Chapter 11: Sucker Punched

Three.

That’s how many people had visited his blog that week. After three months of promoting it, his website, he’d had three visitors. Well, three visitors were better than none. One of the visitors had clicked on the link to an ad for low cost cell phone services.

Dexter stared at his website wondering what he could do to increase traffic to it. He knew the site lacked that essential something that would draw people. The problem was that he didn’t know what was missing.

The website was basically a bitch site in which he proclaimed loudly against what he felt were the evils of corporate life in a service economy. There were a lot of complaints captured on the website, but no answers. People didn’t want to visit a website to look in a mirror that showed them how unhappy they should be. They wanted to find something that would make them happier.

The fact was, that Dexter had not tried to identify what he was trying to accomplish with the website. There were problems in this world and he wanted to fix them. He knew that you didn’t sell by convincing people that they had a problem. You sold solutions! People saw that it solved a problem they knew they had, and they bought.

“I used to be an engineer. Why am I not acting like one?” Dexter said after staring at the screen for five solid minutes.

He let go of the mouse and picked up a pencil. It was time to think, rather than act/react. He looked around for an engineering notebook. He didn’t find one. Grumbling, he turned to his computer. He realized that it wasn’t the best medium for organizing one’s thoughts. Sure, there were word processors and drawing programs. However, they weren’t as fast or as easy to use as a sheet of paper, a pencil, and an eraser (Oh, YES!! Thank God for erasers!).

He got into his car and headed for the ‘super’ office supply and electronics store near his old home. It was a monster of a place, with office supplies, computers, software ... anything and everything there that might appear in a regular, or home, office. Entering it he looked around, taking in the vastness of the place.

He muttered, “So many toys, so little time!”

He went outside and picked up a shopping cart, knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to leave there without spending at least a thousand dollars. He pushed the cart over to the computer hardware accessories. There were eight rows of stuff there. Of course, printers and scanners ate up two of the rows. Home networking was another row of its own. One whole row was taken up with keyboards, mice, cameras and drawing tablets. Another row had every kind of storage medium on the market with thumb drives, network drives, hard drives, and CD/DVD drives.

Dexter pushed his cart along each row picking up little items that caught his attention. One was a pen that could write on a special paper. It would record the pen motions, for storage on a computer. There were several variations of the item, and he spent ten minutes reading each box and comparing features. In the end he decided that they were all the same, and picked the cheapest one.

He picked up a network and a USB drive for backing up his files. He was amazed at how cheap a terabyte of storage had become. He remembered the days when a twenty megabyte drive cost two thousand dollars. At that time he thought he would never have enough data to fill twenty megabytes of storage. Now he wondered if a five terabyte drive was big enough.

He wandered over to the drawing tablets. He figured that might be a way to get the speed of using paper to capture his ideas with the persistence of a computer. There were half a dozen of them on display. He read the packages and compared the features. After standing there for ten minutes, he purchased the one with the largest drawing area.

There were two aisles of software covering everything from operating systems, productivity software, and games. He headed over to see what they had over there that he might want to use. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but thought that browsing the selection would give him ideas. He slowly walked along pushing his cart, while eying the software packages.

A guy standing behind him shouted, “Hey, Asshole!”

Curious about what was going on behind him, Dexter turned around. The next thing he knew was that his nose had exploded in pain. He stumbled back into his cart, and then fell to the floor. His eyes were crossed. His hands were covering his bloody nose.

“Get up!”

Thinking this had to be a case of mistaken identity, Dexter looked up at his attacker.

Shocked, he said, “Will!”

“Get up, Dad!”

“What the hell. Why did you do that?” Dexter asked. It sounded more like, “Wha da hell. Why’d’ya do dat?”

His son glared down at him and shouted, “You fucking walked off without a word!”

“I think you broke my nose,” Dexter said. It sounded more like “I tink ya boke ma noze.”

By this time quite a crowd had gathered around them. The store manager was trying to push Will away from Dexter to prevent further violence. Will didn’t want to move, but wisely didn’t swing at the guy. There was a little pushing back and forth though. A big security guy arrived and that brought a quick end to the situation. Will was led away to the store office.

Dexter remained on the floor holding his nose to cut off the flow of blood. It was throbbing, and it didn’t seem like the blood was ever going to stop flowing. He had experienced bloody noses before and wasn’t worried. He would get the bleeding stopped and then clean up his face.

He looked up to find an EMT there and wondered who had called them. By that point in time, he didn’t really care. He couldn’t make out too many of the guy’s features since he was wearing a surgical mask and gloves. All he could tell was that the guy had brown eyes and dark skin.

The EMT packed his nose with cotton. He put some pressure on the bridge of Dexter’s nose for two minutes. He then removed the packing and checked to see if there was any more blood. There wasn’t. He felt around the nose and then declared that it wasn’t broken. Dexter already knew that.

After picking up the medical supplies, the EMT said that he needed to see Dexter’s driving license. Wondering why the man needed it, Dexter handed it to him.

About the time the EMT backed away, a police officer was there. After getting Dexter’s name and contact information, he said, “I’ve watched the surveillance videos. You were sucker punched. Are you going to press charges?”

“He’s my son,” Dexter said thinking that was answer enough.

The police officer didn’t seem to think that was an answer.

“So? Are you going to press charges, or not?”

“No,” Dexter answered.

He wondered how many parents pressed assault charges on their teenaged kids. He guessed that there must be quite a few, or else the policeman wouldn’t have been so insistent on a yes or no answer. He imagined that there were households where the kids terrorized the parents.

The policeman said, “Since you aren’t pressing assault charges, I’ll write him a ticket for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. I guess, as his parent, you’ll be responsible for making sure that he gets to court.”

“Oh,” Dexter said.

“Have a nice day,” the policeman said before walking off.

Dexter sat there on the floor. The EMT guy returned and handed him a couple pieces of paper along with his driver’s license. Dexter asked, “What’s this?”

“The bill and some instructions on taking care of your nose,” the EMT guy answered.

“Oh,” Dexter said.

He looked down at the paper and saw that he had been charged seven hundred and ninety-five dollars for the call. He wondered when ambulances started charging for going out on a call. It would have been nice to know that he was getting charged for a service that he hadn’t requested. He wondered if he was supposed to tip the guy.

The other paper had some general advice on how to deal with a bloody nose. Effectively it said to call a doctor if problems appeared. It was still throbbing. He knew that wasn’t a problem. It would be sore for a while.