Chuckie Codpiece
There are a handful of things in life that are irritating, so irritating in fact that you consider jamming a pencil 
in your eye. Some of these things you can do something about; others are not so easy to be rid of. For example you can usually squash a mosquito thus ending the annoying buzzing and potential for itchy spots. Those noisy child toys can magically disappear or stop “working” all together. Damn it all.
Sometimes the most maddening things we live with in this life are less avoidable or fixable; baby poop unavoidable, evil children screaming at their parents in stores around Christmas time… legally must walk away. Taxes you have to pay, and hope at the end of the “year” you do not have to pay more. Death… well you cannot escape that; life is a terminal disease.
Then there are debt collectors, they work to hunt you down for debts… however large or small, size is not important. The goal is to make you feel as stupid and freakishly moronic for accruing debt in the first place;
like you should be wearing an orange helmet with a flashing green light on the top so people will know to avoid you at all costs. Collections agents will employ any means necessary to try and get you to pay your “debt” in full if at all possible. One of my student loan “counselors” seems to think I am suddenly, as soon as my loan goes into effect, going to have thousands of extra dollars lying around; I do not 
even technically owe on the loans yet but the way this woman talks it is as if she thinks whatever job I find after college will pay me a lifetime in advance. We will not even talk about what my medical expense “managers” think. People who take these jobs are not human or extremely naïve or so jaded they no longer have a soul.
They seem to think you shit golden eggs filled with cash money. I am not Bill Gates or that Facebook kid; so no I am not capable of that.
There is one time, and one time only I can say I enjoy receiving these calls. When they are calling seeking my ex-boyfriend; I share an ex with Chibi… it is how we know each other. Let me give you some back story on this specific boyfriend. I lived with him, which was the first time I had lived with someone I was dating. Not long after we began cohabitating I lost my job; I was receiving unemployment and able to keep us both fed and the trailer clean. Yes I said trailer. 
For some reason, (well the reason was desperation and a sense that this poor lad needed saving), I decided that living in a single wide trailer, the wheels and hitch still attached, with no air conditioning (in the South, which is essentially living in a huge metal cracker box that heats up all day long) was the best possible outcome for my life. Do not get me wrong there is no shame in living in a trailer. Lots of people do; and I do not look down on them; I have been in some extremely nice trailers, well taken care of and much loved; this was not that kind of trailer. This was the kind of trailer you would drive by on a lovely country drive and wonder who had lived there when it was condemned.
Chuckie, the real prize winner of the deal here, has at least a two pack a day habit, Camels, never generic YOU HAD BETTER NOT TRY AND SAVE A DIME ON HIS TOBACCO! Carter, Chuckie’s grandfather who smoked more than he drank, and drank more than he bathed… 
was a sweet old senile man. I hope wherever he is now he has at least got a functioning shower. Chuckie kept saying he was going to fix it… One time I stopped in on Carter to see if he needed anything and he told me how he had come to live in North Carolina. I am not entirely sure I got the whole story because I am not good at deciphering slurred cough, but it seems he was
fugitive from the law, as the getaway driver for some crime. The statute had more than run out now so he said he could talk about it. Poor Carter, I lied and told him I had a pie in the oven and I had better go get it.
To make things more interesting this single-wide palace, with its tobacco-colored walls, carried at least two mortgages. I am not sure how but somehow whenever Chuckie asked his grandfather for something, Carter would move heaven and earth to make whatever happen. 
One could not keep count of the refinancing, loans, equity… you name it, and there was a paper on that trailer saying should it default it would belong to this company, or that person, or some loan shark. At times I wondered if that was why the hitch and wheels were still attached… I imagined one day I would be mopping or baking bread and just be hauled off to some impound lot.
