Define:Irony

On Friday, I tripped and fell. Actually, it was more like I went ass-over-teakettle and bit it, hard, in front of the entire department, all of whom were gathered to celebrate a fellow co-worker's birthday. I mean, drink-in-my-hand-flying-everywhere, bruised-and-rugburned-knees, sprained-ankle, down-for-the-count bit it. And since it was only my second week on the job, I'm sure I'll be known for at least the next few months as "that girl who busted her ass in front of everyone."

But here's my favorite part: I tripped and fell over a stack of safety posters that had been waiting to be hung on the walls for about six weeks.

If that's not a euphimism for Human Resources in general, I don't know what is.

AH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!

Man, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. From a Worker's Comp report I was reviewing today:

Per patient report, injury occurred prior to care in our facility. Mr. ________ was lifting a vibrator weighing 100 lbs. when he felt sudden pain in his back.

Really, now?

Currently being sought for questioning.

I Ain't Saying She A Golddigger...

Why am I wholly unsurprised that this lovely little nugget of a story came out of Dallas? Granted, it was written and published in my hometown newspaper (seriously, I might as well live in Legoland or Smurf Village given the quality of our newspaper; it's a total joke), but it was completely inspired by the husband-hunting hags in Dallas.

The feminist in me wants to curl up and die right now out of sheer embarassment for my gender.

Going for the gold
You have to use the right bait if you want to land a rich fish - er, husband

By EILEEN McCLELLAND
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Dress for Success
Author J.C. Conklin offers the following tips for what to wear while husband-hunting.

Heels: At all costs.

Bra: The pushup is best.

Hair: Long and blond, if at all possible.

Thong: Always, and it should match the bra.

Accessories: Now is not the time for big jewelry or purses. Both scream high maintenance to men.

Makeup: Most men don't even realize you're wearing it. They think you naturally look that good. Now is not the time for them to find out otherwise.

Know your strengths: If you have good legs or arms, show them off.

But remember: Dress like the girlfriend, not the one-night stand.

Hunting for a rich husband?

Think camouflage, but not the woodsy kind - unless, of course, you're at a rattlesnake roundup, prime husband-hunting grounds in Texas.

In an urban milieu, you've got to look prosperous enough to blend in with your prey's elite social circle. For example, drive a leased Lexus only if you can't borrow a Mercedes.

J.C. Conklin, author of a snarky new novel about Texas women and their pursuit of a rich husband, advises that even spiritual matters matter. Choose a popular Texas religion, Methodist or Baptist.

And don't hesitate to resort to plastic surgery. At the very least, bleach.

"You should have long hair and if you can, be blond, be blond,'' says Conklin, author of The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging With Pride (Ballantine, $22.95). "Every man I've ever talked to has never described a woman who's blond as mousy.''

In the satirical novel, ex-New Yorker Jenny Barton, 29, works for a frumpy female boss-from-hell at the Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau. Recovering from a recent split from slacker journalist Rafe and under the influence of her blond, husband-hunting roommate, Aimee, Jenny attempts to lure a rich Texan or two.

There are certain parallels to the author's life. During Conklin's four years in Dallas, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then the Dallas Morning News, she was surprised to meet women in their 20s stalking wealthy men in their spare time. Women who wear stilettos to shop at Whole Foods. Who liposuction their uncooperative thighs to squeeze into size-4 Vera Wang wedding gowns. Who order room service for their traveling boyfriends to make sure they're spending the night where they say they are.

Born in Houston, Conklin grew up in upstate New York and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a degree in comparative religion. Landing in Dallas was a culture shock.

The women she met weren't hunting for just any husband, but the super-rich variety. To that end, they underwent plastic surgery, starved themselves, bought clothes they couldn't afford and even popped pain killers so they could sleep with guys they found revolting. (Sexy and rich is not that common a combination, Conklin's characters lament.)

"Some of it's exaggerated but a lot of it is what people told me," said Conklin, now 29 and living in Austin. "There is a high premium on looks. I don't think that's exaggerated. There is a high premium on tracking the men. There has been breaking and entering, or breaking into e-mail at the very least."

And when they weren't snooping, they were grooming.

