The Pressure Builds

The last couple days have been just pretty damned happy. The problem with happy is that it provides very little material. Happy is not the same as funny. Usually, funny requires someone to be in pain. Like in that old lumberjack joke:

New hire shows up a lumberjack camp, which is in Washington hundreds of miles from anywhere, though oddly not all that far from Puyallup, home of Slippery Stuff. The boss is showing him around. This is your bunk, here is the mess hall, this is your big, badass chain saw, etc. Standard stuff. The boss asks if the new guy has any questions, and the new guy says, "Yes. I have one."

The Childrens are conspiring to not let me post tonight. It's 10:13, and both are still up. HannieC is at least in bed reading books to herself. MaxieC is crying his fool head off. I carried him around for the last 20 minutes, singing to him. He almost went to sleep. Then I destroyed it all by setting him down in bed when I thought he was ready.

I learend an important thing about myself. That is, the only songs I actually know how to sing are Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and a collection of Christmas tunes. Whenever I sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, I feel compelled to change one of the verses to how it looked just like a little dolly, so she ate it. And I can't remember any of the words to the second verse of Jingle Bells, so I sing "The horses's name was Phil. He had a big McCracken." And then it kinda goes to hell right after that.

I really needs to gets me a book of nursery rhyme songs.

Today, I had lunch with a guy I used to work with a bunch of years ago. We'll call him Skittle. He was also one of the other guitar players in Flo Jackson back in the day when I was still in the band. You probably remember Flo Jackson for such hits as the "Go with the Flo" T-shirt, available in both white and locker-room gray.

He sent me email out of the blue saying how it had been "too long" and how we should do lunch. So we did lunch. I very rarely do lunch, because these idiots I work with love to schedule meetings that run right up until noon, and then schedule more meeting starting right at 1pm. But I checked my Monday schedule and I was free before lunch, and the 1pm mtg didn't have anything on the agenda for which I needed to be there.

Then, of course, some idiot added an 11-12 taskforce meeting, and then some other idiot redid the agenda for the 1:00, and I needed to be at both. But I figured, "f' em. With the size raise they gave me this year, they can clearly stand to have a couple meetings without me there." Plus, today being "A Day Without Illegals," and me being the only Hispanic on the team, I figured they couldn't touch me without generating clear grounds for a racism lawsuit.

There are very few benefits to living in California, but the ability to play the race card virtually unchallenged is one of them. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my raise was based in latent racism, given that my boss at the time was Irish, and you know how they feel about the Cubans. My boss now is more of a backwoods hick than a racist. I may need a new angle for the upcoming year. Or, I might need to divorce The Mrs. and marry my cousin or something. Or maybe a horse.

So Skittle picks me up at 11:40. I cut out of the taskforce early. It was some guy from Oregon droning on in great detail about minutiae that didn't matter, while I waited patiently for him to get to the part that mattered. He never got there before I left, so I fired my questions off to JohnnyB, and left. Later, I learned that JohnnyB had tried to get answers and more-or-less failed. The guy didn't know the answers, but "would check."

That's probably the last we'll hear from him.

Skittle head down the highway. He head straight towards the Barrio. I'm like, "Dood. Are we going to the Barrio on No Mexicans day? Are we gonna be able to get food?"

His response, "I don't know about this being the Barrio. I know of it as being all Vietnamese."

Ah. He was going left at the exit, not right. But of course.

We ended up at some place called Minh's. Oddly enough, we sat right at the table in the front of that photo. The people there knew Skittle. Food was OK. Nothing special. We were the only non-Vietnamese people in the place, if that's a good thing. Then we went to a Vietnamese coffee house two doors to the left. Again, only non-Vietnamese people there. Again, they knew Skittle. Now, I've never been to a Vietnamese coffee house before, but from what I can tell, it involves really large plasma TV's, video gambling tables, and young, improbably well-endowed waitresses in almost obscenely short mini-skirts and skimpy halter tops. I had some kind of iced coffee thing that Skittle ordered. I never really learned what it was. I had a hard time concentrating. He told me I'd be wired for hours from drinking it, but I felt nothing. A couple hours later, I was craving Diet Coke.

On the way back to work, he started telling me this story about this guy we both used to work with who managed to get paid to leave my company and ended up at the company Skittle joined a while later. This guy was an idiot. He apparently got fired from Skittle's company for stealing $2.75 fruit pies from the company cafeteria. Anyways, then he starts up about how anyone can get a job around here if he wants to, and he starts in about how he worked for a long time with a woman who made this pie-thief guy look like a genius. He starts describing her, her cokmplete lack of competence, her belligerency, her inability to learn even basic thing, and I realize it sounds a lot like someone I used to work with. Then I'm thinking how we hired that woman from his company. So I say the name. Yup, that is she. Luckily, she is no longer with us, either. No, she's not dead. She spent 9 months here before moving on to bigger and better things.

Thank God.

Some of you may have seen a post I had up today regarding my whistling "Happy Birthday" this morning. Once again, my boss, despite being home "sick" managed to insist I remove the post. See, it was a personal message the The Mrs., with whom I happened to be annoyed when I wrote it. I have been instructed that personal messages to The Mrs. do not belong on the blog, and I should use private email for such communications.

It's interesting that he does not suggest I actually personally speak to my wife rather than communicating with her electronically. I assume this is because he is married and thus knows better.

So I would like to appologize to the readers for "disrupting the flow" of the blog with personal matters. I always forget that this blog belongs to the world and not to me. I deleted the post not because my boss ordered me to (I am basically unmanageable at work, and the best way to guarantee I don't get something done is to order me to do it. A lot like HannieC in that respect.), but because I figure if I'm going to dish out "advice" to CJ, I better be able to take some myself.

And, BTW, since StinkyJ broke his leg, he hasn't been able to shower. He came to work for a half-day Friday, and man, he is now Stinky!J.