dar334

My Saturday morning has too many distractions to start it with The Instruction Book, but it is starting with blessings.  Four of them to be exact.  Our first blessing has been with us for a little over 13 years, so inevitably he is “a teenager.”  I don’t see a need to say any more about that, except I’m fairly sure he has tested the very last nerve not previously damaged by MS in his mother. He will be followed up in three years by his younger sister, in which case I have been informed that when she becomes a teenager she will be living with me.  The other two blessings aren’t showing any of the signs these two are showing, probably because their dad didn’t either when he was that age.  This isn’t where I intended on going this morning with this blog, but as anybody that knows me realizes early on that I have ADD and use it remarkably well.  God has given us all different gifts which form one body.  We can’t all be hands, and we can’t all be feet.  And, forgive me, but somebody has to be an ass.  When all the pieces are put together they form one body.  I love this concept, God knew what he was doing.

As I was making pancakes this morning and cleaning up the kitchen, I started thinking about tucking Bella in bed last night.  I kissed her forehead and said “Goodnight Lucy.”  I am the queen of nicknames which has annoyed some until they realized their annoyance wasn’t going to stop me from doing it so they may as well accept it and move on.  The third of the four once corrected me when I called her little sister something other than her given name, at which point I hugged her and told her that Grammy could call them whatever she wanted because all the names were said with love.  

After calling Bella “Lucy”, I had to do the math.  Actually she is Lucy III.  My dad called me Lucy.   When Tonya came along she was Lucy II which ultimately makes Bella Lucy III.  Now back to the topic which was Trip.

At work we get service calls from technicians that need help fixing gas dispensers.  We get the majority of our work from Speedway.  Most of you understand the relationships that are formed when you have a job.  In my case, I know several callers quite well, but I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup because I never see them.  In the grocery store I only knew the names of those who wrote checks.  In both of these examples, whether I knew the face but not the name, or the name but not the face, I got very fond of several, and in the same sense, dreaded some.  With the introduction to caller ID, it’s now a game to see who’s calling first so we can be the first to proclaim “NOT IT!” when the caller is someone none of us want to deal with.  I will admit there was, WAS, one peticular caller nobody wanted to deal with.  And with no shame at all, I will admit I even hung up on him once.  In the roughly 35 years I have worked outside the home, this peticular person …….. was the WORST.  He, for some reason, was very stuck on himself and loved himself so much that by asking his name when he called caused rage.  RAGE.  Behind the safety of my telephone, in the epitome of receptionists, when he asked for one of my bosses, I would say “May I tell him who’s calling?”  Even though I now see more clearly that this was something Jesus would never even have thought of doing, when his response to my question was “TELL HIM IT’S GOD!”, I sat there motionless, and then hung up.  As I sit here now, rereading and editing what I have written, I realize that once again I have gotten off topic.

Trip.  Trip is a young man that calls us for help quite often.  He’s polite, and funny, and could easily be my nephew.  Trip works for Speedway.  With technology taking over the world, we have the ability to log in to several areas of our customers business via the extranet.  In the case of Speedway, it’s called IDS.  Having the occasion to log in to IDS for station addresses when Trip called, we discovered his name was Emeneffee.  One of the guys googled his name and found there were 3.  They next time he called I had to ask the story behind his name , I knew there had to be one.  He laughed when I asked and said his grandfather was adopted and from a little town in another state, the name of that little town that doesn’t exist anymore was Emeneffee, so that what his great-grandparents named him.  When his dad was born, he was named Emeneffee II.  As tradition goes, when he was born he became Emeneffee III.  He then explained his mother was a child of the 70’s.  Being a child of the 70’s myself, I laughed and said  “So she was sitting around getting high and decided your name was a real ‘trip’.  He said no, Trip was short for triple, he was number 3.  Now this led me to ask if he had kids.  He has 2 daughters and they are done having children.  I then asked if he had been given a son, if his son would have been Emeneffee IV.  He said yes, absolutely, but they would have called him Quad.

Now that was a long short story,

dar