In which I learn US Geography

I've been paying attention to where the people live that visit this little site and am having the same nightmares that I was having back when I took bonehead geography in college.

(Disclaimer: I am not stupid. I went to school for a degree in chemistry, as well as a degree in natural science (wtf is that used for, you ask? teaching high school science, fyi) and did very well. I also went to mortuary school and got a degree (okay, an associate's degree, which isn't as impressive, but is a degree no less), but am terrible with geography (and English, and history...)).

Anyhoo, until my junior year in college I didn't know any of the states east of the Mississippi River (which I have swam in), save maybe two (Florida and Maine...wait, and Illinois where I saw my first ever firefly). Now, you might be wondering what happened my junior year, so I will tell you: 1. I got a new roommate, and she was from New Jersey, and 2. I took World Geography 101.

The roommate couldn't believe that I didn't know where New Jersey was and bought me a map of the US to hang in my room. Okay, so I learned where New Jersey is.

The geography class was of course world geo, which I am not as bad with, but the teacher, in order to offer us a bit of extra credit (which for some reason I always thought was bs, because if you do the work proper you should be able to pass without it, but even more ridiculous is that I always did the extra credit anyway) would let us fill in all 50 states at the end of our 4 exams that semester. Needless to say, I never got the extra credit, even after actually trying to learn them all.

And all that mess leads me to this map, where I have now located the great state of Virginia (which interestingly is one of the names I had down when I had a baby a few years back. My husband then explained that unless I was giving birth to an 80-year-old it just wasn't going to fly.):

Busy Morning

Ack!

So, my day started out busy, and it’s one of those I-can’t-believe-it-isn’t-noon-yet days where all my work is done in a fast and furious whirlwind and now I have nothing left to do but blog. So, here’s a play-by-play (okay, not really, but close) of my morning:

7:45 dropped off by the hubby at the Starbucks down the street from the office.
7:55 walked into work and before even a “Good Morning,” Big Bird says, “Doll, whenever you have a minute Pete and I have been trying to figure out how to open an obituary attachment on the company email.”
8:00 open previously mentioned email attachment and print it out for BB and Pete.
8:10 visit Jane in the prep room, getting ready to embalm a very large decedent and leave her there to fend for herself while I get ready to meet with the family of said decedent.
8:20 call the previously mentioned family. “Um, hi… Were you planning on coming in this morning? I have down here that you are scheduled to be in at 8…oh you’d rather come in this afternoon? Sure. I’ll go ahead with scheduling the church and everything in the meantime.”
8:30 gown up and join Jane in the prep room.
8:40 manager (Tank) comes in and says, “Doll, when you’re finished here I need to have a little chat with you.” Uh, what? Wtf does that mean?
8:41 Jane says I should go “chat” with Tank now, she's dying to hear what he has to tell me (and she knows I can't keep from telling her anything)
8:42 wander around the funeral home looking for Tank. When I find him he takes me into his office (shit, his office??) and tells me that the funeral home is hiring a new girl (Yay, a girl, and she's cute even) that I am to train. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!
9:00 Get all the service stuff scheduled for the new family and the casket ordered.
10:00-ish help Jane finish up the embalming
10:30 a few more calls for other services, and my day is DONE!

Huh, it seems like there was something else I was going to mention, but I suppose I can just add that later. I will also post about this new hot chick that I will soon be training.

Clean navels for all

There are some things that I get to experience that aren’t in the general public’s realm of experience.

Mondays tend to be busy at the funeral home, and whenever we have services scheduled for a Monday we try to have part-time workers work them so that us full-time directors can be available to meet with the new families that we got over the weekend (some of the families we meet with over the weekend, but not much can be done with them since cemeteries, doctor’s offices, and churches don’t have office hours on Saturdays and Sundays). So, this morning I’ve been working on the family I met with Saturday, calling the church and cemetery, getting the flowers and musicians, etc., and tying up the loose ends from this weekend. Well, Buck, the director that was on call this weekend, must have felt bad that I came in to work on my day off because he and Tank are meeting with the new families today, and I’ve now got nothing to do.

So, back to the experiences that I get to have: Since I have nothing to do I decided to go into the embalming room (also called the prep room) and hang out with Jane, the embalmer that does most of the embalming here. She’s about 50 years old, and we get along very well. She’s been in the business for about 25 years and is an AMAZING embalmer, and has taught me quite a lot in my time at this mortuary, which is handy since the man that originally trained me was a woman-hater and didn’t want me in his prep room (“You have such a pretty face, Doll, you shouldn’t waste it back here with the dead. And the chemicals will hurt your ability to have healthy babies.” Really?? What??). So, she was getting ready to start a case, and I helped her get the body undressed and on blocks, and we were chatting about the weekend. After a bit more preparation we start injecting and bathing the deceased, and I noticed something that I know I’ve seen her do a million times before, but never really noticed. Jane always washes inside the deceased’s belly button. Maybe that won't seem strange to non-embalmers (or maybe it is such a strange thing to think about that it does sound strange, as does all of this), but it is. And it’s funny. I'm talking hilarious. It took just about all of my self-control not to just laugh out loud there at her. It’s like a trademark of hers I suppose. I mean, I wash the bodies, but I can’t remember sticking my finger in someone’s navel to clean it out. K, so that’s my experience. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared now that I re-read this, but wev, right?