"You can't be too overt," Conklin said. "You can't have a short skirt and a lot of cleavage. You have to choose one or the other. You have to imagine what he would be thinking of you as a wife. Dress appropriately, not desperately. Heels are always good. Accentuate the assets that you have, not the style of the day, because men never know what's in. They only know what looks good on you."

Other strategies apply once you have set your sights on a particular target.

"Find out what he likes so you can pop those things into the conversation before he does. And learn to cook one really phenomenal dish so it looks like you're a good cook." You can always hire a chef after the nuptials.

It helps if you're not too squeamish to engage in sports, or better yet, hunting. Wrangle an invitation to a rattlesnake roundup.

"Anytime you show no fear of blood or killing that adds to your ranking," Conklin said. And Texas guys reportedly love to play with rattlesnakes. "I saw a guy holding five rattlesnakes by the tail in his mouth. His left hand was all shriveled from the venom. It's a very macho, very Texas thing to do."

Conklin's Dallas friends had jobs, careers even, but didn't expect to work for very long. After the wedding, the marriage becomes a full-time job.

"What you have to do to keep the rich husbands is just amazing," she said. "All the exercising, all the devotion to this other person. It's not your life. It's the other person's life and you're just staffing it."

Still, there was something about their goal-oriented pursuit that started to change career-girl Conklin's thinking about the whole marriage thing.

"I didn't husband-hunt for a rich guy," she said, "but I was dating a lot of guys who were slacker-reporter guys, and being in Dallas made me realize that was a dead-end proposition. It made me look for guys who wanted the things that I wanted, like a family. In New York, you don't think about getting married until you're well into your 30s."

Some of the changes she made when she moved to Dallas made her more approachable, she said, more marriageable. In addition to becoming nicer and less competitive, she said, "I got a lot blonder.

"I started to work out a lot more. I never used to get my nails done, never used to get my eyebrows waxed, all the beauty maintenance. And when I was living in Dallas, I was wearing heels every day, skirts, suits, very dressed."

Today, she has an 11-month-old son and a daughter on the way. And yes, she is married, not to a millionaire but to a guy with a stable income and goals she shares.

"All my friends in New York are living the kind of life I led 10 years ago," she said. "I got married last year. That's a very Texas influence, I would say."

As if I really needed another reason to despise Dallas and its disturbingly pervasive influence on the way that Texas is perceived...

Honestly, though, I think what bothers me more than anything is not the utterly desperate ends that these women will go to in order to line their pockets, but rather the men who so eagerly accept them as wives. What does this say about them? I don't know what the general consensus is, but I can tell you that every single time I see a man with a trophy wife or girlfriend on his arm, the first thought that comes to my mind is, "What an insecure moron."

See, I think it says a lot more about the man than it does the woman -- and maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, we still live in a society where so many young women are told that they need a "provider" and so many of them are valued based solely upon their material accumulations and outward appearance. We perpetuate this in our society and until that vicious cycle ends, we will always have misguided women. That's an argument for another day, though.

But we've never prided ourselves as a society on allowing people to prey on our money and take advantage of our insecurities. Those are things which, should they happen to you, you'd normally correct or hide or both. Yet, here we have these men -- whether they be aesthetically-challenged, emotionally-challenged, or simply common-sense-challenged -- who are proud of their trophy wife investment! They display them proudly and the message that they hope to convey is, "I'm a success both in my business and my personal life and I have this fine piece of ass to show for it!"

Instead, what they are really saying is, "I'm deeply insecure and/or stupid and willing to forego having any kind of real love, companionship or meaningful relationship with a woman and instead require this Botox-ed, silicone-enhanced, bleached-blonde, Mystic-tanned, money-hungry bimbo to overcompensate for my many shortcomings. Now, can I please have some A-1 for my steak and a piece of lettuce for the lady?" Good job, guys.

/approves

Hot, Warm, Nervous Hands

Woody Guthrie is deeply underappreciated.

Remember The Mountain Bed

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs.
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled woodvines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky.
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber you did lie:
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots, as you lay thinking there.

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away:
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go.

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned.
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life’s reason why
The People laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die.

