since arriving home from my trip i haven’t done much except unpack, clean my apartment, and do a little bit of contract web work. i’m working from home for people i’ve never met before, which means i get my instructions from conference calls with disembodied voices, and i code while watching dvds of the office.
wednesday night i opened my refrigerator to get some water, and i saw that the light was out. “oh,” i thought, “i guess the light’s out.” then i went to bed.
thursday morning i opened the freezer to get coffee, and the coffee package didn’t feel cold like it usually does. then i saw the thawed-out chicken and the water in the ice trays, and that’s when i knew that the fridge was broken.
after calling the apartment maintenance people, i went to the store to buy a cooler and some ice to try to save my food. when i got back from the store, i saw that i’d missed a call from steve, one of the people i’m contracting for. i put my food in the cooler and called him back.
“hey steve, it’s alison,” i said when he answered.
“hi, alison, how are you?” he said.
“my fridge is broken!”
“what?”
“oh,” i said, “my fridge is broken. when you called i was out getting ice.”
“ah,” he said. “well, at least it’s not too hot out yet.”
i think spending all this time alone has made me forget that sometimes people don’t mean “how are you?” when they say “how are you?” also, i think i need more people to talk to.
