Fuck Work, Unless You’re Hiring

Weeeeeeeell, I’ve got some good news and some not-so-good news. And then some more not-so-good news. Let’s go in reverse order:

I did not get the job I thought I was going to get. During my interview, it was strongly implied that I would get a second interview. Instead, they’ve elected not to acknowledge my emails. So, there’s that.

So now, having run through all my friends who have friends who might be hiring, I’m ready for the next rite of passage for this generation: I’m moving back in with Dad after Giant Camel’s and my lease in Philadelphia is up at the end of July. So, there’s that. I’d talk about how I feel about all of this, but since most of our readers are within five years of my age, I’m going to assume you know how I feel.

Now, the silver linings:

-       I’m going to keep looking for jobs, mostly so I can say I’ve been looking, BUT having already mentally processed the defeat of having to move in with family I’m going to concentrate on writing during my last while in Philadelphia. I have my eye on a couple of moneymakers (greeting cards and the much-discussed romance novel), but I also plan to do more blogging, and I have a few more projects in mind. This will be good for me, in that a) I won’t go crazy, b) one of these might make money, and c) then I can hold my tattered little manuscripts out to my father, stepmother, readers, and potential employers and declare, “See? I wasn’t just playing Playstation and crash-dieting and crying! I created.”

-       I get to go to the Texas State Fair in the fall, and to the Chickasaw Indian Casino for my birthday. I’m pretty sure that for my eighth birthday my father took me to an arcade and gave me some money to feed into loud machines covered in blinking lights for a minimal shot at reward. Twenty years are as an evening gone…

-       I get to dish about the crappy temp job I had last winter. I withheld it because I didn’t want prospective employers to find the blog, read me aggressively sassing a job, and decide I was unfit. Now I am exponentially less sanguine about prospective employers even looking at my resume, let alone my cover letter, let alone checking to see if I even HAVE a blog and wrote three books, so what the hell. For months I’ve had little bits of paper floating around with notes about that job, and now I can throw them away.

So, as you might remember from my post about Dawn Davenport being my spirit animal, I worked at a large, poorly run tech company. To cover my ass I won’t name it, but the name is as stupid as “CompuCom,” so should you draw any conclusions from that… My job was to load mobile phone apps onto mobile phones, see if they crashed and were in the correct language, rinse, repeat. Theoretically, this might have been a fun job, but. Most of the apps weren’t in English, resulting in a lot of “fun” with Google translate trying to find the keyboard shortcut for those letters only one language uses, a la “Ѭ.” Even before I began, random layoffs raged – the guy who trained me went a week before I did, which is incomprehensible. So there was a strong slasher-movie aspect – every day you’d show up and someone else would be gone. And most of the remaining people were either assholes, lunatics, or some new and exotic combination. So imagine me getting up at 4:30, taking a two-hour bus ride, then sitting quietly in a freezing office writing up, in extreme detail, why an application (we did not test APPS on PHONES but rather APPLICATIONS on DEVICES) to find a nearby bus station in Stockholm didn’t seem to work, but I couldn’t be sure because it was all in Swedish, all the while having no job security and the worst English-speaking coworkers I’ve ever had. Also, we had to flag things that might offend Islamic sensibilities or annoy the Chinese government. I can honestly say I find both of those things extremely difficult to predict. So you can see why I needed to try to mine it for humor.

Some of the best apps:

-       A body mass calculator that, if you typed in the information wrong, gave the reading “INFINITE BMI LOL YOU ARE OBESE”

-       An ovulation tracker that you could set to text your husband when your eggs were ready: “Honey, get home quick!” I got in trouble for not flagging this as potentially offensive to Islamic sensibilities.

-       A numerology “thing” that told me that, according to my name’s numerical value (verbatim), “looks like you should be peep-year-old aunt bath bar next door.” No clue about Islamic sensibilities, as usual, but this offended the hell out of me.

-       I plugged something in wrong and got an error message reading “OPERATION ATTEMPTED ON SOMETHING THAT IS NOT A SOCKET.” Of all the metaphors for my sex life…

-       A soundboard of clips and sound effects from “Young Frankenstein.” I thought I had my headphones in while I was testing it – turns out they weren’t pushed in all the way and Madeleine Kahn was just screaming away for fifteen minutes. The fact that no one mentioned this to me tells me all you need to know about that office.

And my co-workers: One guy wore a purple-and-leopard-print Santa hat around all day, indoors, in January; on guy ostentatiously backed into a parking space in a VOLKSWAGEN JETTA (if you’re parking in a LOT, your car isn’t good enough to do that); and my supervisor typed interoffice messages in this font. Everyone was queer for sanitary wipes and used them many, many times daily – on their hands, on their workstations, on each other for all I knew – as though they knew I was deliberately not washing my hands after I peed. A poster in the breakroom (it had no chairs in it, but hooray for posters!) advised us that we could donate blood at the nearby Fluid Processing Center.

