(a twitter thread – originally posted Feb 7 2020)
Alright, gather round. I’ll tell you my ‘Alpaca Farm’ story. This came up this morning since my friend had been trying to tell her husband about it and texted me trying to remember what had been so traumatic so she could explain it better.
In 2006, I was working as a telephone technician and got sent out on a service call to the middle of nowhere, I think somewhere around Pinckney, MI. Paperwork said customer had no dial tone on a couple extensions, something like that.
I don’t remember if the customer was under a name or a company name, not really important. Suffice it to say, I found myself at an Alpaca Farm. Owner was a nice (lonely?) middle-aged lady, greeted me, probably introduced me to an Alpaca or two that were out and about.
I remember she had a decent operation at the farm – she’d clearly done well in the past and now mostly was handling the care of the animals and business side of things while she had subcontracted out the logistics of processing the fur.
I don’t remember if she had a spouse/partner, either way they weren’t there, so it was just me, her, some alpacas and a one-floor ranch house that she lived in and worked out of. People who have business phone systems in their houses are a unique bunch anyway…
Her particular phone system was one of the ones I wasn’t super familiar with, but I knew it was a modular one so the problem was likely with a bad module. I had her show me to her phone/network closet/toolshed and yeah, that’s exactly what the problem was.
Note: I just remembered as I was moving this story here that she'd had a lightning strike on the farm and it was immediately clear the module had let the smoke out.
So since she didn’t have a service plan with us, she’d need to order a new extension module. Regardless, I didn’t come with a module for this system so I worked with her to figure out which 6-8 phones she really needed in the interim and swapped them in.
All during this time I was walking around her house, she’s peppering me with small talk, etc. I’m not really paying that close attention to it, I realize later she’s been sort of getting a feel for what she could persuade me to do next for her.
Notably, I find out I have no company cell service in her house and she’s being very… clingy… so I end up calling up the boss to give him the lowdown via one of her extensions so he can pass it to Sales and get her a quote for the new mod.
He also tells me it’s a COD which means I have to get money from her before I can leave. She’s fine paying, but wants me to look at a couple of other things with her phone and internet service first.
She also knows I used to work with Cable TV (since she’s been small-talking me,) so I get roped into doing some superficial troubleshooting of that too. As time drags on, the anxiety increases. I’m about 45 minutes from civilization with no real exit strategy…
…and I’m alone with a very ‘friendly’ woman who, presumably, can assert her will over fully-grown south american camelids so I’d probably be at her mercy when it came right down to it. And evening is fast approaching.
I also MUST get paid before I leave. If for some reason I can’t get paid, there’s an unspoken imperative to f*ck her system up in some way that she won’t notice until I leave. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any way to do this with her following me everywhere.
Even though I’m starting to sweat from anxiety and it’s clear I’ll be late getting back to the shop, I remain professional about everything and eventually she runs out of reasons to keep me and cuts the check. Also, I’ve added about an hour to the bill by this point.
Once I managed to get out, though, I call in to the boss to let him know I’ll be back to the shop late because she withheld paying me until I’d checked some other things out. He gives a creepy kind of chuckle and tells me that’s ok, but I’ll be doing his daily liquor run, naturally.
So that, more or less, is how my *second to last day* at that job went, a day I had originally wanted to just call in sick for, but my girlfriend had said “it’s your second to last day, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?”