Monthly Archives: January 2025

Jackie Wells-Fauth

“Yes, I’m calling to speak to Mr. Smith; it’s a matter of some urgency,” I say to the polite young woman who answered the phone.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith is busy right now; can I connect you with his voicemail?”

Now, I understand we live in a world of automation, but I am highly reluctant to discuss my business into the vacant air, invited  by a mysterious, robotic voice which bids me to, “Leave a message, after the to…” at which point it disconnects me and I’m leaving a different, somewhat heated message into the literal dial tone.

I have long believed that Alexander Graham Bell was an evil genius who presented the telephone to an unsuspecting world as a product of Satan. I know, I know, I’m probably being too harsh, but my battles with the telephone have been extensive, bitter and sometimes downright bloody (I once banged the receiver against my forehead in frustration and cut myself.)

The early phones might have been convenient and fine. “Oh look, Martha, we don’t have to run down the hill to talk to the neighbors, we can just ring them on the telephone,” says George in delight.

“That’s good, since the neighbors don’t live down the hill; they live across the street, and I’m pretty sure they listen in on our calls,” Martha retorts bitterly, “I hate party lines.”

Personal phone use has never been the biggest issue for me, though. We all know the relief of getting to talk to an actual person when we make business calls. That, however, doesn’t happen much in the business world where AI has taken charge of reception duties. And AI systems serving as receptionists have all the telephone charm and etiquette of the warden of a maximum-security prison.

“Listen to the following list of options,” intones the warden, “Press 1 for a manager, press 2 for accounting, press 3 for Maintenance and for Complaints, please hang up and dial 1-800-wedontcare. You have not responded by pressing a number as instructed. We will repeat the options…”

“No, wait! I want maintenance; just give me maintenance,” I say as I frantically try to figure out where the keyboard has disappeared on my cell phone.

“Since you have not responded with a number, you will be disconnected; have a nice day.” And just like that, the warden is gone—off to torture another telephone inmate.

“Wait! Warden! I need maintenance! I forgot the number thingy, play the options again!” I say desperately as the dial tone sounds in my ear.

My favorite telephone antic of all of course, is the “Hold button,” which I am convinced came from the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno.

“Your call will be answered in order of receipt. You call is number 52 and we are presently working for the next hour on caller 3. But your call is important to us, so we will put you on hold and play music they wouldn’t inflict on prisoners of war, but don’t worry, we will break in every so often to repeat that your call is important to us.”

In the meantime, I have called Mr. Smith on my urgent business ten times and have sent that many voicemails into the abyss, never to be heard again. But I’ll try one more time.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Mr. Smith, please,” I say, bracing for voicemail.

“This is Mr. Smith,” says an actual person with an actual voice, “How may I help you?”

I’m delilghted…I’m astounded…I…have completely forgotten why I called him….Dialtone time!

Jackie Wells-Fauth

Okay, everyone who contemplated moving to the tropics this week, raise your hand. (Give me a moment while I raise mine.) For those of you who didn’t, you’re just not thinking creatively…you must be too cold!

I know that into every winter, a little cold must fall, but this week, it has verged on the ridiculous. I do love living in South Dakota, but I admit I don’t handle the ultra-cold too well. It disrupts everything and I can’t wear my short-sleeved shirts. This is a tragedy!

I am poorly equipped to handle all this cold. I had to switch from my afternoon iced tea to hot tea and I absolutely cannot face eating cold cuts in weather like this. It makes me want to curl up in a blanket and eat comfort foods like chocolate and doughnuts. Cold weather is bad for the body mass, but on the bright side, I’ve heard that the higher the body mass, the warmer I’ll stay!

Fortunately, we have the capability to have fires in our basement stove. Unfortunately, I’ve never been any good at starting fires. Roy does it well, but if I try, it never works. I’m reminded of the Jack London story “To Build a Fire.” The poor man was freezing and trying to get a fire going. When he finally succeeded, the snow from a tree overhead dropped and put it out. You just knew he was going to freeze to death then. I would not have taken as long to succumb to the weather!

I never have the luck to get a fire to start. I have tried everything from kindling sticks to all types of paper and I never even get an ember flickering, but I do get a lot of cold air coming down the pipe! So much for the comfort of a crackling fire—the furnace is on its own.

