Sovereignty of SeaWitch

Because I'm bored with Athens, I'll be leaving for Karpenisi in Evritania today. I'll be back on Monday ready to blog again. Have a great weekend everyone!

In my previous life back in Canada, I was a production manager for an ad agency. I very rarely dealt with clients since that was the job of the account executives so I never really honed my "people" skills. My job was to make sure things got done on time, on budget and without mistakes. Because I have been described as a demanding, critical, austere and meticulous person, I did very well at my job but meant that my superiors had to keep clients away from me and that suited me just fine.

Now, that I have to deal with dozens of customers a day, I feel out of my element. I literally have to bite my tongue so many times in a day, it's a wonder I still have one. The stupid things that come out of people's mouths just invite my wrath. The stupid things they do, send me off the deep end. Thank God we own the stores otherwise I would have been fired by now if I was working for anyone else.

I've blogged some examples last year and in January of the odd things that I deal with but if those aren't enough to convince you that I'm daily driven to the brink of insanity, keep reading. There's more. Now, I want to blog the things people have DONE in our stores as well as what they say.

The Porno Section
This section of both stores is in a separate room and I monitor it like a hawk. Why? Because men just can't seem to keep their hands out of their pockets. We have posted signs outside the room to let them know it's monitored by CCTV but that doesn't seem to deter them from doing the unthinkable. When I confront these deviants to kick them out, Mount Vesuvius has nothing on me when I explode. One guy even had the nerve to ask me why I was so angry. He was lucky I was wearing boots that day otherwise he would have had my shoe print on the back of his neck.

Then there are the customers who complain that their porno DVD has no subtitles. ????!! I just tell them that grunts and groans are pretty much a universal language and don't need subtitling. If they're missing the "plot" in a porn movie then maybe they need to be talking to a sex therapist instead of renting porn to begin with and bugging me about such stupidities.

Underage kids who try to rent porn irritate me. When I refuse to let them into the porn room without ID, their standard response is "My mother doesn't mind." My response to that is "I'm not your mother. Let her come in and rent them. " And I send them home to do their homework.

Kids & Parents
One girl brought a bicycle in the store to ride it while her mother was choosing a movie. I waited the obligatory 10 seconds for the mother to say something to her child. She didn't. So I told the girl to remove the bicycle from the store and I'll take mine to her house so we could ride them together in her mother's living room. The mother wasn't too happy but at least I didn't have to explain to our insurance company how a 7 year old broke her leg riding a bicycle in our store.

Another woman's 4 year old urinated on the upstairs' floor. When the mother came to the counter I thought for sure she'd ask for a mop since I had seen the whole thing on CCTV. Instead, she asked me to clean up the mess without one hint of embarrassment on her face. I took the mop and bucket upstairs and told the child that I didn't like what he did especially since he did it out of spite because his mother wouldn't buy him the Finding Nemo DVD and that it better not happen again or he would not even be able to rent Nemo let alone buy it.

Why parents expect me to do their job of disciplining and monitoring their children is inexplicable. This happens far too many times. Parents don't have the backbone to tell their spoiled kids to behave when in our stores. They will tell the children that the "lady" is going to get mad at you if you don't behave. Of course, I will get angry but why should it be MY job? I'm not the parent. No store clerk has ever admonished my son in public, I was always quite capable of disciplining him myself. I've been asked to lie to their children as well and tell them that we don't have a particular movie when we do or that the MP3 player they want is not for sale. And then the same people wonder why I have to be so rude about it.

When we first opened the stores, 10 & 11 year olds would rent movies like Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street and Scarface or other movies I would think was inappropriate for children of such a young age to watch. I used to phone the parents to inform them what their children were watching and then I stopped phoning because not one parent ever told me not to rent the movie. Sometimes, I still refuse to rent certain movies to kids anyway just because I don't think anyone under the age of 18 should see a movie (marketed as a thriller) about the notorious paedophile serial murderer John Wayne Gacy .

I could go on and on but this blog has to end some time and I need some material for my next Snitch 'n Bitch instalment.

When you move to another country, your main concern is how you'll be able to live and adapt to a new country. You don't spend much time thinking about how you're going to die. At least I didn't. Call it optimism or ignorance. Either way, the last thing on your mind is what your death and burial will be like. Even after living in Greece for 7 years, I still never gave it much thought. Until January of this year.

My husband's 91 year-old grandfather died in January. When he died, I felt better for just having known such a good, decent, kind, generous and principled man. After 91 years of surviving two world wars, civil unrest, famine and a military junta, his death did not come as a shock to us. His funeral came as a big shock to me. I was accustomed to a North American funeral involving a funeral home, eulogies to be prepared and written, which priest, how many days for the viewing. When I asked my husband about how we were going to arrange his grandfather's funeral, he was surprised and said "what's to arrange? It'll be over and done with in a day."

