they're coming
july 20, 2002
have people no common sense anymore?
about 1.5 months ago, we get this call at the aiyah household. aside from telemarketers and calls for my dad, no one really comes aknockin telephonically. so this voice 6,000 miles away shoots out of the other end mumbling something about "visit.....july 31st.....one month.....5 of us."
......
hm, maybe we heard that wrong. so we call them back and it was then confirmed that this family of 5....FIVE are coming to visit the aiyah shack for nearly one month. no, they didn't call asking if we were available. no they didn't call to see if it was ok. no they didn't call to say they were visiting LA on a tour and wanted to know if we could meet up. no they weren't asking if they could stay at our house. no they weren't even checking with us if it was OK for anything.
what they DID call to say was that they ARE coming and that tickets have been bought and that was just a 'courtesy' call to tell us that they'll be landing on our doorstep in the good ole US of A on july 31st.
ooohhhhh, i dunno about the rest of you but even if i was going across town to visit someone, i would call first to see if they are free and if it would be a good time to drop in, let alone flying transpacific with daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters in tow for a fuckin 3 weeks!
needless to say, ever since that phone call, things have been like an active volcano around here. lots of grumbling, rumbling, molten lava ready to burst. tempers are short, angers flaring high, no one is looking forward to them coming, especially since they showed such little respect for the people here. but my mom refused to turn them away and refused to put them up in a hotel.
perhaps people don't understand that los angeles is not like hong kong. you can just walk outside your home and have the subway at the end of your driveway. you need a car. you need to drive. you need a fuckin mini van for a family of 5!
i don't live near a subway. i don't even live near a bus stop. and i surely don't have a mini van. so how does one go about handling guests for 3 weeks? anyway, that's one of the major dilemmas plaguing me for the past several weeks. although i have them set up on chinese tours and such, it's just not enough and i still have so many other things to arrange for them....JUST BECAUSE they didn't use half a fuckin brain and book their own tour from hong kong. i know they didn't because they wanted to save money and probably was banking on the fact that we would drive them around and pay for everything but i'm sorry, that's not the way things work.
and even though they are used to the cramped accommodations of the small hk flats, my home is already filled to capacity with people, pets and things and an additional five folks around here is not going to improve things. and what about troubling folks? do they even have any idea what size our house is? and what about our schedules? there is only so much i can handle and i wouldn't even mind driving them around if there were only 1-2 people but what they have is their own mini tour group within a family nucleus.
you would think that at least one of the adults would have some common sense to say, "hey...maybe we ought to call them first to see if it's ok?" but nooooooooooo. don't get me wrong, i don't mind guests coming, especially if they don't mind my shack but please, have some courtesy will you?
they will be here in 1.5 weeks. and i doubt my mood will improve much.
they're coming.
oh yes, they certainly are.
here fishie fishie.
