Dreamland V

Sonny must have been messing around for a while with Celia’s email courtesy of pillow talk and passwords. I mean really, how else do you find out someone’s email password to their personal accounts? You’re either watching over their shoulder, or they outright give it to you. In either case, it’s not a good idea at the best of times.

For those of you dear readers who are involved in something like this, change your passwords now. I shall leave it to you to come up with an appropriate excuse for doing so. Be assured that it will give you great piece of mind later on when the relationship falls apart.

Regardless, it looked like Sonny had logged in to her account and saw emails to and from her newest boyfriend. At worst, he probably saw emails from a couple of others too. I’m not entirely sure what Sonny did to Celia via his access to her email account, but I knew that she was talking to him about someone stealing passwords and sending copies of email from her account. After all, “it’s a small family business.” How could I not know?

I also knew it was Sonny. Who else could it be? Really, what’s more boring than another person’s email, unless you have a vested interest in knowing what’s going on in their life? Believe me, I had absolutely not one shred of interest in Celia’s little life nor in any of the lives of her pathetic boyfriends.

Why Celia never changed her password throughout this episode was beyond me. Had she been a likable person I’d have had some sympathy for her and would have suggested that she do so, but I didn’t. Besides, I was having fun watching the two of them dance. They were so wrapped up in each other’s lies and denials that they couldn’t see the obvious.

Celia’s email security issues went on for a week or ten days or so. Sonny asked me several times if I was the one doing it, but of course it wasn’t me. I figured if he wanted to put the blame on me, he could go right ahead. My shoulders were broad and I could deal with the consequences. I also enjoyed using the occasions to look him square in the eye and think to myself what a chickenshit little hypocrite he was.

Eventually I became fed up with being dragged into the stupidity going on between the two of them, so I wandered into Sonny’s office and gave him a lesson on how email works. I explained how server addresses, routing, and eventually the real sender’s address was all contained in the header information, which is part of any sent email. It took a while for it all to sink into Sonny’s thick skull. When it did I could practically see the synapses firing and the wheels turning reflected in his eyes.

He must have really put the pressure on Celia after that, because late in the afternoon of the next day the madness really began.

Dreamland III

Some years earlier, the old boy set one of his sons up and gave him a chance to run his own business over in the next town. Ever true to the family’s sense of accounting, Sonny eventually went bankrupt and left town with his tail between his legs. He tried his luck at a series of loser jobs back in the big city from whence he came, until finally his old man’s name got him a job during which time he was able to practice his customer/employee relations.

In his attempt to retire, the old boy had put the day-to-day running of his business into the hands of his latest wife. Given that she wasn’t too with-it in the sense that she was running the business into bankruptcy, the old boy had second thoughts and eventually smarted up and brought Sonny back into the fold. He offered to let him discover what was going on with his business: namely, that it was close to being insolvent, and that his wife and employees were stealing the rug out from under him.

Over time, Sonny laid off the thieves, helped the old man divorce his wife — who, I might add, got a big fat settlement through their prenup, which she undoubtedly deserved for putting up with his ugly hatefulness — and tried to bring some semblance of order to the dark, dingy, dirty hole that was the building, which hadn’t seen a thorough cleaning in decades.

The floors and walls were dirty and the windows were splotchy. The staff was incapable of putting a clean rag to the cluttered shelves and display racks, while management appeared incapable of giving them direction. If you picked something up off of a shelf it was covered in dust and dirt from the ventilation system.

During the entirety of this rescue fiasco – which went on for the better part of two years — one employee was retained. She was the finance and insurance link in the business. She had remained loyal, and had assisted Sonny through the discovery process as he attempted to uncover the money missing via a maze of accounting errors and loans to employees, both present and former.

Celia turned out to be quite the comfort to Sonny, whose wife and children wouldn’t be joining him until June and the end of the school year. By the time I arrived on the scene, both Celia – who also had a spouse – and Sonny were well on their way to extramarital bliss.