My parents kept my cell phone on for me as that was really their only way of reaching me. Chuckie never had steady phone service. Somehow or another my cell number was given to people as a way to reach Chuckie. That worked out fine for the time we were actually living together…
That was about four years ago. He apparently “fell off the grid again” shortly after I left him. (And stole “his” dog…) It was then that the calls started. At first, it was just painful and I would ignore them. Then I found out ol’ Chuckie 
had moved some new girl in… It did not matter so much I guess; I had told him repeatedly I was not returning; but Sweet Baby Jesus let the door shut all the way before you move the new girl in.
She also had a shi-tzu that she dyed green and for some reason that just flew all over me. An explanation of why women hate other women is unnecessary here. I knew exactly what he had 
told her because he fed me the same sad story about Chibi… She was apparently much more talented at not talking to others than I was. Besides Chuckie’s behavior had just escalated to the point that I had to explain some things, and I wasn’t going to lie for him.
Chuckie was more or less invited to leave… Let’s just say the invite did not come on engraved paper. Honestly, I believe Chuckie thought
that once you no longer lived in a home or on a piece of property you no longer had to pay for it; not that he paid much to begin with but it was at least enough that the collectors and investigators were not looking for him daily, multiple calls and harassment throughout my day. I was working again and often worked nights. These calls were a bit of a problem. Incidentally, he felt the same way about cars he drove… if they stopped running he stopped paying. If Chuckie got a DUI and the police impounded the car… then they had taken ownership. That’s how it worked in his little mind.
Finally one day I just lost it. I had worked a 12-hour night shift that had been particularly inhumane, as a 911 dispatcher and I was no longer in the mood for these people. I couldn’t just turn off my phone on the extremely off chance they might need me to come back to work and suck even more at understanding police officers on the radio. So after the same number had called me FOUR times in a row I picked it up. I screamed into the phone 
“SOMEONE HAD BETTER BE DEAD!”
There was that “silence” of a call center on the other end as the person apparently shocked that anyone had answered or at how I had answered. Finally, I hear this nasal accent of what could have been Sarah Palin before she was governor, I do not know and she says 
“Ma’am I am trying to reach Chuckie Codpiece, could you please put him on the phone?”
“OH, DEAR! You didn’t hear? He’s in witness protection now. His name is Stan Something and lives in Arizona. You will have to get in touch with those people who do that.” Then I hung up.
I was so giddy with pleasure that I decided this would be my new game whenever they called and ruined my day I would just say whatever, however, and see if I could get 
them to rise to the occasion. The most jaded agents knew I was full of crap, and I was… but I did not know or care to know where Chuckie was.
One time a previous boss of his, whom I had met, called me wanting to get in touch with Chuckie. I was apparently the only viable number in his personnel file. I told this man, poor guy, that Chuckie was probably unreachable because of his being in rehabilitation. The surprised man asked if Chuck was
alright (he was always wrecking his car so I guess he assumed hospital…) I said he would be once he got past animal porn addiction. The guy started laughing and said in all seriousness
“Y’all broke up huh?”
“Got it in one” I replied.
He told me “Good, Chuckie was not good enough for you.”
The best responses came when I started using the different accents I could use. Apparently, call centers in 
India do not like Irish accents. So instead of me constantly asking them to repeat themselves I would just mutter a bunch of Irish slang at them… They usually hung up first.
The best one ever though was a woman who never believed a word that came out of my mouth and she caught me in the middle of a good dream. So when I answered she said something about it ruining both Chuckie and Carter’s credit; that they
would come out and repossess the “property” referring to Buckingham Trailer. I told her in my best Indian (dot not feather) accent, that she could not find the property. To which she coldly replied
“Ma’am last we checked the property is right where it is supposed to be.”
Then I calmly and quietly replied in my best “The South will Rise Again” accent
“Okay. But did you check for land mines?”
She hung up.
I won.
Eventually, it did stop being fun and I just told them that we had been broken up for months, 
years… whatever, however long it had been, and that I did not know where he was but that he lived on someone’s couch with a Lime colored shi-tzu that answered to Shamrock or some stupid green associated name.
xoxo ~A
