How do they find me?

The Uncomfortable-Comment-Maker is a person who can stop a perfectly normal conversation dead in it’s tracks by saying something so uncalled for, so off-topic, and so awkward that you literally have two possible responses. (1) “Um… well… right… ok… I uh… um… yeah.” (2) Complete tomb-like silence. I am quite sure that you have met a person like this before, and in truth we have probably all said something in the course of a conversation that caused it to come to a screeching halt, but there are certainly degrees of offense that can occur and I believe that most of us would fall on the low end of the scale when compared to the individual that I had the misfortune of not being able to avoid interacting with.

It happened while I was on a call to an office that manages vacation rental properties. (My wife and I are going to the Gulf Coast for a week and have rented a beach house. I was simply calling to confirm that everything was in order and that there wouldn’t be any unpleasant surprises when we got there. ) I was speaking with what I thought was a very nice and normal-sounding lady when the following dialog occurred:

Nice-Lady: I see your address is in [My Town], Alabama. Where is that exactly?

 

Me: It’s near Birmingham.

 

Nice-Lady: Oh, ok. My brother was murdered in Jackson, Alabama.

Me: Um… well… right… ok… I uh… um… yeah.

Look, I have all the sympathy in the world for this lady. Having a close family member murdered would certainly be an experience that would haunt me for the rest of my life and I’m sure it would fuck me up plenty, HOWEVER, I seriously doubt that it is something that I would ever, ever, EVER, bring up in a phone conversation with a COMPLETE FUCKING STRANGER!!! I have, in fact, lost family members in rather tragic circumstances. (I would wager that most people have. Tragedy is an unfortunate but inevitable part of life.) I haven’t personally encountered anything as horrible as murder, but the family members are equally dead, and the tragedy level is roughly equivalent. I can’t imagine ever talking about any of these things to someone that was not either (a) a member of my family or (b) a very close friend. And in both cases, the subject would have to come up in a proper context, such as a friend asking me, “So man, how are you dealing with the loss of So-and-so?”. As a completely fictional example, the following is NOT a conversation that I would ever have:

Me: So what do you do for a living?

Unsuspecting person who is about to get more information than they need: I run a tree farm.

Me: Interesting. My uncle Farley got his head cut off in a logging accident.

Poor bastard who wishes he had said “I’m a mime”: Um… well… right… ok… I uh… um… yeah.

So now I’m all worried about this poor lady and her murdered brother. Did this happen recently? Did they catch the person who did it? Is she now a terrified hermit who only leaves her fortified house on bright, sunny days at high noon, and then only with an armed bodyguard? Gahtdammit, I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight because of this shit. How do these motherfuckers FIND me?