It became obvious that he had used several tired old lines on her to get her help and cooperation with the business. Needless to say, her acceptance of “I need someone to be my eyes and ears for me,” had put her in the unenviable position of employee spy, and that didn’t sit well with the drones since most were aware of her relationship with Sonny. Had she been a nice person, she might have carried it off. Instead, she was very much a spiteful, vengeful harpy who was encouraged by Sonny to think of herself as a shadow for every employee who walked through the door each morning. Everything was her business, and it was duly reported to Sonny at some point in time, either during the day or as pillow talk.

It didn’t take me long to get fed up with this stupidity, and eventually, after spying her in a mirror as she lurked behind a column that stretched to the ceiling, I stuck my head around and invited her to join in our conversation. Her eyes widened as the cloak of invisibility was removed, and she stomped off to Sonny’s office where I’m certain there were some harsh words spoken. I didn’t care. I was there for the fun of it all, and fun it had finally become.

Christmas of that first year eventually came around, and Celia received a substantial bonus for her tireless dedication to Sonny’s undying affection. Unfortunately by that time, her services as Sonny’s chief investigator were over, and she was left with the more mundane duties her regular job entailed, chief among them being to keep Sonny happy in a loving way. The longer the affair went on, the more she became the floor police, scurrying here and there in an attempt to project her perceived power and influence among a bunch of teenagers, some of whom were still in high school.

Celia’s dedication was as tireless as it was fun to watch, but it was also pathetic.

Dreamland II

By the time I met him he was in his 80s. He had driven his first wife to death by alcohol. His second was running his business into the ground. His employees in the shop were robbing him blind. He was never happy with anything. Consequently he had plenty to scream about, and would yell and stamp his feet and be verbally abusive to almost everyone who worked for him, mostly because they were in his store and apparently not doing anything, and because, according to him, they knew nothing. He fired employees on a regular basis. Most of them didn’t last six months, and in fact if you walked in to the store after that time you were faced with a whole new pack that he constantly abused anew.

He had no friends. How could he? He was a walking example of how not to treat people, one that could explode at any second at the most trivial slight and begin a tirade of verbal abuse that knew no bounds. He took special delight in calling people cowards, and because many of his employees were kids just out of high school, they were in no position to dispute his assessment of their character.

Like all bullies before him, he was the real coward. If anyone stood up to him — and I witnessed a few who did — he would put his tail between his legs and run like the gutless little weasel that all cowards are. After each of these encounters he ran straight to his son, who would give him comfort and sooth his fractured ego, all the while wondering how anyone could have the effrontery to show the old boy up as one of the most pitiful excuses for a man that could ever exist.

To get him out of the shop, they would send him on errands to other businesses in the much larger city to the west. It was my privilege to drive him on those occasions that happened more and more as the old boy got increasingly miserable with each passing day. Since I didn’t know where any of the locations were that required our presence, I relied on the old man’s geographical knowledge of place, which wasn’t outstanding. Considering that he had spent the bulk of his lifetime in the city, it wasn’t a pretty site to see us driving around aimlessly because he was too stupid to look at a map, ask a question or otherwise demonstrate some measure of intelligence to find out where we were.

Call me vengeful if you want, but there was no way in hell that I was going to do it!

After one such occasion when we were yet again lost, arriving at our destination demonstrated the futility of it all, which was summed up by my overhearing his comment, “That dumb son of a bitch doesn’t know where he’s going.” Which was entirely too true — I had never been there before. Neither had he, apparently.

After that, whenever I ended up driving him around I began getting lost on a regular basis, and even if I did know where we were going I intentionally chose wrong lanes and made turns at the wrong intersection. Petty it was, but I enjoyed having the last laugh. Hell, once I even drove past the freeway exit to come home. When I told that story the entire shop was convulsed with laughter, for the old boy had been telling his version of the same story: “That dumb son of a bitch never knows where he’s going.”