Prose Poem: Tell No One.

 

I was having trouble with my remote.

It wouldn't change over from TV to Netflix.

I checked the battery and fiddled 

with buttons. No go.

So I called my boss about it.

She's a good guy

and I feel comfortable 

unloading on her.

She said to take two aspirin

and call her in the morning.

What a joker she is!

I called her back

(we had got disconnected somehow)

and said "No, seriously -- my remote

isn't functioning properly. Can

you come over for a minute to look

at it? It's really stressing me out."

She couldn't make it that night;

she said she was sorting organic allspice

and couldn't interrupt the process

without grave damage to the product.

I'm an understanding guy,

so I said sure -- come over tomorrow morning.

But strangely enough I got called 

into the office early the next morning.

and told I was downsized.

Was given only twenty minutes to 

clean out my desk.

At my next job I got along with

my new boss famously.

He was very fatherly.

He was an older man,

with a bad heart and diabetes.

So when I got a parking ticket

I waited until mid-afternoon,

after he'd had his lunch and

rested a bit, then went into

his office to ask him if he

could fix my parking ticket.

I had to go look up the word "effrontery"

after he was done talking to me.

After that it was a long time

before I found work again.

But this time I had learned my lesson.

When I got a boil on my neck

I scheduled a staff meeting to show

everyone on my team

 the problem on Zoom.

That worked out fine.

I got put in charge of charting 

everyone's daily temperatures.