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown,
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees were singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim, but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head…

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears,
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here:
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

I wanted to play this song at the wedding (the Billy Bragg/Wilco version), but Richard said that he'd only indulge my eccentric tastes if I would indulge his and allow him to play Rock You Like a Hurricane for our first dance. Thanks so much for that idea, Marge.

The Horror, The Horror

After many years of being a faithful and devoted Outlook user, I find myself forced to become intimately acquainted with that coelacanth of the IBM era: Lotus Notes.

I loved Outlook. No, you don't understand. I loved Outlook. I had a special bond with Outlook, a symbiotic relationship, a knowledge that no matter where I went or what new software or processes I'd have to learn, Outlook would always be there. In return for its steadfastness, I learned all of its ins and outs, the little quirks, the keyboard shortcuts that meant I never even needed to use a mouse while in Outlook (I hate mice/mouses/whatever, a holdover from my college days spent in front of the comforting green glow of CLIs on our Sun computers).

But now I've been thrust into an entire new e-mail world and I'm completely and totally disoriented. It's an awkward feeling. I've always felt comfortable learning new systems and software pacakges. I'm the person (nerd) who can fool around with a piece of software for a few minutes and feel totally at home with it. I'm the person (even bigger nerd) who goes home at night and researches shortcuts and idiosyncrasies and experiments with new and different ways to achieve my ends with those new software packages.

But Lotus Notes has me in a stranglehold. It is a dinosaur. It is a mammoth wallowing in a tar pit. My 51-year-old mother even laughed at me when I told her that we use Lotus at work. Her reaction: "I haven't seen Lotus since 1989! Loser!" I haven't seen or heard from Lotus myself since my "microcomputing" class during my sophomore year of high school. I didn't know that it still existed in any practical form, much less at a global corporation known for its affinity for technology. But I'm stuck with it for now.

It has by far one of the most unappealing and unintuitive GUIs I've ever seen. Granted, it apparently developed the idea of tabbed browsing long before Mozilla or the fancy new Explorer did, but the tabs themselves are tiny, hard to read and open and close at random (Replication? I didn't click on Replication!).

It's advanced enough to know that you've received new mail (yes, but so is the new Hotmail server, so BFD) but it's not advanced enough to actually display that new mail unless you go to a tiny menu in the far bottom corner and click on "Receive," which is maddeningly close to "Send Outgoing Mail" and which I unfailingly click on every time instead of "Receive" because I am so freaking clumsy with a mouse.

If you fail to interact with Lotus for more than five minutes, it will lock you out. It doesn't notify you that you've been locked out, however, so in the meantime you're pecking away at your keyboard and toiling at your other work actitivies, blissfully unaware that there are about fifteen e-mails waiting for you that need to be answered. And when you finally do cotton to the fact that you've been locked out and log yourself back in, the goddamn thing takes about five minutes to "Replicate" all of your e-mails and actually display them for you.

Furthermore, there is no real capability for storing e-mails in folders (the system which I've always used to sort through the masses of crap I get every day). It exists, and Lotus will let you do it, but it's very stilted and difficult and I get the feeling that every time I move an e-mail to a folder, Lotus creakily opens its eyes like an ancient tortoise and stares at me quizzically as if to say, "Whaaat are you doingk, yaaawngk one? Ve do not store files in this vaaay."

And in one of my least favorite moves so far, it has the most ridiculous address book system I've ever encountered. To send an e-mail to someone within the company, you have to know their middle name. That's right. We have over 22,000 employees in North America alone which equals roughly 25 Rogers, 68 Alans, 112 Johns, etc. An intelligent program would rely upon their last name to whittle things down from there. But not Lotus; here we use middle names. So not only am I learning everyone's names and positions and locations, I'm also becoming acquainted with their sometimes bizarre nomenclature (ex: Ernest Quest Daniel III). And it gets worse with people external to the company -- all of my outside contacts like brokers and consultants have to be painstakingly and meticulously added to the little address book subprogram before I can send e-mail to them. Otherwise, I have to pull up an old e-mail of theirs, copy their e-mail address and paste it into a new "memo" (not e-mail, memo...grr) or else I have to type the entire thing in from scratch/memory.

