When I woke up from a concussion-induced slumber, I didn't remember a thing about my past. Most of my knowledge stayed intact, but my memories vanished. Waking up, not knowing who you are, yet still knowing almost every single member of the team that won last year's Super Bowl is an odd feeling, as I'm sure you can imagine. If someone brought a gun to me, I could identify exactly what it was by name, yet I couldn't remember my own. It was a strange time, if you haven't gotten that yet.
I woke up in an alleyway in New York City. I somehow knew the name of every street in the gigantic metropolis, and exactly what was on each one of those streets. Feeling sick from the concussion, I had to get to the nearest hospital. I followed my memory, and after traversing a couple of city blocks, I ended up at the local Catholic hospital, since that was the nearest one.
Naturally, they took me in immediately. The sisters there were great- they read stories to me from the Bible, treated my head injury, and, most importantly, set me up with a temporary job at the local parish to help me make money until my memory came back.
Life at the perish was incredible. I always had good to eat, the people were incredibly nice, I made a decent enough paycheck... But something about being there was just exhausting. I could go out with friends, do the heavy lifting on the church's mission trips, walk across the entire city... But something as simple as passing around the offering plate during Mass was fatiguing.
So I left. I hugged the sisters there that helped me get back on my feet, said goodbye to the friends I'd made, and found a new job.
It's fucking awful. I'm working at a call center for a large appliance manufacturer. Every single damned day I get the same calls...
"My dishwasher isn't cleaning my clothes!"
"Well, sir, walk me through how you wash your clothing."
"Yeah, so I load the laundry. I turn it on. And when I pull the clothes out and dry them, they still stink and have stains in them!"
"You are using laundry detergent, right (you absolute fucking moron, I swear to Jesus, I want to shove you into your own washer and set it to 'heavy load')?"
Silence. Things like that. Every single day. People getting their cats stuck in the refrigerator. Asking why their microwave doesn't work when they don't even have it plugged in. And worst of all, no one is even grateful for when I solve their goddamned problems!
Today, I freaked out. I cursed this idiot out who got his freezer and fridge backwards and wasn't sure why his milk kept freezing and his meat kept thawing. I said some absolutely awful things to him. I started calmly, but escalated, more and more and more until I was threatening to absolutely mutilate him.
And it felt good. I felt powerful. Everything felt right. That's what I was supposed to do. In the middle of threatening to chop him up and feed him to the pelicans on my back deck, I realized exactly what I've been missing.
You know that Satan guy your preacher warned you so much about? Yeah, he's real. And he just got fired from his job at a call center. And he's going to make you all pay for what you've turned him into.