The repercussions of war

Remember how I got really angry at Virgin Mobile and attacked them with hate mail, hate blog posts, hate facebook messages, and hate phone messages? Well, that's very surprising, since I haven't publicized how far-reaching my attack on Virgin Mobile was. However, I did do all those things--I wrote them emails, I posted my criticisms in a variety of online locations, and I ranted about it so much, my dad ended up phoning them and sitting on hold for 20 minutes just so he could tell them how disappointed I was with their company.

Broadcasting an enraged diatribe on the shortcomings of a multinational company is all fun and games up until about a week after the heated outburst, when my emotions have leveled off and I've forgotten why I was angry in the first place and I would prefer to forget that I had a Mr. Hyde moment with my ex-telephone company. The fun ended there with Virgin Mobile, because it was at this point--when I was in this level-headed, Dr. Jekel state, feeling as placid as a mirror-like pond of still water, that Virgin Mobile chose to respond to my email tirades.

Of course, having forgotten why I was angry in the first place, I could not understand what Virgin Mobile could possibly be apologizing for, so I quietly hid their email in a corner of my inbox and continued to pretend that I've always been as calm and collected as I am now.

The end result of all this is that
1) I now know that someone actually reads my rants
2) I know that this reader is in fact the company the rant is aimed at
and therefore,
3) I now must live with two constant fears: the fear that someone from Virgin Mobile will recognize me as That Girl*, and that my uncontrollable ranting will some day burst fourth against another, equally helpless customer service representative from another organization.

This is why it took me 57 minutes to find wall hooks at Canadian Tire on Tuesday. After 15 minutes of searching for the wall hooks and finding broom hooks, industrial-strength metal pulleys, bike hooks, and gate hooks instead, I was frustrated and tempted to ask one of the extremely busy shop people for help. But then I was suddenly afraid. What if I'm secretly not finished being angry and large corporations yet? What if I am unwittingly gearing up to pour fourth a tirade of criticisms on the next Canadian Tire employee whom I come across? What if I inexplicably tell that woman with the nametag over there that she's dressed up to look like a drug dealer and her company doesn't respect her at all? What will happen then?

I spent 42 minutes wandering around the store, trying to decide whether I could get away with hanging my house coat on a broom clip instead. By the time I had someone direct me to the wall hook aisle, I had convinced myself that broom clips were too useful to pass up, which is why all of my hairbrushes now clip onto my wall. I'm actually rather ecstatic about this. The moral of this story is that paranoia breeds inspiration.

*Virgin Mobile has set up camp at my school, so I spend a lot of time counting the floor tiles and humming to myself when I walk through the halls, as if my rant was so infamous that it was picked out of the sea of Virgin Mobile hate mail and pinned to a great wall map of Winnipeg beside my facebook photo with the words Watch Out For This Girl scrawled in red beneath the image. I'm nothing if not self-absorbed.