Luckily, I'm not alone in my sentiments. While doing some of the aforementioned nerd-research, I found these sites:

• Lotus Notes Sucks
• Gripes About Lotus Notes
• 70 Reasons Lotus Notes Sucks
• and my favorite: Lotus Notes - The Horror, The Horror

What I have yet to find, of course, are any sites with names like "I Love Lotus Notes!" or "Lotus Notes Is The Greatest Thing Since Vacuum-Sealed Lunchmeat!" I won't be holding my breath for those.

Leonard Cohen

Well, after many moons of posting blogs on another site, I've decided to transfer them over here to lovely Blogger, which I once utilized and then callously abandoned about three years ago. Unlike Myspace, Blogger is actually accessible here at work and -- what a sad commentary this is -- I do most of my writing at work. It's not that I don't have real work to do, it's more that when I'm sitting here in a big, mostly empty office with music playing, that's when ideas come to me. That, and it really helps diminish my stress level when I can put things aside for thirty minutes or so and just gush randomly onto a little white screen and into a mostly unknown audience.

It's a Rufus Wainwright kind of day over here, by which I mean that I've been listening to old Wainwright CDs all morning long. He makes the perfect contemplative music -- relaxing yet edgy and thought-provoking. I also love the random covers that he does; if you've never heard his cover of Careless Whisper with Ben Folds, go ye to YouTube right now and check it out. It's just awesomely funny and trippy. And right here is where I could head off on a tangent about how much I love Ben Folds now that he's no longer with Ben Folds Five, but let's just stop right here, shall we?

Anyway, one of the covers that Rufus Wainwright did was an old Leonard Cohen song, Chelsea Hotel No. 2, hence the title of the new-ish blog. It's my absolute favorite Cohen song, which is saying a lot (I think that my perverse obsession with Leonard Cohen has been well-documented elsewhere in my blogs, so I'll not go into this right now). I love Cohen's voice, but in the same way that you love Bob Dylan's voice. You accept that it's not perfect, it's often off-key, it's gravelly and not in the good Don Henley way and that's okay because - goddamn - the man wrote some of the most beautiful lyrics this world has ever seen and he can fucking mime them if he wants to because they're his. It doesn't matter how his voice sounds; to actually hear the man that wrote the words say or sing them aloud is an experience in and of itself. It's akin to listening to Eliot read The Wasteland aloud (please, please, please check this out if you've never heard it) and hearing where emphasis is placed upon certain words and phrases, where the pauses and breaths communicate deeper imagery and meaning, far removed from a world where scholars endlessly pick apart his lines and insert their own agendas and interpretations into his work.

But listening to Wainwright's voice with Cohen's lyrics...that was a revelation, too, the first time I heard it. Rufus Wainwright has the amazing ability to take lyrics that aren't his or that are his but have nothing at all to do with him (listen to The Art Teacher for an excellent example) and make you believe that he's felt all of the agony or excitement or passion himself. Now that's a great artist, a great performer. When I listen to Chelsea Hotel No. 2, I ache. I ache for lost opportunities, lost friends, lost times and possibilities and potential. But aching is not a bad thing, not always. Aching - any kind of unpleasantness, for that matter - just paints the good moments in starker contrast to the bad, forces you to appreciate them both more.

Now that I've driven on that side road for long enough, back to the highway. The main point here is that I wanted to share these lyrics because - as I've always said - there isn't enough Cohen in the world:

Chelsea Hotel No. 2

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street
Those were the reasons, that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left
Ah, but you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me, you would make an exception
Then, clenching your fists for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself and said, well, nevermind
We are ugly, but we have the music
And then you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best
I can't keep track of each fallen robin
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
That's all
I don't even think of you that often

BONUS POINTS: Whosoever of you can tell me about whom Leonard Cohen wrote this song will receive, by U.S. Mail, a shiny penny.

Thank you, come again!

In the ongoing, agonizing struggle to free myself from the townhome that I was leasing (very little of which I've bothered to complain about on here because: provokes anger), I had what I thought would be the final walkthrough tonight with the leasing agent and the new tenants. The new tenants are nice enough, I suppose - although I could really give a shit at this point - but they are the type of very anal-retentive foreigners (you know the type, don't act like I'm the asshole here) that make people from a certain subcontinent look really bad and perpetuate a certain stereotype, which I hate (stereotypes, I hate stereotypes). So, by the time that they're finished with their "walkthrough" an hour later - and what am I even doing there? I'm not the landlord! - they've compiled a handwritten, two-and-a-half page list of "problems" that need to be fixed before they'll move in. Which they then give to me. And the proceed to explain at length how they won't be moving in until I fix these things. Again: not the landlord.

