Fighting the Man

I live in a house of men. Old men, but men nonetheless. My house is divided up into three apartments: Jim has the entire second floor, and the ground floor is split into my apartment and a second flat for and elderly man called George. George does not drive, and no one is really sure how old he is (every time someone asks, he gives a different number. These ages are not always in the same decade). He is completely dependent on public transport, and so we always talk about the train. Every time SEPTA raises its rates or comes out with a new kind of train, George leaves the relevant newspaper clippings in my mailbox or wedged into my storm door.

George and I are currently staging a coup d'etat against the Power Company. I came home from work last night to see George sitting outside. He asks me in a conspiratorial tone, "Do you have a computer in there?" as he pointed to my apartment with his cane.

"Yes, I do."

"In there?" he asked again, for clarity.

"Yeah, I have my own computer."

He wanted me to look up a website he'd heard of on the radio. Since the Power Company is raising its rates, he is thinking of getting all of us to talk to our landlord, Uncle Lenny, about switching. Honestly, I'm for anything that will save me over $100 a year and get me away from a company who won't take my calls about outages because they say I don't live in the area and my account doesn't exist.

(I bet they'd change their minds about that if I suddenly stopped paying my bill!)

I let George go on about the power rate increase before promising for the upteenth time to look up the website and report back. He even called out the first word of the web address before inferring that I should chime in and finish it-just to make sure I had the right one. This makes me wonder if George was a schoolteacher in his earlier days.

He even gave me a bag of apples as a bribe.