and the wife, you know, she’s been sick…
After speaking to a hundred different people every day five days a week, they start to smear into each other. Every one sounds just the same as the last; demanding things, evading questions, shouting, mumbling, misunderstanding. I can hardly hear their words because of the din in the background.
But today, there was a man who came on the line as a real human being. He happened to have an electricity meter that required you to buy cards to punch in it to keep the electricity going. basically a pay-as-you-go system that was devised to get people to pay their bills.
“my wife, you know, she’s been very sick recently”
“my wife, she bought these cards from someone else, and they don’t have any numbers on the back. They’re old cards, you know, still in punts.”
“what would happen if I put those cards in the meter? would it jam? could it trace these cards to myself?”
“I’ve asked her to not buy things from certain people, but she keeps doing it.”
Now, maybe he was just a crook and was telling me lies about his sick wife so I wouldn’t rat him out. But that doesn’t really matter cause he could be traced through the very phone call he was making. There are rumors that every single call is recorded for legal reasons. And there was something in the tone of his voice that made me believe that he was sincerely concerned about this, and also desperate enough to use the potentially fake or stolen cards.
I wanted to be able to do something to help him. I wanted to go out and override his meter so he had free electricity. I wanted to credit his account with the value of the cards he had. I wanted to make his sick wife well. I wondered what the sickness was exactly.
And I wondered about this man, who is caring for and standing by and defending his wife, even when she does things he knows aren’t right. In good times and in bad. I thought about what he must have gone through up through time to this moment with her, and what he will continue to do in the future. What sacrifices has he made?
And I looked at the parents and kids in the burger joint at the mall on my lunch break. There was a family that came and sat down at a table beside me. There was only one chair there, so they were gathing whatever chairs they could find. The little girl, who was maybe three, climbed right up into the chair her father was about to sit on. He paused, sighed, and went off to find his own chair. I thought about love and sacrifice.
