Fits of Temper

Back in June I started posting excerpts from my new book , which is a humorous memoir titled A Dead Tomato Plant and A Paycheck. This latest installment is from the chapter tentatively titled, The Silly Things We Do

This particular piece was inspired by a neighbor who was known to do some pretty amusing things and was always willing to let me write about them. I was saddened to hear recently that he passed away and it was ironically about the time I was working on this chapter.

I hope you are making them laugh up in heaven, Dick….

In all honesty, most of us will have to admit to being overcome with childish fits of temper at one time or another in our lives. Whether that happens frequently, occasionally or twice a day, we all have given in to the urge to throw something across the room and watch it smash into a million pieces. (We mothers have to be most careful when the impulse is to throw one of our kids).

Although we all fall prey to this type of behavior, it really takes a big person to admit it, and that being the case, I’m going to tell you what this friend of ours once did. This friend, who shall remain nameless, got mad at his telephone one day. He was so mad that just slamming the receiver back in place was not enough to satisfy him, so he ripped it off the wall.

Then he threw it down on the floor and jumped on it once or twice.

That still didn’t ease his frustration, so he kicked it around the floor a bit, kind of stirring up all the little pieces.

Then he picked up all those little pieces, put them in a brown paper bag, and went to the nearest payphone to call the phone company. (Keep in mind this was before anyone had even thought of a cell phone.)

He told the girl in the service department that there was something wrong with his phone, and she said she would have someone check the lines and they would get back to him.

“‘You don’t understand,” my friend said. “There’s no trouble on the lines. My telephone is broken.”

“Sir, do you mean the instrument itself is broken?”

“Yes, Ma’am, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“What is it that’s broken on your telephone?”

“Well, you could say the whole thing is broken. In fact, you might want to send out a whole new unit.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll have a technician come to your home.”

At that point, I would have skipped town and let someone else greet the repairman, but this friend is given to great shows of bravery as well as terrific temper tantrums. He acted as if it were nothing out of the ordinary to hand a telephone repairman a bag of junk that used to be a telephone and tell him that a Mack truck ran over it.

If I had been the repairman, I might not have been able to resist asking how the wall fared.