Thursday, August 12, 2004

Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season

Hey, everybody, it’s My First Hurricane!

This is an extremely typical me-scenario: Live on a sandbar for a year, and the sea stands quiet. Move to the middle of the state, and all aquatic hell breaks loose.

Flipper, who works for The Mouse On Water, keeps calling with hurricane updates from Disney Cruise Lines. They have an actual terror-alert like hurricane system out there, ranging from 5 (“All clear. Continual nominal monetary rape of tourists.”) to 1 (“Actual hurricane in progress. Close parks; charge $12,897,314,863,946 per poncho.”) I’m taking her word for whatever she tells me, because Disney runs at least the first seven planets from the sun and their radar can clearly kick the ass of NORAD’s radar.

He’s a certifiable hurricane now, Charley is. This has nothing to do with wind speed and everything to do with the fact that the first Local Neighborhood Dip has painted “CHARLEY GO AWAY” on his storm shutters. This was rapidly followed by the local news shooting footage of people fleeing out of various WalMarts with armloads of plastic and tuna; we now, therefore, officially have a Weather Event on our hands.

My Hurricane Preparedness will pretty much consist of throwing a shower curtain into my car. I was planning on doing this anyway, for the Millennium Bellemobile continues to suffer from incontinence, but with Charley on the way it looks as if her peeing problem will upgrade from Occasional Tinkling to Post-Four Rum and Cokes Status.

At last Weather Channel check, Charley was a Category II bearing down on Cuba, which frankly doesn’t concern me—what the hell is there to destroy in Cuba? What’s it going to wipe out, one of Castro’s lithium crystal Commodore 64’s? If anything, a hurricane is going to leave that craphole looking better.

The lack of anything to do in Cuba, it seems, is going to do nothing but piss Charley off, because people who know far more about hurricanes than I do are hopping from foot to foot screeching about the storm “regaining strength” right after it rams through the fields of fatigues.

It’s very surreal times here in the swamp, because the general attitude towards hurricanes here is, and I quote, “Pfffffft.” My friendboy Andy, a native Floridian, actually had to explain to me via IM why it might not be a good idea to uphold our plans to have an Olympics Opening Ceremony Ripping Party tomorrow night. “Um, I really don’t feel like driving on an interstate in 105 MPH winds,” he typed. “Just wait until you see the horizontal clouds come in.”

“What will they look like?” I asked.

“////,” he said.

Well, this I gotta see. I am eager to lose my “////” cloud virginity. We didn’t have those in Ohio. The only clouds I had to worry about in Ohio looked like this: “V”

This has all been preceded, of course, by the Parade of the Television Weather Asshats, who seem to enjoy finding the crappiest weather on Earth and standing in the middle of it. Because radar and remote cameras are never to be trusted. They must verify it for themselves.

“WELL IT’S CERTAINLY WINDY OUT HERE, BOB!! YES INDEED, REALLY REALLY SUPER WINDY! ALMOST AS IF THERE’S A HURRICANE OR SOMETHING GOING ON!” They say these things with golf umbrellas in hand, because when rain is slanting horizontally and you can’t stand upright, what you want in your immediate vicinity is a long pointy object with a metal tip.

“Calm down, little storm,” our receptionist said when she heard the most recent updates. Our receptionist is The Shit, and she will tell you that she is The Shit, so if Charley is going to listen to anybody, it’s going to be her.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Trumped

I was not in this office when 9/11 happened—that honor went to another, equally soul-sucking secretarial job—but I imagine this is a fairly close approximation of the tone of the day.

Here's how I spent my Friday: There was a coup here at the Evil Boring Day Job. Two years ago, the firm I am indentured to sold out to a large corporate conglomerate, ScrewCo., with the understanding that the company would continue to be run exactly the way it always had, only with the New and Added Bonus that we would now be a member of the large, happy, sunshiney ScrewCo. family.

I am sorry to provide such a nasty shock at this hour of the day, but… this actually turned out to not be the case. That pretty much occurred to the original owner of the company on Friday when he, my boss, and her boss were all fired.

They were rehired about an hour later after much screaming, calling of security, and general boardroom wackiness that I heard about fourth-hand but that apparently involved the word “bullshit.” Also “you bastards” and “sue your sorry asses.” But The Three Bosses —all of whom had some hand in starting the company at a point when I was still toting around a TrapperKeeper featuring Donnie Wahlberg—have been placed in a teeny, tiny made-up executive box completely removed from the rest of the company. Effective immediately.

This in turn left me and my counterpart, Michelle, completely without supervision or, in fact, any idea what in the holy hell was going on. We were not alone, however; when we approached one of the vice-presidents to find out when our new overlord would be arriving, he brought his Successories Executive Role to full bore and said, “Oh. Sometime. I guess.”

(Just between you and me and the water cooler, it appears that the company may be attempting to reduce overhead. I'm going on a total hunch here. As my job is completely composed of overhead work, and the people who created my position were fired for ninety minutes last week, it has occured to me that I am pretty much corporate toast. They'll still need someone to do my crappy job, but Michelle was basically our boss' right-hand woman, and actually competent at doing our crappy jobs, whereas my main function was to sit in my office and seethe. I mean, I'd fire me.)

Let’s all give me a big hand for my big BCWYWFBYMGI (Be Careful What You Wish For Because You Might Get It) moment of the month. I have long been on my knees with the whole “Oh, please God, get me out of this place” business, but… this is like putting in a celestial request for an island vacation and getting an all-expenses paid trip to Iwo Jima.

People are walking around here like the Fourth Horse just galloped through the break room. When my boss collected our department in my office (as workspace is assigned in an inversely proportional manner of actual work ethic and positive, team-oriented attitudes, I have the largest office in the department) to announce that she was no longer our supervisor; that she was, in fact, corporate toast, all the women started crying and all the men started staring at individual carpet fibers because the all women had started crying.

As you should well know by now, no one—no one—out drama queens me. I am the one who falls apart when the milk expires. I am the one with the rent-to-own fainting couch. I am the one with the post-graduate degree in Hand Wringing. Spazz attacking is my job.

Well, you know, I just sat there. Michelle cried and AnaMaria cried and our boss cried, and I just sat there. I felt nothing. I was honestly more upset the day I accidentally taped the Orange Bowl over Adventures in Babysitting. I handed out tissues and patted backs and was very, very concerned over whether or not I would still be getting my day off on Monday.

I felt terrible for my bosses, and also felt terrible over everybody else feeling terrible, but seriously: Nooooooooothing. This is what happens, I suppose, when you’ve been emotionally divorced from your job for over a year.

Wait a second, lemmie check how long I’ve been here... Oh. Over a year.

I can’t afford to make anybody suspicious, though, so I made sure to look Very Sad and waved around a Kleenex and occasionally put my hand over my face as though justbarelyholding it together while I was actually trying to figure out what I was going to wear to my job interview. Which had been scheduled for Monday. For about a week.

Yes, Fakery. One of the Seven Habits of Highly Apathetic People.

SCHADENFREUDE MOMENT OF THE DAY: I had trouble pulling into a space at the parking garage this morning because a sleek black Jaguar was taking up two spaces.

Its lights were on.

Facilitate connectivity at: blondechampange@hotmail.com

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