El Jefe Grande

You live with someone ten years you think you know them.  Then something happens that is so shocking you find yourself wondering whether you really know them at all.

We were addressing some much deferred maintinence at our little cabin in the woods.  The ancient pine trees in the front yard had grown into the power lines and when the winter snows came, the limbs would be so weighted down that they stretched the lines to near snapping.  I swore I would take care of it in the Spring, and then the Summer, but I always ended up putting it off.  But now, with Fall in the air and snow on the way (perhaps as early as this week!) there was an urgency to addressing the issue.

I contracted with some local tree trimmers on the mountain and the plan was for them to arrive "mid morning" on Saturday.  "Mid morning" for them ended up being 8:30 am.  The foreman, the man I had met with the week prior, was a burly looking white guy in his 40's.  He showed up in a pick-up, trailed by another another truck with a two man crew and a massive arsenal of chainsaws.  I looked at the chainsaws and thought of the boyfriend, peacefully sleeping upstairs and realized immediately this wouldn't end well.

I spoke to the foreman and stressed how conservative I wanted to be.  I wanted the trees left as natural as possible while yet clearing the power lines.  We spoke of being "surgical" and "judicious" and "thoughtful".  He claimed to understand what I wanted and promised that they cared deeply for the trees.  He then gave his marching orders to the crew, in Spanish, and hopped in his truck, off to another job somewhere on the mountain.

I went inside to get a cup of coffee and heard the first chainsaw rip into action.  And looked up fearfully at the ceiling.

Didn't take long.  Within a few seconds I heard the boyfriend jump out of bed and go stomping along the ceiling to the stairs.  He stormed downstairs, he was not happy.  I swore to him I had no control over it, that they said they were coming later, that there was nothing I could do.  He poured himself a cup of coffee, slowly waking up and calming down.  Together we walked out onto the deck.

And saw the carnage.

It's amazing how quickly you can wreck havoc with just a chainsaw.  They hadn't been at in more than a couple of minutes and already the largest, oldest pine was missing four of it's largest limbs.  It looked like a quadriplegic.

I was shocked, to say the least, and then I looked at the boyfriend, face as red as a tomato, the look of hate in his eyes.

And then it happened.

"¿Qué estás haciendo? Usted está masacrando mis árboles! ¡Basta ya! ¡Basta ya! ¿Dónde está el gran jefe? Tengo que hablar con el gran jefe inmediato. No toque otra rama. Soy furous!"

I was stunned.

The boyfriend speaks Spanish?

Where the fuck did that come from?

In ten years, the only time I've heard him speak Spanish was at a Mexican restaurant, and even then he sounded like a white boy.  Where the hell were these bi-lingual skills when we truly needed them?  Like all the years we suffered through Teresa the lazy housekeeper?

I turned to the boyfriend, gobsmacked.

He looked at me sheepishly.  "It's just something I picked up back when I worked in food service."

It was too late to save our one pine tree, but el Jefe Grande returned in time to sort our aesthetic issues and the other two trees were spared the barbaric trimming of the first.  Hopefully the damage isn't life threatening to the poor tree, which has to be at least a hundred years old.

So now I find myself wondering is I really know the boyfriend at all.  What other surprises await?  Will he break into Mandarin the next time we order Chinese?  Or are his secrets deeper, darker.  I guess only time will tell.

Or, as the boyfriend might say, "sólo el tiempo lo dirá."

¡Viva OC!

Sometime back in the early 70's, the architectural tastes of Orange County shifted, from the clean, efficient Modernist design of the 50's and 60's to the tacky, arched, stucco encrusted fake Spanish hacienda look we know and love today.  Seems somewhat ironic considering the prevailing attitude toward the Hispanic immigrant population at the time, but I think the shift had less to do with honoring the area's rich Spanish heritage and more to do with the popularity of Disneyland and it's fake themed environments.  Sadly, the hacienda look proved to be a gateway drug to the bad architecture of today, the first step on the road to faux chateaus and phony Tuscan villas and Thomas Kincaid-ish English cottages.  But I digress.

The place we call home appears to have been the tip of the spear, one of the earlier examples of "¡Viva Condo!" architecture.  It was built in 1971 to resemble a Mexican shantytown, with dozens of boxy four-plexes, slathered in stucco and capped with tile roofs, tastefully arranged against a hillside.  It's where Taco Bells go to die.

To complete the effect, all the streets in the complex have been given extravagant Mexican names, which is how we've come to live on El Camino Del Rey Mar Vista De Naranjas.

That isn't the actual name, but it's pretty damn close and let me tell you, it's a headache.

Let's start with the fact that most forms don't have that much space or an allotment for that many letters, not to mention blank spaces.  Half my mail is probably being returned to sender.

And then there's the challenge of take-out food.  Most of the orders end in utter confusion when it comes to the address, unless of course the person on the other end of the line speaks Spanish, in which case they laugh uncontrollably at your pronunciation.  So far, unfortunately, the only restaurants up to the task have been uniformly awful.

And it only gets worse.

We had only lived here two weeks when the internet went out.  No shock there, it's Time Warner Cable, the Yugo of Broadband.  Time Warner's system is apparently powered by squirrels and held together with spit and twine and it's usually out more often than it's on.  Having been cursed with them before when we lived in LA, I knew to give it an hour or so.  That's usually enough time for them to find new squirrels or duct tape it together enough to power back on.  But this time, it didn't come back on, which is a serious issue for someone who works from home and relies of the magic of the internet to collect a paycheck.  So I called customer service.

I was quickly connected with "Jenny".  Fun fact:  ALL of Time warner's customer "service" representatives are named "Jenny"!  The Indian firm that's been outsourced with the customer "service" account has evidently decided that "Jenny" is the most American sounding name and they hope to trick you into believing you're speaking with an American despite the thick Hindi accent.  I could barely understand her, but she quickly decided the problem wasn't with the network even though she said 19% of our service area was currently out. "Doesn't that seem like an outage to you?" I asked.  "No" "Jenny" informed me.  "We only consider it an outage if it's more than 20% out".  Good to know.

She insisted I needed a service call.

"Our first available appointment is a week from Friday".

I tried to impress on her the seriousness of the situation, the dire position I was in without an internet connection.  Jenny didn't care.  The only thing Time Warner cares less about than the service they provide is you, the customer.

"Jenny" began filling out the appropriate request, which was going ponderously slow with the language barrier.  And then we got to the address.

After the first four attempts I tried just spelling it out out, letter by letter, like speaking to toddler.

E.  L.  *space*  C.  A...

The space tripped her up and we started again.

Twenty minutes later we had only gotten as far as "Rey" when suddenly the internet came back on.  I hung up on "Jenny".

More than a week goes by and phone rings.  It was Friday.

"This is Manny with Time Warner Cable.  You have a service appointment scheduled but I can't find your street.  Would you spell it for me?

I hung up on Manny too.  Life is too short.