Thursday, August 02, 2007

The Power of Words

Patrick and I were talking about something the other day. I wish I could remember what. But someone had been rude and annoying to him and I told him, "You should have thrown the C word at them."

No. Not that C word.

Cancer.

There are some words that just have the power to shock people and quickly change their tune. And I'm not talking about swear words or racial slurs here.

Patrick doesn't do it, but if I were him I would. All the time. Whenever I wanted to make some jerk uncomfortable, I'd work the conversation around to being a cancer survivor just to watch them squirm.

You see, I have a word like that myself.

Iraq.

You'd be amazed how uncomfortable and twitchy that word can make people.

I've gotten so that I hate to even tell people where my husband has gone. I hate to see people squirm and try to find the right thing to say. But I'm not above using that word to get what I want.

And what I want is for telemarketers to stop calling me!

I live for the few and far between phone calls from my husband. I never know when he'll be able to get through or what crazy number will appear on my caller ID when he does. So I've talked to more telemarketers in the last two weeks than ever before.

I want to hurt them. I want to injure them. Do you know how disappointing it is to hope to hear the voice of the man you love only to have some quick talking sales person try to keep you on the line instead?

When my daughter was a baby the ringing of the phone made her scream. So whenever sales people called I'd just hand the phone to her.

That was kind of fun.

Now all I have to do is mention the word "Iraq" and these callers fall all over themselves apologizing. Then I tell them to put me on their do not call list.

Is it wrong that I enjoy that so much? At least it's one thing I can enjoy about my husband being in that Country That Shall Not Be Named.

No comments: