Today's Lesson in Kafka-esque Logic

Here's a hypothetical: you call an attorney. The attorney has a friend or relative of yours as a client. The attorney is not at the office. You leave a message with her assistant. You have some information about this friend or relative who is her client, but it's important to please keep everything confidential. So, for personal reasons, don't tell the friend or relative that you called her lawyer, please. You even have the assistant read the message back to you so there's no mistake. 

Sounds easy enough. 

However, before you actually have a chance to talk to the attorney, she calls you back and leaves a voicemail, saying that attorney-client relationships [even hypothetical ones] are privileged, so she can't share information about the client with you. 

But, wait a minute, Matlock-breath, I'm not asking YOU the [hypothetical] lawyer to tell ME anything. I want to tell YOU something that YOU need to know about the case. 

Perhaps there was just a misunderstanding, since I didn't want to GET any information from the [hypothetical] attorney, I just wanted to GIVE her some information that might be relevant, even helpful. 

Meanwhile, even though I still hadn't had a chance to talk to the [hypothetical] attorney, she had an occasion to see my friend or relative at her office about the case. And the first thing the [hypothetical] attorney said to her client was, "Oh, Mrs. Linklater called and wanted to talk to me about you."  

WTF?

How do I know this happened? Because the friend or relative called me up and asked, "Did you call my [hypothetical] attorney today?" Fortunately, I could say no, because I had made the call two days before. But YES I did call the [hypothetical] attorney and I can't believe she told the client after I expressly requested, PLEASE DON'T TELL HER I CALLED. Not only that, I hadn't told the [asshead hypothetical] attorney ANYTHING, since I still hadn't talked to her. 

Holy cripes, what was the [hypothetical] attorney thinking? Telling the client I called? Would you be angry? Enraged beyond belief? Or slapping your forehead and saying WTF? 

This actually happened to me several weeks ago. Only it wasn't an attorney. It was another profession with client confidentiality protections. Afterward, I called this trained professional's office and said, "Tell that dingbat to never call me back. I have information she needs, but she is on her own." 

Next thing I know, she's called me back to leave yet another voicemail and reiterate the same client confidentiality issues. I can't have any information from her about the client. She doesn't get that I DON'T WANT ANY.  

Plus she doesn't seem to care that I have important information she might need. 

Then as fate would have it, I had an unexpected chance to meet with this person -- in person -- the other day. She began by repeating her mantra about confidentiality. I said that was between her and her client. I didn't want any information. I had information she needed. 

Mostly I told her I was very angry because she had told her client I called, after I had specifically left a message that requested her not to say anything.

But, she claimed, she had to get permission from the client to talk to me at all. "Really?" I replied. Then she should have called me back to say she had to ask the client for permission to talk to me AT ALL, and I would have said, then skip it. Or, "That's insane." Because it is.

WTF? 

Since when is outside information from a third party included in any confidentiality agreement between a lawyer [even a hypothetical one] and her client? Basically, if I had information that would have exonerated the client of a crime, or saved her life, this [hypothetical] lawyer was saying I couldn't tell her anything because of the rules that govern confidentiality. 

Have I said WTF?

Clearly I had just stepped into the Twilight Zone. So, naturally, this is how the conversation ended with the hypothetical lawyer, who is a real person:

Here is exactrly what I said to her, verbatim: "You. Are. An. Idiot!"  I left out "f**king."

Remember Breakfast?

I've been thinking about breakfast. And how I miss the good old days. A pound of thick cut bacon with fried eggs, sunny side up, cooked in a deep puddle of maple smoked bacon grease, with a tall glass of fresh squeezed OJ, a couple of English muffins slathered in butter, and chocolate milk, not coffee, to wash it all down. Every day. 

Now that's a great cup of calories. Too bad the metabolism that could burn them up has hip implants now.  

On Saturdays, it was pancakes or waffles or French toast with many links of sausage, and everything was covered in butter and maple syrup. Followed by a steaming glass of OJ and a chocolate milk finish. Rinse and repeat on Sundays. 

Sometimes we had ruby red grapefruit, too. Covered in sugar, because that's how I used to roll. If there were no grapefruit, I made the best cinnamon toast on the planet. My daughters will back me up on this. Gotta be white bread toast. Spread the butter so thick that you can't see the bread. Pile on the cinnamon sugar so you can't see the butter. "Brown Top Only" until it's bubbly. If it doesn't bubble, you don't have enough butter and cinnamon sugar.  I should probably do a cinnamon toast demo on my blog one of these days. But only if you beg.

My first foray into something more "healthy" [which is in quotes, because who am I kidding?] was making crepes and rolling them up with fresh fruit. Usually blueberries and cut up strawberries. I would load up the fruit with powdered sugar and squeeze some lime to cut the sa-weetness. How ironic. My children ate all this, too. Only they called "crepes" Paper Pancakes. My little brother takes his crepes one step farther. He makes chocolate ganache for the filling. On dinner plate sized crepes. For breakfast. As sure as Zantac follows Boeuf Stroganoff, we are related. 

During the week, however, I was usually running late to work and often served my precious children cereal. Quelle surprise! Frosted Flakes. Fruit Loops. The usual food groups. 

Over time, the breakfasts of my youth and childbearing years gave way to the egg whites of menopause, followed by the yogurt and granola of my impending old age. However, unlike my conscientious friends, I refuse to include wheat germ on my list of acceptable foods. It is not food. It is something that belongs in a barn. 

Once, in a moment of zealous intention, after attending a "personal growth" seminar, I actually started mixing up a slimy concoction called "barley green" each morning. I gagged my way through a week of unpalatable fescue and threw the rest out. 

In an attempt to be healthy, I wouldn't mind sticking with fruit for breakfast, but American fruit is all about size, not flavor. Like those sour strawberry shaped doorknobs they sell. And those "handpicked" Michigan ben wa balls, the ones with no flavor.

What pains me most is that I eat the "healthy" stuff without any witnesses around to record my good deeds. That is so stupid. Most recently, I've discovered that those popular, ever-so-sour Greek yogurts have made some serious inroads into the sugary American-influenced yogurt flavors I can tolerate. That lip-puckering taste is taking up entire shelves in the Yoplait Chocolate Whips section. Could anything be worse? 

Which probably explains why I bought a pint of chocolate milk and a long john this morning on my way downtown. And savored every lip-smacking moment. 

Surprise!! 40th Birthday Party Shocker

What if -- all of a sudden -- fifteen senior ladies dressed in polyester and sequins came barging into your private dining room, singing Do Wah Diddy? You'd probably be in a state of shock and wonder, all caught on video. When the song finished, one of them [Mrs. Linklater in disguise], began to roast the guest of honor with way too much knowledge about his past. Following the roast, the ladies sang another tune with a special set of lyrics designed to cause further amusement/embarrassment for the birthday boy and the room full of assembled guests. We're here all week. All month. In fact, this is our 60th year. Oh, I crack myself up. 

What the. . .?

I have no idea who these women are. . .

We claimed to be members of the Pep Club 

at his old high school, his classmates from 1991.

 This is Lulabelle Clarabelle Tinkerbelle Jones. 

She is available for bar mitzvahs and Irish wakes. 

                                         Nothing was sacred. No secret was safe.

Drama and overacting were the keywords for the evening.

You got me!!!

Life's a Beach. And Then You Die.

I recently spent a couple of weeks as the guest of friends on the Jersey Shore. Not the Joisey Shore made infamous by the likes of Snooky and her ilk, but the charming, albeit very WASPY, part of the Jersey Shore, with lovely homes and manicured lawns on equally manicured beaches. The little town where we were isn't far from the Victorian quaintness of Cape May, where one goes to catch the Lewes Ferry to Delaware -- at the very southern tip of The Garden State. 
          [I could never understand why New Jersey was referred to as The Garden State, since most of my experience has always been at the airport in Newark. I eventually learned that the whole rest of the state is not only pretty, but very green, once you get out of the shipyards and the industrial effluence around the Meadowlands.] 

One morning, around 6:30 AM, another guest and I decided to take a stroll on the beach, a mere block away. About fifty yards from the entrance to the beach we discovered an eight to ten foot pile of sand about the size of four cars piled up. You couldn't miss it. Protecting this huge pile was an orange snow fence with several buckets piled up nearby. What in the world was all this, we wondered? Over the next couple of days a remarkable sand sculpture began to take shape.  

          

                           

         It turned out that a triathlete named Mike had recently been told he had inoperable lung cancer, which had, unfortunately, metastasized to his brain and his bones. He's the guy in the white t-shirt and baseball cap working on the sculpture.
         So he decided to invite family and friends to a farewell party of sorts. As a sand sculpture enthusiast, he was able to enlist the aid of other sculptors and create this remarkable homage to his life as an athlete, a video game enthusiast, a potter, a lover of Batman, and his career as a jet engine mechanic. We were told that there would be some sort of a presentation, but it never happened while we were hanging around. 
          Then, astonishingly, the day after the sculpture was finished, it completely disappeared. The buckets, the fence, and the huge mound of sand were all gone. The beach was level again. In fact, it looked like there had never been anything there at all. 
          No doubt a local ordinance required a building permit for a hefty fee in the first place, followed by the required removal of said "structure" within 24 or 48 hours. The beach patrol in vacation towns can be annoying like that. Perhaps it was one of the many tractors that comb through the sand for trash each morning that put an end to this remarkable epitaph for a young man whose life would be ending soon.

But these pictures, along with the dozens more that people were taking, will do a lot to help remember Mike for a long, long time. 

       Nearby there was a sign -- LIFE IS GOOD.