In which I love my job and over-use parentheses

Warning: I did not attempt to write this very clearly. I wrote it exactly the way I would have said it, and do not feel like making it easier for y'all to read. Sorry

So, it isn't my weekend on call at the mortuary, but there was a family that came in yesterday like 5 minutes before we closed to get prices on a full traditional Catholic service (okay, so since I'm the Irish (raised by a) Catholic and no one else at the funeral home is Catholic (or knows anything about the religion apparently) I usually get to do all of the Hispanic (usually Catholic, but I'm not trying to sound stereotype-y) arrangements, which would be this family that walked through the door) and I didn't want to make them see a different director if they ended up choosing our funeral home (nor did I want to hear about how much work it is to arrange not only the funeral (Mass) but a fracking Rosary as well (yes, I work with a complainer or two)), so I gave the grandson of the deceased my cell phone number so that if his mom had any questions or wanted to make arrangements they could just call me directly.

(Side note: our funeral home is not the cheapest in town, but we aren't the most expensive either, and I am honest with families about this when they are shopping for prices. I also am very sure that I am the best funeral director out there (although I dont say that to families) and tend to keep price-shopping families even when they find a cheaper place to have a funeral. I dont know why that is really, I just decide its because of my bad-assness and level of professionalism (frack, I'm concieted), and damnit, families just like me.)

Okay, back to it: So, not 15 minutes after the family (and I) leave the mortuary does my phone ring with a number that I don't recognize. And yes, it's the grandson (who, if I can just let you all know, reminds me a LOT of what I imagined Jacob from the Twilight books to have looked like before the movie ruined my imagination of him) and he is telling me that they liked me (surprised?) and that they wanted to come in to make the arrangements on Saturday afternoon.

And that's what I just did, made arrangements with this family (the grandson was the only English speaker, so he translated for his mom and aunt, making me have to look at him most of the time, and let me say, for such a young guy he really was very man-esque in his wife-beater and jeans) and now I'm getting ready to go home and was just thinking this: I love my job.

P.S. Yes, I, a 29-year-old, have read those Twilight books. Also, I loved them.

Interesting people

I met with a guy today about pre-arranging his funeral services. He is young (okay, by young I mean 45), and when I walked into the arrangement office I saw that he wore a "free hugs" button on his plaid shirt. Anyhoo, I had assumed that he must have some sort of not-life-threatening-right-now-but-I'll-die-young-of-what-I-have-early diseases/disorders, and it turns out I was right. I mean, it's rare for someone who is only 45 to make their funeral arrangements, because people that age don't tend to think about their own death too often. So, here he is with his free hugs and his disease, and he's happy as a clam, telling me that his 61 year-old caretaker will outlive him and not seeming to have any problems with that. He also told me what a stud he used to be, and how even though he's alone (for the most part) now, that he sure has time to read and work in his garden (he's been on disability for years now so has quite a bit of free time), which apparently is the greatest garden in town.

It's strange, you know, the things that are important...

Things I'm tired of people asking

1. Oh, (hee hee) you see dead people??

2. Does your hair really keep growing after you die?

3. People move, like, they sit up, after they die, right? Isn't that scary?

4. Aren't you freaked out?

5. What do you do with all the guts?

Argh! Just use your BRAINS!!!! Sheesh.

A lesson: Copy and Paste

I just finished typing up instructions on something really hard to do. Wait for it…yes, folks, copying and pasting in Microsoft programs.

So, Big Bird is a bit old, and by a bit old I mean that she isn’t technically old (62), but she is technologically old. She has a hard time comprehending anything computer related and I’m even a bit surprised that she can use her cell phone.

The programs we hand out a funeral services are all saved in our computer as templates using Microsoft Publisher. We have a template for each of the poems/verses that are commonly chosen by families. When a family decides to use a custom program however, something say, with a photo on the cover, we have a local print shop do the printing and photo editing for us instead of printing them in house. Now, in keeping with Big Bird’s controlling nature, she has to design all the wording for the folders before we give this other company any of the details to the program they are to print for us. I have been the one to do this in the past, be the go-between for the print shop and the funeral home, but Big Bird insisted this week on learning how to do it (which I am all for not being the only one that knows how to do something, especially since I’m not really an office worker anyway). So, I explained yesterday to her that the print shop does not have Microsoft Publisher (I tried to tell her that they are a Mac-based people and we are not, but noticed that she thought I was speaking Swahili, so I just said that they couldn’t open the ‘attachment thing’ if we sent it to them like that), and that we would need to save the Publisher file as a picture file when we were ready to email it over to them. I quickly showed her how to do that (she took notes) and then opened the picture file so that she could see what it would look like when the print company opened it. Well, this started a discussion about why they couldn’t then edit it and all that mess. Argh.

So now I am typing up instructions on how to copy the Publisher words and paste them into a Word document, save it, attach it in an email, and send it to the print shop. Swear to Buddha, I might just die.