Bad Attitude

Yesterday I was working on this story, and I called up a PR woman who works for a firm in Dallas that helped me track down people in this big company before. I wasn't sure whether she was the right person to talk to, but she'd been ultra-helpful and nice in the past, so I figured she'd be a good place to start.

She told me she'd have someone from inside the company get back to me, and sure enough I got an e-mail later that afternoon that had some general statements about the company. I wrote back and said, Hey, thanks, here are some more questions, my deadline isn't until Wednesday, so no big rush on anything.

I then got another reply from this guy within the company, and he was pretty snotty. He was telling me that they don't track those numbers, he doesn't have that information, he can't find that, it would take too much time and effort and his staff isn't big enough and waah waah waah. It really annoyed me. First of all, I KNOW there's got to be records of this stuff. This is fairly important financial stuff we're talking about, and this is a really big company, so you know they're tracking everything. (I'm not going to name the company, but let's just say it's a Big Company. Trust me on this one.) I know you've probably got a small staff and everything--fuck, there's five of us reporters churning out tens of thousands of words every week to fill a whole newspaper--but come on. Seriously. At least say, Hey, we'll try and get you what we can. Don't just blow me off. You saying you don't have the staff or time means "I'm lazy and don't want to waste my time with you."

Jerk. I hate snippy PR people.

Sunday night the weather took a turn for the winterish, and it got really cold and then start drizzling and freezing everywhere. I was inside on my couch, but my back started really hurting. Well, ok, not exactly my back. It was my pelvis, that huge giant bone, the one that felt like I'd cracked it into pieces a little over a year ago when Topper threw me like nobody's business. In fact, yesterday that bone felt almost the exact same way it did when I got thrown, when I had to go to an urgent care center and get it x-rayed to make sure there weren't pieces floating around in there.

The doctor then gave me a prescription for tramadol, which never really did anything at the time, so I generally didn't take them. Last night I took some on the off chance it would help, and sat on a heating pad all night (which helped with the other problem, which that it was really cold in the apartment). I went to bed around 11:30, really tired, finished reading a Texas Monthly article and turned out the lights at midnight. I felt exhausted, but then proceeded to lay in bed until 1:30, unable to fall asleep. Then, my sister and her boyfriend came home.

If I had to pinpoint one thing as the most stressful thing in my life, it would be my sister's work schedule. I know I gripe and whine about a lot of things on here, and I don't talk about my sister as much as say, oh, PR people, but it's because she's family and I want to kind of be respectful of her. But seriously: cannot take it. She works as a waitress and closes most nights, so she comes in around 1:30, 2, sometimes even 4 if she goes out somewhere afterward, and I always, always hear her come in.

I've become a really light sleeper. I don't know when it happened--the time some creepy guy snuck into my dorm room while I was asleep and hovered over my bed, causing me to wake up and have to file a police report? The time I got Fenway and he discovered the most comfortable place to sleep at night is on my face? The time my sister started coming home at ungodly hours and then sitting up and talking or whatever with her boyfriend until like 5 a.m.? I don't know.

But I do know I always hear her come in, and then I always hear her and her boyfriend and it drives me nuts. I've asked her repeatedly to lower her voice, shut her door, keep it down, get a real job, whatever, but it just doesn't work. Last night, Fenway was loud and obnoxious, I couldn't sleep (possibly the tramadol? I have weird reactions to some painkillers), and I could hear her. I laid in bed until 2:30, my heart rate progressively climbing from "oh, we're awake" to "we're doing jumping jacks" to "we're running a marathon and our head might explode." I started trembling because I was just so angry, so frustrated.

Then it was my turn to turn bitchy. I heard my sister and I sprang out of bed, whipped open my door, and stood in the hallway yelling something to the effect of, "Seriously, it's 2:30 in the morning! We only overlap in this apartment like 6 hours a day, and it's when I need to sleep!"

My sister said they'd been whispering and her door was shut, but that just proves that A) I have supersonic hearing or B) she's still loud. I'm opting for B. She has NO idea how loud she is.

But let me tell you, I felt a helluva lot better after yelling at them. I fell asleep with no problem after that.