That’s it. I’m not giving away my blood anymore.
I already had issues with the Red Cross for their creepy advertisements, but when they knocked me out twice and spilled my blood all over the floor, that was the last straw.
Before I recount my harrowing tale of blood and Coca-Cola, I will explain my problems with their ads. More than likely you have seen their simple campaign that shows a large red cross and claims that it equals hope.
I am fine with those ads. It is the more ambiguous, less well known ads that get under my skin and make me question the Red Cross’ moral integrity.
The first ad I saw was on the Red Cross offices downtown. It was a small poster on the inside window that had a picture of what looked to be a 10 -or 11-year-old girl giving the camera a ‘come hither’ look with text beside that read “The right thing to do.” The right thing to do!?
I could understand “Giving blood is the right thing to do.” But leaving out those crucial words made me think that the Red Cross was promoting child molestation.
I mean, really . . . how many people must have that ad gone through before it was able to make it to production? Someone knew what it was implying.
As if that one was not strange enough, several months later I saw another poster (this time at Barberito’s) that showed yet another child, this one a male, maybe 5 or 6 years old.
He was running through a field in autumn and the text read “Seasons may change, but the need for blood never does.”
I get what they were trying to do. Association. Child, happiness, the thought of the happy child bleeding to death because you didn’t give blood because you were too caught up with the seasons changing, sure.
But what instantly popped into my mind was an image of the child feeding on some poor sap; draining his or her blood straight from the jugular because his need for blood never changes.
The creepiness of these two ads combined made me somewhat wary of the Red Cross, but as they are persistent with their phone calls at 9 a.m. and I want free Little Debbie cakes, I ended up back in the chair with my blood rushing into a small plastic bag.
After much hassling and answering many questions about my sexual practices I got rewarded with a large needle in my vein and the instructions “squeeze every five seconds.”
Squeezing every five seconds as my blood drained, I made small talk with the woman whom the Red Cross had seen fit to appoint to the position of vein stabber.
I learned that she was very tired, having a ‘bad day’ (which I took to mean she had killed two people earlier in the day) and had a rather poorly behaved 17-year-old daughter.
Somewhere between her daughter stealing money from her purse and her three-hour drive to work, the world began to get a little fuzzy. As I was tired, I just closed my eyes and thought about taking a nap when I got home.
Apparently my body decided that I would take a nap that instant and the next thing I can remember is a man leaning over me and fanning me with a folder asking what my name was.
When I opened my eyes, I saw bad-daughter woman on her knees cleaning up blood – my blood – with a towel. I don’t know how the blood got on the floor, as there was no longer a needle in my arm and I was not currently leaking any red stuff, but it was on the floor nonetheless.
After about five minutes of being interrogated about my eating habits, the blood mistress asked me if I felt well enough to allow her to take two small vials of blood for testing and classification.
It seems that I had filled the blood donation bag before passing out and all they needed were the test vials for my donation to be viable.
I said that I was feeling fine because I didn’t want my passing out to be in vain as they would just throw out my blood if they could not get the vials for testing.
For reasons unknown to me, she decided to use my other arm for the vial gathering. I said fine and waited for the stinging of the needle going in.
The sting came, moved around a bit, and then started to really hurt. I turned to look at my arm and saw that she had missed my vein and instead of removing the needle and trying again, saw fit to just dig around inside my arm.
As you may imagine, this hurt a great deal. As opposed to doing the sensible thing (screaming “‘Tha blank is wrong with you!?”), I chose to pass out again.
When consciousness was once again forced upon me, I learned that fainting is frowned upon at the Red Cross and was banished to the “Cantina” which is actually a table in a corner packed with Little Debbie cakes and half-sized cans of Coke.
Because I still felt woozy and the Red Cross ladies would glare at me every couple of minutes, I sat there looking dejected and eating as much of their free grub as I could.
Half an hour and three cans of little Coke, two packs of crackers, a pack of peanuts and two Little Debbie cakes later, I waited until the blood ladies were focusing on torturing someone else and then made my escape.
As it is almost two weeks later and the yellow-brown bruise on my arm is still roughly two inches long, I plan on unfairly telling the woman with the pleasant voice that will be calling me in about three weeks (at 9 a.m.) to schedule another appointment several mean things about her character and the character of her mother.

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