Insurance Seminar

Frank, an insurance agent from the Centipede Insurance Group is busy cleaning off the top of his desk. The only thing left for him to do is turn off his computer and walk out the door. While reaching for the mouse to click on the start button his screen flashes and computerized bells are heard ringing. “You Got Mail” the screen flashes.

“I hope it is Jenny. I want to tell her that I am going to be attending a seminar and I won’t be online much.”

Little did Frank know, but that is exactly what Jen wanted to tell him. Frank and Jen were going to be in the same building, the same conference room, the same Insurance Seminar. They both knew it was going to be inevitable that they would one day meet. Neither one of them ever thought it would be this soon, and this revelation made him even more nervous than he already was.

There was something that Frank was meaning to tell Jenny, but since he only saw her on the computer he thought he was safe until he could gracefully bring up in an electronic conversation. He couldn’t tell Jen that he still lived in the house where he was born. He actually lived in the basement apartment, paid rent and prepared his own meals, but he still had to have his mother prepare clothes for him the night before. Frank suffered from a neurosis that affected the way he put on his shoes. He were left to do it himself, he would have them on the wrong feet.

His younger years were terrible, especially gym class in high school where he was made to take a shower. He would break out into a sweat just thinking about taking his shoes off. For some reason he couldn’t see the slight inward curve of the toes on his shoes and would always put them on wrong. When people found out that he wore two different colored laces in his shoes, they wanted to know why. It was awful and these incidents scared him for life.

Now he was to meet the one person who he enjoyed talking with on the computer. His white lie was going to be discovered. Was she still going to find him charming, or was she going to see him as being untrustworthy and a loser.

* * * * *

He packed his bags, called himself a cab, and arrived at the airport. While sitting at the terminal waiting for them to start boarding his plane a woman walks up to him. This woman, with her dark sunglasses, her scarf over her head, and long coat looked familiar, but he couldn’t place where he saw her before. That was until he looked at the lapel on her wool coat. There was a button that held a name of a company, “Amoeba Insurance Agency” and the slogan that him and a girl named Jenny laughed about on the internet. The slogan was “At Amoeba our services keep splitting to serve your needs.”

Reading that button made him for certain that the person trying to blend into the crowd was none other than Jenny. He swallowed but the ball of saliva caught in his throat. He tried to look down at his feet, concentrating on the placement of the toes. Were the toes pointing at each other, will she notice the slight difference in color of the right lace from the left. Then he noticed something that he would have never noticed in a photograph. He knew without a doubt that she was wearing a wig. He felt better now, knowing that he wasn’t the only one who had tried to keep something secret.

She walks up to him and says, “Excuse me, aren’t you Frank Miller? Oh my god, you are Frank. I’m Jenny!”

They clumsily hug, I say clumsy because with all of the flailing arms hands and her purse the scarf falls to the floor. She stands there frozen as Frank stares at her natural hair... Her hair had more colors then Easter eggs. She looked like ‘Rainbow Brite’ who met with the ‘Lawnmower Man’ while he had kaleidoscope eyes. Immediately his problem didn’t seem so important then.

* * * * *

Five years later.

Frank and Jenny are married and have 2.5 kids, a house with a two car garage and 1.2 bathrooms. They are happy living in their own world of acceptance, however neither one of them sells insurance. Frank has almost completely given up on wearing shoes on the right feet and Jenny doesn’t try to hide her multi-colored hair any more. There kids are well adjusted...

Stephanie wears many different colors of polish on her toes which match the multi-colored ribbons in her hair and the two different shoe laces. John is to young to have any kind of problem.