ARTICLES

5/24/09

OLD PEOPLE- WHAT'S THEIR DEAL?

I’m no ageist, I just judge people specifically on how old they are. For the most part I’ve got no beef with most human beings (that isn’t even remotely true). But for some reason, certain old people just don’t rub me the right way. Maybe I should stop rubbing old people.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all seniors. Grandparents are fantastic. But it’s when you come across these aged folks outside of a grandparent situation that you get the real deal. My problem is there’s no middle ground: You either get the nice sweetheart grandparent types, or the heinous devil creatures just counting the seconds until Satan finally comes to claim them.

I lived in a retirement home for a year; I know the happy-haps. No, I wasn’t retired; I had to wear a pager in case one of them fell in a toilet or something. They would then beep me with their life-alert button things. Not a bad gig at all, right? I got a free apartment out of it. Well, you haven’t taken into account just how ridiculous these people are. Don’t get all upset at me; this was not necessarily a retirement home as you’d imagine it. The old people were pretty self-sufficient. There weren’t nurses or anything like that. It was just a congregation of mean old fogies.

First things first, I tried as best I could not to wear my contacts when I responded to a page; the thought of having to see a naked old person with clarity sickens me still. This actually turned out to be a great idea, as I did encounter these situations.

Thank God for my terrible vision

Old people do not like young people (or at least young people that aren’t their grandkids). I’m a young person. They did not like me. I can’t even count the number of times they accused me of breaking into their apartments and stealing various things. For example, one lady accused me of breaking into the apartment, emptying her pills, and then putting them back together. Clearly a great use of my time. Of course, another old lady was convinced that hamsters that lived in her wall were stealing her pants at night and replacing them with older pants. Like, say, a day older. They never did catch those vermin.

I knew it!

One lady paged me at four in the morning for three straight nights because she was convinced that the 90-year-old woman on the floor below her was trying to sabotage her life. How? By sending shock waves up through the floor periodically through the night. Now, unfortunately, she was the only one who could feel them, so nobody would believe her (those fools!). How did she know that the lady on the floor below was doing it? Well, because she had recording equipment (aka a VCR) that she used to record line dancing on TV. WELL IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

The kicker was a lady’s legs bursting when I was on call. I’m not kidding, the veins burst in both her legs, causing carnage the likes of which haven’t been seen outside of a war zone. While I was saving her life, an inch thick layer of blood surrounded her apartment. After the ambulance arrived and whisked her off (she survived or whatever), it was of course up to my roommate and I to completely clean the room, which by now was more blood than air. After spending our Saturday taking care of this, the old bat has the gall to complain to our supervisor that we stole her food while we were cleaning. Mmm, nothing makes me hungrier than soaking up copious amounts of blood. We just couldn’t help ourselves; we just HAD to steal all your prunes and bran cereal. Seriously, old lady?

Hungry?

Old people are the equivalent of 11 year olds. Seriously, the place was like a middle school. In fact I’m pretty sure there was more gossiping going on. (Did you know that STD’s run rampant in old folk’s homes? That’s not gross in the least bit.) The gossiping wouldn’t be that bad of a problem if they kept it among themselves. But old people, as you probably know, are a tad bit hard of hearing. And they assume that everybody else hears as well as they do. So they shout everything. And they assumed that I was out of earshot when I was more than eight feet away. Unfortunately I was not. So I am more than aware of how they felt about me. They weren’t fans.

Morty's the bad boy.

I haven’t even gotten to old people driving. DEAR GOD. I’m sorry, but there’s no more terrifying sight then seeing a car full of seniors. It literally becomes a death machine. Anything near or in that car will die in the near future. Please make them renew their licenses through a test (and not the same test I took to get my license; a chimp could pass that. Which would be hilarious… hold on, I need to write a new movie idea in my puppy journal). People may point to the fact that their accident rate isn’t much higher- that doesn’t take into account accidents THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW THEY WERE IN. Go ahead, ask them to explain all the dings and dents on their cars. They can’t. Hell, some of the time they do realize what they’ve done and just drive away.

Plus they smell bad.