results from the confusion caused by the brain’s inability to associate abstract symbols with abstract ideas. This includes associating letters and words with the sounds they represent. The key to defeating dyslexia is learning to decode English sounds.

You are invited to review the website and take a few of the courses for practice and learn how the program works. Then use it to teach your children or students to read. It can be used for preschool, home school, grade school, or high school. Students, adults, and children can use it. It teaches reading 100% of the time and it’s all electronic. If you know of people who need help, please tell them about ReadingBySix: http://www.dyslexiadecoded.com/

Source: Dyslexia Decoded

As I said at the beginning, I wish my sister had access to something like this when she was young. I know she suffered at school because of it. Teachers weren’t always as sensitive back then as they are now.

I read from a very early age so I’ve never understood what it’s like not to be able to. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a sea of letters swimming in front of your eyes, making no sense, and a teacher treating you as if you’re a simpleton because of it.

I just know that my sister has had to work unbelievably hard to overcome her initial reading problems. What I don’t know, because we don’t really discuss it, is what personal cost to her occurred just because she had dyslexia.

The reputation of service centres that do that kind of work in the UK is not very high, quite honestly. Everyone has heard tales of going along with a pretty new car and coming out with a huge bill.

Now, leaving aside the fact that some people are truly blind to the faults of their own vehicle, it seems there are enough complaints about the problem to make you believe that it happens often enough to be a problem.

After all, if the ’specialist’ in the field tells you that you need some work doing, how are you going to argue with him unless you have specialist knowledge yourself? For most of us, it’s not really an option.

So what do you do when you take your car somewhere new for the MOT and find that the specialist corrected a fault you knew about, for nothing, because it was only a 1 minute fix?

I’ll tell you: you start telling everyone you know. And that kind of advertising is probably worth a lot more than they could earn by ripping people off by adding little jobs on.

Another garage might have made a quick £30, but this one has just made more referrals from that one act than he could have got with a £1,000 advertising campaign.

The car drives a lot better than it did, too.

Spooky, isn’t it?

Well, according to a magazine article I’ve read in a ‘popular’ science magazine it seems ‘real’ scientists are beginning to wonder whether telepathy really is possible, after all.

You see every time you think something is bunkum a scientist comes along and makes you question that belief.

So, is telepathy actually possible?

My own belief is that we’ll all still be arguing about that for a long time to come, since it’s the kind of thing you either believe without proof, or would not believe no matter what. And even for those of us who’ve had experiences that make us believe, it’s hard to convince anyone else.

So the next time you are thinking about an old friend and they telephone a few minutes later, enjoy it as some kind of elemental connection. You don’t need a lot of scientific proof to take that coincidence as proof of your belief.

And never let the doubters spoil your enjoyment of your belief.

For myself, well let’s just say what I believe is something you should be able to intuit – if I’m right.