The Wrong Impression

There is a Honda dealer near the major airport in my city that has managed to connect me with two salesmen who give the place a bad look.

They make me wonder if they spend any time exploring the character and skill of those they hire because my experience is they don’t.

Won’t bother giving you all of the details of the car I went to look at with the kids three years ago or the guy this last December who told me a story.

Instead I’ll share the cars I walked away with from a different dealer were significantly less and had more features than the models the foolish men off of 121 tried to foist upon me.

It has left me with the wrong impression and given the experiences were several years apart I am not real excited about visiting them again.

Given I got a new car a couple of months ago there is no immediate need to attend to this and for that I am grateful.

I don’t mind car shopping but I do mind having to deal with more stupidity than I am required to.

What’s In A Name

One salesman told me he and his wife had played around with giving their son my name but went a different direction.

I am not sure what kind of connection he thought he was going to make there. I like my name and haven’t ever felt the need to change it but I am not so enamored with it that you’ll score points by disingenuously saying you thought about using it.

Hell, over the years other people have told me they had planned on using it for their children. I appreciated that because it was genuine.

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Several months ago my son was on jury duty. He told me the bailiff had trouble pronouncing his first name.

I asked him if he thought the bailiff spoke English as a second language and he laughed. “No, he had that Texas twang but managed all of the other names ok. It was just mine.”

I smiled and told him about the Ringling Brothers clown who couldn’t say Joshua. It happened more than forty years ago at a store in West Hollywood.

My grandparents took my middle sister and I to see a couple of clowns talk about the circus and how to put on clown makeup. or at least I think that is what it was, hard to remember now.

What I know for certain is they held a raffle for circus tickets and I won.

The guy pronounced my name “Jos-who-ah.”

Could have made a crack about that clown having trouble speaking English but he really was a clown and his English was fine, other than saying my name.

Little sister and I walked away with authentic clown makeup that I used for Halloween for several years afterwards.

Who needed to worry about getting a mask or figuring out a costume when you could smear a bunch of greasepaint on your face.

It was certainly better than the Frankenstein mask I made out of grocery store bag and some kind of paper mache thing-a-ma-bob.

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I suppose it is worth mentioning there have been times where when people asked me if my name meant anything and I came up with different responses.

Things like “He who eats souls and devours the night” or “man who knows things.”

Hell when I mentioned Dung in the prior post I didn’t mention I played around with telling him I was the inspiration for the Evil dude in Temple of Doom. You know the one who ripped out hearts and said something that sounded like “Kali-mah!”

But there have also been times where when people asked me about my name and to share something about myself I have said “I am just Josh. Nothing more to say than I am just a regular guy.”

Those moments have usually come when I have been involved in some sort of icebreaker type activity and didn’t feel like participating.

There is a shy side to me that sometimes comes out.

There is also a quiet side, the family says that has been happening more frequently lately. I usually shrug my shoulders and tell them I have nothing to say.

That Is Disturbing

One of the mothers in the parents Facebook group for my daughter’s university posted a Ring video of a man with what looks like a gun trying to break into her daughter’s apartment.

He didn’t get in and the police have been notified but it has caused some concern for all of us.

Can’t look at it and not think that it is disturbing. Won’t panic and freak out because I operate off of statistics and the numbers say we’re probably ok.

But that just dulls the edge a little bit. Doesn’t mean I am not concerned or that I don’t think others should be.

Told my daughter if she ever is in a bad situation to not be afraid to fight dirty. Eye gouging, throat punching, kicking them in the groin, knee or wherever is at the top of the list.

I’ll qualify it by saying top of the list after doing whatever you can to not put yourself in bad situations and to get out of there if you are.

She knows her father wouldn’t hesitate to rip out a throat to protect her and her brother. It is how I am built.

But I never want any of us to find out in person. Better to never know.

The kids do say that when we visited the car dealer I mentioned at the top I scared the car salesman.

“He wasn’t physically afraid of you, but you made him look stupid and he knew it.”

I don’t think of that often, but I would prefer that it never went there either. No reason for him to look stupid, all he had to do was be honest.

It left me with the wrong impression.