A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH
On a recent episode of Call Her Daddy, Alex asked her guest the following question:
“The Governor of Arkansas said, ‘My kids keep me humble. Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.’ How does that make you feel?”
Alex’s guest, Vice President Kamala Harris replied: “I don’t think she understands there are a whole lot of women out here who are not aspiring to be humble.”
This answer awoke something in me. In this world, women cannot afford to be humble. For too long we have shrunk ourselves to fit into society’s box of modesty in hopes to gain respectability when it doesn’t even get us a seat at the table.
I tend to reserve the fucks I give for when it really matters. An art form I was not born with, but rather curated over time. If someone on the internet calls me ugly, I cannot be arsed; however, if I hire a company to fix my home and that company does a piss poor job, fucking up my house as a result, well, call my flying fucks a boomerang because, baby, they’re back.
My husband and I hired a company I will call “FeafLilter” to install gutter guards on our home. This process includes the installation and cleaning of gutters and downspouts. This company failed to clean our downspouts. Do you want to know what happens when water moves freely through gutters but encounters a clog in the downspouts? Let me tell you, it results in a flooded basement. When we called the company, hoping to rectify the situation, they told us it wasn’t their fault, we should’ve cleaned our downspouts. Let me say that again… the company we hired to CLEAN OUR DOWNSPOUTS told us our basement flooded because our downspouts weren’t clean. So, what did we do? We took responsibility and moved on with our lives. Just fucking kidding, we took their asses to court… and won.
Being a force to be reckoned with is not the same as being a Karen. I’m a pretty laid-back person. You won’t catch me berating a barista or bitching out a bartender; however, if you mess with my family, home, or my money, you will catch these hands — or see me in court, whichever comes first.
I had people say to me: “What if you lose in court? This is a big company with a team of lawyers.” To that, I would respond, “Then I lose, but they lose too because they had to pay that team of lawyers.” These companies want you to believe they are bigger and badder than you, and going against them will be a waste of your time and resources, but no matter how good their lawyers are, they cannot fight against the truth and a massive amount of evidence (which we had.)
This philosophy doesn’t just apply to shitty-ass companies with business models that seem like a toddler wrote them — it also applies to friends and family. Last Christmas, I had a shitty experience with some family members. While standing in my kitchen, getting scolded for refusing to disrupt my toddler’s nap schedule (which meant arriving at Christmas dinner at 4 pm instead of the odd ass time of 2 p.m.), I thought to myself this is the last holiday I spend with these motherfuckers, and I meant that shit. Have your Christmas dinner whenever the hell you want. If you have some militant need to consume mashed potatoes before 2 p.m., I won’t take that away from you. As for me and mine, we’ll be having Christmas dinner at dinnertime like the crazy extremists we are.
