If you’ve been reading my blog for the FIVE YEARS I have been writing it, you are familiar with my favorite phrase “I’m not racist….but….”. I’ve blogged in the past about this favorite phrase of mine, in particular about my “not racist” neighbor: the bottle bleach blonde pushing 60, trying to look twenty, whose shorts are so short the world is her gynecologist. If you want to refresh your memory (or if you are new to my blog and want to check out my past awesomeness), read these two entries before reading this one:
Ok done? So you know sort of what I am dealing with here? Ok then, Here we go.
The phone rang this afternoon as I was sitting down with Dante to do his homework after school. On the other end was Blondie, the woman next door in the aforementioned blogs. In her “I’m trying to sound six years old” baby voice she asks me if I know anything about computers and could she come over so I could fix “something terrible” that has happened to hers. I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t super computer savvy and that I was in “homework time with Dante” but she started TO CRY and said she only needed two minutes and this *thing* on her computer was so horrible that she needed it off right away. What am I going to do? Say no to a six year old?
So she comes over with her Mac Air laptop and I’m instantly confused because I’m a Dell PC girl. I know, I know, all the “intellectuals” have Macs, but that proof was just negated the minute Blondie walked into my house with one.
So I ask her what is wrong with her computer and she tells me that it’s something on Facebook. Something so tragic and horrible that her “reputation as a hairdresser” is at stake and I “need to help” her because it is “devastating”. I ask her if it is a naked picture of her (barf) or a picture of her doing something dirty (double barf) or just a picture that shouldn’t be on her business site and she STARTS TO CRY again in her mewling six year old baby girl talk and starts telling me that her niece put something on there as a joke and now everyone can see it and it’s devastating and horrible and it’s disgusting and on and on and on and on.
So I tell her to calm down, log into her Facebook, and that I would do my best to get rid of it.
She logs into her Facebook, repeating over and over and over again how “horrible” and “embarrassing” and “truly not me or my lifestyle” this *thing* is on her page that I am seriously preparing myself for a picture of Blondie spread-eagle on a Camaro or deep-throating her husband. She tells me to click on her workplace link, a hair salon in Louisiana with a similar name to hers, which is “so wrong” and “not the right place”, and “oh my god, you’ll see what I mean now!” and this is what comes up:
That’s it.
I’m not kidding. That’s it.
Seriously. THAT IS IT.
That is the picture that has this woman in hysterics over her reputation. That is the picture that she has deemed as “horrible”, “disgusting” and “devastating”.
That.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!
So I look at her and I say, “I’m sorry, I realize that it’s not your shop and the wrong name and location, linked to you, but what is so terrible about that picture?”
And then I get the famous phrase, “No, no, no, Alessia, I’m not racist…..but I just don’t do BLACK HAIR” (and trust me she said the words “black hair” as though I was saying “Rick Perry” or “spiders” or “George Lucas fucked with the original Star Wars again”.)
This woman was so devastated by this picture that she had to run right over to my house so I could delete it (she couldn’t figure out how to change her workplace in the profile editor) but not before spending twenty minutes “preparing” me for the absolute “horror” I was about to witness.
But she’s not racist.
