I outfoxed the phone company!

Dear Gentle Readers,

As you recall, in my last post, I was telling y'all how good I was at changing my voice to sound like Stinky, Winky and Blinky, the three little pigs. When my daughters were very small, on Saturday mornings my husband, Walker, would get up early with the girls, and try to let me sleep. But, the girls would all three come to my bed and pounce up and down on top of me while they tickled me unmercifully. I would try to hide under the covers and say, “Girls! Don't torment your mama! Let me sleep!” Then they would jump up and down on the bed yelling, “Torment! Torment! Torment! Get up Mama!!! Get up Mama!!!” Such gentle children they were... Then they would yank the covers off of me and pull me up into a sitting position with my feet dangling off the side of the bed. My hair looked like flying monkeys had played in it. I had on no makeup. You get the picture.

“Make your feet talk, Mama!” Now, I hope you realize that my feet can't really talk, but I could throw

my voice down to my feet and my feet would jump all around saying in a very high squeaky voice, “No! No! I don't want to get up! No! No!” The girls loved this and they would pull my poor feet down to the floor and then drag the rest of me out of bed into a standing position. Now you must realize that I had twins and another child a year older. So, I had two babies that were three years old and one baby that was four years old. This is why my feet would protest getting out of bed. My feet knew that once they were out of bed there would be no rest for the weary!

So the years rolled on by. Now the girls are in their twenties. Sometimes when they are home, one or the other will bring me coffee in bed. We snug up together and they talk to me like I'm a girlfriend. We are all so close, and I feel so mightily blessed that they love to come home. They don't pounce on top of my head anymore, but we do laugh about those good old times.... Yes, the years rolled by and it became time for my mother to break up housekeeping and move into an assisted living home. I would have brought her to live with me, but I'm so small I couldn't lift her.

Cleaning out her home went very smoothly. Two of my sisters, Camille and Cea, my sister-in-law, Janelle and I took on the task of moving all of Mama's stuff out. We had heard so many horror stories about relatives getting into fights over their parents' stuff that we were terrified that we might get into an argument over who took what. So, if any of us wanted something, we would hold it up and ask in our most sugary sweet slow little southern voices, “If none of you girls want this dishrag and used Brillo pad, may I have it?” And the rest of us would reply in unison, “Oh no honey, you take it, we insist!” So we proceeded just like that and through some kind of miracle we didn't have one cat fight! Whew!!!

When everything was out of the house I realized that I had to call the phone company and get Mama's service moved over to her room at the assisted living home. I didn't think this would be any big deal, oh boy.... I called the phone company on Mama's phone because I didn't have a cell phone with me. Mama had a land line phone with buttons on it. This a a true account of what happened.

I dialed the phone company. “Service department,” said the friendly young voice on the other end.

“My name is Suzan Rivers. My mother is Mary Lampp. She has just moved from this address to an assisted living home. I need to change her phone service from this house to her new address at the assisted living home.”

“Is your mother there? I will need to talk to her” said the friendly voice.

“No mam, she is at the home. But my name is somewhere in your paperwork as someone you can talk to about her phone service,” I replied in a friendly voice.

“I'm sorry, but I don't see your name anywhere. I must speak directly to your mother on that phone, no other,” she said in a not-quite-so-friendly-voice.

“Look, my mother just had hip replacement surgery. There is no way she can get up the steps to get in this house to talk on this phone. That's the reason we moved her to the assisted living!” I said in a not-so-friendly-any-more voice.

“I'm sorry, but we have our policies,” said a not-friendly-at-all-voice.

“So, you are telling me that I need to find a big strong man to carry my eighty-six year old mother with a bum hip up the steps into this empty house where there is not even a chair for her to sit on while she talks to you on this phone? Is that what you are telling me?” Kiss friendly goodbye.

“We have our policies.”

“ Okay. I'll go look for a muscular man.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” I hung up.

I sat down on the floor and tried to figure out what to do. Then it hit me. I had a great “granny” voice that I used when I did the “Little Red Riding Hood” puppet show. So, I worked on giving the house a good cleaning to kill some time. Then I called “Cathy” back.

“Hello Cathy! I have my mother here now. Do you want to talk to her?” I asked.

“Yes. Please put her on.”

So I took a deep breath and in my most shaky, quavering, dear old granny voice I said, “Hello, this is Mary Lampp....”

“Mrs. Lampp, I need to know your birthday, sweetie,”

I replied in the best sweetie granny voice I could do, “My birthday is October tenth, nineteen twenty- one.”

Cathy said, “Okay Sweetie, what is your social security number?”

I thought to myself that I was in trouble because I didn't know Mama's social security number. So I just pretended to be a tad senile and said, “ Oh dearie me, I don't remember my social security number, but I remember how to make applesauce. Do you want the recipe? And my birthday is October tenth, nineteen twenty one. Did you get that? October tenth, nineteen twenty-one, October tenth, nineteen-twenty one....”

At that point Cathy had started to laugh and said, “Okay honey, you can put your daughter back on the phone,”

“Hello? This is Suzan Rivers...”

“Mrs. Rivers, we will switch your mother's phone service over to her new residence today. She sounds like such a sweetie pie. I'll bet you two are very close.”

“Oh yes, very close, very very close...”