Burns my biscuits -- a mild rant

I have to get this off my chest.

GRRRRRR!!!! ArrRRrrararaghhhhhh!!!!! Fricken-racken shizmafizzlin' $%#&!!!!! THAT MAKES ME SO MAAAAAAAAD!!!!!

Now that that's over, you can read on if you'd like to know why I just threw that tantrum.

I am the scheduling secretary for the girls' volleyball team, and it is a wearing kind of job. I mean, nothing like blowing glass or mining coal or anything like that, but it requires work with a calendar and an advanced paranoia that makes one check and re-check and re-re-check every scheduled home and away date until one's eyes -- meaning mine -- turn into little wizened marbles and fall out of the head.

So the form of correspondence for all this scheduling is email. It used to be done, believe it or not, by snail mail. UGH! I think the Pony Express may have been involved, but I could be wrong about that. Then the telephone was employed, but email is so much easier that it has become the exclusive method of communication between all the secretaries in the league.

Except for one secretary.

We have been trying to schedule two games -- known by me as (H) and (A) -- and she asked me in our first round if she could have my home phone number. I demurred, because I already hate telephones and would like to have a stern word with Mr. Alexander Graham Bell someday about the nuisance of never being able to sit down to the dinner table without the merry ringing of an electronic bell causing us all to groan. I gently told her that everyone else was doing their schedules via email and I really wanted to stick to that. She gave in with bad grace.

So then we worked a little more, but it seemed like every date her team had available, my team was already booked. So she asked me again for my home phone number, and I told her no for the second time, wondering what she thought we were going to accomplish on the horn that we couldn't accomplish on the net. We could reach the exact same impasse, only with voices instead of typing.

Finally, she asked me a third time for my home phone number and I began to feel like she was some kind of crazy stalker. I resisted the temptation to do what I do with the girls when they're being particularly thick and write, "Look, girlie, what part of NO do you not understand?"

I just let it go unanswered.

So do you know what she did? Knowing that I had told her twice that she could not have my home telephone number, she called last year's scheduling secretary and asked her for my home telephone number AND THEN SHE CALLED ME AT 10:00 LAST NIGHT.

I was so outraged, you would have thought I was a Jane Austen character, like Mr. Darcy in full, tight-lipped dudgeon. Why, out of about twenty other people who are scheduling for teams, does she have to be the ONLY ONE who won't comply with the email thing?

My mother trained me very carefully to never be rude to people, but sometimes, you have to allow a certain coolness to descend upon a situation, and I have that straight from Miss Manners. I allowed a chill to fall on that conversation that was worthy of that big honkin' thing that sunk that sunk the Titanic. It is not okay that she called and got my home phone number from the former secretary, especially after being told twice (and ignored once) that she couldn't have it. And it most definitely was not okay that she called when we were all getting ready to go to bed.

As Winston Churchill said, there are certain things up with which I will not put, and that was one of them.