Iron Fist

I convulsively woke up at just after 6:30 this morning to the sound of rain. I spent a frantic thirty seconds figuring out what day it was before deciding it was Saturday and I didn’t have to get up for work. Of course, I’d also been asleep for over twelve hours, so trying to sleep in was probably a futile idea. After listening to the rain fall on the otherwise silent streets outside I got up to make myself some tea.

My roommates are earlier risers, and were up and moving around not too long after my second cup. I live with my brother and his girlfriend, and when they sauntered down stairs I asked if I couldn’t take them to breakfast to celebrate finally getting paid. Less than an hour later we were across town at the Cup and Saucer, seated in our booth.

I was refreshed from my long sleep, but apparently still a little slow in processing, because I couldn’t help but look at my brother blankly when he said, “So you were talking about mom’s book, huh?”

“What?”

“Mom’s book. The birds and the bees, man.”

“Dude, please make sense,” I said, picking at an errant eye boogie. “I don’t get it.”

“I read about it on the blog.”

“What? Someone left a new comment? I haven’t checked my site since Thursday.”

“No, on your friend’s blog. Uh, the one from Chicago. I think she got stuck at the airport.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh!”

-memory burst-

it’s on the top floor look at this view now that’s what I call white where’s your tie double-windsor try the vampire it has tequila sasquatch’s wingspan hey you forced my hand called me ball-less can’t be looking at goatse at work the thumbs should be down it’s like the iphone of hair-dos I brought mustaches for everyone no more neck tattoos look at my pumpkin here I’ll hold it table used to be a roller-coaster no more sugar for him put that in the notes I didn’t know her in the biblical sense this is great pizza last one will be in Chicago sing for me I didn’t hear last time this is some great art in here she put a bunch of quarters in but pressed one player check it fanboy with the mac is waiting to join that conversation never knew that about women you sure trust us only telling you this because I’ve had three whiskeys roadtrip to vegas peed in the holy water last call already…

Memories flooded through me as they do, and I vividly recalled a dozen snippets from a night well spent. I put my head down on the table next to my plate of eggs and laughed long and hard. My sides ached from a procedure gone awry, a whiskey infusion abruptly and unexpectedly rejected by my body around four the previous morning, but still I laughed.

Sitting up finally, I said, “Yes, I may have mentioned mom’s giant sex book. You remember when we found that thing?”

“Oh yeah. Pass the Tabasco sauce?”

“Sure.”

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It seems like the great paradox of the Western world is that our highly advanced techno-economy is able to function as well as it does, considering that our nation’s businesses seem to be staffed entirely by morons and other assorted completely helpless individuals.

Take, for example, my old work. They seemed understanding enough when I told them I was quitting, even though I was taking business away from them by doing so since the contract they had to provide work for my new employers dissolved on the last day I was there. They even were happy to let me work for them an extra week when my new job was having trouble getting all my paperwork assembled in time. But some how this efficiency and diligence didn’t carry over to making sure I got my last paycheck on time.

I had dropped by the offices of my old work about a week after I transitioned to the new job, as my old boss had called to tell me that they had some checks for me. I dropped by and picked up one check for one day’s worth of work to cover the time they forgot to pay me for Labor Day, and another that was a payout of my accumulated vacation hours. I was surprised that I didn’t get my last week’s worth of work on either of those checks, but assumed it would just be deposited to my account the next Friday on the usual scheduled payday.

Well, Friday came and went, and no money appeared in my account. Concerned, I sent an email to my old boss, asking her what the story was.

Corporate automatically sends you your last check when they process the termination paperwork [she replied]. I don’t quite understand what went wrong.

“I don’t really understand what went wrong either,” I sent back. “But that’s okay, I don’t really need to know. Please just send me a check for the week’s worth of work that I am owed, and we’ll call it good.”

Time passes. A week later I send another email asking if they’d figured out yet how to write a check for the amount I was owed.

Well, they are going back and forth at corporate, trying to figure out who is responsible for paying you. I will let you know when I hear something.

“Do they have a check-writing department?” I asked. “Really, I think that they would be best suited to meeting my needs, by writing me a check. I don’t really care who is responsible. I don’t need a CSI: Bureaucracy Land-style forensic break down of what went wrong. I really just want my money.”

By the end of the week, after a few more email exchanges (if you call me repeatedly sending emails asking about the status of my last check an ‘exchange’) I found the following email in my inbox:

The corporate office says they sent you a check in the mail late last week. So you should see it any day now. Thank you.

“Fantastic!” I sent back. “I’m assuming you processed the change-of-address I sent you over a month ago, before my last day, right?”

I didn’t get a reply to this.

The Post Office came through for me and forwarded my last check; it came in the mail last Friday. Rejoicing that I had been paid, I went out to a show that night without giving it another thought. The next morning I sat down and opened up the envelope, and — you know what’s coming, right? — it was for the wrong amount. I had been shorted by a day.

Amazed by the incompetence of this organization, and frustrated by their almost total inability to get a simple thing right like paying me for a single week’s wages, I thought at first about just forgetting about it and saying “close enough”, but then I realized that this would mean that I worked a whole day for them for free.

It’s back to emailing morons again this week. Wish me luck.

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I always feel like a bit of an ignoramus when people hold a demonstration in my city, and I find that I actually have no idea what is going on in Burma to warrant this.  Fortunately for me, I work a desk job these days, which means that if nothing too pressing has come up I can spend the first hour of my day reading the news on the BBC.

I know that today was Blog Action Day, and I was supposed to write about the environment, but I didn’t have much to say about it except to note that I burned very few hydrocarbons today, which is good because I am told we are running out and now have to steam them out of big piles of Canadian sand, which is only slightly less ludicrous an idea than turning our topsoil into car fuel by way of making into corn first (apparently no one remembers the Dust Bowl these days).

I am short on sleep and long on thinking today.

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With the recent rediscovery of my attention span (I thought for a while that it had left me for good) I find that I am able to sit down and read again, which is good, because lately I seem to be far better at acquiring new things to read than I am at reading them.  So I’ve been churning through my backlog of books and magazines and email newsletters and aggregated RSS feeds, and not spending too much time thinking about writing in my blog.

Oh, and I started a new job.  Did I mention?  Really it’s the same job, only with new employers (the company I was working for liked me so much they hired me away from my old company to work for them directly).  That, and I have a real desk now, as opposed to a desk crammed into an equipment closet as an afterthought.  I have a pretty sweet view, too:

And just in time for the leaves to change.  I don’t sit right by the window, but after a year of being stuck in my ‘enclosure’ this is a vast improvement.

[More later, this is about all the attention I was able to summon tonight. ]

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