And true to his words, a quicker and more indifferent funeral I had never experienced. The priest who officiated did not offer kind words of condolence and spiritual hope to the family. Instead, he read the same funereal words he probably had read at dozens of other funerals. There was no one who stood up to read sincere and poignant eulogies for the man who had affected so many lives. A man who had provided for not just his own immediate family but his extended family as well. Most of whom still live in the houses he bought them while he was alive while he died in a small but immaculate one bedroom apartment. 91 years of life on this planet and the best we could do for him was a few grains of sitari (wheat) thrown on his rent-a-grave while a religious stranger spoke emotionless words. It just didn't seem right.

He deserved better. His family deserved better.

In Greece, most funerals are like his. You die. Your family rents a grave for 3 years since there is no space left to bury our dead in Athens. It's so bad that the bodies don't even decompose because there's just not enough soil to do the work. On the 9th day after your death your closest friends and family pay one of the many priests walking around the cemetery to officiate for 5 minutes and you go back home waiting for the 40 day memorial service. Then they return again on the 1 year anniversary of your death to repeat the same banale process. After 3 years, you get exhumed and if you don't pay for a reburial elsewhere, your bones are thrown down a well. Cremation (and embalming) is illegal. The Greek Orthodox Church claims that cremation is sacrilege so it's forbidden but digging up the dead isn't considered desecration? The Church makes more money off burials than cremation. Priests, who are paid by the State, also get paid in cash (most likely never declared for taxation) for performing all these ceremonies when someone dies.

By comparison, when my grandfather died 11 years ago at the age of 92, his funeral service lasted almost two hours. The priest knew my grandfather personally and many members of his family by name. So many people came that the funeral home that they had to extend the viewing days so more people would have a chance to pay their respects to our family. People I had never met drove hours just to make sure someone in our family knew what my grandfather had done for them . I was so touched by the outpouring of emotion and love from them that I actually have good memories of my grandfather's funeral. I had hoped I would be able to remember Pappous Yianni's funeral in the same way. But I can't. I feel we didn't do his life justice. My husband now wishes we had taken more control over how it was arranged. We can't bring him back, but we at least could have been comforted by the thought that we gave him a funeral befitting such a wonderful man.

His funeral made me realize that the way you leave this life is just as important as how you entered it. Therefore, I've made my wishes known to those closest to me that I do not want strangers anywhere near my grave and if I could get buried in the middle of some field in a Hefty bag, that would suit me just fine. No money to be spent on useless rituals or fancy graves. I'd want donations made to as many reputable charities as possible. Most importantly, I would not want any memorial services where people feel obligated to show up. The most I would hope for is that every now and again, that they think of me while they're living their lives and not mourning over mine. I dislike miserable people around me while I'm alive, I certainly don't want misery surrounding me when I'm dead.

If I had a clue, I'd be dangerous.

If I had two, they'd rattle.

If I had three, I would be able to successfully post a blog this week.

I haven't abandoned my blog. My blog seems to have abandoned me. This is the second time I've tried to post a blog this week and I've lost it. The first one was because my blogger editor froze just as I was about to post and the second time was because I decided to type my blog at work and save it to a floppy disk. It's still on the floppy disk. I'm almost to the point where I would take a screen shot of the file I can't open and leave it at that. Even that effort has been foiled since my floppy drive is holding the disk hostage. So once my temper subsides, I will rewrite the blog once again...and have the presence of mind to make a backup. I just hope there will be someone around to read it.

Of course, there is still the distinct possibility that my PC has become self-aware and will spontaneously combust just to put the last nail in my blog coffin.

Surfing made safer.

When DVDs first came on the scene, I just loved to play around with the added features they offered...subtitles in a dozen languages, "behind the scenes", interviews and the games. The most fun I had was switching voices into other languages but after hearing Clint Eastwood say "Do you feel lucky, punk?" in Hungarian, the novelty soon wore off. Some actors weren't meant for dubbing. No one but Eddie Murphy can DO Eddie Murphy.

Now that I'm back to watching movies in their original format, I find myself driven to the brink of insanity from reading the poorly translated subtitles. Sometimes, the translation is so bad, that even my husband will turn off the subtitles so he can understand the movie better.

I'm baffled by this phenomenon. In a country where there are more frontistiria (private learning institutes) for English than there are public schools, why is Greek translation from English so bad? I can't remember the last time I actually saw a movie where a number was translated correctly. Learning numbers in another language is usually covered by the second lesson...after the alphabet.

If a scene in a movie isn't translated properly, the entire meaning is lost. Here are some examples.