When Your Evil Opposite Calls

My phone rang, showing a phone number just one digit different from mine, so I thought, "Hey, this person will say she gets my calls sometimes," or something like that. Instead, she was just complaining that the giant clock in Chesterfield Village had the wrong time.

"Is this the Chesterfield Village Association?" the lady asked.

"Well, this is Chesterfield Maintenance," I said.

"Okay, I live in an apartment facing the clock tower, and that clock is an hour off, and it's also not lighting up at night."

"Oh, okay, I'll check it out." I knew the time was off, because the day before it reset itself back to standard time, a month too soon. I always just figure I'll leave it till Halloween, at which point it will be right again, but I'd just seen it lit up two nights earlier, so that part was news to me.

"So whose responsibility is it to take care of the clock?" she asked in an accusatory tone.

"Oh, it's mine," I said, "I'll take care of it."

"Well, I just want it taken care of, because it's not lighting up, and now it doesn't even keep the right time anymore," as if I'd just pulled a bottle of wine out of my pants, belched, and wiped my face with greasy pages of kiddie porn. I should have said, "Who do you think has fixed that clock for the last nine years? I've changed the motor and the gears, unjammed one of the hour hands FROM THE OUTSIDE (45 feet off the ground), pulled Christmas lights off of it after ice storms, not to mention adjusting the time every spring and fall AND changing the lights when they burn out."

Then she wanted to know my name, I suppose so she could "get me in trouble" if I failed to fix the clock. I told her my name, then I went over, climbed up into the clock, set it one hour ahead, found all the lights to be working fine, and said, "God, bitch."