Fluid. Processing. Center. That’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? Crazy John’s Discount Fluids. Flow-n-Go EZ Fluids. Fluids r’ Us. And then when it gentrifies: the Fluidry.

So in short: fuck work, unless you’re hiring in the North Texas area. I’m available August 1^st.

The Battle of Utrecht

I’ve been writing on this blog intermittently for over two years now, so – senile old coot that I am – I sometimes forget exactly which of my pet insanities delightful eccentricities I’ve told you about. For example, did you know I’m an obsessive list-maker? Everything must be on a list, or it doesn’t count, it’s not real, and I can’t be held responsible for forgetting or not caring about it. I’ve had a running to-do list for years now (obviously regularly transferred onto a new sheet of paper when a lot gets done and scratched out) and it governs my life. I left it at ex-co-blogger Eddie’s house once, and… I did not handle it well. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Now, having the list does not necessarily mean I get the shit on it done, but at least it’s all neatly arranged so I can worry about it. Case in point: my cousin had a baby in late December. I don’t know if she reads the blog, but in the interest of privacy I’ll just tell you she named it after a major river of France – you can decide among yourselves what you’d like to imagine among Rhine, Rhone, Garonne, Seine, Marne, Oise, or Loire. (Too bad France lost most of its empire or we could throw in Volta, Mekong, and Saint Lawrence.) I don’t much care for the name, but I can’t really say anything because a) it’s too late b) it’s none of my business c) I’m a childless spinster and d)  little Mekong’s cousin, born a year earlier, is named Jimmy. She is female, and named after a beloved late dog of my grandmother’s. The dog was named after a black army nurse who was one of my grandmother’s best friends when they were in Europe during World War Two. (Jimmy was a nickname for Jemima or something similar.) Things about this I don’t understand: how my grandmother made a close black friend in the still-segregated army, why she named a dog after her thirty-five years after the war, how Jimmy-the-woman felt about Jimmy-the-dog or if she ever knew, and how Jimmy-the-baby will feel when she hears this story.

Here’s how a discussion of my list-making turned into a rambling discourse about Little Mekong: my cousin asked everyone in the family to paint a small canvas or panel to decorate the nursery, as a sort of welcome. I thought this was a wonderful idea, and immediately bought a small canvas, brushes, paint, and a stencil of a parent and baby giraffe. I painted the grass and the sky, set the canvas aside, and didn’t touch it again until last week. With national supplies of ADHD medicine dwindling (it’s true, there’s like a HORRIBLE shortage), I knew I had to paint it now, while I still had legal amphetamines, or keep putting it off until Mekong graduated high school and “paint baby canvas” had spent eighteen glorious years on my to-do list. So last week, I got out my supplies and prepared to Make An Art. I couldn’t find the clip to hold the stencil to the canvas, so I had to run to the art supply store.

The art store is almost right across the street, next to an out-of-business salon mysteriously named “HAIRZ GOD’S GIFT,” so this errand should have taken five minutes TOPS. Giant Camel came with me to get some supplies for his obscene collages, which was nice because it counted as a date and got me out of springing for Qdoba that weekend.

So we go in, I find my clip, and I go to the cash register. The Art Fag manning the register (yes, I’m sure you’re offended, but you also know exactly what I mean) said, “Oh, I guess you’re just here for the free stuff?”

“Uh… so I can just have this clip?”

“No. We’re giving away gift bags with purchases. Also everything in the store is thirty per cent off.”

“Okay, uh… I guess I’ll pretend to need more stuff to take advantage of the savings…”

So I wandered around a while before just buying five blank greeting cards for when I forget people’s birthdays. I took my clip and five cards to the register, where I got a different, slightly larger art fag, and everything went to hell.

You know how you’ll go to the store, and the one day you’re buying condoms and laxatives, or trying to use the six dollars of food stamps you have left over, or have some awkwardness, you get the chatty, incompetent cashier? You can sail right through with a toothbrush even if you’re paying with an out-of-state check, but God forbid you need Pepto-Bismol even if you have exact change. We had the art-store equivalent of that cashier. I just wanted to go home and paint my damn giraffes. Oh, no. I had to enter the raffle, get my bag of freebies, talk about the raffle, talk about the freebies, swipe my membership card, swipe my debit card, do it all again, hear the cashier yell “Tood, I need your numbers! I need your numbers! Todd, I need your numbers for the register! Todd! Numbers!” do it all a third time, wait for him to bag my purchases despite the fact that I’d just been given a bag of freebies, be invited to some kind of art demonstration later in the day, be offered refreshments, and watch him count my change, look confusedly at the cash register, and count my change again before I could get out of there. I would have gladly abandoned my change, my honor, my ethics and my boyfriend just to NOT BE AT THE CASH REGISTER anymore. It was a shackle and a bishop away from being an inquisitorial torture, although I did snag a free nutter butter on the way out.

