As if that weren’t bad enough, I was in there with a staff member. If you’ve ever been in a mortuary, you know what these guys can be like.

I wanted a table of some sort for the iMac during the slide show that was going to be the last half of the funeral service for my mom. While the iMac has a small footprint, the monitor is 19″. The flimsy fake columns wouldn’t work, the podium was slanted, the chapel tables too low.

The guy took me into room after room, preceding each entrance with a flourish, promising that I would not have to bring a big speaker or some such tall device from home. Each door shut automatically.

At the last room, I held the door open as a reflex, but as he took me deeper into the room, I let go. The door closed with a hiss. We found a suitable table. But when he saw the door, he said, ‘Uh-oh.’

He began pounding on it. It was cold in there. No one came. The chapel was the other way down the hall where my family was having the visitation. He pounded louder.

Luckily, his female companion in the lobby heard, and rescued us.