Among the many, many things on the list are the following items:

1) Re-key the locks (I'M NOT THE LANDLORD)

2) They want the showerhead that was in the bathroom when they originally viewed the townhome, which was mine. I explained that the showerhead currently in the bathroom is the one that came with the home and that the one they saw was my showerhead, which I suggested they could purchase at Lowes for $49.99. They didn't seem amused by this.

3) They also want the shelves that I had hung in the bedroom. Again, my shelves. When I explained that they were my shelves, the husband launched into a shrill tirade which went, verbatim: "We agreed to rent this particular unit based upon the assumption that certain items would be retained in the unit and if these certain items aren't included with the unit, then we will be unable to rent it!" So, in other words, you want me to bring back my shelves, rehang them and just flat out give them to you? Sure thing. I'll get right on that.

4) One of the wall sockets in the bedroom was missing A screw. One.

5) The baseboards were dusty.

6) And, finally, my favorite - they were convinced that I had been living - nay, squatting - in a townhome with no electricity and no A/C and they wanted me to fix this immediately. Actually, the electrician that had been out the day before to fix the wiring had accidentally turned off the breakers in the breaker box. But no matter how many times I tried to explain this and the fact that I'd been living in my new house for over a week and not in the townhome, they just kept asking me, "How could you live like this?!?" in incredulous voices as if they were speaking to a woman who'd been found living in a house filled with 57 cats and two feet of feces in every room.

I can't even tell you how incredibly relieved I am to not be living in a rented house anymore. Escaping my lease has been an utter nightmare - a story for another day, though - and I can't wait until we're completely settled into the new house, drinking beers on the patio with the doors open, listening to salsa music on the stereo until the late hours, and then - much later - driving by my old townhome with six dozen eggs and egging it for all it's worth.

I love italics.

Lumbergh

Okay, I only have a little bit of juice left on this thing today, but here we go:

So, I quit my job at Neighborhood Centers last Friday. I think we all know that by now. Everyone, apparently, except my old boss. On a whim while at my new job this past Thursday, I logged onto the old NCI mail server to see if the retards over there had disabled my e-mail access yet. Of course they hadn't. But it gets better...

My boss was still sending me e-mails. E-mails with subject lines like "10-Month Employees" and bodies like "Katharine, will you please take a look at the attached spreadsheet of 10-month employee payroll errors and get back to me? We need to get these fixed." This is the same guy, mind you, that I handed my letter of resignation to less than two weeks ago. NEWS FLASH, MORON: I DON'T WORK THERE ANYMORE.

*sigh*

So glad to be away from that place...

Wednesday

I know that we have all -- every one of us -- worked in an environment that, at one time or another, we have deemed to be a little slice of hell or at least a slightly more sanitized version of an insane asylum. As a teenager, my father worked grueling, hot summers in a meatpacking plant in Fort Worth, treading carefully as he lugged pound upon pound of freshly-butchered beef across floors slicked with blood and viscera in the days long before OSHA or plant management executives ever attempted to make the packing floor safer for employees. Fresh out of the Navy after World War II, my maternal grandfather worked in a three-story shoe store in San Francisco for a store manager so nasty that, even as his mind is failing him at the age of 90, is still remembered with a clarity only invoked by certain levels and means of cruelty, leaving their marks upon his mind after nearly seven decades. In the summer of 1978, my stepfather was indoctrinated in the methods of "crowd control" used by the Houston Police Department as he clashed with Black Panthers and other demonstrators during the race riots that plagued the city, battering sweat-beaded temples with his nightstick and Macing unprotected eyes as he fought through a tide of rioters. My paternal grandfather was an orphan, raised at the Itasca Home for Boys until he was 18 years old. The boys earned their stay by making, mending and washing their own clothes, milking the cows and collecting eggs from the hens, and growing their own food -- all while getting an education.

