Torture Time

I did not go anywhere yesterday. I stayed home, wore an old ratty T-shirt, no make-up, hair slightly pulled back and sliding from its holder, and did some painting. I finished a book that I was reading. When Toby and Jesse came home, they put on their grubbies. Toby worked in the garden while I cooked fajitas on the grill. It was a pretty lazy day. Then the water-treatment salesman came by.

We are about to start a big addition onto our little house. You can see the photos of Toby and the jackhammer over at Jesse’s blog. Yesterday while he was running the jackhammer, the air conditioner man came by to talk to Toby about some specifics of putting in a unit and how we needed to prepare/build for it. The man stayed pretty much outside other than to look inside and say that "yeah, I can do that…" The whole visit lasted maybe five minutes.

So while I was cooking dinner last night – just setting it on the table actually – the water softener salesman calls. He said he was almost to our house. I yelled out the door to Toby, "Hey, there is a man coming by about the water!" thinking that the man would not need to come in. I was wrong. The man came inside with a little suitcase and proceeded to put it on the table. Jesse and I were pushing the food and plates out of the way to make room for him. Then he went into his dog and pony show testing our water, showing how hard it was, showing how soft water would look after it had been through his water treatment, etc. For close to an hour, he rattled on about his product in typical salesman mode (had a Yankee accent). There we sat looking like, well, like a bunch of Okies. On the table along with his salesman’s suitcase was a big plate of meat and our plates. Pushed to one end of the table was my art stuff, today’s mail, a watermelon, and Jesse’s bills which she happened to be paying when the guy came in. It was not comfortable. Only the dog was excited to see the salesman.

We must have looked like Ned with his first grade reader, or do all salesmen seem to be talking down to you? Toby went into "tease/torture mode." This is hard to explain to someone who has not personally witnessed it. Toby is normally a very quiet person. Maybe because he has a slow West Texas accent, people assume he is slow. Toby is a first rate smart a$$, and sometimes it comes out in a big way. He had a smart comment to everything the salesman said. Most of it was funny in an odd way – like when the salesman said, "Do any of you have any sodium restrictions or high blood pressure?" Toby answered, "Only the dog does." When the man held up two little jars containing our water from the tap and tap water that had been through his softener along with some yellow dye to show the particles, Toby said, "Are you sure you did not get that from the toilet?" It went on and on. Jesse and I could not help laughing from time to time- sometimes just rolling our eyes. I have to say that the salesman was a great sport with a good sense of humor. I think he liked Toby – for the most part.

After it was all said and done, the man was gone, and dinner served, I wanted to kill Toby for inviting the man here without telling me and then for torturing him throughout his spill. Yet the man did seem to think we were hicks (we looked the part) and maybe deserved what he got.