Who’s in charge of this website? Where’s the HR department?
How many sick days do I get, and is that for both physical and mental illness?
Does OSHA know about this?
Is this like “Catch 22”?
There was supposed to be creativity here, a refuge from the hum-drum life, a daily affirmation that I was still human and not just a drone from a bad Matrix fanfic. I know that not every day can be a game winner, but jeez louise!
Sorry, I’m ranting.
Filed under Paul
A year ago today I re-entered the ranks of the gainfully employed after being out of work for two years and forty-five weeks. To be given the opportunity to contribute and make a living again after being at one employer for so long (strike one), being my age (strike two), and having been out of work for so long (strong three) was a wonderful thing and it would be hard to overstate my gratitude.
On the other hand, it seems that I’m holding my own and pulling my weight, and then some. With the magnitude of the changes I was expecting there was a sliver of doubt that I could still make the grade (see strikes one, two, and three above). There have been days when I’ve been exhausted and a few where I’ve been a bit down on myself and frustrated (gee, I’ll bet some of that comes through in these daily brain regurgitations!) but despite that things are better now than they were a year ago, both for me and for the Habitat for Humanity affiliate where I’m the Director of Finance.
A little thing went a long way to making my day today. I got a card from our CEO, a simple little congratulations for making through the first year. An acknowledgement of the anniversary, a bit of praise.
If you think that’s not that big of a deal, consider that at my previous employer no one from the President and Vice-President down to the executive secretary ever acknowledged any kind of work anniversary. Not one year, not five years, not ten years, not twenty years, not twenty-five years. Forget about the proverbial gold watch for twenty-five years – no one knew and no one cared.
There are a lot of reasons that this job is so much better than that one. I like the job and the company goals more, I like that we’re actually making a difference in people’s lives, people who need the help. (We build houses for low-income military veterans.) I like all of the people I work with. The commute is much, much shorter — if you don’t think that’s a big deal, come and drive around in LA traffic for a few morning rush hours. I now have people to work with who I can truly trust to be teammates, people that I can count on to get things done, help me when I need it, and ask for my help when they need it.
The fact that we take the time to set up a calendar to give out a card on work anniversaries is small, but very important. It makes a huge difference.
Here’s to the next year and to all the years beyond!
Filed under Habitat For Humanity, Paul
There might be so many reasons.
Maybe that fish last night was a little bit spicy, or the broccoli was making you a bit gassy. Maybe that had you feeling punkish all night, leading to a lousy night’s sleep.
Maybe there’s an anniversary coming up that you thought would be a cause for celebration, but you’re just not feeling the joy. Or maybe it’s the other way around, you’ve got something going on that you can’t put your finger on and that’s putting off from the celebration.
Maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed.
Maybe you’re feeling under appreciated.
Maybe you miss someone. Maybe someone’s showing up in your head at night and you don’t understand what they’re trying to tell you or why they can’t still be there when you wake up.
Maybe you saw or heard or read something that got stuck down in your subconscious like a burr that wiggles its way deep under your collar on your back. You can’t quite remember what it was or why it bothered you, but you know something’s not quite right.
(You hope that it’s not because you’re a closet asshole. You HATE people like that. Although being that guy and not realizing it would definitely qualify as a burr in the subconscious.)
But you can’t act grumpy at work, because it’s not their fault and it’s not their problem. You shouldn’t act grumpy at home, because, well, the same.
So you put on some good tunes, try to get some work done, maybe try to write a rambling piece on your website, keep smiling, keep putting one foot in front of another, and hope that tonight you either get some sleep or some answers.
Maybe tomorrow won’t be a day you’re just grumpy.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
It’s my week to be on standby, but I’ve been given the word that I’m not required to check in tomorrow. Yeah!!
I don’t envy the folks who have to try to get people to show up for jury duty. It’s a civic duty, a responsibility of being a good citizen, necessary for our judicial system to work, blah, blah, blah. I get it. I agree. But the brutal reality is that for the potential juror it really is a disruptive and often frustrating experience. It can cost you lost wages, extra expenses for childcare or transportation, and the compensation you get in return is a token at best.
Many jurisdictions try many different schemes to get people to show up for jury duty and make it as fair as possible while also making it as (relatively) painless as possible. The Los Angeles County system these days isn’t bad as they go.
You’re “on call” for a week, but you’ll only have to potentially go in for one day of that week. You call in or go online every evening to see if you’ve been picked to show up the next day. If you make it through the week without being called in, you’re done for the next year.