I…work in an office. It has air conditioning and inspirational framed artwork (not mine). I have a comfy chair that I stole from the office next door when the former occupant was asked to resign. My iPod is docked in a Bose stereo system that pipes out Chet Baker and Air while I work. I get fresh office supplies every two weeks and a paycheck every other Friday. I do not pack meat. I do not fit shoes onto smelly feet while being harassed by a paranoid asshole. I do not get shot at, wear riot gear, or get urinated on by arrested suspects. I did not work in an orphanage for my entire childhood and adolescence. I also do not work in a Chinese sweatshop, a Thai whorehouse, a Ukranian smelting plant or a Columbian coca plantation. So why do I feel like I'm losing my mind when I'm at work? Why do I feel like this, of all jobs, is the worst job on earth?

Sometimes I feel like I'm in an elaborate reenactment of "Gaslight," or maybe that's just my narcissism rearing its ugly head. But I do believe it's the little things, the small insanities and pretensions, that will wear you down over time. Tiny things, really; very tiny things. Things that, in a normal world, would go unnoticed. Things that, if you bring them to an outsider's attention, would make you seem insane for being bothered about. Only your fellow inmates can commiserate and understand -- Did you see the way that guard let Nacho get an extra chocolate pudding at lunch today? And he let him stay out in the yard five minutes extra to finish his cigarette! Nacho must be slipping him something through the outside… -- and you feel foolish for venting about your frustrations during the fleeting moments that you're in the outside world.

Today -- maybe if I explain "today" then I can make more sense -- was nothing special. It was a Tuesday, still is a Tuesday. The recently-appointed director of our department has recently gone what Moira and I have termed "power-retarded" and we are all dealing with the repercussions of the massive promotion and accompanying breakdown of all of his social and intellectual skills in our own silent ways. He has responded to his promotion by finding new and subtle ways to demean us and insinuate to other directors and their departments that we are all terribly worthless and shouldn't be bothered with matters of real importance – all issues are to go through him now. This also includes my area of "expertise" (cue huge peals laughter from me here -- okay, but seriously, I really do have an area, breathtakingly lame as it may be, that he knows jack shit about), so in between fuming and fielding calls from idiot employees, I entertain myself while I listen to him next door, attempting to explain what a pre-existing limitation exclusion clause is and how it affects Jeff Butterman's medical plan deductible (hint: it doesn't and…I hate you). So, again, regular Tuesday.

It's only 9:00 a.m. and I'm already heavily feuding with the payroll department in our ongoing, epic, Hatfield–and–McCoy battle of "who can put the most monkeys onto each others' backs." It would be fun if there were real monkeys involved, but sadly…no. By 11:30, it's time for lunch. Since we're always pressed for time, Moira and I decide to take our lunch break and use it to run out to Party City to gather supplies for the job fair that we're hosting this weekend. Since it's only a few miles up the road, we don't plan on claiming mileage and -- again -- we're using our lunch break to do this. Moira grabs $50 from the petty cash reserves, we buy our supplies and come back to the office. She takes the receipt, the change and her itemized purchase order -- filled out in triplicate, because that's how much we like paperwork -- to accounting. They scan the receipt and P.O.s, count the change carefully. Then they notice it: the sales tax. Being a non-profit, we are a non-taxpaying entity with regard to certain areas and items. Accounting asks Moira, "You paid sales tax?" Yes. "Why didn't you give them the card showing our tax exempt status?" Because I don't have one; I didn't know we had anything like that. "Well, you're responsible for the extra sales tax paid, then." Excuse me? "You're responsible for the extra sales tax! We'll just take it out of your next paycheck." Seriously…excuse me? "NCI shouldn't have to pay sales tax since we're tax exempt. So, since you didn't follow agency procedure when purchasing these items, you're responsible for the sales tax. It comes to $3.52." You're going to dock my check for $3.52? You're really going to do all the paperwork required to dock my check for a measly three dollars? After I used my personal time to take care of agency business for a job fair that I'm being forced to work at all day on Saturday? "I'm sorry, Moira, but you should have followed agency procedure."

I feel like there should be a paragraph here, but I'm still too aggravated by our $3.52 mistake of apparently monumental proportions to even follow up.

