So yesterday around noon, I walked out of my office and saw the plant manager and the safety manager standing around. I told them I was off to lunch, and asked if I could bring them back anything.

“Actually, you can just go home.”

Go home? Go home? Did I do something wrong?

“We’re letting everyone go home at noon, to do whatever it is you need to do to prepare for the hurricane.”

Ah, right. The hurricane.

“Cool. Thanks. See ya.”

So on the way home, I stopped off at a grocery store to pick up some of the many items I had failed to obtain from the Hurricane Survival Guide, namely rubbing alcohol and insect repellant. I waited for twenty minutes at the deli counter just to buy some turkey and cheddar.

“Number 25? 25?”

I looked down at my ticket. 27. Alright, baby, two more to go.

“Yes, I’d like a pound of smoked turkey, and a pound of slicked chicken breast. Also, give me a pound of the honey ham, and another pound of the roast beef. No, the roast beef on sale.”

Holy crap, lady. This is a hurricane that is projected to barely graze us, and you’re feeding twenty?

“Also, give me a pound each of the muenster, American, sharp cheddar, and provolone.”

Argh.

Twenty minutes later, I had my deli and was headed home.

I threw my mail on the hall table, walked over to the tv, turned it on to nothing in particular and went to the kitchen to put away my meat. Hee!

You ever get the eerie feeling that something just isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It took me a few minutes to realize that when I opened the refrigerator door, I didn’t hear the compressor running. The thermostat was set to “coldest” so I should have heard it click on. Nothing.

Shit.

I phoned my rental agency, told them that I needed maintenance performed on my fridge, and they called back ten minutes later to say that they were sending someone over.

Mexican maintenance force to the rescue!

What they failed to mention, was that they weren’t planning on fixing my fridge. They were driving over a new one. Had they mentioned this small detail, I could have emptied the fridge and cleaned it out before they arrived.

Instead, I sat down and watched some NYPD Blue on TNT after destroying the Falcons 84-3 in Madden 2004.

When they arrived, an old man and a woman in her thirties armed with an electric drill, a cell phone, and a new fridge, I began to panic slightly. So I rushed around the kitchen, emptying all my crap from the fridge onto what counter space I could clear, even throwing shit in the sink while they wheeled in the new unit.

So I stood around, half-paying attention, half-watching NYPD Blue, while they spoke to each other in Spanish, and installed my new fridge. Every now and again I would turn to them abruptly, trying to make them think that I understood what they were saying.

And then I heard it through the TV: “Puta.”

They stopped talking and turned to me. I shrugged and turned to the TV pointing at Medavoy berating some young Puerto Rican hoodlum.

Apparently, this episode, which I had seen before, features a side plot where Medavoy, accused of being a pussy, grows a pair, and starts haranguing some guys who fired shots at a rival gang from a bus.

(It also ends with Sipowicz at his moonlighting job as a Marshall babysitting some Africans who have been caught trying to smuggle cocaine and heroin in swallowed condoms. The final scene is pretty powerful, what with Sipowicz panicking and holding the hand of one of the Africans as he spazs out after one of the condoms bursts. “Welcome to America.” Fade to black.)

Anyway, back to the moment at hand.

“Screw you, Puta!”

Now I took French throughout High School, so I don’t know dick about Spanish. But I do know curses.

So I’ve got these Mexican maintenance people installing my fridge, giving each other sidelong glances and muttering to each other in Spanish, while my food melts and rots on the counter, while every other word on TV is “Puta.”

“No. You’re the puta.”

“Uh uh, puta.”

“Don’t make me slap you around with this here phone book.”

“Please, puta. You don’t got the stones.”

“…”

“…”

“Puta.”

Finally, after an eternity of finding new and creative ways to work “puta” in the conversation, NYPD was over, and my fridge was installed.

And then the hurricane hit. Kind of anti-climatic though. I didn’t lose power, nor did I get flooded out. No 2x4’s came flying through my window.

The only issue I had was with a window that wouldn’t close. I think I broke it off it’s track or something trying to force it shut. So to avoid turning my apartment into a wind tunnel, I affixed garbage bags to the window frame with duct tape.

Man, I was out there every hour or so patching it back up. So, you know, for future reference, taping up a window with garbage bags and duct tape in hurricane winds doesn’t really work.

101 uses, my ass.

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