If you do get called in, it’s for one day only – if you’re not picked for a trial or put on a jury. I’ve been a couple of times where that’s happened and it might just be one of the most boring experiences on the face of the planet. I’ll bring a book, and these days with the music, books, podcasts, movies, and television shows on my phone, it could be worse. But it’s not terribly comfortable, you’re locked in at their whim as to when you and where you can go, you pay an arm and a leg for parking, and you have to put up with all of the security theatre to get in and out.
Think of a long day of high school detention being held in the worst airport terminal you’ve ever been in, stuck with a couple hundred people who are just as bored, uncomfortable, and pissed off as you are, and you’re probably all losing a day of pay or worse.
Maybe you get picked for an actual jury pool. (I’ve had this happen once.) Then you get to go off to another incredibly boring room and sit until all of the players (judge, lawyers, plaintiff, defendant) are ready. You start to get lectured on what the rules are, what’s going to happen, what the case is about, and so on. In my case, by the time all of that was done, it was time to break for lunch. Then, after lunch when we’re all told to be back promptly at 12:30, a couple of our fellow potential jurors blew off the deadline and mozied in more like 13:00-ish.
The rest of us cooled our heels in a hallway for that half-hour with nowhere to sit. They can’t start, they can’t move on, they can’t talk to us, no one can do anything until EVERYONE is present. I don’t know if they fined, jailed, or waterboarded those who were late and kept us all waiting, but I can hope.
Now we got down to business! We still didn’t know what the case was about, just whether it’s civil or criminal. We all get to fill out a long questionnaire so they can see which of us have something in our life that would disqualify us for one lawyer or the other. It’s a civil case for a landlord-tenant dispute and you own an apartment? Gone! Someone’s suing over a POS lemon they got from a car dealer and you work selling cars? History! A criminal case for drunk driving and you’ve had someone in your family killed or injured by a drunk driver? No thanks!
And so on.
Once they have all of the questionnaires they start tossing folks “for cause.” Then they start bringing us up one by one and start asking questions. Some get dismissed, the lawyers each have a few “picks” (I’m sure there’s a legal term for it) where they can toss you without giving any justification or reason, and some get sent over to the other side of the room to wait.
I assume that once they get 12 or 14 or 18 or whatever they need over on the other side of the room, they’re done, the rest of us get dismissed to go back to the jury pool room and be bored again and wait some more, and they get on with their trial. I’ve heard tales of that part taking a day, a couple of days, a week, but it’s pretty rare to end up lasting months and months like the OJ Simpson trial did. But it could.
In my case, after they had four or five jurors picked, they took a break and the lawyers went and huddled up with the judge. They came back and announced they had reached a settlement, and we were ALL sent back to the boring jury pool room. (I figured that one of the lawyers or the other was giving the jury pool the hairy eyeball, didn’t like their odds, and hit the eject button.) We waited there another hour, there were no more trials pending for the day, and we were all released, clutching the magic paper that said we had done our jury duty and didn’t have to do it for another year!
For now, all that fun’s on hold and I’ll be at the office tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night I’ll call again and see if Tuesday’s my special day. I will admit, when you’re calling, going through the check-in over the phone, and finally punching that last button and waiting to see the result, it’s a bit dramatic. It’s not Russian roulette, but I definitely noted some anxiety. The need a drumroll or something to go along with it.
Four more days to go.
Filed under Los Angeles, Paul
Yesterday, when I showed y’all a big ugly bruise on my arm that I could not remember getting, one friend suggested that perhaps I had taken up sleep walking. My immediate response was to suggest that perhaps I should wear my step-counting smart watch to bed to see if it knew something in the morning that I didn’t.
While it’s possible I’m bouncing off the walls while sleeping,
I do know that I have other barely conscious nocturnal activities that leave morning mysteries.
Sometimes I find notes that I wrote to myself about really vivid dreams.
Occasionally these notes almost make sense if I can sort of remember bits of the dream, but if I can’t, I just have the cryptic note.
For example:
Not a clue, folks. I’m glad to see that we won the silver, although I’ll always wonder how came we close to getting the gold.
Of course, it’s the “at other end of field we feel the trinkets” line that catapults this one into a class of its own. It made sense in its own dream-like way right up to there.
