Sorry to be a little late with my blog this week. The ceiling outside my office collapsed. Among other things. No, seriously, the ceiling outside my office collapsed. My grandmother didn’t die, the dogs didn’t lap up all my special massage olive butter. I was late because the ceiling collapsed. Well, actually, it collapsed after it sort of melted and fell apart because it was made of those thick cardboard panels. Which happened because the panels were saturated with water. Which happened because the upstairs-across-the-hall doctor installed a water purifier under his sink that decided to… flood the entire floor, the floor below, and also the basement below that.
Now, the business about the water purifier is murky. According to one side, it might have been improperly installed. According to another, it might have malfunctioned and split in two. For all I know, it was an AI and decided it hated the doctor and wanted to kill all humans with rapidly growing mold and mildew. What I know for sure is that it happened just before (1) a full week of massage, (2) a three-day, ten-hour-a-day chair massage event, and (3) just before another full week of massage. Oh, and wedge in spending my one day off with my associate and our husbands after the chair event lugging our entire office to an empty suite so we didn’t have to stop business. Also wedge in stripping, hammering, insurance adjustors, and huge drying fans that made our suite feel like one of the sauna rooms at Olympus Spa. Nothing like sweating to the music of hammers to really get you in the mood for a good massage.
But it was when I tripped over a drying fan (in the basement, in the dark, where they turned the power out after we had to move our storage to a different compartment), that I just lay there on the concrete for a minute resting, and said, “Dammit, I want a fruit basket.” “Why a fruit basket?” asked my associate. “You know, an apology. Given with fruit. To sweeten it up.” Sarah is younger than me by 16 years, and did not grow up in the Land of Thank-You Notes, as I did. But back in my day (boy, do I sound old), when somebody ruins your freaking day in such a gigantic way, you get a fruit basket. With flowers, maybe. Or some cheeses, nuts, and hard candies. Possibly even a bottle of revoltingly cheap champagne. “They might want to apologize, but they can’t,” she said. “Y’know, liability issues. Can’t admit fault.” “A box of chocolates?” I suggested. “A plate of homemade brownies? A nice note with a Starbuck’s GC? No? Geez.”
See, I’m not sure where saying “I’m sorry” and “admitting fault” are precisely the same thing. I ran into this whole never-say-you’re-sorry thing when I first started massaging. “You should never say ‘I’m sorry’ in a massage,” an older therapist told me. “The client might think you’re saying her pain is your fault.” What? That makes my eyes cross. If a client comes in and is in pain, and I say “I’m sorry you’re in pain,” that is not admitting fault. How could the pain possibly be my fault as it preceded me? That is simply me being–I don’t know–caring? Sympathetic? Empathetic? I am who I am and what I am, and what I am is sorry that the client–or anyone else in the Vale of Tears we call life–is suffering. Geez.
I was good and I was kind and I never missed a beat after the ceiling fell in. I faked it ’til I made it, but sustained faking it takes energy, which I am low on at present. What would help, would be a nice apple. In a fruit basket. Which could even appear anonymously, wiped of all fingerprints. No one would ever “admit fault,” and yet I’d know exactly where it came from, and get that comforting feeling that come from knowing an involved human regrets the unavoidable extra efforts this entire ludicrous incident has involved.
