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veritable pharmacopoeia
Wednesday, June 5 2002It was a rough day for Gretchen. She's been taking various over-the-counter pain killers, but today for some reason their effectiveness declined precipitously and she couldn't escape the pain. Mind you, even when Gretchen's pain killers do work, their effects only last four or five hours and then it's time to take more. But by the time she knows it's time to take more, she's already entered a hour-long period of pain.
We were watching teevee tonight as Gretchen suffered at the hands of her imperfect painkiller regime. But then it came on, an advertisement whose message had always escaped us (even though we could have, if asked, recited its rhyming slogan by heart). The ad was for the pain medication Alleve, a dose of which supposedly lasts twelve whole hours. Their slogan is ponderous but nonetheless memorable, "All day strong, all day long."
I immediately ran down to the Neergaard Pharmacy on 7th Avenue to pick up a bottle of Alleve, and while I was there I went on something of an over-the-counter shopping spree, buying a veritable pharmacopoeia of pills to help Gretchen with her varied and sundry medical problems. I bought two different kinds of sleeping pills to help her make it through the night as well as tablets that would hopefully draw her near-constant belching to a close.[REDACTED] This morning Ernie the upstairs neighbor (who gets his high-bandwidth internet for free via an ethernet line plugged into one of my hubs) called me for tech support. Because Gretchen answered the phone, however, he didn't initially say that tech support was what he wanted, since he knows Gretchen is suffering from a bad illness. At first he said he was calling to "check in" on Gretchen. But then he immediate changed the subject to whether or not I was around. He had, he said, an "IT question" for me. It turned out that he couldn't figure how to set up his Outlook Express to read a POP mail client, a problem that I eventually had to go up to his apartment to correct.
Before I went up, however, Gretchen (who, owing to her illness, was in a foul mood most of the day) had time to stew about Ernie's ungratefully exploitative nature. "He's not happy getting free internet access; now he has to call us for tech support. It would be one thing if he showed any appreciation. But he doesn't." So she actually called him up and said something to this effect, "Look, times are tough and neither of us down here have a job, and I was wondering if you could give us $25 each month for your internet." At first Ernie tried to give her some sort of nonsensical shit, but when even he could tell he wasn't making sense, he reluctantly agreed. And after I set up his Outlook Express, he handed me a check for $25.
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