Finally home, I took an inventory of the goodie bag:

-       The bag itself, which is one of those reusable shopping bags that everyone thought was environmentally friendly but it turns out they aren’t

-       A small tube of yellow ochre acrylic paint, with one of those “CALIFORNIA SAYS YOU’LL GET CANCER” labels

-       A little box with two more acrylic tube “green gold” and quinacridone magenta.” Now… two things. Gold doesn’t tarnish, so “green gold?” Does it just sound better than “remember that tacky brass lamp your parents had in 1989? That color.”? And “quinacridone magenta.” Magenta is already a fairly specific color – do we need it to be sub-specified by whatever peculiar chemical is in it? Has anyone ever demanded of an art store clerk, “Does this magenta have quinacridone in it? THERE MUST BE QUINACRIDONE OR ALL WILL BE RUINED.”

-       A stick of Elmer’s glue. Does anyone know what that animal on Elmer’s glue is? It looks like a fat chupacabra.

-       Some post-its

-       A sketch pad

-       A small paintbrush

-       A yellow highlighter

-       Another brand of acrylic in titanium white

-       A maroon gel pen, in case you wanted to be a female teenage Aggie fan in 2001

-       A plain blue ballpoint

-       A New Year’s Sale coupon that’s good from February 28 to March 13. I don’t think that’s even Chinese new year.

-       Something called an “angling tool”

-       A six-inch ruler, which of course is useless for me (did you get that? Did you get the dick joke?)

-       A single sheet of watercolor paper

-       Some tape

-       A brown map color taped to a card (tangent below)*

-       Another tiny tube of acrylic in “azo yellow.” You are artists. Here’s a list of things that are yellow: the sun, lemons, buttercups, jaundice, white wine, gold, topaz, any number of lemon-flavored candies, most urine, bees, honey, Winnie the Pooh, squash, blond hair, cheetahs. Nothing? Nothing better than "azo?”

-       A tiny gesso board

-       A package of “paper samples”

What on earth does a person do with such a bag? Paint a six-inch-high painting of a titanium white woman in a yellow ochre dress and with azo yellow hair running across green-gold grass toward a quinacridone sunset on a variety of papers?

I did, however, produce a wonderful painting:

The shape of the giraffes is a little shaky, I grant, but I’m pleased with the spots, and the shrub is a triumph.

*Brown map color tangent: in second grade, I had a teacher who liked to give out coloring packets. Graded coloring packets. There were like, thirty pages stapled together, and we were to work on them in our free time when we were done with our work. No one ever finished them, so on the last day of the term we all had to take them home and finish coloring them. Our teacher, oddly strict about accuracy, wanted everything to be brown, since “people didn’t have fancy dyes back then.” So we had to color brown Christopher Columbus, on a brown ship, with a crew of brown Spaniards and Italians, in brown clothes, eating brown bread, leaving the brown dock in brown Spain, and finally arriving on the brown shore of Hispaniola, which featured brown natives in brown clothing standing in front of brown tree trunks.
I no longer care for brown.

UPDATE

Remember Unsolved Mysteries, and how every few episodes they’d solve a mystery and announce “UPDATE?”

Well, here’s my update. You’ll get the whole story in a post later this week, but I got all kinds of laid off last week. Financially this is extremely inconvenient, but a) Goddamn, I hated the job and b) as soon as I get my last paycheck I can write a post about the job, which will be a treat for me and hopefully for you. The layoff happened Thursday. Friday, I was hemming and hawing over whether I should go out Laid Off Drinkin’, when I heard your favorite crazy neighbor and mine, Wacky Wanda, clanking around in the hall. Of course I started to eavesdrop, and it turned out she was making a long, emotional farewell to another neighbor, Girl-Who-Slams-Doors, in which Wacky Wanda thanked Girl-Who-Slams-Doors for the “positive energy.” Doesn’t “positive energy” sound like an aerobics class for people with HIV?

Anyway, fool that I am, I assumed Wacky Wanda was saying goodbye because she was leaving, so I went out and got xX lol drunk Xx on half-price Applebee’s Long Island Iced Teas, because I’m a 34-year-old divorcee. I then didn’t see Wacky Wanda for a few days, and thought she was gone.

Well, no. At eleven last night (Monday 20^th) Wacky Wanda starts banging on the door screaming, “Somebody, please, help me!” over and over. Now, not to sound cruel, but Wacky Wanda has broken into my apartment, called me a thief, almost burned down my apartment, aired her plumbing-problem stench into the hall, blared the Cranberries with her door open at night, and woken me up twice. I’m on the side of whatever she wants help against. So Giant Camel and I gather ‘round ye olde peephole to watch. “Please, I did it before, and I don’t want to do it again! I SMELL BURNING! SOMEBODY HELP ME!” Girl-Who-Slams-Doors rode to the rescue. Why Wacky Wanda feels like we’re on good enough terms to come to us for help is an unanswerable question.

About an hour later, Giant Camel went out, and what did he find leaning against our door?

An umbrella, a dress, three shoes, and a glove. Later, she went downstairs and put a box of raisins and a pile of k. d. lang CDs on the free table. She’s still not the worst neighbor I’ve ever had.