I try the mind over matter trick. It’s ten below outside, so I make sure to read the epic novel “Hawaii” and I eat pineapple while wearing a lei. I draw the line at doing the hula, however; the last time I tried, I put a hip out! Mind over matter didn’t work; I was still freezing.

Roy is not nearly as bothered by the cold. He was watching a football game this weekend where the football players were playing in the snow. They were slipping and sliding, and they had bare hands and arms in a snowstorm so thick that it was hard to see if the ball went between the goal posts in a field goal!

“How can you watch that stuff?” I asked, pulling my coat closer around my body as the snow changed to sleet and clanged off the helmets of the players. “It’s positively freezing my blood.”

“Well, I’m not there,” he replied, “and sometimes a game is more exciting when you don’t know from one minute to the next if they are going to go sliding into the goal line.”

After three hours of watching the blizzard of Philadelphia, I was relieved to have it over. Probably the LA Rams were too—I can’t imagine that’s their usual climate for play. They undoubtedly went back to their hotel rooms to thaw out and I removed one layer of my many layers of clothes.

Then, just like that, another game came on and guess what? More snow! I don’t enjoy football all that much anyway; I really don’t want to increase the misery by freezing while I watch the game.

“Can’t we watch something else,” I whined as I put on another pair of socks—over my hands. “I am freezing and it’s obvious Buffalo is going to win.”

“You never know, anything can happen and that’s especially true when they are playing the game in the Arctic.”

Monday morning proved that football games in the snow are not the worst thing about cold. I did not set a single foot outside and I was still frozen, just looking at the thermometer. I kept waiting for it to get above zero, and it never did.

The dog went to the door and looked back as if to say, “I would like to go out now.”

“You don’t want to go out, trust me,” I told her.

She didn’t trust me, so I let her out and she made a complete about face and had her head back in the door before I could close it. Turns out that dog and I have something in common. Neither one of us enjoys the cold.

“Don’t worry, if I find a tropical island to go to…” I began, looking at her, “I’ll be sure to send you a postcard with something warm on it.”

Stay warm all of you—spring must come sometime!

Welcome to Hell’s Kitchen

Jackie Wells-Fauth

Yes, indeed this is another rant about my cooking. But I’ve finally decided what my culinary technique reminds me of. There is a program on television called “Hell’s Kitchen.” I see it advertised, but I don’t watch it because cooking programs just depress me. And that program appears to consist of a man yelling at people for poor cooking. I can get examples of poor cooking anytime I want!

What I don’t usually have is people yelling at me for it. Fortunately, the one person in my household who hates cooking more than I do is Roy, so he’s careful about how he comments on what I cook. Since we met when he, as an Aberdeen fireman, showed up to put out my burning supper, he can’t even tell you that he didn’t know what he was getting into!

So, he has eaten many a meal that wasn’t exactly up to cooking show standards and he’s pretty mellow about it. He can eat burned bacon, undercooked pancakes and warm orange juice, without too much complaint. “The bacon has less burned spots this time,” he will say and I feel like Julia Child because I take that as the greatest compliment in the world. Take that, Hell’s Kitchen!

There are some critiques occasionally for my cooking, however. I mismanaged a piece of fried chicken one day and divided it between the dog and the cat. The dog, not the most discerning of cuisine artists, gobbled down her share, but when I offered the other part to the cat, she looked down her nose as if to say, “I don’t take failed cooking projects, thank you.”

I occasionally make pastry items when my grandsons come. Years of experience have taught the older two to be cautious about what they put in their mouths, but the four-year-old not as well-educated in my cooking yet, crammed an entire bar in his mouth, looked thoughtful for a minute, and then spit it back out. That pretty much says it all!

The biggest critic in the house, of course, is the smoke alarm. My sister once gave me a set of napkins which said, “Supper’s ready when the smoke alarm goes off.” I would be offended by that if it weren’t for the fact that the smoke alarm and I are on very close terms. I slightly overcook something and the smoke alarm announces it to everyone. “Shut up or you’re next!” is my favorite response, but the smoke alarm is usually unmoved. It also doesn’t respond to shoes thrown at it, brooms taking a swing or any curse word I can come up with.

