Author: Ridley

This is an ugly feeling. There was a coworker of mine who was recently let go. I suspect strongly that they feel that I was involved in, if not responsible for, the decision to let them go. I can understand why they would think that, but it isn’t accurate. I stuck my neck out for them for months and delayed the act as long as I was able given my limited influence.  But…there’s no way I’m going to throw my teammates and employers under the bus to explain what really happened. There’s no possible good outcome there. So, I’ll just impotently recount the events as vaguely as I can and let myself be seen as the bad guy.  I’ve done plenty of bad things, but this isn’t one of ’em.  I know this wasn’t especially interesting, but I just needed to say it.  I’ll try to get back to business tomorrow.

It’s been a bit of time since the last post and for that I apologize. I’ve been struggling with re-arranging my online pressence and wound up neglecting this space. I’ll aim to correct that, but no promises for the immediate future.  Two of the last three night, I’ve been plagued by dreams involving my sister and her being lost or abducted. In each case, it was my fault. I don’t know why, but in the dream, I felt guilty about it. Both mornings, I woke up feeling nauseated, unrested, and generally terrible.  I’m sure there’s a reason for it. I’ve no clue what it might be. I’m ready for this to stop.

Really, all I want is to live someplace nice, to be able to work at a job I don’t hate and can leave at the office when I go home, and to have Beautiful Girlfriend (in theory, by that time, Beautiful Wife) with me. That’s really it. Anything else is lily-gilding.  This date used to carry a great deal of significance for me. Now?  I can’t even remember what it felt like to be that person thirteen years ago. Funny old world, innit?

Lord I’m boring when I’m not feeling well. I can’t taste anything, I don’t have any energy, and I can’t think about more than one thing at a time (and that’s the best case scenario). It’s gray outside, the cashflow isn’t great, and I’m already dreading work. Great way to spend a weekend, huh?  I need a vacation. It’s been…I don’t know how long. I went to Florida with Beautiful Girlfriend last year, and we did a quick trip to the beach. Neither of those were particularly relaxing. I guess, for the most part, vacations aren’t. I’m doing a quick inventory of all vacations going back to childhood and the moment they get stuck with expectations, it’s over.  I need to sit down with a Calvin and Hobbes anthology for a few hours.  

My beautiful girlfriend queued up “Bored To Death” for us to watch tonight. This is going to sound snarky, but I really don’t mean it that way: There ought to be a genre of comedy shows that you enjoy even though they never make you laugh. I enjoy “Bored To Death;” I even find it amusing. I just almost never actually laugh. I do enjoy the fact that Zach Galifanakis’ character is a comic artist and the work he draws is actually quite good. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I found that his art is actually drawn by Dean Haspiel. That’s all kinds of cool. The show has a strange rhythm, but I definitely recommend it.

I’m not a big believer in “signs.” I don’t think that, if on a first date, you see two doves together, it’s sign that you two are “meant to be.” I don’t think that, if you’re thinking of cheating on your significant other, that it’s a sign that you two shouldn’t be together. Doves are just doves and cheating is just cheating; anything else is just trying to impose meaning on something that is ultimately meaningless. That said, when you spend your entire day at work composing your own eulogy, well, that can’t be good, can it? I’ve been working for thirty-one years now, which is roughly sixty-five percent of my life. I do “restaurant information technology” and have for roughly as long as “restaurant information technology” has existed.  I never really chose this field. I majored in philosophy for the brief period I was in college and waited tables when I wasn’t in school. The money was pretty good but it dawned on me that the money would literally never get better. So, I decided to figure out the computer in the office. It was an old IBM 286 with a four color monitor. It ran DOS 3.3 and featured a custom word processor and spreadsheet because Lotus and WordPerfect were too expensive. Please understand that it was a very different time. Thus, the extent of my plan was: “Hey, this seems to be a way to get out of waiting tables that doesn’t require a degree!” Obviously, a degree would have helped, but good fortune makes a fine substitute for matriculation. This was the dawn of the personal computer era, so knowing how to navigate a command line was a relatively rare skill. “I’m not good with computers” was still a good excuse for not using one. Plus, this was an era in which men, by and large, did not know how to type. It sounds strange now, but back then, typing was woman’s work. Because of this, I had a leg up. My handwriting had always been poor, even in grade school. Because of this, they put me in a special education class to teach me typing. So, when computers first started popping up in the workplace, I was several laps ahead of most of the gents I was competing with. Needless to say, many of my early computer-based jobs involved more women than men. My career arc went something like this: Waiter–>Waiter-who-does-office-paperwork–>Help Desk for Restaurant Company–>Developer for Restaurant Company–>All Kinds of Restaurant IT Stuff. If, in retrospect, it seems like more a matter of inertia than planning, that’s a pretty apt take on it. I just kept moving where the opportunities were rather than seeking anything in particular. I learned a lot about what I didn’t want. I have never had any interest in management and my brief experiences in that role were painful. Firing people is the worst. Anyone who enjoys it probably ought to seek help.  Back at work today, it’s all kinds of strange. It’s the first day back after a three day weekend, so the rhythm is already syncopated. Add to that the fact that the song stuck in my head is an old Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd tune and it’s a wonder I can concentrate at all. Oh, and there are going to be layoffs today. I guess that fact that I’ve been told means that I’m safe, but you’re never really safe. I learned that twelve years and one month ago. I do know, however, that the person sitting next to me is on The List. It’s so hard not to say anything, to give them some warning or advice (file your FMLA paperwork now!). I hate this. I hate business. I hate that I’ve become a business person. My mother has lived in the central part of the U.S. for most of her life, but she did a brief stint in the San Francisco area. When a thunder storm rolled in to town, her co-workers were terrified. Apparently, thunderstorms are uncommon on the west coast, but my mother didn’t flinch, as she was well accustomed to the sound of thunder. The layoffs were kind of like that. This is the seventh round of layoffs I’ve experienced, but for most of my coworkers, it was their first. You can see the fear in their eyes today, like something has fundamentally shifted in their worlds. It’s kind of depressing to think that I’m so used to layoffs that my only reaction is “well, at least it wasn’t me this time.” On an unrelated note, a friend and I were just talking about one of our high school teachers. She was, without question, my favorite teacher in high school. Unfortunately, all I can remember is how awful I was to her. I was disrespectful to a degree that the memory of it causes me to shudder to this day. And this day is a very long distance in time away from those memories. I wish I could say that I was a good, model student, or even one of those cool, rebellious types who just needed the right teacher to engage them. I wish I could, but I can’t. I was simply a jerk to her. Usually, time erodes the rough edges away from memories, but I think, in order for that to happen, you have to spend some time with the bad bits. This is the first time I’ve thought of this teacher in a long time, so while the memories aren’t fresh, they haven’t been processed so they’re still sharp and embarrassing. That’s how it feels to me. I wonder if other people process memories the same way.  I’m not a big believer in “signs.” I don’t think that, if on a first date, you see two doves together, it’s sign that you two are “meant to be.” I don’t think that, if you’re thinking of cheating on your significant other, that it’s a sign that you two shouldn’t be together. Doves are just doves and cheating is just cheating; anything else is just trying to impose meaning on something that is ultimately meaningless. That said, when you spend your entire day at work composing your own eulogy, well, that can’t be good, can it?I’ve been working for thirty-one years now, which is roughly sixty-five…

I’ve tried to make this a place for working on stories and, to date, I haven’t been enormously consistent with it. I’ve held this space for years, but I haven’t done a lot with it. I’m in the midst of re-thinking the whole “what-goes-where” business of online writing and I’m not certain where this fits.  It does fit, though. More to follow soon.

Back tomorrow.