Later that afternoon, our power went out. Our director was in a meeting at the time. My coworkers and I expected that after the first ten minutes of the power outage, the meeting might be dismissed and the assorted directors would scurry back to their departments to "assess the situation," since everything is a situation around here. A pane of glass broke a few weeks ago when the central atrium was being painted; company-wide e-mails were sent warning of the imminent danger presented by the rogue glass shards that landed in the flower beds below -- Don't go into the flower beds! Dangerous glass!!!11!1! -- as if trekking through the flower beds in the atrium was our favored lunchtime activity. So we were surprised when our director showed up nearly an hour after the power had gone out. He was equally surprised that we were sitting in a group in Angela's office, not working.

Our building was built in the 1960s and in addition to not providing enough parking for all of the tenants (most of us have to park at another parking lot six blocks away and take a shuttle to work), the insulation is shot to shit. I normally love the giant plate glass windows in my office – a view to a sane and sunny world – but during the power outage I started to feel like an ant under a malicious child's magnifying glass. So the four of us spread out in the one dark office without windows, cherishing the remaining A/C, as Angela suddenly found herself and her windowless office vindicated. We discussed actual HR-related issues for a while before falling into American Idol debates and the pros and cons of DVR. By the time that our director made his way back to the department, we had long left the domain of polite conversation and were viciously mocking various employees and telling crude stories of various incidents (yes, of course the woman who stunk of sex came up…do you even need to ask?).

His first words: "What's going on here? Why are you all just sitting around?" Moira, jokingly: "Well, in case you hadn't noticed during your meeting, the power has been out for an hour." Director: "Yes, but why aren't you working?" Us: blank stares, hate. Me, finally: "The power…is out. The computers…are dead. The phones…are dead. The copier…is dead. There's not a whole lot that we can do in the dark, without phones or computers." Director: "Well, I can think of a lot of different things that we can get accomplished without power. For example, you can collate. You can stuff envelopes. You can organize your office. You can shred things in your 'To Shred' bins. You can file." Me: "File. In the dark." Moira: "What envelopes? Why would we stuff envelopes? We don't have any envelopes that need stuffing." Angela: "Collate?" Me: "Collate what? I don't have a big pile in my office marked 'To Collate On A Rainy Day.' And we can't file in the dark." Moira: "How are we supposed to shred things without a shredder? Can we just go home now, please? It's sweltering in here. And we don't have any work to do." Director: "I don't know…" Moira: "All the other departments have left. We're the only ones still here. And it's freaking hot, seriously." Director: "Well, if you all feel like you just can't come up with any work to do, then I guess so. Just make sure that you get your work done from home." Us: blank stares, but this time with much more hate, then lots of shuffling around and getting the hell out of that dark, sweaty pit while we still could.

As we were leaving, I heard the director calling after us, "Well, I guess I'll just stick around here and do my work, since I've got tons of work that I can get done with or without power! And I'll make sure that payroll knows not to dock your checks since you're leaving an hour early." We left him behind in the unusually silent, darkening building, seemingly the only person still there; left him to his scurrying and paper-shuffling and insane bureaucracies, feeling lighter with every step that we took towards our cars, six blocks away. On Tuesday, we got an extra hour of sanity – an extra hour on the outside. Let's see what Wednesday holds.

Home

I'm home again, and it's awfully quiet around here today with Richard gone. I dropped him off at the airport this morning, less than 12 hours after we touched down in Houston. So, in approximately 24 hours, he'll have been in Memphis, Little Rock, Dallas, Houston, Detroit and finally Rochester. My poor boy is such a travelin' man these days.

Anyway, I'm slowly sorting through the roughly 250 pictures I took in Memphis (I'm...not kidding. It's a sad sort of addiction.) and I'll post some later this week. For now, though, a really great quote from a New York Times article about Houston:

It's true: The greater metropolitan area is truly a geography of nowhere, a crazy quilt of strip malls and strip clubs and gas pumps and houses. But the sneaky thing about Houston is that the city's heart isn't to be found in one place; it's in a thousand small places and subtle pleasures. Trouble is, most outsiders don't have the time to assemble the scattered pieces. Only with time does mishmash become mosaic.

How abundantly true.