That would have been bad enough if not for the recent addition of an air purifier. I thought this was a great idea until I realized that the only time the air purifier gets excited is when I cook. Now I have two robotic critics of my cooking, and people want to make this an AI world? I don’t think so!

The other day, I decided that instead of burning bacon in the frying pan, I would char it on the broiler. Someone told me this made less of an atmospheric impact. No, I don’t know what that means, but it sounded good!

Of course, the bacon singed on all the edges and the smoke alarm joyfully started its usual routine. “I know, I know, I don’t need you to tell me the bacon burned,” I shouted at an inanimate object. “Nobody else cares, why do you?”

At just that moment, the air purifier kicked in. This machine, normally completely silent in its operation, suddenly kicked into a gear I didn’t know it possessed, frantically trying to clear the air of my cooking. It revved like a racecar engine, and for a few minutes, I thought its insides were going to come bursting out with the effort.

“Et tu, Brute?” I asked, my eyes stinging with smoke. “I don’t already have one machine giving my cooking an F, you have to add your opinion??????”

By the way, even the dog wouldn’t eat the bacon. Welcome to Hell’s Kitchen.

Jackie Wells-Fauth

I was out for dinner last week when I overheard a conversation that really resonated with me.

“My New Year’s Resolution this year is to lose weight,” came the determined declaration of a young lady at a neighboring table. “After all, God loves a healthy girl.”

“So, the same resolution  as last year,” drawled her companion cheerfully, “And the year before that, and…”

This cynical observation was interrupted by a sharp rap on the shoulder from the young lady setting her resolutions, but the fact that everyone, including her, laughed, told me this was probably a correct assessment.

But I can truly relate to this resolution and I don’t think it’s too chancy of me to say I’m not alone. How many people, every year, including me, set losing weight as their New Year’s Resolution, only to have their good intentions blasted out of the water by a January filled with lots of calories?

It is, however, a legitimate choice for a new start. After eating the fatted cow all through the holiday season, I wager we are all finding the waistband on our trousers a little tight. The merchandizers of the world long ago caught on: After pushing every candy and snack possible at Christmas, January’s ads are all about exercise equipment and diet deals.

And while I do try to clean up my eating habits after abusing them horribly during the criminal holidays, I stopped calling it a diet some time ago. And this philosophy, although rocky at times, serves me pretty well. I simply resolve not to resolve to lose weight. Simple, right?

“I thought you weren’t dieting any more,” a friend will say after I have selected the sugar-free beverage (with obvious reluctance).

“Oh, I’m not dieting,” I say, with false cheerfulness, “I really like this diet soda…it has a delightful aftertaste.”

“It tastes like the inside of an oil can,” my friend answers, “admit it, you’re on a diet.”

“I’m not on a diet; I’m just exploring new and nasty tastes,” I insist, but we both know the truth: Resolution or not,  I am counting calories in the new year and I’m reminded of it everywhere.

Choosing a muffin over a frosted roll is a major dilemma.

“You know, it is a proven fact that in order to lose weight and keep it off, you have to give up high calorie things for good,” the television dietician states positively.

How sad that makes me, but I know it is probably true. That does not, however, mean that I don’t cheat on my marriage to high fiber muffins by stepping out with a roll slathered in frosting once in a while. After all, I have not made a new year’s resolution to diet. I just try to keep the sugary activities to a minimum. But I’m not dieting. My resolution is to not diet.

Which brings me to my greatest enemy…the bathroom scale. None of this non-dieting thing works if the scale doesn’t cooperate. I regard my scale with all the affection that Elmer Fudd had for Bugs Bunny. And occasionally, as I watch the dial spin higher and higher, I fantasize about shooting it.

When I first began my “non-diet,” I wouldn’t step on the scale if Roy was in the house.

“It won’t change just because I’m here or not here, you know,” he pointed out, the first time I demanded he vacate the premises during the morning weigh-in.

“I know, but if it’s too high, I want to keep my screaming to myself, without any witnesses,” I explained.

“And if it’s nice and low?”

“Then you’ll have to come back into the house sometime and I can brag about it then,” I concluded.

So far, my resolution to not diet has worked out pretty well. And if I don’t maintain the weight I want, I won’t worry too much. After all, God loves a chubby girl, too!