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A TRUE Valentines Day Snippet, It Happened To Me ... smee2


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Another smee2 tale ... :)

Now, this is not a joke. I found it funny, but it is not a circulating joke. It is, I am sorry, a long read, and if you don't care for my previous long reads, you can skip this now. Just trying to give fair warning.

This didn't come from a friend, forwarded by one of their friends, in fact, I know for sure it has never been on the internet in any way before, because it happened to me ... smee2 ... yeah, THAT me ...

So, here goes ... a Valentines Day Snippet

Years ago, one of the current, flash-in-the-pan best known authors in Europe and North America was Xaviera Hollander. In case you don't recognize the name, she is "The Happy Hooker" ... the name of her book. I think she was arrested in the US and had to leave the country when she was let go and that is how she ended up living in Canada. We Canadians are forgiving, non-combative, and take in all sorts of people and this was a time when we had just gone through taking in a lot of "draft dodgers" I think they were called, who did not have the ease of conscience to be part of the Viet Nam war. Xaviera sort of snuck in there when we were not looking. Her book was held up, literally, in a session of parliament, and even given out to members of our parliament by a politician who was supporting her move to Canada, on a permanent basis. He was a Torontonian when he was not in Ottawa (the seat of our federal government) and we handled his home and office phone lines. That may be how she came to us, a referral from him. So, she was living in Toronto, as was I at that time.

That time, ah ... that time. It was the early seventies (about 1973 or 4 as I recall) and the time span in which I met and fell for my now departed husband, Neil. (It is somewhat important to the gist of this story that you understand not only the what, but the WHEN. Also it was a time before the recognition of AIDs and the almost manditory use of condoms ) Anyway ... on with the snippet ... I was living the life ... in Toronto, a big city, and me a country girl, Toronto being somewhere I never thought to be ... But there I was. Working a job and a half to support my own little business that I had started up the second week of living there. I was, if nothing else, fairly ambitious.

One of my part time jobs, the one where I met Neil by the way, who was a client I talked to every weekend evening for a few hours when he just called in to put in a request for a wake-up in the morning. You remember those times? We didn't all have telephones that went directly to voice mail, but had "answering services" ... places where your phone line was diverted so that a switchboard operator could take your calls when you were out and you would call when you got in to pick up the messages? Very popular with doctors who needed appointments taken or lunch time relief for their staff, and with people who just needed the service. For those of you who don't remember answering services ... I really feel sad for you.

Anyway, I operated cord boards ... yup, like Lilly Tomlin in her "This is the phone company, we don't have to care:" comedy skit that helped to make her famous. You don't remember that either? Google her and you might find some of her stuff on YouTube. I hope it is somewhere, preserved for those who didn't get the joy and laughter of seeing it when it was happening.

Geez ... I knew I was long winded sometimes, but this is getting ridiculous.

Working evenings, weekends, and being on call for times when someone couldn't come in for their shift, I had to know a lot about all the boards in our establishment. The company I worked for had five or six offices in Toronto. I worked at them all, and knew most of the lines and customers associated with them without even looking. (Average in each office 500 to 700 lines) I was very good at some things and that was one of them.

On our downtown office we had Ian Tyson, of Ian and Sylvia fame ... really? Google and maybe YouTube ... you get the idea. In that office we also had the home line for the mayor or Toronto, and some of the other locally and provincially well known and "famous" people who used our company for their answering service.

We had one office where the operator, that would be me sometimes, dispatched tow trucks after office hours as well as taking phone lines and putting out pager signals ... pager signals? ... I am definitely getting too old if you don't remember those ... or maybe you are just too young! I know, I know ... but maybe Google ... you get it. It was on the most recent office opened that we had the home phone line for the agent (or promoter of some kind?) for Anne Murray ... singer ... television, radio, hootenanny stuff (hootenanny? Google), sort of the beginning of soft country ... Canadian, first hit "Snowbird", first woman, as well as first Canadian, to win the Album of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards, 1984, for "A Little Good News" ... and before long in her career, and for many years, a Las Vegas, mega hotel/casino (super star, sort of the Ceine Dionne of the day} showroom entertainer. Anyway, we would chat with her when she was in between shows, or after the shows were over, late at night, when she was in Vegas. She knew that if she called her agent and he wasn't home, she would end up talking to one of the switchboard answering service girls. Often she called after a show, to wind down, knowing she would get one of us,and just needing someone to chat with. One year we all got signed Christmas Cards from her.

Sidetracked? Me? No, never ... hahaha

At one of the offices, as I started out to say, we had the line for Xaviera Hollander (pronounced Zaviera) on our boards. And this is where the Valentine part comes in. I get there ... it sometimes takes a while, but I do usually get there.