Now if I can find one of these notes that has an “OUCH!” on it…
I just have no stinkin’ clue what “it” was:
That’s my right upper arm between my elbow and shoulder. It felt tender Monday morning, almost like I had gotten a shot there. (I hadn’t gotten a shot there.) Tuesday morning it was sore. Yesterday it was purple. Today the yellowish-green tinge set it.
I’m hardly in agony – it’s just a big bruise.
They mystery is that I have absolutely zero clues about what caused it. One would normally think that a collision with something or slamming into a doorway or being slugged with a baseball bat would leave a memory that would last at least a day or two.
Nada.
Zip.
Zilch.
Let’s see what color it is tomorrow!
I wore a suit to work today, a tiny step up from the “usual” dress shirt, slacks, and tie.
The first words out of their mouths by almost every single person in the office was, “Do you have a job interview today?” That list includes my boss.
Sometimes a guy just wants to look pretty, okay? What’s wrong with that?
And no, there was no job interview.
Filed under Paul
Not a phrase I ever thought that I would be using in describing myself.
I don’t “shop.”
I “buy.”
I generally know what I want and I just want to get into the store, get it, and get out.
I try to avoid too much shopping online, because it’s so easy to spend hundreds of dollars and have it conveniently come with free shipping. But wait, there’s more!
Imagine my surprise on Election Night when I found myself on a men’s clothing site, hunting for bargains in my size.
Granted, I was still buying, not shopping. I know my size, I’ve gotten shirts here before, I know which brands I like, and I sort of really needed some new dress shirts. They had a lot of old stock (last years’s style? who cares, “style” is not anything I’ve ever spent two brain cells on) available in one of this size, one of that, pretty hit and miss. But with a little bit of searching, suddenly I had five brand new shirts, many in bright colors (which I favor) inbound from around the country.
We may be in sewage up to our armpits out there these days, but I’ll be looking sharp as I wade through it!
(Actually, I won’t look “sharp” since there’s that whole “who gives a rat’s ass about fashion or style” thing, but I’ll be comfortable and **I** will like the way I look. Everyone else can take a hike.)
Filed under Paul
I don’t think it’s laughing with us any more, or maybe it never was. Perhaps we just don’t get the joke.
I’m not a “number nerd,” but this one was a little hard to miss. I’ve been working for weeks on a big project at work (the annual budget for next year) and it’s being finalized today and presented at a big meeting tomorrow. (Yes, on a Saturday.)
I tend to keep my various drafts as I go through a project – you never can tell when you might have to go back and retrieve something that you edited out or changed at some point. The point being that as I’m wrapping it up and generating the final, final copies for distribution, I was working on draft #11.
And today is November 11th.
It was 11:11.
I chose to take that as a good sign. Portents, I’ll take the good ones, we’re drowning in bad ones for the last week or five.
Forty-five minutes later, I got told that there were just two more little changes that my boss wanted. So much for celestial harmonic convergence as expressed in a PDF printout of a large Excel spreadsheet.
And once again, as I type, a skunk has gotten spooked very, very nearby.
Is the lesson that one needs to never give up and keep fighting until the bitter end against impersonal fate and a universe of blind chance, or that one needs to give in and accept and just go with the flow as if a bit of flotsam being shoved about by Brownian motion in the particle-antiparticle foam of a quantum (laughing) universe?
Stupid, freakin’ universe!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
I’ve heard that phrase for years and it’s always seemed to ring true. I finally tracked it down to a Robert Frost poem, “A Servant To Servants,” and the actual quote is:
| He says the best way out is always through. | |
| And I agree to that, or in so far | |
| As that I can see no way out but through— |
Sometimes the only way past some horrific ordeal ahead is to grit your teeth, do your best, and suffer through it as best you can. You can’t put it off, you can’t run away, it doesn’t matter how much you hate it or how much it’s going to hurt, it’s just going to have to be. The only way to get out of the ordeal is to live through the ordeal.
This is going to be one of those weeks. Between more deadlines than I want to think about coming at me like a freight train at work, and that thing that’s happening here in the United States on Tuesday, I expect there will be a lot more stress than sleep this week.
Let’s all just keep breathing, try to keep calm, and remember that some of this shit (especially on the national level) has very, very little that we can do about it (other than to cast our votes, of course) so worrying about it and letting it make us crazy is sort of a waste of time.
Easier said than done, but if you watch my back, I’ll watch yours. In the end, that’s all we’ve got anyway. The family that we were given and the “family” that we make for ourselves.
If we just didn’t have this stupid Daylight Saving Time shift last night piled on top of it all!
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