The director of the funeral home is a walking example of why people of certain professions need constant psychological support. His family has owned the funeral home for three generations, and it’s obvious that he’s a little too used to the discussions of “This was a good year: many fresh, juicy corpses” variety.
He started the memorial service with the following speech:
“When my father owned this funeral home, he buried about 16 people a year. And we buried 600 people here in 2013 and are hoping to do even better next year! And why do we bury so many more people? It’s because we are such caring people! And now let me show you the most important object in my life. I have it right here!”
And he whipped out a money clip with a bunch of banknotes.
“Yes, money!” he exclaimed beaming. “But it isn’t just money! It’s the money clip my grandfather left me. And every time I look at it, I think about this great business he left me. So I hope that in the future, when you have funerary needs, you will come to us!”
What a damned idiot. Absolutely inhuman.
I will pray that people like him (I suspect there are many of them) would see the light.
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Yikes.
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One would think that if he really wanted people to give him their business he would be a bit more sensitive. Did his family teach him to talk to clients like that?
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There is also this extremely cheerful employee who said to me, beaming, the first time I went to the funeral home, “It is SO GREAT to have you here!”
So I asked if I could work with somebody else and was assigned a very nice, sensitive employee who understands that it isn’t a happy occasion that brings weeping people to a funeral home.
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What a creep.
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I’m sure he meant well, but he seemed beyond the point where he could control this.
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He’s probably seen a lot of really ghastly stuff in his day and it’s left him a bit unhinged. Imagine having to sort out the parts of a family killed in a car wreck or deal with a corpse whose former occupant died in a fire….
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That’s done in the morgue, though, and that’s separate from the funeral home.
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Ever read Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One”?
I suppose this person you’ve described may also “volunteer” to go “away”, provided you give him all of your savings …
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