There were a lot of calls the evening before, and the day of, Valentines Day, for Xaviera ... a hot chick in anyone's book and she had made a lot of friends in Toronto. One of them was a fellow she had been ... dating ... another old fashioned term which may or may not be something you can Google ... anyway, she had been dating a gentleman who also had his phone lines on our boards. So, on Valentine's Eve, Xaviera, who had been out that evening with this gentleman, called his home when she got home brfore he got back to his home,and we got his line because he had not gone straight home but out for a drink, he said. She called to leave him a Happy Valentine's Day message. Being European and not speaking English as a first language, she surely did not realize what she had said when she said " Take a message and say this ... "Happy VD" ... which she meant to convey the message, Happy Valentine's Day. We all knew better, but we were trained to take a message as it was given, word for word if the caller wanted it that way. And since we were dealing with both ends of the conversation, her line and his, we made sure it was taken as given.( Xaviera Hollander was a world renowned prostitute and madam, with "houses of ill repute" in most European countries. Her book "The Happy Hooker", was scooped up like candy by women who wanted tips on how to "entertain" a man, and by men who wanted to hear the juiciest of her adventures.)

The evening passes, as does the night, and voila, we are at Valentine's Day ... and of course everyone wants to have that evening off to go out with their husbands or boyfriends (boyfriend, archaic term ... Google it) ... Well the message, taken as given, sat in his message box all day and the gentleman did not pick it up until early evening. So it was me, smee2 me, who had taken the message to begin with, who had to give it him when he called. So I read it out saying, "Miss Hollander left a message, saying, "Happy VD" ". There was this audible intake of breath, a pregnant pause if ever I heard one, and then he exhaled an explosion as if he had been holding his breath ... "What did she say, exactly?" I explained to him that when we are given something to say in the caller's own words, we write it down, and relay it just that way. She said "Happy VD". He hung up the phone without even saying Thank You as he usually did, being a very polite gentleman.

Immediately Xaviera's line rings. She is taking a bubble bath, we don't know if she is alone but she had alerted us she was going to be in the bath of bubbles and we should take her messages until she called back. It was the gentleman calling of course. I had just been speaking to him, and he may have thought the voice was familiar, because he questioned who he was speaking to, very confused ... for more reasons than one I suspect. He wanted to know where she was, what she was doing, with whom, when would she be back, could he reach her before that? We could not give out any of that information and I asked him if he wished to leave a message. His message ... "What!"

He called back several times while she was in the "bath of bubbles" and kept leaving messages like "What did you mean?" Where the h@ll are you?" "Why are you not calling me back?" "What did you mean by your message?" "Call me ASAP" {ASAP, another pre-cel , pre-PC, and pre-text era term)

She got the messages, all of them, when she was out of the bath, and ready to take messages. As I gave them to her she kept asking what did he say exactly, and why would he say that, and he sounds upset ... no kidding. He was upset. And to him, fit was or a very obvious reason. (Now don't try to tell me you are so young you don't remember the term VD !)

She left him a message ... "It does not sound like you are having a Happy VD at all. When will you be here? I am almost ready for our date to go to the club." When he finally got the message she left, he was, it seemed, well on his way to a next day, liquor induced hangover.

Now, we operated on the old fashioned cord board ... and although it was possible, it was against all company rules, to cross the cords and let one party speak with another if they are both on the same service. The back and forth messages started getting very heated so I offered to "hook them up" literally. It is rude, bad manners, sometimes funny, and most likely illegal, to listen in on these conversations except to just touch the contact to see if the line is still open, meaning the conversation is not finished. But I was, at that time, rude, unmannerly, uncaring of the legality, and looking for a chuckle. After all, I was the one working Valentine's. So, yes, I admit it ... I listened in.

He was angry and hollering. She was confused and questioning. They were both trying to get information from the other and neither one of them was taking the time to find out what was at the base of this conflict. I took my life, well maybe just my job, in my hands and broke into the conversation, with "Excuse me. Excuse me!"

Well, they stopped talking and shouting over each other, and surprised, listened to me. I explained my position and that I had been privy to both sides of this "conversation" that wasn't really a conversation at that point. And I solved the misunderstanding, and put their relationship back on track, with each of them apologizing to the other, and both of them forgetting all about me.

And what makes this funny, at least to me?

I had to explain to the wealthiest, best known, published, hot point of very strong opinions, and undeniably the most famous prostitute of the time, that in English, VD means venereal disease.

And the memory of that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes me chuckle every Valentine's Day.

To answer a question that some of you will be asking ... NO ... since breaking my back I DON'T have anything better that I CAN do with my time. But I do enjoy story telling. :)

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