I spent the better part of this afternoon waiting for UPS. (Memo to UPS advertising department: Who the fuck green-lighted the "Brown" campaign? Repeating "brown" over and over is positively scatalogical. I can't believe over the course of however many meetings between corporate and advertising not one person raised a hand and said "Um, about this whole brown idea....".) When it's a delivery, I just make sure I'm home by 5 pm. This block is on a late afternoon delivery schedule which means that whatever you order will arrive sometime after 5, usually closer to 6:30. Now with all that tracking software they've added there's no more waiting for a delivery. Once you have the delivery date, if you happen to be privy to your neighborhood delivery schedule, you spend and hour usually waiting for your package. (he he "package" he he) Not so with pick-up, however. And I was waiting for UPS to pick up the defibrillators The Hellcat had sold. You read that right. It seems that one night shortly after he had moved in, The Hellcat was returning from somewhere East (village) of here, possibly the boyfriend's but just as likely not, when he came upon what appeared to be a wholesale dump of a medical office. There were chairs and lights and fixtures, those chrome tree thingys you hang IV bags off of. The thing that really caught his eye though was that there seemed to be several defibrillators just laying out in the trash, presumably waiting to be picked up to become so much landfill. Surely, he thought they couldn't be throwing away working defibrillators, but by the same token, they looked to be in pretty good shape so maybe.....
Which is how it came to pass that The Hellcat ended up returning to our apartment sometime well after 1 am lugging a discarded defibrillator. It was then I expressed my doubt that anyone would be careless enough to discard a working defibrillator onto a Manhattan street for anyone to find it and possibly be badly injured or killed by it's (mis)use. In retrospect I should have known better. In Manhattan we throw out desks, chairs, halogen lamps by the thousands. The microwave we threw out worked (badly). We throw out working computers with the hard drive still in them. Need a new monitor? You can wait if you like someone will throw one away eventually. Clothes that I don't donate I leave on top of the garbage to try and avoid a wholesale rummage. Hell, we even throw newborn babies into the trash on occasion. So would a working defibrillator be that much of a surprise? OK then, would three working defibrillators give you pause? Because when The Hellcat returned home and bravely (or foolishly, take your pick) plugged it in and fiddled with enough knobs to confirm that what we had here was a working defibrillator, he decided that it might have some resale value, and returned to the street where two more were waiting to be picked up. So for the last month or possibly longer it's been impossible to open The Hellcat's bedroom door all the way as it was being door-stopped by two defibrillators. And yes, we both had several thoughts/dares about trying them out (only at 20 joules or so) and speculations as to possible sex toy uses. Speculation, I assure you.
As the weeks went by The Hellcat talked to various medical equipment re-sellers and buyers and he had price quotes all over the map. It was clear that if he put a few days effort into it he could probably realize a quick thousand out of the deal if not more. But as we've seen these past few weeks, a few days effort, in succession, is beyond The Hellcat's abilities right now. A phone call on the subject per day was about all he could usually manage.
Which is how I ended up spending the afternoon waiting for UPS to pick up two of the three defibrillators. While he didn't manage to sell them outright, The Hellcat found a middleman who was willing to sell them on a more or less consignment basis. This was all finalized concurrent to packing for the trip, fooling around with the on again/off again boyfriend, trashing the apartment and sleeping through the original flight.
Be that as it may he made it to California, albeit a full 12 hours late. I'm down to one defibrillator, so if the whole building goes into cardiac arrest, someone's gonna die.
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